OK.

Full day and a half of using my iPad and I can’t get it away from my teenage daughters – hence the snappy title.

• Battery Life:
  • Absofuckinglutely unstoppable. I’ve had it on for the entire day today, playing movies, surfing the web – ooohhh… the web surfing… and drawing on it.
  • As of 8:15pm, battery is at 65%
• UI:It’s cooler than SJ made it look in his easychair rollout talk. Smooth, fast and responsive without even one hiccup so far.
  • If you have an iPhone or a touch, you know what to do.
• Apps:
  • I bought iWork.
    • Pages: Pretty damn cool. Kinda hard to type fast on the slippery keyboard, but I think I can get used to it. Extremely intuitive interface with one exception: where are all the files kept and why are there multiple copies? Must look into it.
    • Numbers: Seems exactly as useable as pages – I’m going to mess with it tonight.
  • iPhone apps sometimes crash.
  • iPhone apps look a little yucky compared to the “HD” versions of the iPad apps.
  • Google Maps app is shockingly fast and useable. The multitouch stuff really is amazing in this.
• No Flash.
  • I have yet to find this a problem. CBS even has a (FREE) iPad app that lets you watch their shows (FREE) and it acts just like Hulu. I’m guessing that all the networks are going to do this if they like money. 700,000 sold in one day… yoiks!
• GPS, Compass, Accelerometer:
  • All work flawlessly with most apps, though some of the app store purchases seem a little “rickety”… possibly the new API – I know there were some changes between iPhone and iPad.
• Screen:
  • Sharp, crisp and fast.
  • Sticky fingers do leave some smudges though, I’ve had to clean it twice today but there’s been a ton of fingers on it.
• Movies: Awesome. Clear and sharp and very fast to load.
• Books:
  • I’ve purchased one book: Dies the fire, and it’s very readable – The one thing I might add is a “lock scree rotation” button. Occasionally, while shifting positions, the screen rotated on me.
  • There are a bazillion free downloads of all the classics. It felt funny loading Tolstoy and the collected works of Shakespear on it but I did it because I could.
• Mail:
  • Pretty much the same a iPhone mail with more room.
• Safari:
  • Holy mother of God this is where the iPad totally shines for me. The speed is fantastic, the refresh speed of the graphics is amazing and the multitouch to zoom in and out of pages at will is just so cool.

I had it with me at the aquarium today and the reactions were anything but ambivalent. I got one of two reactions:

1.) OMG is that an IPAD!! Want!
b.) Oh yeah, an iPad, I can’t believe you bought one.

The naysayers usually say: But it’s just a big iPod Touch…

My question is: “is that a bad thing?”

Still trying to figure out if this will replace the MBP… it might.

This is a seadragon viewer available from none other than Microsoft (click the full screen icon, it’s cool). Their R&D guys are also amazing. Gosh.. that’s a lot of amazings..

Skyboxes are six images that are mapped onto a cube that follows the 3D camera around in a realtime 3D space.  The skybox object is drawn first and then everything else is drawn on top of it.  It simulates a big giant sky.

I’ll post a tutorial in a while, I need to get these done first:

This is my morning at the Aquarium:

Get it at the App Store.

Now with Fins!  Woo!

Modeled in Silo3D, textured and rendered in Maya, tweaked in Photoshop.

It’s been suggested that I include the text of this character concept so here ya go!

Kierie

She is a slight girl in her early twenties.  Some Caucasian and Asian mixed with Pacific Islander and South American Native.  Above average intelligence and an almost spooky way with animals – they trust her.  Extremely lithe and physically fit but not very big, she sprints and jumps out of harms way instead of bashing through it.

She comes from a bunker in the desert where her stratospherically wealthy ancestors, the Chay-Nee, stockpiled goods and renewable technologies against what they knew was coming.  She doesn’t know this, but while they were not the architects of the apocalypse, they share a large amount of the blame for it.

The roof of this bunker has been open to the sky for the past 100 years since the automatic systems kicked on and let the People out.  Until this “Awakening” moment, the People had been fed and housed by an automatic system of hydroponics and hidden vats of genetically modified growing muscle tissue.  One year after the roof opened, all the systems shut down, throwing the People into a long period of chaos and then finally tribalism.  They use the remnants of technology of the past in shamanistic ritual and have a meme of a “final use of technology” that will be used at the end of times.

She is armed.  All of the People are hunters and farmers.  Her weapons of choice are two short machete’s that she wear on the outside of each thigh.

While out hunting, a band of nomadic raiders found her hunting party.  Seven of the People against thirty raiders, they killed the raiders and hung their carcasses in a circle around their camp.  That night, while they slept, a thundering wind and bright lights came from the darkness.  Everyone was killed but Kierie.  She awakes in a strange forest, completely alone and has been wandering and hunting for two months – trying to find her way back to the Bunker.