I must admit tho, in the first week, my  impressions while commuting were a bit poorly because taking the iPad out of your bag in a swiss train is somewhat.. let’s just say not my style :) (It was mid April, no iPad here till end of May)
It was just the same at ETH. Everytime I took it out, I either ended up with hearing people whispering “Hey, isch das es iPad?” (en: Is that an iPad?) or coming over and asking me, if they may hold it for a while. (I guess that’s how mothers feel when everyone wants to hold their babies? – JUST DON’T FRIGGIN DROP IT!).

#1: ETH or less arrogant: University.

The iPad was announced during my last exam session – and I was eagerly waiting to give this thing a try since you read mostly PDFs at ETH. This is basically how it works here: Usually, you don’t have Podcasts, you sometimes get your “course book” on paper and most of the times you get the slides of every lecture online.
I currently have 5 courses, only one engineering course this semester. The rest is pretty much only “blah blah”. (no, that was not free choice) Which means: many many slides. So, sometimes I printed them out during the semester or I had to print them before the exams (double sided, 4 slides per side..). What happened now is that I read every single information of my courses on the iPad. It’s kind of paradox – I didn’t like to read the stuff on my laptop, which is why I printed it in the first place. But I really like reading all the slides and exercises on the iPad.

This reduced the weight I usually carry around quite a bit. And since I have a device with a screen I can actually read something for an hour I’m able to leave my laptop at home. (Except for the boring days). This also reduced the weight of course, but it’s not the key point. When I brought my laptop with me, I usually opened it – I tend to get bored very quickly. And when I opened it, I started working on some programming projects. As some may know, when I’m programming, then I don’t get much information of what’s happening around me – including a boring course. So, now I don’t have the laptop anymore, only my iPad. Now the thing is that I either read the slides on it – or browse the web for a while during which I’m actually able to multitask. And I really do feel the effect of paying attention during the lecture – I get tired.

But, there is always a downside, right? I’ll just put it straight out: FOR FUCKS SAKE, why can I not save my PDFs with safari? “Are _you_ nuts?”. This makes it so ridiculously annoying to read stuff on a “bad WiFi day”. There’s another thing – which is also the 3rd question every fellow student asks me: can you mark text. Short answer: not with Safari. I think there are Apps  out there that can save PDFs and mark text in them. But the hassle of searching for the PDF in Safari, copying the link into that app and saving it there – I’m not so sure about that experience. As a student, I really really miss these two things: 1) Saving my PDFs – I now have 2 screens full of links to PDFs and 2) Mark text in PDFs – and then generate an abstract of the PDF?

This might be ETH specific, but yes, we do not have the best WiFi infrastructure – and depending on where you are seated, you have very bad reception. The fact that the iPad’s WiFi reception is not really its strong suit doesn’t improve that either.

#1 Conclusion

A nice device for students. It’s very slim, quite light (if you are able to hold your arms out for a minute…..) and great for reading. It’s lacking some core features tho, like saving PDFs and marking text in a PDF. As a student, you need to be able to work with information – which you cannot out of the box. Given the high price tag, I wouldn’t really – and never have – recommend it to my fellow students just now. I don’t really know about the payed Apps, since I only use the free Apps, which are not really striking. Out of the box: not really, but if you can afford it: go for it! With the right Apps: go for it! Ah, yeah, and if you are looking for girls: the male/female ratio of people approaching me was 50/50 – My guess if you are a single and female with an iPad: make sure you have some spare time ;)

#2 Commuting

First: again, I don’t have a paid iTunes account, so I’m just using iBooks with Project Gutenberg. Alright, I put it out there – I sometimes read books ;) While commuting, I do 3 things in 99% of the cases: read/watch the news, read books and watch podcasts – the order reflects the precedence. As I said in the beginning, I wasn’t really into people talking to me during the train ride. But you get used to it a.k.a. you learn how to cut it short ;) The first few days were horrible with this thing. I usually commute when it’s bright outside, say: I’m not really the guy for 8AM lectures. Reading on this shiny glossy mirror in the train gave me one hell of a headache. You see short reflections of the sun, houses etc. all passing by. At some point I thought it was much worse than with my macbook pro. As usual, you don’t always get the window seats – which actually reduced this problem! If you are not sitting next to the window: way less reflections and sparks etc. I really started to like watching podcasts. Watching podcasts? Yeah, the iPad doesn’t perform very well in WiFi only mode in trains. Even if some trains have WiFi nowadays, I tend to miss those consequently. This bugged me for a while. I really liked the iPad experience of wired.com or cnn.com – and I wasn’t really unhappy with nzz.ch either. There was a solution to this: Android.

After hacking around for a while with my ADP1, I found a tool called WiFi tethering. It basically turns your phone into a wireless access point. However, the battery drains very quickly. But hey, I could now read my news in the morning! I have to say, reading your daily newspaper on this thing: awesome. But publishers have some work to do. While I usually liked the web experience, I couldn’t find many native iPad applications that really caught my eye. If there is one, then probably the NYT – but I somehow enjoy their web experience a lot more. Wired is coming up with a really cool application. I’m really looking forward to it. I think I made a lot of “the suits” jealous when I was watching some video on wired.com after having finished reading the NZZ.. (You know the feeling when you know somebody is watching over your shoulder?). I must admit, I haven’t found the proper way of holding this thing, especially in trains. You don’t have the space to do the iPad sitting style besides the fact that this is a very uncomfortable position anyway.

Nonetheless, I enjoy reading my daily news on the iPad, while trying out different positions to hold it :)

Because the Android battery drains rather quickly, I usually read books on the way home. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells lately. I kind of had the same issues as with reading news in the beginning: reflections and holding. It’s easier to hold it if you are reading books, because you only have to tap the right side if you want to flip the page, which means you can hold it with your right hand or both hands. The bookstore is really nice – I love the concept of the in-app-bookstore. If only I had U.S. CreditCard. I don’t really know why this has to be all that difficult to just buy a friggin book. Probably different agreements with every country. “Kantoenligeist” as we call it.. Anyway. I like the main font, the others not so much. The screen is bright enough and you can change the brightness in the iBook app while reading. As long as there are no reflections from the sun or other light sources, you can read fairly well. I’d say for the passionate reader, this might not be the ultimate device, but for casual 1h a day readers like me, this thing does the trick fairly well. There is another questions/remark I get fairly often: Why didn’t they just use continuous scrolling with books. Yeah, well.. I tried that here: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35/pg35.html – Holy crap, that would be really really annoying. I think there is a reason why we use books with pages and not rolls of paper. Pages give you orientation and a sense of progress (how much is left?). Whereas scrolling is just annoying and you feel lost in a very very long piece of text. (It almost  takes your motivation away – for the casual reader that is.)

#2 Conclusion

Commuting with the iPad is difficult today – because everyone wants to touch it or talk to you. (Again, it’s End of April 2010, no iPad launch in Switzerland). Once this is resolved, I think I will use my iPad with much less worries :) I don’t see the WiFi only model as something a commuter would use here. If you are a really passionate book reader – not needing internet at all in the train, and thus only require WiFi, you may wanna opt for a Nuuk or Kindle. For the rest of us: I’m really looking forward to the 3G model. It’s very nice to use the device everywhere you can use your mobile phone and still be able to do most of the things on the web on a nice, larger screen. (Note: Videos on NZZ.ch do not belong the the 90% of the internet video you can watch on this device). Reading books for the not so picky people: nice. Not great tho, but nice. Watching podcasts – what shall I say? It’s just great. But they couldn’t do a lot of mistakes here either..

#3 One Last Thing

The battery life on this thing is just great. Especially for people like me who have to charge 3 device every day – I always forget one. So I’m really glad I can usually charge my iPad on Thursday and Sunday evening (not that it is empty by then, but just for safety).

This is it. For Students: very nice, lacks features. Buy it if you have the money. Commuters: really, wait for the 3G model. (Or buy an Android phone..).

Recent happenings made me write this one :) For a few years or so, there has been this tool called Twitter – very nice thing, if you use it right. Lately – for a few months or so? – I’ve come to use Twitter as an outlet for my work/life imbalance. And users and especially friends have noticed that.. I heard a few times now, that I sound arrogant, disrespectful and maybe a bit harsh. Fortunately, I know most of my followers and they know that I’m usually not arrogant and only sometimes disrespectful (e.g. wearing a T-Shirt at BoSW ;)). About the rest I really should not care, should I? Well, since I gained some publicity at Open Expo and at BoSW, you may find my tweets pretty quick. So, this is quite a new situation – people watching me. The problem is, they are not only watching me, they also identify me with the company I work for.

So, I think I need to explain myself for once and for all – I’m no man of bullshitbingo. I don’t think, light would have been that much of a success if it wouldn’t take the shortest path from A to B.
I like being honest, being direct and being precise. What I really really hate is feedback in the form of “well, I somehow really don’t like to look of that button in the sense of….” – WTF?! I really don’t want to being forced to parse your sentence and getting out the core essence. Could you please do that for me? And this is no wonderland. Don’t feel personally attacked if your code is crap. That happens.
Unfortunately, it happens to me more often than I’d wish :)
When I rant, I really don’t think I could do it so much better – about that I really don’t know – but I know that it is crap. Did you ever drive a Fiat? You somehow just know that it is crap, even if you couldn’t actually build a better one yourself.
It’s not that I’m arrogant – I would be if I take the nice way and not telling others the truth.

Why I really love twitter is the instant feedback. It’s the valve for so much – happiness, hate.. everything. And usually you twitter within the first 60 seconds of your thought. If someone wrote “Gosh, I hate GottaGo, it’s just sooo friggin slow” on Twitter – that would be the best feedback ever. It’s what someone really cares about – the first impression if you will.
Or even a less precise one: “Holy crap, which moron did that GottaGo thing?!” – Sounds personal, eh? Well, it is not. It is against the ideas and the code behind GottaGo, not against me. But I know instantly that something that I did really failed for that guy – again, an important first impression.
Catching that is so important for a developer. (Since it’s Twitter, you can respond!)

I’d really like to say “Sorry”, but I don’t see any reason. Usually, I mean what I tweet. I may think “why couldn’t I just wait a minute before I tweeted” but the core of what I mean is there – with emotions! When I say, “[Ubuntu] Linux developers seem to be a bunch of morons if they wonder why they don’t have a real user base”, then I most probably mean it that way. (This example is based on the Ubuntu redesign debate). I could write that sentence as “Linux developers may not doing the right thing when they think they know UI design better than a UI specialist”. How nice of me, right? Well, it’s not really my opinion. Because in my eyes, they are a bunch of.. They are sure not in a way of development and whatnot, but socially and user friendliness?
Blahblah.. what I want to say is: I mean what I say, it’s the most honest thing I can offer you. Deal with it and use it or stop writing software and making decisions.

Is it really necessary to be rude and do it in public? No. It’s just so convenient. And usually, I fight with a problem until I’m reeeeally pissed off. That’s the moment I twitter :) Why? Because I usually hate it so bad that I’d love to squeeze and punch someone really hard. And twitter gives me the same opportunity as we did in Kindergarten: pulling your pants down and tell others you have an ugly girlfriend!
Yes, I really need to grow up – one day. Until then, my idealism will hunt and bug you all. Until I’m dull and worn out, I will always be honest and direct – and I expect the same from you.

To the company: my company must hate me for my tweets – I would :) They really don’t have anything to do with this. And they are not really forbidding me to tweet.. And if you prefer a nice looking company, filled with ties and lies, you are probably better off without me.

If you still think that you can’t stand it anymore: please please please please unfollow me and we can go drink a beer or whatever. I really don’t mind someone not following me.

Imagine as well: You are Opel.. They made some not so good cars back then – they had a few bugs. Then they brought out some better cars (I heard so..) but now, nobody – except the few who are really interested in those things – buy Opel anymore. Why? Because they had a bad experience or missed something.

Recently I heard something like this from a former PHP programmer:
I gave him some piece of code.. like this: “$a = new foo_class(); $b = $a;” He was pretty upset that I was going to post him a code which included object copying – and that’s exactly what he hates about PHP. Well this might be true for PHP4 but not for PHP5..

What am I going to tell you.. Well, the recent numbers of “GottaGo” made me think. We had an enormous loss of users after the 2.1 update and those are not coming back – probably never. So even if those hardcore fans who sticked to “GottaGo” over the time have updated so far (we only have about 5% v.0.0.1 users) those who missed something in the first version are not comming back – and they are not trying it again. Sad but true :)
As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, I’m not quite happy with the name “GottaGo” anymore. And even less with the logo. (Not the design itself, which is great, but with the message it sends..)
Besides that, “GottaGo” plays only a siderole in the new version, which kinda makes it not being “GottaGo” anymore. Rather a Schedule/Timetable app based on GottaGo. (To talk a bit of the coding side: almost 75% of the code was rewritten for this release – and of course every pixel was redesigned..)

What I think is that “GottaGo” deserves a new release – with a new name. Unfortunatly I can’t go with a cool name – although there were a few very good suggestions – but all geek names again :)
This means, we are most probably going with “Transport” and some other minor changes.. I hope you don’t mind if I rename this and me being an attention whore – but I think those who supported me in this new release deserve it.. And I think those who are not happy with “SBB Fahrplan” deserve it as well.

Let’s see, how this pays out.. It might be a horribly wrong decision, but since it’s a free-time project, I can only learn. :)