Digit #46 – Božský Apple iPad v praxi from Muvi.cz on Vimeo.

Alright, I’ve read the reviews. I’ve the read Cory’s piece about open-ness and closed platforms (and I agree, open is better). I’ve read from the nit-picking details to the high level geekery, and I’m here to say, the iPad is an important device. Of course, some have already heralded it as the inflection point in “tablet” computing, and it is that – but the reason I think it’s important is actually a bit larger.

I truly believe that the models of human-computer interaction (”HCI”) that all of us grew up with are going to change dramatically in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. I believe it so much that Brad and I are working on it as a third show. And the reason that the iPad is such an important device is that it is a decisive break from the keyboard/mouse paradigm that we’ve been living in for 45 years (yes, the mouse is over 45 years old).

With this device, grandmas and doctors and “people on the street” will suddenly make the jump away from computing as a keyboard and mouse. In fact, the mode of interaction (and it is interactive, even if you’re passively viewing media content) is *completely* different. Multi-touch, tablet, portable — in much the same way that it’s hard for me to describe how I interact via a keyboard, so it is similarly hard to describe interacting via an iPad. But I think it comes down to this (fittingly, I’m writing this on Easter, in case there are any amateur theologians out there): Once computers went from pure business applications (numbers) to something “people” used (and this includes the entire advent of the internet), the primary mode of expression was the word. Text. Dare I say it, “logos.”

Accordingly, the HCI mode was textual. Even the mouse was built to point at text links; highlight text links; manipulate textual (and sometimes numerical) objects.

The iPad blows right by that (and it should given that what the video revolution has brought to the web). Sure, there’s email on the device – but it’s a secondary application. This HCI mode is built to interact in a way where the “word” isn’t the defining object. And that, my geeky friends, whether your inner early adopter is fully satisfied or not, is a game changer. Yes, there are iBooks and apps with text — of course! But the mode of interaction has moved beyond the word as primary HCI mode. Granted, it’s in some weird, hybrid, not fully formed, purgatory universe of user interaction — but the move has been made. And it’s been made on a device that “everyday people” are going to use. [sidenote: this thing is going to CLEAN UP in the grandma/grandpa and kid (4-8) gaming markets. CLEAN UP.]

By the way, saying that the iPhone/Smart phone market did this first really doesn’t work. Phones always had different modes of interaction (voice). We brought computing *to* them. Most people don’t think of their phones as computers. So, the iPhone – yeah, it softened up the marketplace. But the iPad – it’s a *computer* that no longer feels like “a computer.”

At the end of the day, sure there are problems with it: it doesn’t multi-task; I can’t ever achieve the speed of typing I can on a keyboard (though I’m an edge case, since the Department of Defense taught me to type north of 120 words per minute eons ago); it doesn’t have the USB port I want; it needs video/camera. NONE of that matters. That’s details. That will all come. This devise is an inflection point because it marks the moment where the dominant human-computer interaction model of the last 50-100 years began to fade in prominence.

And that’s why the iPad is important.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison table.

You’ll notice that Wave doesn’t have a green yes in every cell in its column; it’s still missing functionality that’s holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment—specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave).

This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you’ve got ideas for how to polish it up before we rev up the printers.

GeoHot, one of the fathers of the iPhone’s jailbreak community, has just released the exploit that’ll unleash all sorts of promising PS3 hackery, just like he promised. We can’t wait for the homebrew and, frankly, piratical features this enables.

From the source:

This is the coveted PS3 exploit, gives full memory access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. Enjoy your hypervisor dumps. This is known to work with version 2.4.2 only, but I imagine it works on all current versions.

You can find it at his page for now—try it out, let us know how it works!

Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who’s spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that’s a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Over the next couple days we’ll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.

Chrome OS is a promising cloud-based operating system, but the big complaint most people have about it is that Chrome OS is entirely browser-based. New netbook OS Jolicloud is a lot like Chrome OS, but with the addition of killer desktop apps.

Before you even consider Jolicloud, you may want to look at their big list of compatible devices. It’s pretty huge, and I’d also suspect not complete. I’m actually testing it in a virtual machine and it’s working just fine, and it would probably work on a fair amount of other hardware.

Think you’d like to try it out? You can install it easily from Windows using a simple installer. Rather than wipe out your Windows installation, it simply carves out some partitioned space on your hard drive so you don’t have to worry about ditching Windows altogether just to try it out. Ready to give it a try? Once your Jolicloud installation is complete, you’ll end up at the login screen.

Enter the username and password you created during installation, and when you log in, you’ll end up staring down the Jolicloud netbook launcher screen.

You’ll also be prompted to set up your Jolicloud account at this point, but unfortunately the specialized Jolicloud accounts—which is part of what makes Jolicloud so cool—requires an invitation code, so you’ll probably want to sign up for one ASAP. If and when you do sign up with a Jolicloud homebase, you’ll get access to the Jolicloud App Directory pictured below.

It’s from this directory you can install your favorite programs—from Skype and Dropbox to Boxee and Spotify in a single click. When you’re logged in to Jolicloud, you’ve also got access to your social stream:

…and a convenient update manager:

In short, Jolicloud is a very impressive looking netbook operating system. Sure it’s just a specialized interface running on top of Ubuntu and powered by a lot of Mozilla Prism packages. The App Directory makes the operating system—as TechCrunch accurately put it—feel like an iPhonesque OS for netbooks. And unlike the current state of Chrome OS, the current alpha release of Jolicloud is actually pretty well supported.

It’s probably a little unfair to compare Jolicloud to Chrome OS, since they are ultimately very different in their approach, but they are both aiming for the same market—your netbooks. If you’ve given Jolicloud a try in the past or just want to weigh in on its looks from the screenshots, let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

The mere promise of Google Wave inspired a rainbow of potential use cases, but Wave’s best real-world use boils down to this: it helps a group get things done together. Here’s how to manage a group project in Wave.

Note: If you haven’t gotten your Wave invite yet, check out our invitation donation thread first (or, better yet, keep an eye out for the same thread this Friday). If you have gotten into Wave, search for title:"Invite others to Google Wave" to find the wave with your invites. Wave’s only fun if your cohorts and workmates also have it, so give out your nominations to the people you want to wave with.

Wave’s invitations have been rolling out steadily over the last few weeks, so you and your co-workers might have already gotten some Wave love. If so, let’s take a look at how you can manage a project in the real world, even given Wave’s current unfinished state.

Background: Over the last two months, I’ve co-managed a large-scale group project with a team of six people in Wave: the production of Adam’s and my new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave. We didn’t write the book in Wave, mind you—but we did manage the project in Wave, where we collaborated on everything behind the scenes, from the book’s style guide, to its pricing plan, and to iterations of its cover design. Whether you’re writing a book or planning a weekend trip, here are a few techniques you and your workgroup mates should know that make Wave a great project management tool.

Shared Tags and Saved Searches

To keep all the project-specific waves into a single bucket, the first thing all the members of your group should do is agree on a project-specific tag. Unlike email folders or Gmail’s labels, Wave’s tags are visible to all wave participants, like Flickr or Delicious tags. So if you decide your project’s tag is “Vacation plans,” everyone tags project waves the same and can find waves based on that tag.

To easily see if there are new updates on the project’s waves, save a search for the tag. In this case, search for tag:”Vacation plans” and click the “Save Search” button on the bottom of the search panel. (You can even assign a color to the saved search for some visual flair.) Once that’s done, you have a project-specific “inbox” (so to speak) in the Searches area of the Navigation panel.

In the screenshot at the top of this article, you can see that for the book project, the agreed-upon tag was “cwg,” and in my Wave client, it was colored gray.

You can even break down project tags even further by combining them. For example, you could tag waves specific to hotel research “Vacation plans” and “hotels.” Then, a search for tag:"Vacation plans" tag:hotels will narrow down the results further. Here’s more on saved searches and Wave filters.

Choose to Reply Below a Blip, Inline, or Edit the Blip

Unlike email, where you can either reply to an entire message or chop it up into quotes and reply inline (which is a tedious and manual process), in Wave you can do either of those things—OR just edit the message that someone else wrote, as if it were a Google Document. This ability to co-author a single message and see past revisions of that message in one place is what sets Wave apart.

In a public wave situation where anyone can edit anything that anyone else has written, it can be total chaos (see, for example, the Lifehacker public wave we tried out with readers). But within a trusted circle of co-editors, revising a single blip together—and having the option to have threaded inline conversations about that content as well—makes getting work done much easier.

For example, if someone asks a series of questions, others can reply inline like email (but more conveniently). But if someone’s drafting a document and needs help filling in the holes and keeping it updated, others can just dive in and hit the Edit button, like Wikipedia. In the screenshot here, you can see a message that has had two authors (Jon and me) but also contains inline replies.

Wave’s three modes of interacting with and editing content—replies, inline replies, and co-editing blips—makes its collaborative abilities in a single context very powerful. Here’s more on the three ways to update a wave.

Private Replies

Sometimes in a group conversation, you want to direct a private reply to a single member or subset of a group about a larger issue—and Wave makes that very easy. Inside the context of a single wave, you can click on the timestamp drop-down and choose “Private Reply” to say something to a subset of that wave’s participants that no one else can see. This ability comes in extremely handy whenever someone has something to add that’s only meant for a few people’s eyes. These private conversations with you appear inline on the wave that everyone else can see—so it can feel weird, like you’re talking behind the backs of others but right in front of them—however, not everyone can see the private back-and-forth in wave. Here’s more on how to send a reply only certain people can see in Wave.

Playback and Wave Forking

Since Wave is more a document collaboration tool than an email replacement, its contents are living things that go through a series of change and revisions over time. Wave’s playback feature lets you move forward and back through those revisions. If a wave has changed too much, and you want to restore an older version of it, Wave makes that possible. While you’re in playback mode, in an older revision, from the timestamp drop-down, choose “Copy Wave” to create a new wave that contains that old revision. (Currently you can’t restore a wave itself to an older version of itself; you have to copy that version to a new wave.)

Here’s more on how to play back wave changes over time to catch up on a conversation or restore a past version.

Helpful Bots, Gadgets, and Add-ons

There are tons of Wave bots and gadgets out there, and the ones that will help with your project depend on what you’re doing. But there are a few that could help in almost any situation.

The XMPP Lite Bot: One of the issues with adopting Google Wave into your workflow is the whole “yet another inbox” problem. If you’re working on a project in Wave but forget to check it every day, you can get notifications of wave updates via IM. The XMPP Lite bot can GChat you as project waves get updated. To use it, add the bot to your contacts (its Wave ID is wave-xmpp@appspot.com), and then add that same contact to your GTalk contacts list. Add the bot to any wave you want IM notifications from, and click the Subscribe button.

The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget: One of the simplest and most useful Wave gadgets available, the Yes/No/Maybe gadget makes asking a simple question of a group and tallying responses dead-simple. To use it, type a question into your wave that has the possible answers, Yes, No, or Maybe. Then, click on the Yes/No/Maybe button on your Wave toolbar. (It’s got three small boxes—green, red, and yellow.) Then, wave participants can just click on their response and add a little note by clicking the “Set my status” link.

Here are a few more great gadgets and bots for Wave.

Google Gears and a modern browser (or a plug-in for IE): The advantage of using a web application is that you don’t have to install software other than a web browser onto your system to access it. That advantage comes with some caveats in Wave. Google Gears, the browser add-on that ships with Chrome but that you have to download and install for Firefox and Safari, isn’t required for Wave, but adds essential functionality: the ability to drag and drop files into Wave. The bad news for Mac users is that Gears is still(!) not available for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (why, Google, why?) and it doesn’t come with the Mac build of Chrome, either. However, if you’re on a PC and you want to easily share files in Wave, you need Gears. (In fact, Wave is speedier and more stable in Google Chrome than Firefox and Safari, so if you’re on a PC it’s worth using Chrome for Wave.)

Additionally, Wave doesn’t play nice with vanilla Internet Explorer. Since it relies on new and emerging web technologies that IE doesn’t support yet, if you try to access Wave in IE, you’ll get prompted to use another browser or use the Chrome Frame IE add-on. This might throw a wrench into your plans to collaborate with co-workers in IT lockdown, without the ability to install an alternate browser or IE add-on on their office computer.

While Wave doesn’t have classic project management tools like to-do lists or Gantt charts built-in, it’s great for project-specific real-time messaging and collaborating. (Plus, to-do lists and more are no doubt on the way in the form of Wave extensions.)

Have you done anything in Wave besides chat it up with a few strangers? Got any Wave advice, tips, or insights? Let us know in the comments.

From Lifehacker.com