Problems are: where to begin and pretty much everything and more has already been said.
I was going for the Random thought about blablabla… until John Gruber posted his Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad.
So, after a quick round up of some of the good reads of the last couple of days, I’ll take a more personal approach (mixed with a few things I consider in need to be said, again).

One of the best reads was probably Fraser Speirs‘ piece rightly called Future Shock.
He doesn’t talk about the iPad, but more of the biggest scam of the last century: computers are not for everyone, despite what they are trying to sell us, and how the Apple tries to solve this problem.
And that’s what trolls, screaming their pain about the lack of front-facing camera or a Flash plugin, are missing.
This revolution (yes, it is one) is not about the device, it’s about a new way of using computers.
I wrote a piece 3 years ago about this. Every words are still up to date, and the iPad is a new, soon to be good, answer.
About those trolls, by the way, here is a really good word to them (and the following one is not bad either).

Here ends the recommended readings.
For the ones about wether or not the iPad has a USB connection or a video output, you’re on your own
(and try to think a little bit and find the answer yourself. If you can’t, here is the Macworld FAQ).

As for the things already said elsewhere, but that really matter, they are simple.
The success of the iPad is not tied to the design of the product, or even the OS.
It’s the Content: The Apps that will enable it with the perfect function for you, or the new way of experiencing medias.
Dan Lyons a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs wrote a great piece, capturing the essence of the iPad, months before its announcement.
Let me repeat : It’s the Content.

In that way, the NY Times application mock up that was presented during the keynote is far from being anecdotal.
D Day minus 60, there is already a new-ish way of experiencing medias.
Pause a minute, and try to imagine what this device will enable in, say, two years from now.
And what goes for News goes for Comics (remember the Marvel buyout by Jobs-(partially)-owned Disney) or Movies.
In a word: Stories.
How will the iPad tell stories in very few years from now.
This is mind blowing.

The iPad is a device to access content, instead of creating content.
It’s brilliant: Youtube’s stats show there is a 0.2% contribution ratio.
In our case, it means that for 1 person uploading a video (needing a not-iPad computer), 499 can view it on their iPad.

The iPad will redefine a lot of things (in addition to being a tremendous success)

That’s what Gruber knows already, of course, when he calmly collects quotes for his delicious future claim chowders.

All that is great sport, and it’s a really enjoyable (if collateral) part of Apple’s business.
Let’s get things down, to a more personal level.

Every last Apple announcements were pretty much the same.
A few talks before “yeah, I’m a cool kid, I heard about The Rumor”.
Then come the announcement, and then: The Vending Machine Conversations.
Those are just the funniest things.
Three kind of people here:
iPhone owner since day one, or two, not necessarily Apple fanboy, just the guy who knows what it feels, what difference it makes.
He’s sold on the iPad, even if he might not buy one.
Then, there’s the recently-purchased iPhone owner. This one doesn’t really care. If he stumbles upon an iPad, he will let himself be dragged in. Until ten, wait and see.
Last, there is the “I on’t need an iPhone, I’m good with my useless Blackberry” type,
going in concert with the “I don’t own anything digital, I’m a rebel” kind.
Those people have a real problem with computers. Not that they don’t use one, far from it. Most are power users. Windows users usually, but advanced non the less.
They have a problem with their digital lives, and they wait for companies, like Apple, to solve it. Except that even they can’t define their own problem. They don’t even know they have one.
Apple rumors lead them to hope, and obviously, they are disappointed. Thus comes the Rage.
“Humpf, I prefer my Archos, it hold 160GB. iPad’s lame.”
“I was expecting a computer I can use with Illustrator and Photoshop, but when I’m away, you know. iPad’s lame.”
“Apple really blew smoke to our face all these last weeks. iPad’s lame.”

Oh boy! These moments are really precious..
Well, for you I have just one thing. You’re a morron. Not for not wanting or needing an iPad, just for not understanding how game changing it is, even with you not needing one.

Reading the trolls on the Internet is fun. Hearing them from your office chair: priceless.

So, what the iPad means, for me, in my day to day life ?

I already know that I will buy 3 of them in the next 12 months.
One for me.
Not that I need it, but I’m a geek Apple fanboy.
One for my wife.
We were pretty set on buying her a MacBook, to complete her iMac, in casual web browsing, mail reading or video watching moments.
The iPad fits perfectly here. It’s not a mobile use per se (as in “out of the home”), it’s a comfy-in-the-couch use.
And the third one will be for my son.
He will probably inherit mine when I upgrade to the 2nd generation iPad.
Those who know me, also know that he will be between 30 and 36 month old by then.
What ? WTF ? An iPad for a 3 years old kids ?
Yes and definitely yes.
The iPad will solve many broken use case we, as parents, are facing.
At 2 (and for the last year), he’s been using our iPhones, playing games we bought for him, watching little funny videos of him and his cousin, or just playing with those funny little pictures that moves all around.
It’s amazing to see how natural Apple’s touch interface is to a 2 years old kid.
So he will play on the iPad.
Then there are movies. Sometimes, he watches animated movies on a portable DVD player. Clunky, fragile (the player and the DVD), no real battery and a horrible screen. Once ripped, all those cartoons will hold in his iPad.
It will become the perfect entertaining/learning device, at 1.5 pounds.

Also, I’m seriously considering replacing my mother’s MacBook with an iPad.
Simplifying her approach to computer.
I might have to wait for printing support first, though.

Then there is this email from my brother, the day after the announcement:
“I have a crush on the iPad. Will need one.”
He’s not a power user, he works with a Windows PC and a Blackberry, and owns an iMac for web surfing, photos and music.
The iPad will be the perfect companion to its digital life.

I will close this post with what might be the most lethal feature: the price.
Having an entry level model at $500 is just a brilliant move.
Competition is left sitting in the mud, an it puts the iPad in range of almost any electronic consumer good.
Considering you will be able to do many different things with it, the iPad will very often be an interesting alternative.
This is one of the rare product for which Apple is leaving his fat margin away to secure market shares fast.
They want to impose the iPad and the concepts that goes with it to the biggest audience.
If they succeed, computers will never be the same.

Yes. Again. I had a life changing experience.
OK, little clarification needed here.
By reading some of the latest posts titles, one might think I have a rather small life.
In fact, it’s the opposite. I just have many lives. Many many.
The main one evolves around my wife and my son.
Then there is the one around Mac Computers (which, itself, includes many others), the one designing, the one coding, the one listening to music, the one watching movies, and so forth.
Well, recently, some of these lives, Computer and Data related, have been profoundly altered by a not-so-new service called DropBox.

DropBox takes your data and put it in The Cloud (a very fashion word to say on a disk somewhere on the Internet…) and once it’s there, you can then synchronize multiple machines with said data.
Let’s say you have a machine at work, another one at home, plus a laptop you carry around when you’re not in one place or the other.
Well, you install the DropBox app on these machines, select the folder acting as the DropBox and let the magic happen.
Data get sent on DropBox servers, and then copied back on the other machines.
It’s the new version of that USB thumb drive collecting dust in your pocket.

You also have a clean web interface to browse and download your files, for when you don’t have one of your machine at hand, SSL secured.

That was the original idea.
Since, the Dropbox team has been busy. The list of feature is long and keeps growing.
Versioning system. To access any previous version of your files;
LAN sync. Your machines will recognize they are on the same network and transfer files directly, bypassing the internet, thus greatly improving transfer rates.
iPhone app. Free, you can browse your drop box, and even open and read a whole bunch of supported files (image, music, movies, text, presentation, pdf) and upload photos or movies from your camera role (the closest thing to a Finder the iPhone has).
Sharing. Specific folders and files can be public, enabling easy collaboration or punctual sharing.
Free. Not really a feature per se, but still very cool. 2Gb just by signing up. 250b more if you come from an affiliate link, and 500Mb more if you are the one bringing a new user.
Paid plans are not cheap, $99/year for 50GB, $199 for 100GB, but considering the amount of services, it’s fair.

Future development look promising too.
The team setup the Votebox, a place for user to vote for the next features to be implemented.
There are some great ideas, one of them being an API.

So, now that we have taken a quick tour of Dropbox services,
lets see in what way it changed my way of working and organizing my digital life.

First, I got rid, once and for all, of all the thumb drives that were sitting all around my pockets.
It may seem trivial but for someone like me, always trying to consolidate stuff in pockets, it’s a big deal.

The great thing is that data stays on the local disk. Allowing you to use files just like any other.
I put just about everything on my Dropbox.
It has my web development folders (git repositories included), my graphic design files, my clients projects and every tools and documentation I use regularly (or not).

I use it to transfer data from one point to another, also:
Need to bring home 500 Mo of files ?
Drop in in the box and leave.
By the time you get home it will be on the internet, and, given your home computer is awake, it will be there too.

In the end, I’d say that Dropbox brought me peace of mind.
In the same way that, since the iPhone, I leave home without knowing where I go precisely: I’ll look it up on the way ; I leave home, without wondering if I will need any given file. I have them all available.

If you want to try Dropbox, and would like to enjoy 250MB of free (in addition of your free 2GB),
use this link.

The first one is so obvious that it’s in the name of the technology : there are 2 things to learn. Rails, of course, but Ruby also. And, at the beginning, it’s hard to tell what feature comes from the former or the latter.
Ruby is the language, really nice and clear and concise.
Rails is the framework, powerful, but performing a lot of magic in the background, making it that much harder to see the whole picture.

Second, Ruby is fairly young (1998) compared to other languages such PERL (1987).
Rails is even younger (2003).
(Oddly, PHP is fairly young (1995) although it seems it’s been around forever)
It’s a strength, since it’s better suited for today’s rich web environment,
including modern concepts such as AJAX at it’s core, for instance.
But on the other hand, there is much less resources than there is for older languages.
Even with RoR being the hot thing around the web for the last 2 years, there are very few open source projects available for integration or learning. Blog engines or CMS are still scarce, and even if plugin and gems come in number, snippets of code are not as ubiquitous as for, say, PHP. We have yet to see a blog engine as powerful as Wordpress, or a good bulletin board or webmail engine.

Since it’s young, there are fewer developers. On the other hand, these are also the early adopters, the most passionate, the most willing to learn and to share, and maybe, simply put, the best.
But they can be hard to follow sometimes:
- You do this, you put that there, and done.
- Uh… OK, but… Sorry, I didn’t catch that first…
Rails being young, its evolution is blazingly fast. New seed available every other month, new features, new ways of doing things…
As soon as version 2 was out, they announced merging with Merb, eventually bringing a whole lot of new things to learn.
There is no time to rest (yes, geek-pun a little intended).

Also, you can have more trouble finding what I call mid-level resources.
You know, the thing between The 15 min blog engine and the upcoming new killer feature of the edge version ;
the solutions to the kind of problems you encounter as you begin mastering the syntax and building more complex apps, but are still a few years from calling yourself a guru…
It’s getting better though, especially with Ryan Bates’s excellent screencasts at railscasts.com.
He has a way of making things look really simple and natural, and can explain pretty much anything in just a few minutes.

And all that, is just for Ruby and Rails.
Along, comes a slew of surrounding technologies (the Ecosystem) you have to learn, one way or the other, if only just a bit.
Capistrano, for smooth rails deployment scenarii ;
Git, for an effective version controlling system (and GitHub for the closest thing geeks hve as a social network);
chances are that you will have to drop your good ol’pal Apache server, in favor of a Mongrel stack, or at least manage a Passenger Phusion plug in ;
and also Gems, Rake tasks…
and all these technologies, being, for the most part, even younger than RoR, have that much less resources.

All in all, there are still plenty of reasons to go on.
Rails has a way to speed up development time drastically, Capistrano makes deployment as simple a “cap deploy” and Gems and plugin bring powerful tools or handy little functions to your app with not much more than a few lines of code.
Just beware that this Build your blog in 15 min screencast or that Up and Running with Rails book might have misleading titles.

Since I talk about resources, let’s share some.
The first and absolute best would be Ryan Bates’s RailsCasts.
5 to 20 minutes, one topic at a time, free (but donations accepted).
Even if the first ones are pretty simple, he doesn’t spend time explaining all the ins and outs:
Railscasts are best served after a good ol’book. (see next post for that)

Just after come the APIs : Official Documentations.
It’s actually embedded with ruby and rails ; use the ri command.
A little bit intimidating at first, but once you search a few commands, it becomes more familiar and quite powerful.
I like keeping them in html format locally (at least on my laptop).
Ruby ones (the Ruby Core and the Standard Library) are at ruby-doc.org .
and I always carry around the enhanced HTML-formatted Rails API doc of Railsbrain.com.

Peepcode has very good screencasts, not very expensive.
The good thing is that they cover lot of the technologies of the Rails Ecosystem.

There are a few tutorials, more or less thorough.
They usually cover a specific feature or plugin,
but there, Google is your very good friend, since it’s closely related to the app you’re building.

Then, two and a half years ago, I began looking for a new web development environment.
I boiled the choice down to two.
On one hand, there was Flash and Flex and Air,
and on the other hand, there was Ruby and Rails.
I didn’t really give the Flash family a spin ; Ruby and Rails were the Hot thing on the web and, after reading a few line of code, I felt closer to Ruby than ActionScript.

Two times, I failed.
PHP and the dozen of ongoing project grabbed me back.
Late last year, I gave it another try. Much more determined to succeed this time.
Twelve months, as many books, and hundreds of hours of web browsing have passed since.
(That’s my method for learning. Maybe the subject of another post).
This time, was the One.

I have made a few web sites in ruby now, and I must say : it’s great.
Sure, you have to embrass a way of thinking, constraints and predefined methods, but the reward is mighty.
Web development is my side pet project ; I only code 2-3 hours a day (on the good days) so I have to be pretty effective.
Ruby & Rails provides a structure, allowing one to focus on architecture and design, without giving up good and powerful code.

Over the next few posts, I will try and tell a story,
share resources, code and advices (sometimes learned painfully),
in the hope it can help another nubyist to bootstrap.

This pretty much means that I need music everywhere all the time.
Walkman, then DiscMan, then MiniDisc, then iPod solved the problem when far from home.
But Home has always been a problem.

I need to easily have access to any one of my 25 000+ song, in any room, at all time.
Seems easy. It’s not.

The first attempt to distributed music was Apple AirPort Express.
An as short as inconclusive attempt.
Second attempt, until recently was with Roku’s Soundbridge.
Wifi connected devices, with or without speaker, reading your shared iTunes Library.
Design of the product is average, interface is passable, and reliability uneven.
But it did the job, until one of the devices died.
Then came THE QUESTION:

Do I stick with this solution, or do I migrate to a whole other one ?

The other solution, you’ll have guessed, is Sonos.

For several months I wondered.
Then I took the plunge. Sonos it would be.
Sonos has nearly the perfect solution for ubiquitous music around the house.

To begin with, those nice white & alu little boxes fit perfectly in any interior.
Not the main issue, but important for us, aesthete.
Configuration : a breeze.
They choose not to rely on your crappy wifi network to provide the service; they create their own, without you even knowing. It’s fast, and streams my 320k m4a across the apartment when my Mac has sometimes a hard time finding my Airpot Extreme. And the more you add zones, the better is your coverage.

Once you point it to your iTunes Music Library, you can have your playlists and everything, without further configuration. You don’t even rely on iTunes anymore. The Sonos create it’s own stream, thus not being limited to 5 clients.
You interact with the system via an app on your mac, via the Sonos Controller, rugged and water-resistant, or, icing on the cake (three coats please) via a full featured free app on your iPhone.

What’s more to say… it works. Period.

All that is left is to choose a nice pair of speakers. I chose Jamo’s A102.
Not necessarily audiophile’s first choice (hey! let’s be honest, my bathroom isn’t the Vienna Opera Hall…), but nice performance considering size and look.

And for those of you needing more things on the cake, let’s say, a cherry, comes in the Sonos Customer Service. Nice people, actively contributing to Twitter, and ready to go the extra mile to make a customer happy.

It’s been a long time since I didn’t feel that way for a consumer product, and that feels good.

Of course, you could argue that it isn’t cheap.
I agree, but honestly, have you ever been really satisfied with cheap solutions ?
I figured not.

Life Is Good.