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Coming Soon..
posted by Hampton on Wed, Jan 27th 2010
More valuable than solid Unobtainium, I am releasing my comedy CD soon. I finished the editing process recently at a friend's house and I have to say it came out FANTASTIC. The audio quality is great and the recording itself went off without a hitch. It's a solid 55 minutes of stand-up with most of the "ums" "ers" and "oh boy oh boy"s taken out. If you are a fan of the strip I hope you will consider picking it up. I am working on putting it up for digital download. I'll post again when it's up! See you goons later.
The iPad and comics
posted by Clay on Fri, Jan 29th 2010
I've got some mixed feelings about the latest nerd toy from Cuppertino. I don't know if I'll be among the first to queue up and grab one, but I'll be watching it very closely with a fist-full of cash ready to go.

Hardware-wise, the only omission I see as a problem is no camera. It could have standardized video chat among the masses and it's a missed opportunity that they left it out. No back facing camera also means that augmented reality iphone apps won't work on it either, though I've yet to find an AR app that was actually useful rather than just fun. The software, I think, has some much more major flaws that I hope are addressed when iPhone 4.0 comes out. Steve Jobs stated the iPad is a replacement for a netbook at the start of the announcement. Multitasking, although not absolutely necessary, is annoying to leave out of a machine that could easily handle it, and makes for a poor user experience as a media tablet.

For this next part, I would like to take a moment to rant at directly address Steve Jobs:
"Hi Steve, how's it going? I cannot believe you had the BALLS to say 'This is the best web browsing experience,' then navigate to a page with the 'install flash plugin' icon clearly visible. I know that you hate Adobe for making a closed plugin a standard, but holy hell, you are positioning this as a MEDIA device. Do you think it's good for the consumer to automatically close off most of the web's available media? Your argument for leaving it off the iPhone was barely passable when you intimated that Flash would run poorly on it, and the lack of any of the competition seriously supporting it made it easier to swallow, but are you telling me that there is a reason other than your own stubbornness for not including Flash support on the supposedly CPU beefy iPad? If you hate Flash, disable it as default, and make the user have to click it to initialize it, but to leave out even the option of playing it is crippling the web browser, which you state is one of the iPad's key features features. If you think HTML 5 negates the need for Flash:
  1. HTML 5 is still a couple years off from becoming standard across all browsers, so adoption will take most if not all of the the lifespan of the first gen iPad.
  2. HTML 5 doesn't support DRM and you have direct access the video files this is the only reason that content providing sites like hulu will publish their stuff to the web, so I don't see them switching to HTML 5 They might make a custom app, but until I see it, this sucks.
  3. Even if HTML5 becomes a standard very quickly, it will be an annoying experience to navigate to a site that is still using Flash and not be able to see it.
I can only hope that you come to your senses, Steve, but considering how long it took you to put in cut and paste, I won't hold my breath."

Whew! It was good to get that off my chest. But to be honest, those are software issues that they can fix later on, and I'm hoping that they will reveal Flash support and multitasking in iPhone os 4.0. Also, no Flash support is more like a thorn in my side than a complete dealbreaker. Let me tell you how Steve could sell me one of these things tomorrow with or without Flash support. Partner with Marvel, DC, Image, Vertigo, and other big comic publishers for the iTunes book store, and open it up for indie publishers to publish directly to the store. Use the same business model as with music, but also allow subscriptions to titles. It would be worth the $499 for that functionality alone for me. I'm actually surprised they didn't announce a deal with Marvel at the event. Disney now owns Marvel, so that should have been pretty easy for Steve to swing.

Right now I feel there are too many unknowns to conscience buying one with the faith that it'll get all sorted out, so I'll sit on it for now, and wait for the coming comic industry revolution.