Support, Hawaii and the Obligatory iPad post

First let me give a quick update on Support. I've moved to tenderapp.com for providing support over my old mail based approach. The biggest advantage they offer is i can have more than a single support person helping out -- On that note if you have emailed recently or visited http://support.loghound.com you may have noticed I've got some additional help. I'm really happy to publicly announce that Karn ("WebKarnage") has joined team Loghound doing support -- I couldn't be happier with all of the great help he has been providing.

The really nice thing that this has let me do is take a vacation, I just came back from Hawaii -- While I've gone with my family on vacation before I always logged in every day to do support, answer questions and generally keep things running smoothly. What was really nice about this break was I totally unhooked -- I checked email I think twice but otherwise was 'offline' which was a great break.

My vacation ended last night, April 2, when we returned home -- Now let me be clear, I never planned to come back the day before iPad day but that was just the way it worked out.
Let me start my (obligatory) iPad post by saying I don't regret buying it -- That is an odd way to start the post but you'll see below what appears to be a lukewarm reaction -- I really do like it but I would best describe it as 'meeting expectations'.

I pre-ordered a 16GB model to pick up at our local Apple store -- My reasoning was that it would be mostly a 'bed side' computer and I didn't need a lot of storage but in listening to Andy Ihnaktko talk about it on theMacbreak Weekly -- In the discussion he said "You should buy the 64GB model because you will find yourself putting 'everything' on it" -- That sort of struck me and I thought that 16GB really could fill up pretty quickly if you started adding some heavy apps -- I ended up asking if I could upgrade to a 32GB model when I got to the Apple store and they were able to support my request.

So this morning I trundled off to the store with my 8 year old son and at about 8:20 we were in line waiting (the local paper showed up and snapped a photo here -- I'm the guy with the blue hoodie on the left hand side.

So back to my impressions -- Like I said it meets my expectations -- Expectations that were pretty high so that's saying something. The only thing that really suprised me in an unexpectedly good way was looking at photos. Syncing over some iPhoto libraries and looking at the photos on the iPad is spectacular, much more than I expected.

Things that worked as well as I expected were web surfing (fast, high fidelity), iBooks (crisp text, fun to turn, great book syncing) the Mail app (and the google gmail web interface) and google maps.

Finally there were a few things that were a disappointment: iPhone apps scaled 2x look terrible (almost unusable) - I get it that graphics scaled up look clunky but I assumed they would scale text up better than they did (my guess is the scaling is happning at the graphic card level so perhaps it's not possible to scale text differently than other elements).

The launch apps from third parties were a mixed bag -- I love the potential of the netflix app but it crashes, a lot. Evernote is very nice but also tended to crash -- I'm sure that these will improve quickly however. The device is surprisingly heavy in the hand -- while that feels good from a 'boy this is sturdy' point of view it's extra weight compared to a kindle is a concern -- I'll need to do some real reading to see how that works.

I have a few iPad app ideas that I'll be playing with over the coming weeks & months -- It should be fun.