• Collection of iPad UI conventions pulled from frames of Apple’s demo videos. http://j.mp/daLakN (via @manukumar, @veen) #
• RT @wattenberg a celebration of color (new piece with @viegasf): http://hint.fm/blog #
• Must check this out: RT @landay nice talk by Paul Gross of Wash U. (C. Kelleher student) on code reuse in end-user programming tool #iui2010 #
• Google Buzz: someone’s post can pop into my feed if enough people recommend it, even if I don’t follow them. Very useful within a company. #
• Google’s code name for Buzz: Taco Town. http://bit.ly/afqsIF A lot of Googlers still calling Buzz postings “Tacos”. #

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One day after the iPad was introduced, reactions in the tech world have been mixed, so I watched Apple’s announcement to see for myself.

There are quite a few features the iPad lacks: multitasking, a camera, Adobe Flash support, HDMI video output, USB ports, an SD slot, and so on. But remember that at first, the iPhone didn’t 3G or native apps for a whole year. And who would have thought you could successfully sell a smartphone without copy and paste for two years? I bet the iPad is starting out the same way — start off with just enough features to get people hooked, figure out what’s really necessary, and then add on.

If you paid attention to Steve Jobs’ pitch, he may have talked about features and specs, but he really emphasized the experience of using the iPad. “The Internet in your hands,” he said over and over again. Hey, it may look like just a giant iPhone, but once you actually try it out, you’ll be hooked. He’s trying to appeal to your emotional, sensual side — which helps explain why a lot of left-brained geeks weren’t buying his spiel.

A few other random thoughts:

• I found it quite interesting to see what were essentially full-screen iPhone menus being used as pop-up menus or sidebars in iPad applications. If Apple designs its SDK well, it may not be too difficult to create one application that works on both the iPhone and the iPad.
• The home screens look anemic on such a large screen. The icons look too small, and the spacing too large. I’m surprised Apple didn’t put more design work into this.
• For input, I didn’t believe the rumor that the iPad would require you to learn a complex set of gestures, but I was hoping for something more interesting than a virtual keyboard (hello, ShapeWriter). I’m curious to try it out and see how well it works. While the iPhone keyboard isn’t perfect, it works better than I expected on such a small screen. And at least you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it.
• The biggest surprise for me was how aggressive the pricing is, $500 to $830.

I’d love to get my hands on an iPad, try it out, and see whether it’s as “magical” as Jobs claims. But even if it is, I won’t buy one yet. I never buy the first generation of a gadget, and in the case of the iPhone, it was a good idea. Let’s see what the iPad 2 is like.

This is the ultimate rickroll:

Last night, an old song that I first heard in high school suddenly popped into my head. I didn’t know the name or any of the words, but I could distinctly hear in my mind the haunting melody and the clear singing but the indistinct lyrics. I also knew it was by the ’90s British band Lush.

So I went on a little quest: how could I figure out what that song was? Two iPhone apps sounded like they could help.

One of them is Shazam: hold up your phone to a recording of a song, and Shazam will figure out the song. It works well at weddings (American Boy by Estelle featuring Kanye West), bookstores (Midnight Sun by Ivy) and even while boarding airplanes (Taking You Home by Don Henley). But it doesn’t work if you don’t have a recording, so it wasn’t going to help in this case.

Another iPhone app, Midomi, is supposed to detect songs that are played on the radio or even hummed. But I’ve found that it doesn’t work as well as Shazam for recorded music, and when I tried humming the Lush song, it didn’t display any songs by Lush in its results.

So I tried something else: I went to Amazon and searched for Lush. Eventually I navigated to the Amazon MP3 store, where I could press one button and hear 30-second previews of virtually all of Lush’s songs. Finally, at #23, I heard it: For Love. And also thanks to the web, I finally figured out what the heck they were singing.

A few months ago I said I’d blog about the highlights I had gleaned from my friends’ blogs. Well, here they finally are:

• Twitter is the latest social software craze from the valley, whose appeal I barely understand. Anyway, if you want to know what the buzz is about, Thomas Han, an avid user, has a great tutorial, a review of Twitter clients for the Mac, and some tips and tricks.
• Jason Hong found a video of a nifty game for tablet PCs called Crayon Physics Deluxe.
• Jason also found a web site that “measures” the reading level of a blog. According to the site, my blog’s reading level is high school. But there is no explanation what they are measuring, and Jonathan Bailey in his blog Plagiarism Today has pointed out a sleazy ad technique they use.
• Meanwhile, Juicy Studio has a more rigorous discussion on how reading levels are measured. According to them, my Gunning Fog Index is 9.18. What does that mean? Find out.
• Danyel Fisher ran into a rant about pie charts by Coda Hale, although other viewpoints were discussed in the comments.
• Nicodemus clued me in on three spinoffs for Mystery Science Theater 3000: Riff Trax, The Film Crew, and Cinematic Titanic. Isn’t the net wonderful?
• I had no idea where “Don’t tase me bro!” came from, but I was enlightened by Dulbecco (1, 2). Now, a certain comic strip make more sense.
• Dulbecco also blogged about the delightfully wacked song “Still Alive” in the game Portal. After I heard it, I wasn’t surprised to find out that Jonathan Coulton wrote the song. He is interviewed about the song in the gaming web site Primotech.

• For you Billy Joel fans, Here Comes Another Bubble.
• Earlier this year, Conan O’Brien was in San Francisco for a week. Watch his visit to Intel (part 1, part 2) and you’ll be impressed with what he gets away with. And I bet Sam Wo Restaurant in Chinatown is getting a bump in business after Conan’s ad for the hole-in-the-wall.
• Bustin’ out of the late ’70s, the pop band Dschinghis Khan seems to be Germany’s answer to the Village People. A video of their 1979 hit, “Moskau,” has become one of those odd Internet fads. To top it off, someone made a “translation” of the lyrics.
• The Second Life hype is unreal. Leave it to the TV show The Office to deflate some of it. And the advertising firm DraftFCB announces their debut on Second Life by parodying it.
• Kurt Thomas probably would have won the gold in gymnastics if the U.S. hadn’t boycotted the 1980 Olympics. To keep himself in the public eye, he starred in the movie Gymkata, one of his more ill-advised career moves. But it’s left us with gems such as a fight scene where the village well is conveniently shaped like a pommel horse.

Looks like my prayers (and those of many others) have been answered: Apple will release a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch in February, enabling developers to write their own native apps for those devices. I’ll be curious to see how the third-party iPhone/iPod app market will develop; I bet it will be huge.

At its Max developer conference, Adobe gave a sneak preview of a new tool code-named Thermo that allows designers to create the front end to Flash-based rich Internet applications without writing code. For example, you can import a layered Photoshop image and convert parts of the image to real UI controls. You can also create dummy data so that you can test out your design without needing the database code to be finished.

Someone posted videos of the Thermo demo on YouTube. I highly recommend watching them; the demo is one of the most impressive I’ve seen, especially in the end-user programming area.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

IBM made a big splash a couple of weeks ago when it released a new productivity suite based on the Productivity Tools in Lotus Notes 8. I joked with my colleagues that it should be called “SmartSuite for Notes.” But I never dreamed Lotus would reach back even farther and dub the them Lotus Symphony.

I remember the first incarnation of Lotus Symphony. A integrated software package for DOS, it included a spreadsheet (of course), word processor, database, charts, and communications program, although if I remember correctly, all of the modules looked suspiciously like a spreadsheet. I bet I still have a couple of .WRK files on some floppies somewhere. But eventually our family settled on Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets and Microsoft Word for DOS for word processing (at a time when everyone else used WordPerfect).

Even though John Dvorak dubbed the original Symphony “one of the bottom 10 worst software disasters,” I think enough time has passed for Symphony to have largely shed its negative connotations. In fact, it probably doesn’t have any connotations anymore. And I find it fascinating to see new life breathed into this old brand, along with the resurgence of Lotus itself.

What’s the next Lotus brand to be resurrected? Agenda? Magellan?

As a kid I used to read the encyclopedia (yes, my nerdiness goes way back), so Wikipedia is truly a joy. Not only can I read it, I can also improve it. Most of my edits have been in subjects I initially know little about but have some strange interest in.

I have an unusual capacity to remember the twists and turns of corporate history, such as the whole Citigroup/Travelers saga. So when I saw the skimpy history section that the Travelers article had, I had to jump in and help out. I also created the article for Capgemini, one of the world’s largest consulting companies, after seeing a sign for “Cap Gemini Ernst & Young” in Cupertino and trying to figure out what the heck that was. In this case, I just created a stub, and thankfully the rest of the Wikipedia community filled it in.

I’ll also do articles of local interest. For example, I heavily rewrote the article on Vallco Fashion Park, now Cupertino Square. Just today, I was reading about Mineta San Jose International Airport, and I knew something was wrong when its history section started in the early 1980s. So I couldn’t resist doing a little research and adding a paragraph about how the airport really started, in 1939.