Where is Waldo... I mean John...

Well, it has been a few months since I have written a new blog post. So I thought I would take a few minutes to crank out a quick post.

First and foremost, business has picked up and the weather has increased to a much more desirable temperature. The past several weeks have been a flurry of meetings and putting together proposals for a number of potential clients. All a great thing since as many of you know, I am doing my own start-up and making a go of it on my own. Just for grins, here is a partial list of some of my new clients. OK, this is also a shameless plug and a attempt to increase the off page SEO value of my clients sites.

DentSquadUSA • P+D Solutions • dZignPak • WhiteShield • Virtech Paralegal • The Solar Group • RDH Vending • Pacific Church of God • It's Rocket Science • Heritage Vistas • Calahan Design Solutions

The services that I am providing for these clients varies from client to client. Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, web site design and maintenance. I am totally having a great time working with these clients.

Hands on with the iPad

If you have not had the opportunity to have a little hands on time with the new iPad from Apple, you will find yourself,or at least I did, start thinking of ways to justify spending the money to buy one.

My first impressions was great, I was impressed with the screen, the size and the applications were beautiful.

The physical device felt a bit thicker than I was expecting. The edges of the body were smooth much like the newest generation of the MacBook Pro screen. The screen was larger than I imagined and was crisp and clean. Clicking or tapping icons was a little more pronounced than I expected. Several times while I was testing the unit, i tapped an icon and nothing happened. I had to slowly and intentionally tap the icon to get it to register the selection.

The software was very iPhone like and the same gestures allowed me to quickly pick it up and start flipping screens left and right. I also found it very responsive to the orientation of the iPad and flipped as needed.

Using the keyboard was pretty easy I did find the vertical keyboard a bit cramped to type with both hands as a keyboard. Flipping it horizontal was a much easier typing experience. However, I was unsure where my fingers were since I did not have a bump on the "f" and "j" keys.

The e-mail application was much richer than the iPhone version of the app. It was more like the Mail app on the Mac OS which allowed you to see your folders and accounts I like that added functionality.

The Calendar would allow you to flip to a horizontal version and gave a much richer look and feel with having a column on the left to see your calendars. I really liked the fact that each event in the calendar had a colored bullet with black text unlike the Mac OS Calendar where all the text for an event is color. That might be a preference but did not take the time to look.

iPhoto was very much like the iPhoto on the Mac. It allowed you to double tap a photo thumbnail and open the image to full screen. Flipping a finger left and right was smooth to navigate between images. Using the thumb and index finger would allow me to rotate images effortlessly. You could also setup slide shows by accessing a menu and defining time and transition.

The iBook app was nice. There were all the expected functionality that I would guess would be available with other eBook Readers. This included the control of brightness, text size and bookmarking. I really enjoyed the page turning animation. It was very intuitive to allow the 3D representation of turning a real books page. I also loved how you could run your finger back and forth to control the animation. Several of the books that I looked at also included illustrations and looked great.

The web (Safari) looked great. I looked at a couple of my sites and a few others to get an idea of the format. My sites generally are 955 wide and looked great in both orientations.

I also looked at a couple of YouTube videos and they were a bit chunky but would not slow me down from watching old StarTrek content. I viewed a HD video and it looked amazing.

Summary, I would love to have one of these now, but I am not at a point where luxuries are allowed :-(. I could see that this could easily replace a computer for my kids since all that they do is surf the web and do e-mail. As a student I can see the iPad quickly becoming a norm on campuses with the availability of the books in the iBook format. Adding the iWork tools allows you to word process, presentation creation and many of the other standards.

If you dare, go check it out at the Apple Store and see what you think. Oh by the way, you might want to leave your wallet at home, since the $499 starting price is pretty tempting.