We finally received our Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) Pro 2 that we ordered for our iPad. The idea was to relegate our Apple Wireless Keyboard to only those trips where we need extreme portability and still require a keyboard. The rest of the time, we’d use the HHKB because of its superior tactile feel. As [...]

Magnificent mechanical keyboards.

by WyldKard on April 26, 2012

While people love to talk about how intuitive touch is as an interface method, the cold reality is that for certain applications, legacy input formats still reign supreme. For example, for writing, there is no unseating the keyboard in one format or another, as writing by hand is slow and cumbersome for longform input. 1 [...]

The theoretical 7.85″ Apple tablet.

by WyldKard on April 6, 2012

Some have made the case, admittedly admirably, that if Apple were to make a tablet smaller than the iPad, it would come in at 7.85″. Technically this makes sense, but it’s only looking at the issue from a hardware perspective, not from a functional one. Take the iPhone and iPad for instance.1 The two devices [...]

More on keyboards and iPads.

by WyldKard on March 30, 2012

One of the iPad’s greatest strengths is its touch interface, which has proven itself more intuitive than traditional computing mechanisms like the keyboard and mouse. Yet sometimes, physical input mechanisms remain useful, as in long-form writing. In a rather confusing piece praising the iPad’s abstraction-free controls, TUAW’s Erica Sadun digresses to bash keyboard use with [...]

Retina graphics and file-sizes.

by WyldKard on March 23, 2012

Retina-optimized graphics are awesome, we all pretty much agree. But there comes a trade-off with such: file-size. TUAW’s Mike Schramm summarizes the issue: The most obvious drawback is app size. Those bigger graphics take up more space, and for many graphics-heavy applications, that could put them over the cellular data download limit (now at 50 [...]