Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/18/ipad-review-video-made-on-a-ip.html
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sent from my iPad…
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That’s no more sensible than feeling guilty about using your PC mainly as a typewriter and web browser when you discover that other people use their PCs to model the size of the galaxy’s central black hole or to design jet engines.
The Ipad is a computer like any other. You can use it to do anything you like, from watching videos to creating complex videos and everything in between. There’s no shame in using it for simple tasks and there’s no legitimate bragging rights for using it for complex tasks.
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I’ve watched the video a couple of times because I’m trying to figure out how she did it. Parts of it I understand - like sketching while screen recorder is on. Other parts I’m still mystified. For example, at one point the video is playing inside of an iPad that she drew while she sketches below. How did she do that?
Anyway, this is really impressive. Caldwell is very talented and I hope she makes other stuff like this in the future. It inspired me to resume working through the exercises on the draw-a-box website on my iPad. Like Mark, I suddenly feel like I’m really under-utilizing this machine.
@frauenfelder What do you think of sketching on the iPad with the Pencil? Have you compared it to a more traditional Wacom-type pen? I ended up putting a matte screen protector on my iPad and now it feels exactly like I’m drawing on paper.
Explained how she did it here
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Impossible. I was told that iPads aren’t real computers, and no one actually does work on them.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/aristotl/
As a prolific writer and polymath, Aristotle radically transformed most, if not all, areas of knowledge he touched. It is no wonder that Aquinas referred to him simply as “The Philosopher.” In his lifetime, Aristotle wrote as many as 200 treatises, of which only 31 survive. Unfortunately for us, these works are in the form of lecture notes and draft manuscripts never intended for general readership, so they do not demonstrate his reputed polished prose style which attracted many great followers, including the Roman Cicero. Aristotle was the first to classify areas of human knowledge into distinct disciplines such as mathematics, biology, and ethics. Some of these classifications are still used today.
so when Steve Jobs enthuses that he “can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary”, he’s overstating his case.
Not to mention that it shows an innate lack of understanding of writing/printing as a medium (i.e. an intermediary) on Jobs’ part.
As for the review, it’s impressively made, but for me it mostly shows the reviewer’s ability to cleverly combine various apps and plan out a “flow” of sorts in composing the video. While some of these apps are probably iPad-exclusive, there’s nothing in this saying it’s not possible on any (pen-enabled) computer.
Secondly, while I agree that flexible computerized learning tools are invaluable and will ultimately transform how we learn and how we transmit and store knowledge, the review’s obvious “Apple’s ideology will save us all” bent strikes me as frighteningly naïve, and is further underscored by the opening statement that “it’s easy to be cynical about technology[, but…]”. Just because a company’s founder was espousing a love for creativity and free knowledge forty years ago doesn’t change the fact that they’re currently forcing closed systems on users (and has really been doing so since day one), taking away users’ abilities to control their own property, and not least enforcing draconian policies and purposely making everything more difficult when it comes to service and repair of said products. This, of course, applies to many, if not most tech companies. The whole point is that Apple is no different, and continuing to portray them in this light just helps obfuscate this.
I don’t really know of any better alternatives (well, we have FairPhone for phones, but their hardware is way too outdated for most people), but that’s not really the point. The point is that we need to strip Apple of this mythical image that they’ve very successfully built for themselves, as it doesn’t do consumers any good whatsoever.
Is a $329 computer that handles pen input with aplomb a great deal? Sure, especially with a processor as fast as the A10 and the solid optimization that Apple is able to ensure with most apps. That the pencil is a $99 addition would be well worth mentioning in the review, though. As would the closed-off app library and the utter lack of serviceability (this is meant for school kids! Of course they’ll drop, throw, spill on and whatever else might damage these things!).
My main objection is still the evangelizing tone here, though. The world definitely doesn’t need less cynicism towards multi-billion-dollar tech companies and their constant hunt for more ways to sell us junk we don’t need, and to make us turn fully functional tools into e-waste! No way.
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