1. If you have seen other Apple product introductions, the format is familiar, and they are never less than well executed. Of the intros I’ve seen, nothing has come close to the introduction of the iPhone. (I saw the original Mac intro years too late to fully appreciate its true impact.) But what the introduction of the iPad may have lacked in shock and awe, it made up for in the completeness of the story. The iPhone was on stage by itself, just the software that came on the phone. The iPad arrives with an entire ecosystem, of new and existing applications, third party developers, accessories, etc.

   People who were expecting to get the stomach drop of excitement that the iPhone intro produced (at least in me) were certainly disappointed. But that’s misplaced, the iPad is a far more advanced product and story than the iPhone was when introduced. It’s like the difference between the excitement of crushing hard on someone new, versus the comfort and trust and love that comes after many years of marriage. One’s more exciting, but the other is richer and more fulfilling.

2. Another disappointment, or fear, that people have expressed is the lack of “openness” or “freedom.” I’ve got a different word for that concept: “complexity.” You can call that spin if you like, but I’ve spent 20+ years showing people how to use computers, and they’ve never been easy to use. Even today, 25 years after the concept of clicking and double-clicking hit the mass market, I see people confuse the two, and that is the most trivial of examples. It’s easy to come up with dozens more serious.

   What Apple is doing, first with the iPhone and now with the iPad, is offering a new model for computing, one that allows more direct interaction with objects on the screen, while at the same time simplifying away huge amounts of complexity, things that most people will never care about.

   Those of us who are “computer sophisticates” think those things are important, but when the iPad arrives, and normal people love them, and rave about the user interface, and buy them by the millions, we’ll see what’s really important, and it’s not the “freedom” to fuck around in the file system, or the “openness” to go out onto the Wild Internet and download and install random software.

   Try this exercise: every time you hear an expert say the iPad isn’t open, change “open” to “complicated.” Every time they write the iPad is “locked down” subsitute “simplified.” When the gurus get detailed about “important” three letter acronyms or random tech talk, hear “blah blah blah,” because that’s all it matters.

   Gruber put it best, it’s the arrival of the automatic transmission for computers. Those of us who are enthusiasts and experts will have access to manual transmissions for decades — regular computers are not going away. But for those folks who only care about getting to their destination, it just got a lot easier.

   Update: Here are some terrific articles that tackle this topic in depth, and in different, complementary ways:

   • “Future Shock” by Frasier Speirs suggests that existing computer experts are suffering from future shock.
   • “The iPad Is For Everyone But Us” by Mike Rundle argues that “Most people who … are now writing about the iPad are misunderstanding its intended audience because they’re not in it.”
   • “On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing” by Rob Foster illustrates the reaction normal people are having to the iPad.
   • “iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up” by Joel Johnson calls the whiners out on the bogus parts of their arguments, and suggests they compete with Apple, instead of just complaining.

3. If you want to really understand this, and get an idea of just how much Apple is leading by example, watch the segment where Phil Schiller demonstrates the iPad versions of the iWork suite (a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool). Apple has completely re-thought the way that you interact with these tools, and except for the on screen virtual keyboard, it surpasses the desktop experience in every way. Really quite extraordinary, it was here that I got genuinely excited about what is new in the iPad, and what it means. A small taste of The Future.

4. Scott Forstall offered developers a big incentive to build apps specifically for the iPad: separate, prominent placement in the iPad App Store. The phrase “a new gold rush” was used. Is that sound in the distance the clatter of Android and web OS and Blackberry phones being dropped by developers? Maybe not, but Apple is certainly building tremendous momentum for their platform. Competitors will not be catching up for years.

At $500, the iPad will be $100 cheaper than the original iPhone I lined up to buy. I may not line up for an iPad, but I’ll certainly be buying one. Yes, the 2nd generation will be even better. That’s always true. So what. I don’t think the iPad is the grand slam home run I wrote that the iPhone was, but it’s most definitely a hit that will score runs. I want one.

Copyright © 2010 by Aldoblog. All rights reserved. This feed is provided for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal-2010@aldoblog.com so we can take action immediately.

In my review of the Bookmark iPhone app, I noted that for the long tracks of an audiobook, the standard controls of the iPod app, optimized for 3 minute music tracks, can be frustrating. Bookmark is one solution to this issue. Another comes in the form of self-contained audiobook apps from Recorded Books.

These audiobook apps are found in the App Store section of iTunes, rather than in the Audiobooks section. You are buying not merely the audio portion of the audiobook, but also an app that will play it back. Indeed, you can only play the audiobook from its dedicated app; you cannot use the iPod app, or Bookmark, etc.

These apps are the iPhone equivalent of the Playaway format: player and book baked into a single device. The idea is to make an audiobook as easy to use as a regular book — a single (physical, for the Playaway) object that you pick up and take with you, no other items needed. The self-contained audiobook app makes the experience of buying an audiobook, getting it onto your iPhone, and playing it simple and straightforward. In theory.

The experience goes like this. After you have purchased the app and synched it to your iPhone, you will find the app’s icon on one of your home screens (here, the bottom left corner, above the Phone app). For the high-quality commercial books, the app’s icon is a miniature version of the book cover, a nice way to spot the book easily. (On the other hand, if your home screens are anywhere near as crowded as mine, giving each book a spot on them would be a serious organization issue.)

When you first launch the app, it will flash the book cover, and then go to the main app screen, which is fixed in landscape view, and begin playing the book:

Only the first chapter of the audio is included in the app itself; when you start the app, the rest of the audio will be downloaded automatically, in the background. You can only listen to parts that have finished downloading. The app can (apparently) download parts over a WiFi, 3G, and even EDGE connections. I write apparently because it gave no warning when I was downloading on a slower connection, and simply allowed it. While I experienced timeouts on non-WiFi connections, there is no way to know if this is inherent to the app, or if I was just getting a bad mobile connection in my house (AT&T in San Francisco is notorious).

Feedback about the download consists of text progress messages, “Part 2 of 54”, alternating with an estimated time remaining (though I saw estimates only while on WiFi, never for slower connections). Depending on the length of the book and the speed of your connection, downloading could take 20 minutes, or hours. If you are sitting in your easy chair listening to the book, the background downloading is unobtrusive and won’t bother you at all. But be sure to plan ahead if you’re expecting to listen to your book on a plane, or where you otherwise won’t have a connection. And understand that downloading only occurs while the app is running, and only while your device is “awake.”

Controlling Playback

The app controls for play/pause, skip backward and forward, and volume are obvious and intuitive, in box #3:

The skip buttons take you backwards or forwards by 30 seconds, probably the most useful interval for a skip button. The progress meter in box #2 is a slider that allows you to drag the playback point to any position in the current chapter. Less obvious, you can drag through the table of contents, box #1, and clicking a chapter title takes you to that chapter. Very nice. These controls allow you to easily reach any point in the book with just a few clicks or drags.

There is a sleep timer, which can be set to turn off the book after 15 or 30 minutes, and a playback speed button, to allow you to play the book at 1x or 2x speed (box #4). The double-speed playback is clear and understandable, but loses some of the nuance in the narrator’s performance. If you’re in a hurry to finish a book for a reason (due date, book club meeting, etc.), go for it, but otherwise, hey, this is supposed to be enjoyable, why are you trying to make it end faster?

The user interface is attractive, and in terms of layout, very well designed. If it were not all crammed onto one screen, it would be terrific. Unfortunately, the main playback control buttons are too small, and it’s very easy to hit the wrong button even when giving the screen your full attention. It would be impossible to control while driving a car without dangerous distraction.

The two halves of the screen, table of contents and the main playback controls, should be separated onto individual screens and enlarged, with controls for moving back and forth between them. This would be easy to do, and would give you a way to use the app in portrait (normal) orientation, too. Some performance optimizations would be good; I found the interface to occasionally be somewhat sluggish, which made the small buttons doubly irritating, because it was not clear if it was because I missed the button, or because the app was slow in responding.

Finally, the worst controls issue for me: the start/stop button on my Apple headphones do not work to control the audiobook playback (instead, it starts/stops the iPod app). This is a killer, because the button on the headphones is the main way I stop playback of a book when I’m ready to go to sleep, or need to talk to someone, etc., because it’s much faster to reach than to unlock the iPhone, find the right screen, and hit the stop button.

Audiobook Playback

The recording quality is fine. There’s no way to tell what the files are encoded as (at least, not without technical digging that’s more trouble than it’s worth for this review). From listening it seems to be roughly equivalent to Audible’s Type 4 format, which is pretty good (I have listened to dozens of books in Type 4 format), but I now prefer Audible’s Enhanced format, which has twice the audio resolution, and sounds noticably better, even to my poor ears.

More seriously, you can only listen to the audiobook while you are in the app. There is no background playback, so you can’t e.g. switch to Bejeweled to play a game or three while listening. If you leave the app, the audiobook stops. Period.

There is no bookmarking capability. The app saves your position in the book when you stop playback or exit the app, just like the iPod app, but otherwise you can’t save locations in the book. There is no way to take notes about the book while you’re listening, and you can’t even exit the app to use the Notepad app. If you need to take notes on the book, it’s back to pencil and paper.

A few more minor notes.

• The audiobook I tested, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was $14.99 as an application, and $19.99 as a standard audiobook. The master recording for each is the same, the only difference is the format, app or audio track. Both are a good value (the book is over 21 hours long, less than $1/hour), but the app is $5 cheaper.

• There is a very limited selection of audiobooks in app format, a dozen or so quality commercial recordings, and a few dozen more which package the less polished LibriVox recordings of books which are in the public domain. Also, audiobook app entries on the iTunes store often neglect to give details about the recording, like if it’s abridged or unabridged, length, who the narrator is, etc. All standard stuff when you look at regular audiobooks.

• Audiobooks purchased as apps present organization issue. As noted above, they go into the Applications list, not Audiobooks, in the iTunes library. There are fewer viewing options for apps, and a much lower limit on number of apps you can put simultaneously on an iPhone (though practically speaking, the real limit is storage space, not app slots). More seriously, audiobook apps can’t be in smart playlists, which I use extensively to manage which audiobooks are on my iPhone at any given time, and for other organization and management tasks.

• I experienced a problem where I could not get the app to load; it would crash back to the home screen after a few seconds. Rebooting my iPhone didn’t fix the issue. I had to delete the app, reload it, and redownload the book’s audio to be able to get back to my book. That would suck if I had been on an airplane.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.0

If you are new to audiobooks, these self-contained recordings are a great way to try them out. The self-contained recording is cheaper, and the dedicated audiobook controls make it easier to enjoy your first audiobook, without having to learn the escoteric iPod app controls that you need to know to keep from being frustrated when playing the long tracks of a standard audiobook.

But if you are an experienced audiobook listener, especially if you have been listening to them on your iPod for a while, you will probably find these audiobook apps extremely frustrating. Although the lower price is tempting, you will almost certainly be happier in the long run continuing to buy standard audiobooks. I personally found listening to a novel in this format to be quite frustrating. (But then, I’m an expert on the “right” way to do it.)

Summary of the summary: good for beginners, bad for experts.

Pluses:

• Simple controls are easier to figure out than built-in iPod app controls for handling long audiobook tracks.
• Easy access (no need to find the Audiobooks section in the iPod app).
• Less expensive than standard audiobook.

Minuses:

• Controls are too small, and sometimes sluggish.
• No background playback.
• Requires time and planning ahead to download audio.
• Cannot use standard iTunes tools to organize a larger collection.
• Frankly, for true beginners, a real Playaway audiobook is a better bet.

More Information:

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle app, $14.95
• Other Recorded Books apps

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and I received no compensation for this review. I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.

Copyright © 2010 by Aldoblog. All rights reserved. This feed is provided for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal-2010@aldoblog.com so we can take action immediately.

Bookmark is an alternative audio player dedicated to audiobooks, based on the insight that the iPod is great for music, but not very well-suited to audiobooks. Bookmark was designed around the central concept that, when listening to a long audiobook, you want different controls for moving around in the much longer tracks, and tools for marking positions in the recording that go beyond just saving where you left off. If you’ve ever listened to a long audiobook track on an iPod, and especially if you’ve ever thought “I want to go back and hear that part again,” you know what this is all about.

Using Bookmark is simple. Start the app, choose a book from the list of titles (Bookmark filters out everything but audiobooks), and press play. In this regard, Bookmark is much like the built-in iPod app. The basics of playback are pretty obvious, with standard controls for play/pause, volume control, and track progress.

Where Bookmark begins to differentiate itself is with the “Time Ribbon” controller, which is a very simple and clever way to skip forward or backward in a track, in increments of 30 seconds, 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

This is a precise method of jumping around in an audiobook, that is more approachable and discoverable than scrubbing in the standard iPod app. If you’ve ever been frustrated trying to go backwards by a minute or two, or dozed off listening to a book in bed, this is for you.

“Heads Up” mode is terrific for listening while driving, when you cannot spare your attention to control the iPod app, or even Bookmark in normal mode. An iPhone or iPod touch normally demands that you look at it to control it, because there are no physical buttons to feel your way around. In Heads Up mode the controls are simplified to only two swipe gestures, which are easy to accomplish without taking your eyes off the road: up and down to pause and resume playback, and side to side to skip forward or backward 15 seconds. This mode could literally save your life. It is the only safe method I know to control a touch-based iPod while driving, unless you have physical controls built into your car stereo or iPhone mount.

The other major difference from the built-in iPod app is the app’s namesake: bookmarks. It’s easy to figure out how to set a new bookmark (though the bookmark editing panel could be simpler). You can create as many bookmarks as you like, give them meaningful names, and add notes to bookmarks, perhaps to remind you of why you saved that position. You can also save notes on the book (track) itself. It is possible to send yourself (or anyone) saved bookmarks and notes via email; this is the only way to export this information from the app.

Like the built-in iPod app, Bookmark can play audiobooks in the background, so you can use another app (say, Bejeweled) while listening. This goes beyond just backgrounding; you can actually switch to the iPod app, and control the audio from there using the standard UI, and then switch back to Bookmark, and use its controls. Switching back and forth is seamless, never pausing or stuttering audio playback.

Bookmark does have a few modest flaws that you should be aware of:

• I dislike the current visual design of the application. Textured backgrounds and non-standard buttons are mixed with standard iPhone controls. While there are some applications which have successfully departed from the iPhone platform UI standards, it takes a strong visual designer to carry it off. Bookmark 1.1 does not, but I have seen a mockup of a forthcoming version, and it looks fantastic. Something to look forward to.

• The bookmarking interface needs some work. You should be able to simply tap into the Notes field, instead of needing to hit the Edit button. It would be nice to be able to hit the Next button to move from the bookmark name to the notes field. It’s usable, but this panel feels like a “rough draft” of what the developer eventually intends.

• The current release has a few other user interface issues, which I expect to be resolved in the next release. The main player window is entirely reworked, resolving issues such as Heads Up mode being buried in the More panel, etc.

• Unlike the iPod app, Bookmark does not combine multiple tracks from a single audiobook into a single entry in the titles list. This makes the list unnecessarily long, and is especially problematic for audiobooks which have many shorter tracks, such as from MP3 CDs or eMusic. For this reason, the developer currently recommends Bookmark only for audiobooks which come in long tracks, such as those from Audible or the iTunes Store. This issue is intended to be resolved in the next release.

• There is no way to view or access existing chapter marks in an audiobook. This is no big deal for many audiobooks, which either don’t have chapter marks, or have them in silly places, but for those that do, it’s extremely irritating to not be able to use them. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the iPhone SDK, so it’s in Apple’s hands to resolve.

• The Time Ribbon controller, while very interesting, suffers from some implementation flaws. The biggest is that audio playback is immediately affected when you hit a skip level, which can be jarring. I think it would be better if the app waited until you let go of the controller to jump the appropriate distance. At the very least, a half- or quarter-second pause to see if you were moving past a skip level to a greater one would be a good idea.

• While you can move back and forth between Bookmark and the built-in iPod app while a book is playing, unexpected position changes are almost inevitable if you do it when a book is not playing. This is because by default Bookmark stores its own Last Played position for each book, instead of sharing it with the iPod. (The alternative, sharing the position, has other issues, due to iPod app bugs that unset the Last Played position after syncing. Damned if you do…) The next release will have a work-around that should handle this better. In the mean time, you can avoid it by sticking exclusively with either Bookmark or the iPod app for your audiobooks.

• Stability and glitches are an (occasional) issue. I crashed the application once, and encountered another oddity, where navigating from the current book to the list of titles whirred for a while, and then reported that I had no titles on my device yet (this is reportedly an iPhone OS bug). I’ve encountered incorrect cover art in the titles list and on the playback screen. And occasionally saving a bookmark would silently fail, requiring me to re-enter it.

To reiterate: these are all modest issues, and many of them should be resolved in the next release. Bookmark works well most of the time, and has no severe flaws.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.1.1

Overall, Bookmark represents a useful tool for regular audiobook listeners, especially if you listen (and re-listen) actively, or are using a book as a reference or object of study. Being able to set more than one bookmark, and name and annotate them, is invaluable.

Bookmark is also great if the standard iPod playback controls frustrate you when listening to audiobooks. The Time Ribbon is extremely approachable and usable, and most people will like it better than the (non-obvious) scrubbing controls in the iPod app.

Heads Up playback mode is worth the price of the app all by itself, if you listen to books while driving alone.

Bookmark has a few flaws, but if you listen to audiobooks regularly, it is easily worth the $3 purchase price.

Pluses:

• Innovative “Time Ribbon” controller.
• “Heads Up” mode.
• Multiple bookmarks and notes.
• Can play audiobooks in background mode.

Minuses:

• Non-standard UI, and occasional polish issues.
• Cannot use or display embedded chapter marks. (SDK issue.)
• Minor bugs and stability problems.

More Information:

• Bookmark in the App Store
• Bookmark web page
• Bookmark on Facebook
• Bookmark on Twitter

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of Bookmark, and I received no compensation for this review. I did share a draft of this review with DockMarket, the developer of Bookmark. A “real” journalist would not do this, but I believed that getting feedback and a peek at the next release was more important than “pure” journalistic integrity.

Also note that I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.

Copyright © 2010 by Aldoblog. All rights reserved. This feed is provided for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact legal-2010@aldoblog.com so we can take action immediately.