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The wait ends (for my iPad 2)
On Tuesday, while reading my morning news and Twitter feeds, Andy Ihnatko tweeted that he heard reports that Apple Stores were receiving a bunch of iPad 2s. Given my luck getting an iPhone 4 the day after release waiting in a relatively short line, I decided to give it a try. I arrived at the Fashion Valley Apple Store around 8:25 am to see a line and took that as a good sign. When I got to the end of the line, 2 Apple Store employees asked which iPad 2 I wanted and when I said the 32 GB Black WiFi one, one of the employees pulled out a stack of cards and handed me one with the model number written on it. Very cool, I was going to get an iPad 2 without more waiting! At about 9:05 am, I went instead, paid the Apple tax and left with my brand new iPad 2. I already had a smart cover, so I was all set.
Now that I have an iPad 2, was it worth it? You'll have to wait for my "review" (my reviews are pretty quick and not as in-depth as the well paid tech journalists).
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Review: Netflix for iPad
The other day my wife came home and asked about Netflix streaming as someone mentioned to her that she used her Wii to stream. I said that we could give it a try as it is only $8 per month. I signed up for the free trial and started playing with the iPad app to setup my instant queue and see how well it streamed.
The iPad app works, but really is an unpolished app. Within a few minutes of using it, I became frustrated with it. First off, when I tapped on an item, it didn't highlight as most iOS apps do; this is likely due to laziness as iOS provides a way to highlight an entire row and the app uses two columns so it separates the row and highlighting part of a row would have required extra work. Next the app was slow when I tapped on a selection so I wound up tapping more than once. This caused problems as it kept starting to play a selection as the second tap was queued up.
My problems didn't stop there; after a selection plays and you go back to the home screen, your location in the list is lost. So if I scrolled through the selections, found one, tapped it to view more, but accidentally tapped twice and it started played, when I cancelled out of it, my position was lost. This made the experience quite annoying.
When you scroll through the list, the last row said "Load More Titles". This is another aspect of what I consider poor programming or laziness. The more polished apps automatically start loading once the last row is displayed. It is actually quite easy to implement and saves the user a tap.
The app suffers from rotation issues as it gets quite confused and doesn't resize the list at times when you rotate the display. Further showing lack of polish is when I went to switch apps and showed the bottom bar, the main loading page came back up. Strange behavior for an app.
Pros
- Convenient way to add items to instant queue.
- Reasonable playback quality
Cons
- Unpolished application that suffers from some serious usability issues.
- Bugs cause some strange behaviors when rotating and switching apps.
Summary
While it is great to see that Netflix has come up with an iPad app, I would have expected more from a well recognized brand name. My view is that they either used inexperienced in-house developers or outsourced it to a company that needs some work on developing quality products. I hope that they continue to update the app and address some of the issues I've noticed.
The app is still usable to add items to the instant queue, but the process could be a bit cleaner.
The wait begins (for my iPad 2)
Like many tech geeks, I plan on getting an iPad 2. It isn't necessary for me to get one, but the increased speed, slightly reduced size, and smart cover just make it too cool not to get. I really don't have time to stand in long lines to get one (I did stand in a few hour line for my iPhone 4), so I figured I'd try to get one today.
I called a few local stores and of course, got nothing. When I was talking to my wife and I mentioned that there were 18 combinations, she suggested I just order it online to get what I wanted. That makes a lot of sense and I should have done it yesterday to get in line with the 2-3 week wait. Since I waited a day, I'm now at 3-4 weeks. Wow, that seems like an eternity in tech years!
I'm going to call Wal-Mart on Monday and see if they got anything in, but I'm not holding my breath. I've also been told that the Apple Store gets shipments everyday so I might try there later in the week. If I happen to score one early, then I can simply cancel my order. Why didn't I order first thing Friday morning and then cancel my order if I managed to get one? I did this with the iPhone 4, so what was I thinking? Maybe I was just overly optimistic about getting one.
Paying for High School Sports
In today's local paper, there was an article about how over 800 local teachers were receiving pink slips and could potentially be let go if the school district can't figure out how to find extra money to pay for them. Several months ago, there was some uproar about students paying for extra curricular activities including sports. Apparently there is a California state law that guarantees all students a free education and this includes sports.
So, we as taxpayers can't ask athletes to pay for anything including uniforms, insurance, transportation fees, etc. To me, this doesn't seem like it is in the spirit of the law; the state is trying to provide students a base education to succeed. Instead of cutting teachers and classes, wouldn't it make sense to completely cut sports and let athletes find a way to pay for them?
I understand that sports are the main focus of some high school students, but shouldn't academics be key? The law is supposed to give equal access to all students regardless of ability to pay. I'd like to see the law amended to exclude non-essentials activities and get athletes to pay their own way; I suspect that most students can afford them, just maybe don't want to afford them. How many of them have cell phones (monthly fees add up)? How many waste money on Starbucks? How many have iPods?
Let's get our priorities right and put education first and get rid of this misuse of education funding.