If I want an app in the store on launch day, I need to know what an iPad feels like. There are roughly 59 days left before the lines form in front of Apple’s retail stores. In a video shown during the presentation, Scott Forstall described Launch Day: ”…there’s going to be a whole new gold rush for developers”.

Back in college, Jeff Hawkins (the founder of Palm and Handspring) gave a guest lecture to one of my engineering classes. One of the key points he stressed—that sticks with me a decade later—was the absolute importance of building prototypes. Hawkins carved wooden and styrofoam blocks representing what would later become the Palm Pilot. He took notes on it during meetings and answered phone calls on it.

On the iPhone, we have been living with the devices for two and a half years. We know what they feel like. Xcode’s simulator is great, but there’s nothing like building and debugging your software on iPhone hardware. During your design phase, the Briefs project from Rob Rhyne is invaluable. In addition if you haven’t watched it already, check out Craig Hockenberry’s presentation from C4[2], describing what he learned by using his software in the real world.

How is the iPad going to be used? On the sofa? In a coffee shop, a cramped airplane seat, in bed, on the kitchen counter, commuting on the Metro, or even on the toilet?

I put together a very rough, very quick iPad template based on Apple’s technical specifications page. The 9.7″ diameter screen translates to a 7.76″ x 5.82″ rectangle (1024 x 768 square pixels). Download the PDF, print out a copy and build yourself a cardboard iPad prototype. Cut out 4 or 5 layers of cardboard from a shipping box and glue them together to make the prototype 0.5″ thick. Use rubber cement to put the paper stencil on the top layer.

Once you have this constructed, you immediately see why there is such a large black bevel around the iPad’s screen.

Good luck, happy designing & see you in March!

Download the iPad template:
http://apparentlogic.com/design/iPad/iPadPDFTemplate.pdf

or as a PDF or OmniGraffle document:
http://apparentlogic.com/design/iPad/iPadGraffleTemplate.zip

Almost all digital cable boxes come with an active IEEE 1394 (FireWire) port. If your Mac also has FireWire, you’re in luck. I wrote a Mac OS X System Preference pane that listens to EyeTV channel change notifications and relays them to your cable box.

Download the free System Preference pane at: http://apparentlogic.com/channelchanger/download
This software has been working fine for me, but it still is brand new, so please use it at your own risk!
Double click the .zip file to expand. Double click the “Channel Changer.prefPane” file to install.
Channel Changer runs as a launchd service in the background, listening to EyeTV’s channel change commands.

It’s got all the normal good stuff like:

• Sparkle to keep your software up-to-date
• Log view to see what the Channel Changer service is doing in the background
• launchd to start automatically & run in the background when you reboot your computer
• An uninstall button in case you don’t need the software anymore

So far, I can only confirm it works with my Comcast-issued Motorola DCX-3200. However, it should work for most FireWire enabled cable boxes. Please drop me a line if you have any problems. Also, please let me know the make & model of your cable box if it works for you! Contact me at alex at fajkowski dotcom.

I added an option to that disables EyeTV from setting the same channel twice on your cable box. Depending on your cable company, sending the same channel change command may cause your box to toggle into a “Television Guide” mode that looks like this:

Finally, for some acknowledgements about software libraries used in “Channel Changer”.
Thanks to Andy Matuschak for Sparkle, a wonderful Mac OS X software update framework.
http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/
And thank you to Uli Kusterer for UKKQueue, a clean & powerful Cocoa wrapper for kqueue file change notifications in OS X.
http://zathras.de/