As luck would have it, the guys at Java Code Geeks wrote about using Oracle/Sun Microsystem’s Virtual Box, which I have extolled in the past. So, I’m going to follow their tutorial, download the live CD, and have a go. If it’s really all that great, maybe I’ll even try my hand at developing an app for that platform, perhaps as a warmup to writing an iPhone/iPad app, who knows?

Instead of simply waiting patiently (or impatiently, as the case may be), I’ve been avidly reading every review I could find, and trying out iPad-optimized web pages, including the iPad site from National Public Radio. NPR says it is best to view their iPad site in Google’s Chrome browser, since it isn’t optimized for other browsers. Hmmm. I wonder why Chrome, and not Apple’s Safari? Maybe Chrome is more like the iPad version of Safari than Safari itself is?

As a member of the Apple Developers Program, I’ve also downloaded the beta version of the iPhone SDK (Software Developers Kit) that includes an iPad simulator, but must confess I haven’t yet found time to fire it up. It would be different if I actually had a real application I wanted to develop, but so far I’m still trying to learn the development how-to. Thanks to some comments on a technical article about iPad app development, I may have an easier time of that now that I’ve found Corona Simulator, an alternate SDK that seems to be much more straightforward to use than Apple’s Xcode alone.

So, even without a chance of getting our own iPad, we’re considering driving up to Austin tomorrow to see if maybe we can touch one anyway. Maybe that will get me excited enough to finish the Corona tutorials and start working on my own apps, who knows?

I opted to pick up our iPad at the Apple Store in Austin, since we’ll be in that general area when it’s released, and it might be fun to shop for accessories at the same time. We’ve shopped at this store before, and know the parking is exceptionally easy, which is why I picked that one. We may be staying in New Braunfels, which is closer to San Antonio, but what the heck? Either way we’d have to get in the car and drive for an hour, so the direction we head in doesn’t make much difference.

Apparently I was not the only person a little bit excited about getting my name on the list of early adopters. Mashable said there were an estimated 51,000 iPads sold in the first two hours, and 90,000 on the first day of preorders! Not too shabby for a device the pundits kept wondering why anyone would want one. I know why I want one, of course. I’ve got a Kindle DX, and I have been very disappointed with it. While we do use it, most of the time I prefer to fire up Windows 7 in a VirtualBox window and use Kindle for PC to read my Amazon ebooks. When my iPad arrives, I’ll just use Kindle for iPhone on that instead, unless Amazon has a native iPad app ready by then. Color and a backlit screen make the reading experience so much better for me than eInk’s grainy, low-contrast screen that requires a strong reading light. I really don’t understand at all those people who say it’s harder to read an LED computer display than an eInk device or paper. They seem to get their data from the bad old days of CRTs with flickering, unshielded UV-radiant screens. Silly.

As an ebook reader, I certainly expect the iPad to be the best of the breed, but that’s not the only reason I want one. It will be a superb portfolio display, too. And using Reunion for iPhone combined with a collection of family photos, it will be the star of any family gathering. Oh, the possibilities just keep growing….

One of my primary objectives for having this device, especially the 3G version, is to supplement our very pricey VerizonWireless Mobile Broadband account. While that has been a real lifesaver on the occasions, like this past week, when we are in a place without acceptable internet connectivity, only 5 gigabytes of throughput for a month just isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Figure that only two Netflix streaming video movies would use the whole month’s allowance and you’ll understand. We simply use the internet too intensively to be happy with that kind of parsimony. AT&T’s iPad unlimited data plan, which we can turn off when we’re happy with local WiFi, will be wonderful. Phil will be able to watch movies, I’ll be able to get all the video tutorials and podcasts I want, and all the rest, without paying Verizon twice their already excessive monthly fee for using 1/5th more bandwidth, like we have the past couple of months. After all, as many people around the world have said, internet access is a basic human right.

So, we expect to really, really, really enjoy this device when it finally arrives!

Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

First, there is the screen itself. It is not paper-white at all. The contrast is rather poor, and text is not as sharp-edged as I’d like. Not having a backlight, while saving battery consumption, does mean it’s necessary to have a light source handy to read productively. My caveats don’t extend to the point of complete disgruntlement, though. While the screen on my iPhone is backlit and high contrast/resolution, its smaller size makes it much more difficult to read for more than a few minutes. Since one reason I want an eReader is for grad school textbooks, that makes a difference. However, although I can list a number of caveats, my reaction was not nearly as negative as that described by Nicholson Baker in his The New Yorker review. However, even Baker says in his final paragraphs that once he started reading, “Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos promised it would.” However, one feature that leaves me completely unimpressed is the built-in Web browser. I’m not sure if it’s Sprint’s 3G network or the browser software or the Kindle’s hardware, but for some reason opening a page on the Kindle is excruciatingly slow, and unless the page has a very clean design and a well-functioning style sheet, the results can be unreadable. I find that even though Web links normally provide very useful extensions to many documents, on the Kindle they are just too much trouble to be worth the time and effort required to use them.

Kindle for School

Last term I bought several textbooks in ebook editions, and found it quite a hard slog to get through them on the iPhone. For the Fall semester I’ve already purchased a couple of required texts in Kindle format, and I’m much more confident that I will be able to read them more productively than I could on the iPhone. For one thing, the Kindle for iPhone app doesn’t have a way to highlight or mark text selections, a time-honored study technique used by students for countless years. The Kindle DX does allow highlighting, and automatically adds marked selections to a file called “My Clippings.txt”, which can be downloaded to a computer using the USB cable. As a plain text file, these notes can then be organized in any way one chooses. On the Kindle itself “highlighting” consists of a light grey underlining that is not very conspicuous, but not invisible either.

Kindle Resources

Speaking of Kindle for iPhone, since Amazon’s acquisition of the company who make the highly-regarded Stanza ebook reader software, the latest version of this app shows many improvements obviously imported from that excellent application. Stanza itself comes in a desktop version as well as for iPhone OS, which has a feature I just found out about. Possibly new since the Amazon acquisition, it is now possible to save books readable by Stanza Desktop in Kindle’s .azw format. In particular, I’ve found that .epub format ebooks, available from many publishers including O’Reilly and Associates, Baen Books, and the public domain resource, Project Gutenberg, are very easy to use on the Kindle. Just open them in Stanza Desktop, select File-Export Book As-Amazon Kindle and copy the resulting file into the Kindle’s “document” folder when it is connected to the computer with its USB cable. Or, email it to the Kindle using your personal [yourname]@kindle.com address. Before sending documents to the Kindle via email, though, you have to register the email address you want to send it from in your Amazon “Manage my Kindle” account. Using this address costs US$0.10 per document, but will send it directly to the device over the Whispernet Sprint cellular network. There is also a free email address, [yourname]@free.kindle.com, but there is not much point in using that for this purpose since you have to then copy the document from your computer to the Kindle, and if you already have it on your computer in the appropriate format, why send it through Amazon’s system?

The Whispernet cellular network does add a special filip to the Kindle. Buying books on the Kindle and having them delivered directly to it within minutes is possibly the most compelling reason to buy this eReader instead of others on the market at this moment. Amazon’s Kindle Store has an enormous selection of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs available, of course, and the hardest thing about it is to avoid blowing the budget filling up the Kindle with the enticing commercial offerings. But finding a lot of sources of free ebooks has saved my finances. One list of sites offering free ebooks is in The Kindle 2 Cookbook: How To Do Everything the Manual Doesn’t Tell You, which has a lot of other very useful information, too.

This ought to give you a taste of why I’m happy with my new Kindle DX. Will I still be as thrilled with it if Apple announces a competing product next month? Maybe not, but in the meantime I gotta go now… so much to read, so little time!

The good news about the Barnes & Noble announcement is that they plan to make their ebooks available on many platforms. Here’s what the company president had to say about that:

“Today marks the first phase of our digital strategy, which is rooted in the belief that readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time,” said William J. Lynch, President of BN.com.

But in spite of all these factors, I’ve still bought one. Why?

The fact is, I’m impatient. I’ve long seen the benefits of digital media. Indeed, I’ve even published books electronically myself. A decade ago, I owned a PalmOS device (a Handspring) on which I read a number of ebooks as well as kept track of appointments, played games, and so on. That device finally failed, and I didn’t replace it, so all the content I’d bought for it, while still in my computer’s archive folder, is essentially lost. Still, I did enjoy the handheld experience, and know I’ll use any ebook reader I finally acquire. There’s the practical issue of portability, too. My husband and I live in our motorhome nearly half the year, and there is just not enough room to carry all the books I’d like to have available in there.

But what about that iPhone I’ve written about so often? I’ve even written about the Kindle for iPhone app on this blog and I use it still. But as much as I love my iPhone, it is the case that my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be (which never was that great), and these days I simply cannot read for long or as well on even as good a screen as the iPhone’s simply because of its small size. I find that although I have read entire books on it, I don’t retain as much sense from them as I want to. Also, the iPhone app doesn’t let me highlight blocks of text to refer to later. Yes, I can create bookmarks, but that’s not quite the same. Since I have bought some of my textbooks for grad school as ebooks, these are critical shortcomings.

In short, the Kindle for iPhone app is a stopgap. I had hoped Apple would announce a tablet computer or ebook reader this summer, and if they had I would have held off a while longer, but they haven’t. Oh, if they do eventually come out with a new gadget, especially if they make a deal with Amazon to allow Kindle-formatted ebooks to work on it, I will cheerfully throw my Kindle up on eBay and jump on the killer iBook. But until that day, Amazon is getting my somewhat grudging allegiance and money.

However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

The problem I was trying to correct is that the video card emulator in VirtualBox 1.5 was not up to handling a high-end graphics task like video editing. Version 3 does a much better job, especially after I read the User Manual (gasp!) and followed the suggestion there to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a package of device drivers and applications designed to optimize the guest operating system’s performance. It did indeed do that. Before installing these Guest Additions, I was unable to resize the window where Windows 7 beta was running, and when I clicked the cursor inside that window it was “captured” by the VirtualBox application until I tapped the “Host key” to release it. With Guest Additions installed, I can stretch the display window as large or small as I want it, and the cursor moves smoothly from one OS to the other without requiring a keystroke to release it.

There are a few other enhancements as well, including shared folders, which allow access to any designated folder on the host system, time synchronization between host and guest systems, and of course better graphics support.

So, with all that, does vReveal run? Yes! So, I will be testing it using some videos I’m shooting on my new iPhone 3GS, and will have some before and after examples here soon. It still might not work, because even though the application did open, when I tried to look at a sample video I got an error saying it could not find a compatible GPU (Graphic Processor Unit). Even though the iMac has an nVidia GeForce GT 130 on board, the Windows 7 installation may not be able to take advantage of it if the correct drivers are not available. Cross your fingers!

vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.

So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget: