I've now spent one entire week with the iPad and although most of both the hardware and software has already been discussed online, I feel that, considering the fact that I heralded the iPad as the future of computing (not that I've been the only one or even in the minority), I ought to at least say a little bit about my experiences with it.

First of all, what am I using my iPad for? Well, to be quite honest, I hadn't carefully thought about use cases for the iPad before I bought it, but I wasn't too surprised when I found that the iPad has now replaced my MacBook Pro for most of the things that I do at home. This includes, but is not limited to: browsing, chatting, email, instant messaging, watching videos on YouTube, reading, twittering, facebooking, and listening to music. That's a lot! So, as you can imagine, I'm using my MacBook Pro a lot less now. I feel that perhaps it's foolish to go into a list of things for which I still need my MacBook, because it is far, far too extensive. iPad is the future of computing, not the present, and it can be very few people's primary computing device. However, I have to say that the first version is very, very mature already, especially for a home user. However, as of now, it's tied to a Mac or a PC for too many things such as software updates, getting data in and out, etc. that it will be a while before it can stand alone. (iPhone OS 4 will address some of these concerns though; for example, you'll be able to send arbitrary attachments to the iPad via email.)

Is it an oversized iPhone? A lot of people have asked me this question and I really don't know what to say. Sometimes my answer is "Of course not, it's an entirely different experience", but sometimes I feel that it's almost exactly like an iPhone. A couple of examples. For me, an iPhone was never a viable device for any kind of extended activity such as reading, gaming, or chatting. Not so on the iPad. I transferred all of my RSS feeds from NewsFire to Google Reader the day after I got this thing and started using NetNewsWire on the iPad to read all my news. The text is crisp, and most importantly, large! It's an amazing reading experience. And even though it sounds corny and a lot of people have said this already, when you visit a website on an iPad, you feel one degree closer to the site. Some people have described it as having a more "intimate" feel to it. It feels good and it feels right. This was not a feeling I ever got when I was browsing sites on my iPhone because it always felt so constrained. Another thing that is completely different on the iPad is writing. I'm writing this whole entry in the Notes app on my iPad and it does not feel painful. On the iPhone, I would be screaming for a real computer with a real keyboard about two sentences into anything.

Now, when does it feel like an oversized iPhone? Mostly when you discover things like, oh, Safari still can't do a Find inside a webpage, or that you can't edit any of the song information inside the iPod app, or that I still can't type in Hindi (or for that matter, that the one RSS feed I can't read on my iPad is my Hindi news feed, because the Hindi font support is still half-baked and all the matras are messed up), or that I can't truly multitask between my IM app and a browser... the list goes on. Limitation-wise, the iPad is virtually identical to the iPhone, and it's just as annoying. And iPad users will have to wait until September or October for all the iPhone OS 4 goodies, and longer still for the makers of popular apps to adopt those APIs.

Speaking of development, the iPad is a very, very exciting platform for developers like myself. Of course, it's a pain that I will have to completely redo the UI for my app, but on the other hand, there are so many exciting things that I can do with the user experience on the iPad that I couldn't have even imagined attempting on the iPhone. It's an exciting new world out there, and I am craving for some free time to spend on developing an iPad app. Perhaps next weekend.

It's funny that I feel it hardly "relevant" to talk about the hardware just because it barely feels like it's there. I never thought the iPhone was a particularly good looking device and the same goes for an iPad. With the screen turned off, both the iPhone and iPad look like plain old black slabs. All the magic lies in the software. The one thing I feel like I just have to mention about the hardware though is the battery life. It's phenomenal! My usage pattern for the iPad is more akin to a cell phone than a laptop. With my laptop, I would never even think about leaving its power adapter behind when going anywhere. When I think of my laptop's battery, it feels more like a tiny power backup device to keep the computer from turning off while I move it from place A to place B, both of which are equipped with a power adapter. It's a completely different experience with the iPad. A single percent point of battery power seems to last forever. I think I might have charged my iPad last on Thursday night or something (it's Sunday night now). The fact that I can't even remember exactly when is remarkable. I started writing this with the iPad's battery at 9% and now it's at 4%. It's been more than an hour! (All while the music was on too.) So, when I heard that the innards of an iPad looked more like a computer strapped to a battery rather than a battery strapped to a computer, I wasn't surprised one bit.

I know I wanted to write more about the iPad, but there is so much that I'm rather glad I've forgotten all the rest of it. Otherwise, I'd be here for another three hours, tapping out paragraph after paragraph about how this device makes computing (finally!) awesome.

Labels: English, Mac

When I started using the iPhone, both as a user and a developer, I finally saw freedom. Freedom from the ridiculous way in which software - Mac or PC - is made today. Here was an entirely new UI paradigm that finally - finally! - did not have the horrible and messy baggage of desktop operating systems. The very same menus, windows, pop up buttons, etc. that, in the 1980s, were the saviors of computer users everywhere, rescuing them from the abyss of the command line interface, are now the devil. We all know this because we know how incredibly hard it is for people like our parents and less "tech-savvy" friends to even become close to proficient at using them.

The iPhone came and showed us that we don't need all that! Hell, it didn't even have Cut, Copy and Paste for more than a year, and I almost never felt it missing. And yet, when they finally added it, the way they did it just blew me away with how clever and minimalist it was. (In contrast, look at how Windows Mobile or Palm Pre tackled the same problem, and you'll see how they're still burdened with the baggage of desktop OSs - it's just all too easy to give in to following the tried-and-true way, right?)

This is big. Forget about the iPad itself, but look at what it is saying. It is saying that we can have a fully usable desktop operating system (for that is what the iPad has, believe it or not), while simultaneously throwing away most of the crud that makes a desktop operating system what it is today. Many will complain that there is no Finder. But I don't want a fucking Finder! I've had it with manually managing a ridiculous file hierarchy on my computer. I've also had it with hunting for commands in menu bars, toolbars, contextual menus, and pop up buttons! I absolutely love the UI innovativeness that both iPhone and iPad are brimming with; this is the kind of fresh slate that was previously thought of as impossible to attain, and the kind of fresh slate that any other company would give an arm and a leg for.

And I have to give Apple kudos for playing it off as well as they have done. If this had been directly pitched as a successor to the Mac OS, there would have been massive booing, since it didn't run any Mac software, couldn't work with any of the existing peripherals, and so on. What they've done instead is to let their brand new OS with its brand new UI paradigm mature alongside the Mac OS, letting this new OS build its own base of both users and developers (140,000 apps!), so that when they ship the successor to the MacBook in a couple of years and it runs what we know today as the iPhone OS, no one will raise an eyebrow, because it will be the most natural thing in the world. I look forward to that day.

Labels: English, Mac

One good sign of a very bad fan is when he finds out about the latest book in a "trilogy-ish" written by one of his favourite authors only by strolling into a bookstore and being told about it by the pleasant, hippie-like shopkeeper. But then again, I wouldn't go to great lengths to blame this faithful reader given the fact that said author is dead, and would it really be too presumptuous to think that people ought to stop having books published once they're six feet under? Apparently so.

Labels: English

Of the newly introduced Google Latitude for iPhone, which is a web application:

We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

This is one of the major issues with developing apps for iPhone. Apple tells you they won't accept it after you have done all your hard work, and this ought not to be underestimated. The only thing that is a bit surprising is that Apple has the balls to give the same crap to Google.

Labels: English, Mac

对我来说，学习中文一个很重要的好处是能够更好地了解印地语。中文与印地语之间不同很多，但是那些稀罕的相似之处是非常有趣的。

两种语言都有“语气词”的概念。“语气词”是语言学家们使用的术语，意思是一个小词，这个小词自己没有任何意义，可是能够影响到句子的总体意味。以下的几个例子会阐明我的意思：

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
“这真是太多了，我吃不下了，你帮我吃吧。”

Labels: Chinese

I think one of the best things that has happened for me as a result of having studied Chinese is a much better understanding of Hindi. Chinese and Hindi have more differences than similarities but the similarities they do share are quite fascinating.

Both languages have this really interesting concept of a "modal particle". A modal particle is a term that linguists use, which approximately means a small word which doesn't mean anything on its own in a sentence, but which has an influence on the overall meaning of the sentence. The examples below should clarify what I'm talking about:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"Yah bahut zyādā hai, mujhse aur nahiⁿ khāyā jāyegā, tum khālo nā."
"This is too much, I can't eat any more of it, won't you eat it (please)."

Labels: English

मुझे लगता है कि मेरे चीनी पढ़ने से मुझे सबसे ज़्यादा लाभ हुआ है अपनी ही इस हिन्दी भाषा को बेहतर समझने में. चीनी और हिन्दी भाषाओं में समानता से अंतर ज़्यादा हैं, लेकिन जो समानताएं हैं, वे बहुत ही रोचक हैं.

दोनों भाषाओं में एक बहुत ही दिलचस्प चीज़ है यह "मोडल पार्टिकल" की संकल्पना. मोडल पार्टिकल एक भाषाविदों के इस्तेमाल का शब्द है और इसका मतलब लगभग है एक छोटा सा शब्द जो अपने आप से एक वाक्य में ज़्यादा माइने नहीं रखता, परन्तु जिसका वाक्य के समग्र तात्पर्य पर प्रभाव पड़ता है. नीचे दीये गए इन चंद उदाहरणों से आपको समझ आ जाएगा मैं क्या कह रहा हूँ:

"यह बहुत ज़्यादा है, मुझसे और नहीं खाया जाएगा, तुम खालो ना."
"तुम खेलने क्यों नहीं आये?" "अरे भाई, मैं कल के टेस्ट के लिए पढ़ाई कर रहा था ना!"
"तुमने ठंडे दिमाग़ से सोच लिया है ना?"
"हैं! तुम पागल हो गए हो क्या?"
"आज तो मेरे पास टाईम नहीं है, मैं कल आता हूँ हाँ."
"हे भगवान्, तूने यह क्या कर डाला रे..."
"क्या है भाई?"

इन उदाहरणों में, जो शब्द मोटे अक्षरों में लिखे हुए हैं, वे "मोडल पार्टिकल" कहलाए जातें हैं (कम से कम, मेरे हिसाब से, इनको हिन्दी में मोडल पार्टिकल माना जाना चाहिए). इन शब्दों का काम होता है बोली में भावना डालना. अंग्रेजी में ऐसे शब्दों का ज़्यादा इस्तेमाल नहीं होता है, और मुझे लगता है कि इस ही लिए मैं जब गुस्सा होता हूँ, तो हिन्दी में ज़्यादा आसानी से दूसरे व्यक्ती तक अपनी भावनाएं पहुंचा सकता हूँ. ये शब्द वाक्य में केवल भावना डालने के लिए होतें हैं, इस बात का एक अच्छा सबूत यह है कि ऊपर लिखे उदाहरणों का मूल मतलब इन शब्दों को निकालने के बाद भी बिलकुल नहीं बदलता.

ऐसे शब्द चीनी और जापानी में भी भरे पड़ें हैं. चीनी में इन्हें "语气词" (यू-छी-थ्स) बुलाया जाता है जिसका अनुवाद होगा "भाषा भावना शब्द". जापानी में इन्हें "叙法の助詞" (जोहो-नो-जोशि) या "मोडल सहायक शब्द" बुलाया जाता है. इनके बारे में ज़्यादा जानकारी के लिए, विकिपीडिया पर भाषाविज्ञान से सम्बंधित लेख पढ़ सकतें हैं, परन्तु विकिपीडिया पर भी इन चीज़ों की जानकारी अभी बहुत कम है.

इस लेख का सम्पादन रुंगटा के हिन्दी ट्रांस्लिटरेशन उपकरण के द्वारा हुआ है.

Labels: Hindi