Hasta La Gadget!

Today’s ridiculous Apple rumor comes from Apple Insider. The claim? That a new FaceTime-equipped iPad will be in stores in time for the holiday season, just six months after the original launch. Bull.

That there will be an iPad with a front-facing camera for FaceTime videoconferencing is certain, and it will probably be there in version 2. But the idea that Apple would bring out a new model so soon after the first one is nonsensical in many ways. First, Apple can barely make enough iPads to keep up with demand. Only in the last few weeks have order-times dropped to a reasonable 24 hours, and with the iPad’s Chinese launch coming soon, it seems that Apple will continue to sell as many iPads as it can make. Introducing a new model so soon would be pointless.

Second, Apple runs its portable devices on a yearly update schedule. Every summer sees a new iPhone, every September a new iPod lineup. And while there is no precedent yet for the iPad, its safe to assume that it, too, will receive yearly updates. One year is long enough that early adopters like me will be happy to buy every new model, and long enough not to piss off customers who feel that their toy has be obsoleted too soon. Remember the fuss about the iPhone price-drop? Imagine what would happen if a new iPad came out in a month or so.

Apple Insider’s source is “a person with proven knowledge of Apple’s future product plans” and says that:

A version of the tablet device with a built-in video camera and support for the new FaceTime video conferencing standard has already progressed to the advanced testing stages.

He also said that “there was an ambitious push inside Apple to verify the refresh for a possible launch ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season.”

Which brings me to a third point. Why rush an update into stores with just one tiny, incremental hardware change? It seems very unlikely that there will be a Retina Display in a new iPad so soon after launch. After all, if the prices of such a big, hi-res screen were already cheap enough to keep to the iPad’s $500 price-point, wouldn’t Apple have put them in there already? The same goes for an SD-card-slot, which I’m guessing will be in iPad 2.0. The price of the rest of the hardware will have to drop before these are added, and six-months into a product cycle seems to soon.

I say this rumor is nothing but a rumor. If you want a new camera-toting iPad, wait until April.

Slightly more credible is Engadget’s report that Target may begin selling iPads on October 3. The gadget blog has a screenshot of a Target point-of-sale device that purportedly shows the inventory information for the iPad.

Apple to move aggressively on FaceTime, camera-equipped iPads [Apple Insider]

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired

See Also:

• IPad to Get Two-Megapixel Camera This Year
• Concept Case Adds Camera to iPad
• Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, if you buy your movies and TV shows from iTunes or go through the trouble of converting non-Apple-supported formats. But what if there were a pain-free way to play almost every type of video format? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.

VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for its versatility in supporting a ton of media formats and playing high-quality video files that would make lesser applications choke. Romain Goyet, the CTO of the developer behind the app, Applidium, was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.

The first iPad version of VLC is simpler than the desktop version, and quite a lot prettier. To get movies into the playlist, you drag them into iTunes, just like adding files to any other app. You can’t add folders, but you can drag in pretty much any kind of file. Some files may cause the app to crash on launch, and the only way to find out is to remove them one at a time.

Fire it up and you get the above view. The app can take a few moments to generate thumbnails of your clips, and it presents them in a nice looking grid, which you can scroll. In addition to the thumbnails, you get the file name, the length of the movie and its on-screen size. HD movies get badged as such, and if you have watched a clip partway through, a little pie-shaped progress indicator is overlaid onto the icon.

To play a movie, just touch it. If VLC thinks your iPad might not be up to the task, it will ask if you want to try anyway. I did with one short 1280 x 720 clip, and all I got was sound.

Not all file formats are supported: The AVCHD files from my Panasonic GF1, for example, can be added via iTunes but don’t appear in the app. Subtitles, though, do work. Just make sure the SRT file has the same name as the movie file and drop it into iTunes alongside the movie. It works great (although you can’t turn them off from within the app).

Sometimes the video starts to break up, and sometimes the sound gets out of sync. The former usually fixes itself and the latter can be cured by quitting and relaunching VLC. This is no hardship as the app remembers where you left off.

There are a few other iPad apps that will play AVI and DIVX files, among other formats, but VLC plays files that the others wouldn’t even open. And so far it appears not to drain the battery significantly more than the iPad’s hardware-assisted video player (VLC uses software decoders for much of its work). I’m 15 minutes into Truffaut’s 400 Blows and the battery is still at 100 percent.

The one big thing I miss is the volume boost of desktop VLC. ITunes on both the Mac and the iPad have whisperingly low maximum volume settings, whereas sound in VLC on the Mac comes out loud and clear, but not on the iPad version. That said, this is v1.0 and is way more polished than any other video app I have yet seen on the tablet.

The best part of all this is that VLC for iPad will be free when (and if) it makes it through the app review process and into the store.

Update: Romain wrote to make a few points. First, the crash-on-launch problem is known, and will be fixed in the next update. Second, the reason my MTS files don’t show up in the app is because VLC recognizes videos by file extension. Adding this one in should make things work. And third, volume boost is coming. Great news!

VLC for iPad [Applidium. Thanks, Romain!]

See Also:

• VLC for iPad ‘Next Week’
• VLC Ported to the IPhone

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Photograph of Stéphane Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés, Public Domain

E-readers have tried to make reading as smooth, natural and comfortable as possible so that the device fades away and immerses you in the imaginative experience of reading. This is a worthy goal, but it also may be a profound mistake.

This is what worries Wired’s Jonah Lehrer about the future of reading. He notes that when “the act of reading seems effortless and easy … [w]e don’t have to think about the words on the page.” If every act of reading becomes divorced from thinking, then the worst fears of “bookservatives” have come true, and we could have an anti-intellectual dystopia ahead of us.

Lehrer cites research by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene showing that reading works along two pathways in the brain. When we’re reading familiar words laid out in familiar sequences within familiar contexts, our brain just mainlines the data; we can read whole chunks at a time without consciously processing their component parts.

When we read something like James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, on the other hand — long chunks of linguistically playful, conceptually dense, sparsely punctuated text — our brain can’t handle the information the same way. It goes back to the same pathways that we used when we first learned how to read, processing a word, phoneme or even a letter at a time. Our brain snaps upright to attention; as Lehrer says, “[a]ll the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up.”

I think Lehrer makes a few mistakes here. They’re subtle, but decisive. I also think, however, that he’s on to something. I’ll try to lay out both.

First, the mistakes. I think Lehrer overestimates how much the material form of the text — literally, the support — contributes to the activation of the different reading pathways in the brain. This actually deeply pains me to write down, because I firmly believe that the material forms in which we read profoundly affect how we read. As William Morris says, “you can’t have art without resistance in the material.”

But that’s not what Dehaene’s talking about. It’s when we don’t understand the words or syntax in a book that we switch to our unfamiliar-text-processing mode. Smudged ink, rough paper, the interjection of images, even bad light — or, alternatively, gilded pages, lush leather bindings, a gorgeous library — are not relevant here. We work through all of that. It’s the language that makes this part of the brain stop and think, generally not the page or screen.

Second, it’s always important to remember that there are lots of different kinds of reading, and there are no particular reasons to privilege one over the other. When we’re scanning the news or the weather (and sometimes, even reading a blog), we don’t want to be provoked by literary unfamiliarity. We want to use that informational superhighway that our brain evolved and that we have put to such good use processing text.

Reading is, as the philosophers say, a family-resemblance concept; we use the same words to describe different acts that don’t easily fall under a single definition. It’s all textual processing, but when we’re walking down a city street, watching the credits to a television show, analyzing a map, or have our head deeply buried in James Joyce, we’re doing very different things. And in most cases, we need all the cognitive leverage we can get.

Now, here’s where I think Lehrer is right:  Overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.

We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.

This is where we’ve been let down by our reading machines — in the representation of language. It isn’t the low-glare screens, or the crummy imitative page-turn animations. They’ve knocked those out of the park.

In fact, we’ve already faced this problem once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, book production went into overdrive, while newspapers and advertising were inventing new ways to use words to jostle urban passers-by out of their stupor.

Writers wanted to find a way to borrow the visual vitality of what was thought of as ephemeral writing and put it in the service of the conceptual richness and range of subject matter that had been achieved in the nineteenth-century novel.

That’s where we get literary and artistic modernism — not only Joyce, but Mallarmé, Stein, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, Dada, Futurism — the whole thing. New lines for a new mind, and new eyes with which to see them.

That’s what e-books need today. Give us the language that uses the machines, and it doesn’t matter if they try to get out of the way.

See Also:

• The Future Of Reading
• The Itch of Curiosity
• Primal Information
• Information Addiction
• How Preschool Changes the Brain
• Despite Reports, B&N Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You
• The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It’s Not What You …
• Photos: Putting Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 Head-to-Head
• You Can Read Manga On Your Kindle With Mangle
• Why Does the New Kindle Have A Microphone?

This is the most exciting iPad app news for a while: VLC, the play-anything video client for OS X, Windows, Linux and more, is coming to the iPad. The application has been ported to the tablet and is already sitting on line in the App Store approval queue. It should be available next week.

VLC is an open-source media-player maintained by a bunch of French school-kids, as well as anyone else who wants to help. The iPad version has been ported by developer Applidium, and will, like other versions of the app, be free.

VLC is the grandaddy of video playback. It will play just about any file you choose to throw at it, supports subtitles and even streaming (if you managed to watch last week’s streaming Apple event on non-Apple hardware, you were probably using VLC). On a computer, it is essential (if only to allow you to skip the ads and trailers at the beginning of a DVD).

An iPad version will let you play XviD, H.264, MPEG4, FLAC, 3GP, MP3, MPEG2 and AVI files on a device that only supports one video format natively. It will most likely be doing this in software, which will mean that your iPad may take a battery hit compared to watching a properly converted movie, but so what? The convenience of throwing any torrented movie onto your iPad will outweigh that.

I’ll have a full review as soon as I get my hands on the app (presuming that Apple approves it).

VLC for iPad [Applidium via Mac Rumors]

See Also:

• VLC Ported to the IPhone
• Interview With The Creator of VLC4iPhone

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Windows Phone 7 Office Image via Microsoft.

Traditionally, Microsoft has been a software company, leveraging its office suites and operating systems, but selling applications for any compatible hardware and platform. For smartphones in particular, its strategy has been to supply the software and let other companies worry about developing the phones. So why not go all the way and sell its software for every device on every platform?

That’s what Business Insider’s Dan Frommer proposes the company do: “Microsoft should develop Office apps for the iPad, Android, Chrome OS, BlackBerry tablet, and any other computing platform that is likely to become popular over the next 5-10 years,” adding that “if Microsoft wants to keep people tied into its Office suite, it needs to go where the people are going.”

Office is integrated into the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS, but would compete on several fronts in smartphone and tablet platforms, including iWork on Apple’s iPad, Google Docs on the mobile web, and Dataviz’s multi-platform Documents To Go, just acquired by Blackberry maker RIM.

Frommer sees RIM’s purchase of Documents To Go as a defense against the possibility of Microsoft introducing an Office app for Blackberry. Ironically, if RIM stops active development of Documents To Go for other platforms, that could create just the multi-platform opening needed to entice Microsoft to swoop in.

See Also:

• RIM Confirms It Bought Documents To Go
• Microsoft Office Web Apps
• Wired 15.04: Desktop, R.I.P.
• Microsoft's Mobile Strategy Takes Aim at Apple, Google
• Apple: The Microsoft of Mobile?
• Microsoft's Mobile Shakeup: Will It Unleash Windows Phone …
• Microsoft's Challenge With Windows Phone 7 Is Wooing Developers …
• BlackBerry Tablet 'BlackPad' Readies to Take On the iPad
• Documents To Go: Finally, an Office Suite for the iPad
• Microsoft Tells Windows Phone 7's App Story