I lost my iPad (to my son)

The iPad is truly amazing in that anyone can use it with very little direction. I made the mistake of letting my 3 year old son use it. He's now addicted to it; he loves to see pictures and hear the Toy Story Read-Along book.

If I pull out the iPad, all he wants to do is play with it. I almost have to wrestle it out of his hands. Maybe by the time he goes to kindergarten, I'll give him one!

(You can see I'm a bit worried about him dropping my very expensive device.)

The iPad, a few weeks later

I've now had an iPad for a few weeks now, since they became available to the public. When I first saw them introduced, I didn't see me getting one because, as an average consumer, I didn't see it fitting into my life.

An iPad managed to land at my feet and I've completely changed my tune. This is the device for the average consumer. Granted, the price right now is a bit high, but I think that the iPad is going to revolutionize a number of fields including textbooks, newspapers, and portable computing. While I was impressed with the iPad when I first started playing with it, it wasn't until the next morning when my wife picked it up, that she said she could see how it could be used as a textbook. She had seen my Sony Reader and was unimpressed with it, but the look and feel of the iPad puts it in a whole different class.

While I've done some iPhone development in the past, I don't use an iPhone (I can't justify the monthly cost). I use my iPad everyday to read news, RSS feeds and email. It isn't going to replace my desktop, but I'm excited to start developing applications for the device.

The iPad is the future of tablet devices.

Cleaning up after yourself

Yesterday I saw a Twitter post from Jonathan Wight of Toxic Software complaining about background apps that when you trash them, still keep running and he suggested using FSEvents to automatically terminate when that happens.

Well, I have a number of projects that have background apps and I thought that this would clean things up a bit, so I slapped together a sample project. In addition, I've worked on a number of projects that suffer from the same problem, so hopefully other developers can incorporate this (or something similar) so that when you trash an app, the background helper app goes away with it.

I'm using Stu Connolly's SCEvents to wrap up the FSEvents. This simplifies my code a bit. I've included his source in the download; it is released under the MIT License.

Feel free to download this code. I'm releasing it under an MIT License

Comments are welcome on the code.

Dollars for my Sony Reader

I wrote a few weeks ago that now that I have an iPad, my seldom used Sony Reader PRS-500 had no use to me. On the MacBreak Weekly podcast, I heard about
gazelle.com where you can sell old gadgets and get money. I didn't have high hopes as I usually keep gadgets to the point that they have very little value.

A few days after I received my iPad, I went to the site, setup an account, and received an offer for the Reader. It was more than I expected and with a code from MacBreak Weekly, I got a bonus and then by selecting an Amazon Gift Card, I got another 5% bonus. Gazelle.com was easy to use, they sent me a pre-paid shipping label and within a week after they received it, I got a gift card for $116! They actually upped the value when they received it because I misinterpreted a checkbox; it said "rechargeable battery", I said no because I thought it meant a separate one.

Not a bad little deal for me to clean off my desk and get a few bucks for a device that I no longer use.