textism: Rampart: Based on the Novel Octopus by Flannel
Say it out loud: iPad
But I’m afraid I’ll only ever love the device despite its embarrassing name. And that makes me love it a little less. Apple, you fucked up.
Adam Lisagor is right: iPad is a stupid name, stupid in such an obvious way that I saw three different people on Facebook make the “if Apple makes a larger iPad, they can name it MaxiPad” joke yesterday.
But the thing you have to remember is that Apple’s product names are stupid more often than they’re great. Sure, “PowerBook” was a great name, but the first one came out almost twenty years ago. “Mac Pro” is a solid name, as is “Mac Mini”, and “Time Capsule” is a great name. “Apple TV” is serviceable, if unimaginative. But just look at the list of the other major products Apple’s introduced in the last decade:
- “iPod” was silly-sounding when it was introduced, but the iPod brand benefited from a soft launch (Mac-only for the first year or so back when the Mac had a much, much smaller presence); people were used to the name by the time the product went mainstream. And the derivative names, like “iPod Shuffle”, “iPod Photo”, “iPod Mini”, “iPod Touch”, etc. have always been boring (with the lone exception of the iPod Nano).
- “iWork” and “iLife” are overly-cutesy, though it’s interesting that the individual applications that make up the iWork and iLife suites actually have pretty solid names: “Pages”, “Numbers”, “Keynote”, and “GarageBand” are all great names, and “iPhoto” and “iMovie” are decent. “iWeb” and “iDVD” are duds, but, honestly, who uses those applications anyway?
- “MacBook” sounded really stupid in 2006, and “MacBook Air” sounded doubly-stupid. It’s only because we’ve all heard the word “MacBook” approximately 8 million times since that it now seems reasonable.
- “iPhone” isn’t exactly stupid, but it was certainly disappointingly unimaginative back in 2007—after all, that’s what everybody was calling Apple’s phone before they even knew it existed. Now, of course, it seems like the most natural name in the world.
- “.Mac” and “MobileMe”. Enough said.
Looking through this list, it’s clear that Apple usually picks the most obvious product name it can think of, regardless of whether it sounds stupid or not: “Apple TV”, “iWork”, “MacBook”, “iPhone”. And so much the better if that name consists of an “i” prefix followed by a one-syllable word. With that in mind, “iPad” fits right in with the rest of Apple’s product line, and I predict that a year from now we’ll all have forgotten that it once sounded funny.
1 week agoRiccardo Benedetti, Roberto Frigerio, Riccardo Ghiloni
1 week agoVery interesting and reasonably short paper. The basic situation:
- “[E]lementary education majors are largely female and have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major.”
- “By the school year’s end … the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that ‘boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading’ and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall.”
Of course, this is only one piece of a very large puzzle, but it confirms something I’ve suspected for years.
1 week agogelatobaby: Tomorrow is going to be awesome. Obama is going to tell us that we have no money and Steve Jobs is going to tell us how to spend it.
John Gruber on why you shouldn’t expect to see Flash supported by whatever Apple announces on Wednesday. The answer in seven words:
2 weeks agoFlash is owned and controlled by Adobe.
Interesting. According to some pseudo-scientific formula, my birthday (which was yesterday) is apparently the most depressing day of the year.
(h/t lencheto)
2 weeks agoA student asked yesterday whether this is possible. I vaguely remembered that the answer was “yes”, but not how simple it is.
2 weeks ago
Buy apps from this giant list of excellent indie Mac software and the proceeds go to the Haiti relief effort (via reputable organizations such as Doctors Without Borders). Win-win-win.
I just bought Instapaper Pro and Tweetie for Mac (which isn’t mentioned on the Indie+Relief page, but is part of it nonetheless). In addition to those (the free versions of which I’ve used for a while), I own and can definitely recommend Delicious Library, Pukka, and Tweetie for iPhone (I also own Fetch but don’t recommend it unless you need Kerberos support).
2 weeks agohotdogsladies: Liberal outrage seems to really heat up about 36 hours after it might have been useful.
