My main question about the Apple iPad is apparently answered “yes.” Developers will be able to use custom fonts in iPad applications, including print-media publications sold as apps.

Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.

My own thoughts:

• I don’t yet know enough about it to know if it really is the gadget that will save the news media, let alone the book or TV industries. For instance, I don’t know if it will support full professional typography in publications distributed as iPad apps (it doesn’t support it in Apple’s own iBooks app). I strongly believe real fonts, chosen and tweaked and kerned by real designers (and not just the seven or eight “web-safe fonts,” either) are the key to making online-distributed reading matter seem professional enough to command a price.
• The hardware’s limitations don’t bother me. It doesn’t have a cell phone in it, but third party software will certainly being Internet-based phone calling to it. It doesn’t have a standard USB plug, but it will have an optional adapter for one (which means you can attach external storage devices, webcams, etc.).
• The software’s limitations concern me a bit more. A device meant to be, among other things, a full service Internet browser needs to be able to run Adobe Flash. A device meant to be an on-the-go field computer needs multitasking (more than one application running at one time), or at least a universal clipboard. With luck, these discrepancies should be fixed before long.
• What are the fine-print terms of the AT&T 3G data subscription, available as an option with the higher-end versions of the iPad? Could I use it with WiFi to run a Net connection into my regular computer?
• As UK comedy legend Stephen Fry notes, Jobs gives a helluva presentation. As others noted, Jobs and Obama, those two master sales-orators of our time, spoke on the same day. Obama’s speech was telecast and streamed live to millions. Jobs’s speech wasn’t, except for a few brief excerpts on CNBC. Most people who wanted to learn every detail as the announcement was happening had to settle for “liveblogging” text commentaries at various techie Web sites—which can actually be a more intimate, more involving medium than just watching somebody talk.
• I don’t care about the name, either way. And the jokes about it are already old; which is probably just how Apple predicted they’d be when the name was picked.
• Yes. I want one.

A diarist at Daily Kos, using the nom de web Devilstower, alleges that when (and if) the rumored Apple Tablet is finally announced this Wednesday, the result will be a new online-media dichotomy:

It’s not Apple vs Microsoft anymore.  It’s not even Apple vs Google.

It’s Apple vs the Web.

Just as the web replaced earlier systems, Apple is building an alternative ecosystem that uses the Internet’s backbone covered with their own cross-device platform.

…When this wave has passed, there’s every chance that a lot of people will make their way through the Internet without ever seeing the letters “www” again. It won’t be the web. It’ll be the Orchard.

What doesn’t Apple have in the Orchard? You. They have a massive presence in the media realm, but they don’t have anything to offer that competes with the freewheeling world of blogs and the rapidly changing social media space.

They don’t have it yet. And maybe they won’t. But, fellow resident of Dinoville, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Elsewhere in the piece, Devilstower refers to the “dinosaurs” of old closed-system online networks such as Prodigy and the original America Online, and implies that’s what Apple’s trying to re-create.

I see something else going on here.

The Web, for all its vast expandability and universal, gate-free access, has severe limitations as a presentation tool for professional, packaged content. It doesn’t allow for real typography, at least not without a lot of complex workarounds. It doesn’t allow for standardized page sizes or complex graphic design. Web-based content can’t command a price from readers because (among other reasons) readers subconsciously don’t perceive it as a place for works of value.

The Apple Tablet platform can be all these things that the Web isn’t, or has a hard time being.

The Web won’t go away any time soon. If it ever does, it will be succeeded by something that does what the Web does best, only better.

By “what the Web does best,” I’m thinking of chats, social networking, discussion threads, blogs, real-time information, and the whole ongoing mashup of different media from different places and times.

But fully integrated, depth-heavy works of the communication arts will be better served by the Tablet platform. Until something better succeeds it.

I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).

Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.

He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”

Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.

(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)

Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.

The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.

…before pay-per-view cable channels, championship boxing matches used to be telecast exclusively on “closed-circuit” feeds to movie theaters and arenas. For home audiences, the promoters would license one TV or radio network to broadcast a studio-based show, in which an announcer would read round-by-round descriptions of the action transmitted by teletype from the fight venue.

This is the closest precedent I can think of for “live blogging.”

One of the chief live-blogged events every year is Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo, Apple’s chief vehicle for announcing new products.

Yes: An event that’s all about the latest, greatest, and shiniest electronic media devices gets its first communication to the outside world by the modern equivalent of telegraph-era technology. Guys with WiFi-equipped laptops sit in the audience and type out brief descriptions of what they hear and see.

(Apple used to try live online video streams of the Jobs speeches. But they never mastered the bandwidth issues. Online video is better suited for recorded content and niche audiences than for a lot of people watching the same live thing.)

So, like thousands of the Mac faithful, I went to Mac news-and-rumor Web sites to read about what Jobs was saying while he was saying it, accompanied by the occasional still digi-pic.

I’ll let other sites explain what Jobs said and showed. As many sites predicted, there’s a new really thin laptop computer, online movie rentals (some in hi-def!), and software updates to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. There’s also a new wireless external hard drive. All the live bloggers gushed in insta-print over all the stuff.

But they disagreed with the show’s closing entertainment. Jobs trotted out one of his celeb pals, Randy Newman. He performed “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” his return to his old snide singer-songwriter act after several years of toiling in the family business of soundtrack composing.

One live-blogger, Jason Snell, was apparently only used to Newman’s movie songs. Here’s Snell’s comments, reconfigured into chronological order:

“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’” What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.

‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.

“Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”

My question is different: Who knew such impolite but lucid talk about the end of the American empire would find an outlet at a Fortune 500 company’s PR show?

• Marshall Alternative School will finally close this year, its remaining programs scattered around the city.
• A Tukwila hotel manager turned himself in to face accusations that he stole $1.4 million from hotel guests’ corporate accounts.
• Gregoire’s next big idea for the 520 corridor: A mediation team.
• Makah tribal leaders want to go whaling again.
• How to keep school bus riders pacified: Use satellite music, specially curated to be squeaky clean.
• And the Mac universe impatiently awaits whatever Steve Jobs is going to announce this morning.

…of iPhone hype stories this past week, Steve Jobs is quoted as calling “the human finger the most sophisticated navigation device known to mankind.” I’m sure the Babeland ladies would agree.

A British real-estate development firm is offering newly-built, tiny, one-bedroom condos (known there as “flats”), under the trademark “iPads.”

The beloved laptop upon which I’ve written the past year’s worth of these site entries is now superseded by a newer model. That’s OK; I still care for the one I’ve got.

Forbes reports Apple Computer’s contacting the major record companies about selling music videos through iTunes, to be played on computers and/or a future video iPod. Sony’s PlayStation Portable game machine can already be easily used to play motion-picture content.

Don’t think of this as the Forbes writer does, as a way for the deservedly-beseiged music giants to make another buck. Think of it as a way for indie videomakers to make a buck, at last.

During the dot-dom madness days, a lot of fly-by-nite outfits popped up (including several in Seattle) making and/or distributing short online video productions in many genres–sketch and standup comedy, animation, documentary, alternative news, erotica, and even video art. Most of the nonporn efforts failed financially. (The ad-supported, big-money-backed iFilm is the chief surviving exception.)

But, following on Apple’s embracing of audio podcasters, iTunes could provide a simple, open-to-all-comers pay-per-view system. (And because it’s Apple, it wouldn’t be annoyingly Windows-only, like so many subscription net-Video systems out there.)

Of course, having a workable business model doesn’t mean indie short-video makers will have an easy path to profitability. Cheaper means of production since the ’90s have led to an explosion of indie feature-film making, resulting in a glut of unviewable semipro movies.

But freed from the need to keep a compelling story going for more than an hour, these nascent artistes with their digi-camcorders could learn their craft while getting audience feedback. Film/video is a complex collection of skills, best learned via the high-concept, immediate-impact form of the short.

In the ’90s, several instructors and advisors told young filmmakers to skip shorts and start directly in feature projects. Chief among their reasons: There was no market for live-action shorts, but features could be hawked at Sundance and other festivals, or at least sold on video from your own website. For a middle-class kid looking at a lifetime of credit-card servitude just to break into his/her chosen craft, it was an easy idea to accept.

We’ve all seen, or scrupulously avoided, the results: Innumerable, interminable exercises in “hip” violence and relationship whining, with bad acting and terrible audio.

With shorts, these kids can say what they really need to say and then stop. Like I’m doing now.

Starting next year, Apple Computer will shift to Intel processors. Sites that specialize in Mac coverage will have much, much more to say about this than I. But for now, consider these points:

• Apple’s move away from IBM’s PowerPC chips further reduces Big Blue’s involvement in the personal computer biz, which it once dominated. It previously sold off its own PC operations to a Chinese company.
• Wired suspects the real reason for the switch might be Apple honcho Steve Jobs’s increasing involvement within/sucking up to the Hollywood media conglomerates. Intel, you see, has been developing anti-copying schemes that would reside directly on the CPU chip. They’d prevent home users from doing anything to music and movie files that the media giants don’t want done.
• If Apple hardware will now have “Intel Inside,” does that mean Mac OS X will be runnable on other companies’ hardware? And if so, will there even continue to be Apple hardware?
• Apple claims it’s got developer tools that’ll make the transition really easy for software creators, and that even unadapted applications will run swiftly and bug-free on the new machines. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• Does this mean the beginning of the end of Apple’s whole “Think Different” corporate identity?

I took a piece of my condo-sale proceeds (otherwise tightly secured away to stave off the credit card companies) and got me a new iBook G4 with the new Mac OS X “Tiger” operating system. I only had to wait in line 45 minutes at the Apple Store on a cloudy Friday evening to get it, plus some extra RAM.

This marks only the third time in 23 years of computer purchasing that I’d bought an all-new machine, at its regular retail price, from a brick-and-mortar retail outlet.

The first time was for a Radio Shack TRS-80, of which I have little more to say at this time.

I will, though, tell of the first Mac I bought, at the U Book Store back when its computer department was hidden away in the Alumni Association’s building. It was the Mac 512 (the second Macintosh model, after the original Mac 128), purchased in mid-1995 at the end of its product “life.” Instead of MC/Visa, I bought it under in-store credit “contract terms.” I couldn’t actually bring it home for two days after I bought it, because, the salesperson told me, they needed to properly “break in” the machine by leaving it powered up that long on the premises before they could entrust it to me, or me to it.

This time, I looked around, decided what to get, told the first clerk I saw what I wanted, waited at the Genius Bar for five minutes, was greeted by another clerk with my purchase in a handy carry-out-strapped box, paid my money, and strutted out humming April Stevens’s “Teach Me Tiger” and the Mills Brothers’ “Tiger Rag” (but not “Eye of the Tiger”).

I’d pondered getting a Mac mini instead, but I’d have had to also get an external monitor, and those (at least the good ones of those) ain’t cheap. Besides, I’m sorta used to the wireless/cord-optional life by now.

Compared to its three-and-a-half-year-old predecessor, my new iBook has twice the official processor speed. But between the improved G4 chip architecture and the new OS version, it actually runs several times faster on most CPU-intensive tasks. (I’d previously considered replacing the shareware outlining program I’d been using, just because it took up to two minutes to save files. Now, that task’s accomplished in seconds.)

I’ve yet to explore most of Tiger’s new features, other than the improved search box in the Finder that can track down anything I’ve ever saved by content (not just title). That’s partly because of time constraints; I’ve gotten a gig proofreading a new book about Tiger.

Other things I’ve acquired for my new place include a Caller ID box (how’d I even manage to live previously without this godsend for the home-office worker?) and a laundry hamper with wheels (an absolute must for anyone whose residence and washing machine are an elevator ride apart).

…involuntary “Internet fast” for yr. intrepid web-editor today and part of yesterday.

At exactly 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, my hard drive froze. It wouldn’t restart; all I got was the gray screen of suspended animation, Mac OS X’s counterpart to Windows’s blue screen of death. I was able to boot up from the external hard drive, but the internal drive didn’t even appear. None of the diagnostic applications to which I had access could fix it—Disc First Aid just gave up, and Norton Utilities crashed.

Bright n’ early Thursday morning, a friend came over to lend me his expertise and his copy of DiscWarrior. That program churned and stalled for nine hours without rebuilding my corrupted directory structure.

What I was able to do was get online while booting up form the external drive. I downloaded an OS upgrade, which enabled my external drive to perform a basic boot-time rebuilding on my internal drive, making it visible again. Two restarts later, I was booting from the internal drive again.

I’ve been able to make a complete backup. And I’ve obviously been able to get online and post this. It’s still running slowly (my friend suspects the OS is struggling to find dats within a still-corrupt directory structure).

This is the first time anything like this has happened to me under OS X. Under the old Mac OS, this sort of thing happened enough times a year that I could remember what to do about it.

As for why it happened, I’ve two theories:

• I’ve been running my iBook with dangerously little free hard-drive space. OS X uses virtual memory, particularly when accessing web sites that use Flash animation.
• OS X update 10.3.5 may be unstable. Stick to 10.3.4.

A KIND READER thought some of the rest of you, particularly out-O-towners, might enjoy this P-I piece about the Mac programmers at Microsoft.

FORBES HAS A NICE laudatory piece on the 20th anniversary of the original Macintosh.