Keep an eye out for Reeder (as a Google Reader/RSS App). It is with Apple for approval – so I have been told and highly recommended.

I completely agree with your thoughts on it and it is certainly an exciting space to watch or be involved in.

Cheers,

Gary

(Reading this back, it makes me sound like an Apple apologist. I’m not really, but I do own a lot of their kit)

Of course only geeks have iPads – they’ve only been out for a few days! No normal person buys things like this on the day of release… it’s taken nearly 3 years for iPhones to get into the hands of normal people – give the iPad time.

Just as they did with the iPod and MP3 players and the iPhone and smartphones, Apple seems to be blazing a trail for what is possible and doing so in a walled garden environment – rather in the same way that games consoles do. Then, afterwards, more open systems emerge with slightly less wonderful user experiences. That’s the trade-off.

But don’t lets slag off Apple. They have their ways of doing things, and they work – both for them and for their users. They are also innovating – plenty of attempts have been made at tablets in the past and they haven’t worked. Apple seem to have the knack of creating new products and making them just work. If open is a viable alternative, I’m sure Google or whoever will fill that gap.

I suppose the final point to make is that the iPad has a great browser on it, and anyone can develop for it, all you need to know is HTML, or whatever…

I really hope Scott is right about Android. I think Apple has demonstrated there are huge profit margins in machines with high quality surface aesthetics, but we need aesthetically pleasing easy to use machines that can also breed in the wild; then we can expect to see truly worthwhile innovation.

I can see where you are coming from with ‘the new computing’ – I remarked to my wife after I had been using it for a while that “I wish all computers worked like this”.

Of course, referencing the point I made in the post about openness, if all computers were like the iPad there would be very little innovation and hacking and that would be a bad thing. However, when the Android based tablets start turning up, this will change. It’s an exciting time to be geeky.

Thanks for the tip re: NewsRack, looks great.

The iPad, I find, is exceptional. The sharing options in Twitterific or in NewsRack (my RSS reader) are second to none.

This is the new computing – I am convinced of it. I’ll write about it later this week.

Scott