Some Fire, for a small harem?

Click through to the Amazon site

Big people are saying that the unimpeded march of the iPad is finally met by able competition. “The march has met its match,” they assure. I’ve been cheering the progress of all things Apple, and only Apple, but this pause in a major Apple affair has warmed me. May the best tablet win, and may the winner match my measure, too.

A few weeks ago I put my 13” Air on the shelf and began to cuddle up with the petite 11”, the custom model. She is said to be slower than my last love, but she doesn’t show it. She should have some less resolution but I can’t see it—the infallible ingredient of the perfect affair, the blindness of true love. Our embrace is yet unbroken, and my ardor exceeds my expectations of my 52-year-old self. In this state of affairs, not merely is my 13” jilted; uncared for and untouched hours sometimes is my iPad 2, who stands pouting in the dark inside my bag. She doesn’t deserve this: There is none yet to beat her allure, and there is not one on whom my magazines show as they do as they unfurl on her: The Economist; Time; NY Times; Esquire; and, most of all, Popular Science. Sometimes I ask her to wear a surprise, like the Lufthansa in-flight magazine, and in the last two issues there burst forth from her the colors of Patagonia and the bubble of Buenos Aires. How she sizzled!

But, alas! I cannot read a book on the beauty, and I cannot write for long on her. The feast of her colors and her blinding radiance mean that we engage in intense spells that are not so long as a book demands, or the time you usually give to tap and re-tap and tap again 500 words that satisfy you. No, a book and a long joust of writing ask for a companion who is gray, sober. For me, writing happens on the 11”, and I read books on the somewhat stout Kindle, who, when not in my hands, leans on the taller iPad in my bag.

I should be happy with my small harem, but my eye hasn’t stopped roving, and it is caught now by the brand new Kindle Fire. Are the big people right? Could she be the one? The one love who is more than my last and all my lost loves? Can I enjoy Outlook India, the short office document, and also War & Peace and Crime & Punishment on her? And, O yes, how good is the surfing experience?

I cannot tell for some time. I have been an ardent Apple fellow, but Apple’s favors come slow to India. And Amazon’s Kindle came to India after two models had been used and discarded in America. The Kindle Fire arrives November, first for America, and Amazon’s site does not say which model of her they will send here, and when. Until then, I will read of her with the promising name, and ask regarding her secrets, and steal looks of her in the hands of others, with some doubt and also with much hope, because even if she will eventually not stand up to the iPad she is certainly almost as photogenic. There have been times in my life, like in the days and nights of my youth, when I have been more than happy with just a picture.

Update on Friday, October 7, 2011 at 7:05PM by Shashikiran Mullur

Survey: iPad is Kindle Fire-proof

Thank you, Steve…

Will they continue to keep it up at Apple?

I guess many Mac-users came to the Mac on a route like mine, which begins with the iPod. I used my first iPod with a PC, and that iPod lured me to the Mac, a 17" beauty, after a year with which I went to the 15", then to the 13" PowerBook, thereafter to the 13" MacBook Air and its upgrade in the following year, and Friday last week I received from Singapore the 11" i7 MacBook Air, on which I am typing this piece. In the time between those laptops I’ve shopped for two iMacs, and as regards the iPad, I bought it quite quickly after it was born, and the iPad-2 not too late after its issue, and now I am hoping the iPad-3 will arrive after a decent pause because I must rush first for the iPhone-5 to wherever a not-locked version goes on sale after that model is released. I’m breathless, in spite of an insatiable appetite for whatever they design at Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

In the meantime I am wondering if I should replace my Apple Cinema Displays with the Thunderbolt versions, but I haven’t any takers for the two I have, one at work and the other at home.

My wife and my son get the models I give up, and they disappoint me by using Windows on Apple machines. But of course they are helpless, because at work they must abide by Windows, the official operating system, whereas on my stubborn part I hold my head high with an Apple in hand in my Windows workplace—my Mac with two-screenfuls of apps written purely for OS X.

OS X took its time to take over me after I’d switched—not in one discernible instant, but after some days and weeks with OS X, Windows began to feel so irksome that I began to refuse to touch the keys on a PC or to move its mouse on occasions when PC owners worked with me with their PCs. Eight years have passed since the Mac came into my life, and my monogamy with it is still without threat.

Let me start with the purchase, and ask you, do you share my emotion: The wrapping on the sleek box; the shallow tray in it on which the device rests; the side-compartment for the white cables; the so-slim user-manual that respects in the extreme the intelligence of the user: the obsession begins there, then, from the first first brush with the skin of the packaging. Then that delicious moment when you lift the device off the tray. Apple devices have a product-quality so high, and Apple never advertise their quality. Even after you have owned several Apple products, the feel of your new Apple relives the first fervor. The heft of it! The snugness of its corners in your palm! The faultless ergonomics! And the display, which is surely and predictably and incredibly more scintillating than on the last Apple you bought.

Even those who haven't ever experienced a Mac aver that its OS is stable. But that is just the small part. As you use it, the Mac’s features strike you like liqueur squirting in the mouth from a capsule of chocolate. Like how a cocktail stirs you that is shaken and not stirred. Every piece of the product—hardware and software—is a thorough left-brain creation that integrates with the right-brain vision of a genius. If you wish to achieve flow, go use a Mac, a device so intuitive that it seems as though God created man and Mac both together and kept the Mac for Himself and started to share it only recently. When you are in flow with a Mac, in that moment, your soul meets the soul of the machine and you realize that the soul in the machine is the wondrous soul of Steve.

I adore the Mac and its every cousin from Apple: in part for the pleasure it gives me, but much more for the lesson it tells the businessman in me regarding how deeply a business can connect with whom it serves.

Thank you, Steve.

awesome note, an awesome app!

Awesome Note

I found Awesome Note recommended at Evernote. It works with the iPad and the iPhone.

When I need to scribble a phone number someone is tossing in a tearing hurry, I tap on the quick memo icon. Journaling is easy using the diary interface and you can add pictures which take neatly the exact width available when opened on either device, or as icons. Every kind of list can be created, for shopping, packing, reading, anything. The to-do list gets so pretty it beckons you to it, and you go without hesitation, and thereafter all you need to do is do the to-do! Notes can be grouped into folders, and folders can be stacked, and stacks can be arranged for easy reach.

Using the app is easier than it reads here.

The app syncs with Evernote and Dropbox (sorry: Google-Docs), and I use Google-Docs. Note taking on both the iPad and the iPhone is a pleasure with Awesome Note, thanks to the soothing interfaces, but I am surprised BRID haven't a Mac version with which the iPAd and iPhone versions sync, and complete a Mac-life. I hope they are working on it, and I wish that many are buying what is now on offer, because this is an app for which I am praying for everlasting life.

For the full range of planning and comprehensive task management with a GTD approach I go to Omnifocus, but for use as a digital notebook for journaling and notes and lists and for simple today's to-do, Awesome Note has been a terrific find.

Steve Jobs: the new working class hero

The HP Slate 500So HP have released a tablet for the business user, and the pictures of it show a gadget that is almost an iPad outside, but the press release reveals that it holds the same old spirit inside, a spirit that hasn’t aged well.

For business users!

The success of the Mac and the iPad and the iPhone has revealed starkly the men in businessmen, that they are what they have always been suspected to be—real humans working with more than half their mind on play. The current trends indicate the rising numbers of those deciding to be true to their nature, who like to bundle work and play in a single tool.

Apple is putting play before work, it seems, and the rising sales of the Macs reveal the true desire of the white-collar working class. A revolution of the masses seems to have begun, and Steve Jobs is the new working class hero.

My iPad and I

I am purging to the page every day for some weeks now and I regret I didn't start the exercise sooner. I feel lighter, much lighter after I have written, whereas when I splash my emotions on others and see on their faces what I've done, I feel heavy and hopeless.

iPad photo from the Apple site
They say it is better to write by hand, that the hand is an extension of the mind, that when you feel tactile paper when pencil rubs on it, thoughts flow, uninterrupted. I can now vouch that it is true. So, I bought a pencil by Montblanc paying a hefty sum for the best in its class, thinking “what the hell,” while paying for it, and I've been enjoying how it rests on the web between thumb and finger, a weight just right, and cool when I rub the rings round its cap on my skin when I pause while writing.

But I enjoy belonging to this age and I hate the manual search, which I need to do often, and I want to cut and paste and rewrite, and I need to edit quite a bit—English is not my mind's language. So, while I write into the Moleskine I'm often asking how I'll seek out the piece I'm writing when I want it sometime, whether I shouldn't be shifting back to the Mac for making notes and for serious writing.

But the laptop is a bother, it burns my lap, and in many public places it is unseemly to work on it, being conspicuous, and a bother to carry, though I use the MacBook Air from the time it was introduced. It is very thin but it is also very wide and it has a lid which you should keep open when you work on it.

The Articles app
It is two weeks since I began using the iPad, and my gratitude to Steve Jobs has doubled, tripled. My grief is that I'll not likely ever see this man who has made my life so much fun.

It is a simple device for one who works only on its outside. The screen is as large as it should be. The keyboard in landscape is comfortable and most applications have a thoughtfully enhanced user-interface in this mode. I use only the wi-fi option because the device is not launched in India, so it will not work on 3G, and I'm not willing to ask anyone to trim my SIM card and hack the hardware. The rubber cover that sells under the Apple brand props up the device neatly in landscape.

As pretty as it is, Notes communicates with the laptop only via mail, so I took a tip from Creativist: I write on Simplenote, which syncs without a hassle with Notational Velocity on the laptop, from which I take the plain text into Scrivener for final editing, and then I publish. My office notes and all other notes I write daily files also in Simplenote, which I transfer at the end of the day from Notational Velocity to MacJournal. I maintain two journals in MacJournal, one a Work Journal, another a Writer's Journal.

Calendar, address book, mail, none of them need a mention, they just look good while they do their job without ever calling for attention.

Keynote, Numbers, and Pages are applications I work on at the desk in the office, but I have them on the iPad and are good for light use, though among them I use Numbers the most, my spreadsheet work being always light. Evernote is a fine application, but I hope they include sub-folders soon, because it is difficult to store masses of gigabytes all in main folders, but the most fun is Dropbox into which I have moved my entire Documents folder on the Macbook Air, so they are all available to the iPad, whenever I connect.

Holding the device, feeling really like I'm holding a mere notebook in my hand, I feel again the spirit of my boyhood, the lingering excitement when I wore the compulsory new clothes for festivals. When I wake up I reach for the iPad and begin writing; at night, in bed, I tap into it a few words of happiness before I turn off the light—with a fervor I never experienced with a laptop.