Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s campaign against Adobe Flash has become explicit. The company on Thursday published a website of “iPad-ready websites,” listing sites that support “the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.”

Clearly Apple believes Flash is an outdated standard. Apple has reportedly been urging web developers to use HTML5 for video playback rather than Flash. Noticeably, HTML5 appears 10 times on the “iPad-ready websites” page.

Websites on-board the iPad-ready boat include The New York Times, CNN, Reuters the White House and others.

Apple’s lack of Flash support for the iPhone has been a paramount complaint among critics who believe they’re missing out on a big chunk of the web. Apple’s persistent lack of Flash support for the iPad reinforces the corporation’s vision of a future where Flash is left behind.

But as simple as it may sound to ditch a format in exchange for another, Wired.com’s Webmonkey editor Michael Calore points out that ditching Flash for HTML5 would be complex for the web as a whole. (HTML5 is technically not a format, after all.) He points out that there’s no agreed upon video format for HTML5, and support varies greatly from browser to browser.

“Not to be overly critical of Apple — anyone pushing for open web standards deserves kudos — but the company seems more deeply concerned with digging Flash’s grave than it does with promoting semantic markup,” Calore wrote.

Read more of Calore’s views on this topic over at Webmonkey.

See Also:

• Apple Video Shows iPad Flash Support, But Don’t Believe It …
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• The Key to Apple’s iPad? Uh-Oh, It’s Magic
• Adobe Plays the Porn Card in Flash Campaign Against iPad

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

You could spend all day reading early reviews of the iPad, or you could just take a glimpse at the word cloud above to quickly gather what people are saying. Generated with Wordle, the cloud contains the most repeated words from each of the eight iPad reviews that were posted last night. (We removed the words Apple, iPad, apps and new for the sake of eliminating some redundancies.)

Priced between $500 and $830, the iPad hits stores Saturday. Stay tuned here on Gadget Lab over the weekend for more in-depth coverage of the device.

See Also:

• Personal Thoughts About the iPhone 3G, Visualized Through Cloud …
• Roundup: The First Reviews of Apple’s iPad
• Five Essential iPad Accessories
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration

Yes, the iPad has fewer features than a comparably priced netbook. Yes, it’s tied to an app store controlled by a single company that has proven to be both capricious and prudish in the kinds of content it approves. And yes, it won’t run Adobe Flash, instantly crippling many websites.

But the iPad is an important device just the same, because it’s simple and it’s fast.

Early reviews of the iPad confirm my experience using the device during Apple’s press event two months ago: there’s something seriously different about Apple’s tablet.

That difference can be summarized in two words: It disappears.

It’s basically a screen. There’s a home button, and some buttons on the side that you don’t pay much attention to while you’re using it.

On the iPad, websites look pretty much the same as they do on my computer display, with one important exception: They fill the screen. Instead of living inside a box with a URL bar and a bunch of buttons alongside other boxes and applications, content takes over the device. There’s almost no noticeable interface.

On top of that, the screen is the most responsive touchscreen display I’ve ever had my hands on. Put your finger down on a page and wiggle it around, and the page follows your finger exactly, and instantly.

Those two facts — the lack of interface and the instant responsiveness — lend a psychological concreteness to whatever you’re looking at. You’re not just looking at Wired.com through a browser, you’re holding Wired.com in your hands.

Ditto for photos, calendar entries, e-mail messages and even video: You feel as though you’re holding the actual pictures, calendar pages, messages and movies.

It’s a subtle difference and, rationally speaking, it is irrelevant to the content that appears beneath the glass face of the LCD. You get exactly the same words and pictures (but not, of course, any Flash video or animations.) But it’s a profoundly different feeling for the human on this side of the glass. It makes the content feel more immediate, more real and more “in the world.”

Over time, that’s going to make profound changes to THE way web designers create and deploy their sites, to the way we think about “online content,” and to the way we think about computers.

In fact, it’s the beginning of the end for computers as technology. Technology, after all, is stuff that doesn’t work yet, as Douglas Adams observed a decade ago. Once it starts working all the time — like chairs or electricity — you stop thinking about it as technology and start taking it for granted.

The iPad promises much, and we have yet to find out if it lives up to its expectations. Make no mistake: Once we have unfettered access to the device, we will be testing the iPad thoroughly to find out where, and how, it breaks down, and we’ll report the results here.

But if it works as well as promised, the iPad could be the first computer that people will be able to take for granted. And that’s why, like many people who live and breathe technology, we’re both excited by it — and a little bit scared of it.

Photo: Jonathan Snyder/Wired.com

Wired tech in real time: Follow Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

See Also:

• The New Media Mall: What I’ll Be Expecting From the Apple iPad
• Wired.com Buyer’s Guide: Choose the Right iPad
• Five Essential iPad Accessories
• How the Tablet Will Change the World
• 13 of the Brightest Tech Minds Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• What the iPad Means for the Future of Computing

Speaking of leaked iPad Apps, App Advice, the App Store listing site, has managed to put together a gallery of 1,350 application that will be available to download on iPad launch day.

The list is pulled in from Apple’s servers, which seem to be hosting these app description pages but withholding them still from the iTunes Store proper. Depressingly, flicking through the pages brings on the same feeling of disappointment you get when browsing through the dross in the current App Store.

In fact, with a few exceptions (like the Brushes app shown off at the iPad launch, and hopefully Instapaper), you can bet that pretty much every one of the iPad apps available at launch will be little more than existing iPhone apps recompiled to work on the iPad without pixel doubling. That’s because the developers of quality applications know that they need to rethink the whole design of their products for the new machine, which is proving to be more than just a “big iPod Touch”. Still, if you feel like getting yourself down, fire up Pink Floyd’s The Wall in iTunes and head over to take a look.

The IPad Apps Are Coming! [App Advice via Giz]

I got pranked this morning, by the folks over at Apple tear-down-and-repair site iFixit. In an email from head honcho Kyle Wiens was the following juicy paragraph:

We had to resort to some subversive techniques involving a cop from Ottawa, a donkey, and three uncouth janitors to obtain this pre-release Apple Tablet (don’t ask, because we won’t tell).

We felt we compromised our morals at first, but we quickly got over it and began tearing this sucker apart. Apple has completely changed directions since their original press announcement, but the new hardware we got is actually much improved in a number of ways.

April 1st, or April Fools’ Day, is the day beloved of fools the world over (actually, the anglo-world over). Before the internet, the day was funny. You might knock on a neighbor’s door at 7AM, hand covered in ketchup and bandages, begging a lift to the hospital (my mother did this) or just read the day’s papers and spot the spoof ads therein.

These days, “viral” marketing companies seed their filthy campaigns days before (and often after) April 1st, so it becomes increasingly hard to tell what is real or not, especially for a site like Gadget Lab, which specializes in digging up amazing and unbelievable new toys. Unlike these PR morons, though, whose few days of “fun” sour a whole year of communication, Kyle’s prank is at once obviously a fake, and also hilarious. The “Apple Tablet Teardown” is in fact an un-boxing and subsequent dismantling of an Apple MessagePad 2000 aka the Newton.

The article is a gem. The iFixit folks have played it dead straight, and the captions and characteristically great pictures are produced as if this really were a brand new product:

It features a monochrome, backlit LCD measuring 4.9 x 3.9 inches, capable of providing resolutions of 480 x 320 pixels.

and

The tablet has a user-replaceable battery! You can use Apple’s proprietary battery pack, or you can just buy four AA alkaline batteries if you’re on the go.

That’s how you pull off an April Fool: the old fashioned way, the way that actually makes somebody smile. What you don’t do is put some dumb video up on YouTube, mail bloggers incessantly for a week before April 1st and then, on the day itself, patronizingly “reveal” the “joke” and then beg “I’d appreciate if I could get a post in [sic] your website.”

Apple Tablet Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]