To USB or not USB.

The iPad Camera Connector kit was designed to copy images and videos from your camera, iPhone, Nano or SD card to your iPad. But it's fun plugging everything USB in just to see if it works with the iPad. I've stated specific devices here since your mileage may vary and there are no guarantees.

Serendipity

• Jump Drives Xporter Magnum 64G is a 64 Gig jump drive on steroids. (It also comes in 128 Gig.) These have enough memory to fall into the category of external hard drive. Mine connected and downloaded images and movies fine. I'm overjoyed with this, since it gives me a way to import video for Real Director and the forthcoming iMovie for iPad. Unlike external hard drives, these require no additional power. The connector supports both FAT32 and HFS+ drive formats.


• USB Microphone This one was a shocker. I figured for sure there wouldn't be enough power, but my massive G Track USB mic worked fine with RecordStudio Pro. Excellent news for those looking to use their iPads for serious audio recording. I should also note that Belkin's TuneTalk works fine. This is a great little stereo mic designed for the iPhone and plugs into the iPad's socket with no connector required. The Blue Snowflake on the other hand did not work.

The Expected

• Memory Card Reader The Camera Connector kit comes with a SD reader, but some are reporting they can plug in their compact flash reader and download images. Note that your card should be formatted in the camera, not in a computer. Video must be H.264 720p or smaller with AAC audio.
  
  I don't use anything but the SD family. I plugged in the freebie SD reader that came with an Eye-Fi card and this worked fine for JPGs and video. I appear to have imported a WAV file too, but can't find it anywhere.


• USB headset. My Logitech A0356A headset worked fine with both Skype and RecordStudio Pro.


• Keyboard The Apple standard USB keyboard draws too much power. Others have reported that some USB keys with no external USB ports built in are working.


• iPhone Plug in your iPhone or video Nano by USB and you can copy photos and video from your camera roll. IPhone 3G is not supported.

Failures

• External Hard Drive Neither my Lacie Little Disk 80G or 300G worked. There is not enough power to drive these, even though the 300G had a power cord driving it from my Air USB port. Some are reporting other external drives work when they are plugged into a power source. To me this defeats portability but might be useful for speed sake in getting files off a hard disk when at your desktop. The connector supports both FAT32 and HFS+ drive formats.


• iPod Shuffle Not supported warning. But then, I didn't expect this to work.


• USB Hub I got a "uses too much power" warning when I plugged in a GearHead 4-port portable.


I'll post updates as I plug more stuff in.

Tips.
• If the camera connector doesn't work at first, try restarting your iPad by holding Home and Sleep. Then turn off your iPad, plug in the connector, then turn it on.
• On any external media card or drive, the iPad will be looking for a folder called DCIM. Add it to the drive on your desktop and put any video or image files you want to transfer in it.
• Blue check means a file is selected for import. Green check means it's already been imported.

Review: WeatherStation

Unlike the iPhone, the iPad doesn't come with a weather app. There are many out there and some have advanced radar, hourly forecasts, etc. The problem with most of these is that they're not very viewer friendly. Adding your city is not a problem. It's that the apps are gaudy, there's too much information and the presentation visually is very confusing.

WeatherStation is pretty much what you have on the iPhone: current conditions, daily forecasts for the next five days, time, date, sunrise and sunset all on one screen. In landscape mode, switching cities is a matter of one tap and it's easy to tell which city you're looking at.

Nothing extraneous here. So unless the Weather Channel is your reality TV, this app gets you to the weather basics fast.

The search for what Search actually searches.

Search is a little frustrating on iPad. It seldom finds what you're looking for. What? You didn't know your iPad had a search? Tap your Home button. Then tap it again. Search is similar to Spotlight on Mac and finds things instantly, without even having to type a return. However...

Built in apps only.
Sadly, search only works with the built-in apps. It doesn't access the dedicated file areas of added software. So it's very useful for finding a word within a thousand Notes, but not useful for finding a word within a Pages document. Many apps have their own search. Pages can search within a document only. You'll find it in the Tool menu.

No web content.
Search will not find anything within Safari's cache. For those who feel Safari's lack of search within a document is frustrating, this can be quickly fixed with the find-in-this-page bookmarklet. This is a little JavaScript that gets stored in a Safari bookmark. When you launch this bookmark it doesn't take you to a new web page, it searches the current document and highlights the search words. Follow the instructions on the site to install.

I don't got mail?
Search can only find what's in the mail that's on your iPad. And the way iPad works is that it only stores the most current messages locally. Most are still on your server. Once Mail has searched what's on your iPad it gives you the option to continue to search your server. Note that this can take a while.

These limitations are all frustrating, but once you know them and the workarounds, you'll find yourself finding things a little easier.

Review: Adobe Ideas for vector sketching.

I have never been an Adobe fan. But I'm stooping to say they got one right.



The lousy interface company.
Adobe creates some great file formats. But for as long as they have been associated with Apple, you'd think would have learned about user-friendly interfaces. Acrobat is the worst thing to create PDF files with. Buried somewhere in their menu maze is a clunky way to do everything, but it's so frustrating to get there.

Ideas is different.
Ideas is the simplest app Abode has ever written. The menu structure isn't intuitive, but simple enough to get by. Draw a line and you'll immediately fall in love. The moment you release your finger the line is vectored to create a smooth, beautiful stroke. You have complete control over width, opacity and color of your pen, even if getting to these controls takes more steps than necessary.

The photo layer.
Ideas has a few nice photo tricks. You can add a photo layer underneath and draw overtop of it. You can also remove it later, making sketches a great choice if you want to do tracings. Another cool feature is the color picker that allows you to create a palette from colors within a photo.

Vector export.
Your drawing can be mailed as a vector art PDF with a clear alpha background. These are great for pasting over top of backgrounds in Pages or Keynote. Provided you haven't added an image, these drawings are tiny and can be scale up to any size.

Adobe finally frees creativity.
Ideas is free. That's surprising coming from a company that usually charges outrageous rates for their software. Well worth keeping a copy on your iPad.

Tips

• To paste a drawing into Pages or Keynote, email it to yourself. In the email, hold your finger on the drawing and choose Copy. Open Pages and paste.

HMTL 5/Flash Part 2

So what's so good about HTML 5? Is it better than Flash? Not really. It will just allow you to do similar things with standard methods. To the average web user, you're not going to notice a lot of difference. Currently many sites use JavaScript for many of the multimedia and graphic tricks. Many of these will work with standard code in HTML 5 and CSS 3.

JavaScript is a compact programming language that most browsers can work with, but JavaScript can be insecure, bog down browsers and function erratically. Using HTML 5 these functions will work faster, smoother and more predictably.

These new tags are supported by many browsers and some are already supported by Safari for iPad. If you're using one of the other browsers for iPad, most of these actually work off the same core as Safari, so the new tags will probably work as well.

Remy Sharp has put up a nice little demo site where you can test these. Currently the following at least partially function:

• Interactive Canvas Gradients


• Content Editable


• Video


• Geolocation


• Post Message


• Online Connectivity Monitoring


• Offline Application Using Manifest


• Storage


• Web Database


• Web Database Rollback

Most of this can already be done with JavaScript and other methods, but HTML 5 will do it more efficiently and make media-rich web pages easier to write and implement. Switching from JavaScript will make many of these functions—like animation, video and audio—look more Flash-like.

HTML 5/Flash Part 1

There's a huge amount of noise about Flash and HTML 5. Apple says one of the reasons that iPad will not support Flash that HTML 5, will do most of those tricks and do them within Web standards.








So what's wrong with these beautiful flash sites and videos?

• Flash is not stable on all browsers. You'll commonly hear about browser crashes that occur when viewing a Flash site or video. Flash isn't viewable on many browsers, even when you don't count iPhone and iPad. Some browsers block flash, since it so often used in ads. And when it actually is viewable, users often get an upgrade message, delaying getting to the site or content.


• Flash content is not searchable. Most sites depend on search to attract viewers and many depend on it for income. Flash is in essence a movie. Just like you can't search a YouTube video for a word that someone says in the video, you can't practically search Flash. And regular HTML sites with Flash content rank low in searches.


• Flash, like any movie, is slow loading. Yet a further inconvenience.


• Flash is an extra expense. You have to build an HTML companion site to make search work. And those who find it through search won't see your Flash version anyway. HTML can be modified in a text editor. The entire Flash site need to be redone just to change one letter.


• Flash is designed for a mouse. One of Steve Jobs contentions against implementing Flash on the iPad is that a mobile device doesn't have a mouse. As this is something Adobe has never addressed as the device market has become more mobile, this is the deal stopper.

In short, it's not just that Flash isn't a web standard, it's that Flash was set up to never be a web standard. As another Adobe file format designed to protect content, it's also designed to protect itself, as a read-only format. The average user can't afford to create Flash files due to Adobe's extravagant software costs.

Everything is stacked against Flash's success as anything more than a specialty video format for the desktop. Adobe took a gamble with PDF and won. They took a gamble with Flash and appear to be losing. Ironically, with Adobe taking out anti-Apple ads, a large part of PDF's success is that OSX adopting it as standard export and printing format.

And another interesting fact: Apple's QuickTime format is actually capable of creating movies that work like websites, but Apple must have decided somewhere along the way that since QuickTime was unlikely to be a web standard, it wasn't worth the gamble.

Next: Demo HTML 5 on your iPad.

iPad User Guide for iBooks

Apple has made the iPad manual available for free through the iBooks Store. This freebie is literally a nice addition to your library.