Paper is a new sketching app for the iPad:

The team spent months painstakingly figuring out how to emulate materials on a digital screen. For example, they had to understand how lead plays on the texture of paper, and how pen ink moves when you apply an artistic wrist flourish. Even more time was spent getting watercolor paint to bleed just right when you hold down your finger in place. Swipe your finger side to side quickly and the watercolor smudges like you’d expect it to. The point here is providing real tools to use every day while sketching, drawing, and creating — and to that extent FiftyThree has succeeded.

Looks fantastic.

Matthew Panzarino:

The iPad has always been designed to disappear, to make you forget you’re using it.

Joshua Topolsky:

In some immediate way, this defense rings true. There are many documented cases of worker mistreatment and injuries in Foxconn factories. There have been reports of underage workers. There have been suicides. Some of the most important and honest revelations of these issues have come from Apple itself, which issues a supplier responsibilty statement every year detailing both the improvements and problems it’s having with international partners.

But until the radio broadcast Daisey took part in — and many of the follow-up interviews he gave — this problem was never discussed in a such a big, public way. Daisey’s lies inspired honest questions about the gadgets in our pockets. Did he betray the trust of the public and journalists by lying? The answer to this question is easy: Yes. But were the lies necessary?

Let me quote Jim Dalrymple, because his response to this is precisely right:

Bullshit.

Daisey’s argument wasn’t that there have been abuses at Foxconn. We know that, and we know it in large part because Apple has been uniquely forthright with detailing working conditions and abuses in their supply chain. No, that wasn’t what Daisey argued. What Daisey argued was that the abuses he claims he saw—underage workers, maimed workers—is commonplace, Apple knows about it, but does nothing to change it. That is a lie, a lie which mislead his audiences and This American Life’s listeners about the reality of the situation.

Topolsky thinks that’s okay because now more people are aware of abuses happening at Foxconn. What Topolsky neglects to consider is that those people, having listened to Daisey’s bullshit, are now even less well-informed now than they were before, if they took Daisey at his word. It may have created coverage for the issue, but it created misinformed, inaccurate coverage and understanding of the issue. There’s nothing defensible about Daisey’s actions, and it’s disappointing to see Topolsky throw his support behind him.

No. “Disappointing” is too weak a word. Jim had it right: it’s bullshit.

Cody Fink:

Where my eyes quickly got tired when reading on previous generation iPads, I found the Retina display helped me stay focused and interested in reading texts for much longer periods of time. Where I wasn’t too interested in reading long form articles on the iPad before (I mainly relegated that to the iPhone 4S at the kitchen table), I now consider the iPad to be a great e-book reader.

I think that overstates it a bit—the iPad 2′s screen was fine for reading—the new iPad’s screen really is better for reading. While I was never bothered reading on my original iPad’s screen, my eyes seem to relax more while reading on the Retina display, which makes reading for longer periods—an hour or so—more enjoyable.

Jeff Atwood:

At the point where these simple, fixed function Post-PC era computing devices are not just “enough” computer for most folks, but also fundamentally innovating in computing as a whole … well, all I can say is bring on the post-PC era.

We’re living through an inflection point in computing, and it’s going to have huge effects on society as a whole. It truly is a special time to be around.

John Gruber on Mike Daisey:

Daisey impugned the integrity of Apple — and the journalism of ABC News — in order to work people up regarding problems that don’t exist. This only served to draw attention away from the labor, health, and environmental issues in Apple’s Asian supply chain that do exist.

He has hurt the true cause, not helped it.

Gruber nailed it. Daisey didn’t fudge the truth a bit to tell a bigger truth—he told lies which misrepresented the truth, told those lies outside of the theater, for the benefit of his own play.

There’s no question here. Daisey lied to the people who attended his performances and lied to everyone else who read about his experiences. He manipulated people, and—let’s be honest—he did so to benefit himself. What he did is terribly shameful.

Jim Dalrymple:

People generally don’t care as much about specs as they do about what they can do with the device. You can list off the specs for the new iPad and people will just nod politely and smile.

However, if you tell them that with iCloud all of their information will be across every Apple device they own, including computers, you can see a light go off.

For the past ten months, I’ve been working on an application for the iPad. It’s called Basil, and you can check it out here. I am so excited to finally share it with all of you.

Here’s the idea: Basil is for saving recipes from the web, organizing and cooking them. You can save recipes from the biggest sites with one tap, and your recipes are always organized, because Basil auto-tags them with the main ingredients and makes it quick to add the meal and cuisine type, too. That way, you don’t have to waste time categorizing your recipes. You can spend it doing what you really want to do—cook.

Here it is:

Basil is $3.99, and you can check it out on the App Store here.

If you’d like to hear a little bit more about what it does and why, keep reading. And then go check it out on the App Store!

The Details

I cook quite a bit, which you probably know if you follow me on Twitter.¹ Cooking is really fun, because there’s always something new and different to try, always something to learn. But there was something that annoyed me a lot while cooking: When I’d find a new recipe from the web and wanted to cook it a while later, it was a pain finding it again. Sometimes I’d save it to Instapaper, and other times I’d go spelunking across the web trying to find it again. Either way, it was a pain—when I really wanted to be shopping for groceries or cooking, I was searching the web. And sometimes I couldn’t even find the right recipe again.

I tried a few different apps to see if they solved it, but none of them quite worked for me. Either they didn’t make it simple to add new recipes, or they had so many features that it obscured the whole point of the app: cooking.

So I decided to make the app I wanted: one that makes it really easy to find new recipes, save and cook them.

Basil isn’t filled to the brim with included recipes. There’s plenty of other apps that do that. Basil includes just four recipes (from Neven Mrgan and Jim Ray’s great Salt & Fat), since it’s meant for the recipes you want. It really is what you make it.

Finding new recipes to cook is easy, because you can search across all of Basil’s supported sites with one tap. When you find one that sounds good, tap Save, and Basil will save it (and any tags the website uses) in just a few seconds, and then ask you to set the meal and cuisine type (if the website provides them, they’ll already be filled in):

As a result, your recipes are always organized. Instead of spending a bunch of time categorizing them, Basil does it for you. If you want to see all of your breakfast recipes, for example, you just tap “breakfast”:

It’s pretty cool. What’s really powerful about this is you can combine any of them. Say you want to see your Chinese soup recipes: just tap “Chinese” and “soup,” and and they’re all there. Or your breakfast recipes with bacon. Whatever it is you want. It’s a really great way to move through your recipes, because it’s instant, and you can re-discover ones you forgot you had.

You can also search through your recipes with full-text search, too. This makes it really easy to find a recipe even if you don’t quite remember the name, but you remember where it came from or some part of the directions.

One of my favorite features is—appropriately—favoriting recipes. Instead of spending time deciding whether a recipe is 4 or 5 stars, you just favorite the ones you really love. That’s it. Simple. And once you do, they’ll always be in your favorites tab, ready to cook.

And what about cooking?

Let’s Cook

When I’m cooking, I usually have a few things going at once, so there’s not much time to read a recipe with small text. What I want is for what really matters—the ingredients and directions—to be as clear to read as possible, and preferably readable at a glance from a distance.

So that’s how the recipe view is designed (click on it for a larger size):

Ingredients and directions are set in big, readable text.

You might have noticed that in step 2, “1 hour” looks like a button. Well, it is. And if you tap it, this slides in from the bottom of the screen:

Any time directions become buttons, and they start a timer for that amount of time. Doesn’t matter if it’s “1 hour,” “one hour,” or “1 hour and fifteen minutes.” There’s no need to fumble around with your phone or the microwave to set a timer—Basil takes care of it for you. It’s one of my favorite things, because it makes cooking a little easier.

I really hope you love using it as much as I do. It’s been such a great experience learning how to develop iOS applications, designing it, and solving design issues and bugs. I love using it, and I hope you do, too!

You can check Basil out on the App Store.

1. I started because my girlfriend and I got sick of eating out every time I visited her while she was away at college, and she’s a really good cook. [↩]

David Barnard, riffing on T.S. Elliot:

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

Nailed it. “Borrowing” implies quickly tacking on some idea you saw from someone else without really thinking through why it’s that way. When you borrow an idea, you’re just photocopying it.

But there’s no shame in taking other people’s good ideas. They’re good ideas, after all. But rather than tack it on, you should think through why it’s such a good idea, and how it fits with your own design’s intent. By doing so, you find the greater truth behind why they designed it that way, and you can integrate it into your own design appropriately, and even improve on it. That’s taking it and making your own, and there should be absolutely no guilt about doing so.

The New York Times’s iPad app was updated for the Retina display, and includes a couple new features, too: syncing for saved articles and the ability to copy and paste article text and look up word definitions.

It really is a great application. I started subscribing to their iPad app a couple months ago, and reading it each morning has been wonderful. It’s still too expensive, but they’re doing great work. And it should look fantastic on the new screen.

Lukas Mathis:

After downloading and playing around with Apple’s new iPhoto for iOS, I felt like I was teleported back to 1998. Touching and gesturing in different ways would make seemingly random things happen. I regularly unintentionally activated features, changed views, opened or closed pictures, and got iPhoto into states I wasn’t sure how to get out of again.

Best look at iPhoto for iOS I’ve seen yet.

iPhoto for iOS is uncharted territory for touch applications because it’s so capable. While I think Apple deserves a bit of slack because of that, it’s also true that they need to think through these gestures and UI concepts, because it’s an application that could influence how people design more complex interfaces, and they should take that responsibility seriously. If we’re going to use gestures for the primary interface to application functions (and I’m not so sure that’s a good idea), we need to make sure they’re right so we can remain consistent with them.

Writing for Ars Technica, Iljitsch van Beijnum compares iTunes’s 1080p to Blu-Ray.

Spoiler: iTunes does pretty well.

Christopher Breen:

The point being, once you see the Apple TV for what it is—an accessory rather than The Thing Itself—it makes sense in Apple’s larger plan. You bring the content, we’ll provide the ways to move it where you want it.

That Apple included the Apple TV as an accessory when purchasing the new iPad says it all.

The number of rumors that Apple is working on a small, 7-8″ iPad have increased recently. DigiTimes posted another today.

I wanted to address the idea of a small iPad because I’m sure it’s something Apple has thought about a lot, and it’s an interesting question whether it’s a good idea or not.

I have no doubt that Apple is working on a small iPad, but that’s a separate question of whether they will actually release it. Let’s think through it.

Why A Small iPad Makes Sense

The iPad is big and a bit heavy, so holding it in one hand for an extended amount of time isn’t comfortable. This makes the iPad rather inflexible for reading or watching video, because it requires holding it with two hands or propping it up on something (like your leg). A smaller iPad would fix that. It’d be great for watching video or reading because there would be many more ways to hold it that are comfortable, which is reason enough for some people to want one. A smaller size and weight would also make it that much better of a travel device.

A smaller iPad would also (presumably) be cheaper—say, $249 or $299, $100 less than the iPad 2 costs today. A sub-$300 price opens the iPad to even more customers. It’d be a web-browsing, video-playing, book-reading, game-playing device for less than $300, which is much easier to justify as a gift or for convenience and entertainment.

The last reason is also a good one for why it makes sense for Apple. Apple’s strategy tends to be to introduce a product that’s really, really good, and then as time goes on, expand the product to fit price-points below and/or above it. With the iPod, Apple introduced it at $399, then a second generation at $299, then an iPod mini at $249, and then the iPod shuffle at $99. Each new model had a slightly different purpose, and they expanded the iPod’s potential audience. Someone who could only afford an iPod shuffle might purchase a regular iPod the next time.

That logic could make sense for the iPad, too. The 10″ iPad is the do-anything iPad, the 8″ is the entertainment iPad. A slightly different intended purpose, and a lower price-point, could expand the iPad’s potential customers to include people who initially were considering Amazon’s Kindle Fire or Barnes and Noble’s Nook—someone who wants to read, watch video and maybe play games, but doesn’t want to spend very much money. And when they realize how much they love their iPad mini (or whatever they call it), they might buy a regular-sized iPad the next time.

That’s also attractive, of course, because it would blunt the Kindle Fire’s demand by eating into its price advantage.

Why the Small iPad Doesn’t Make Sense

That’s why a small iPad could make sense for Apple. Here’s why it wouldn’t make sense: the iPad is not the iPod.

Expanding the iPod line-up was an easy choice, because (1) different iPod models for different purposes didn’t cannibalize the other models, and (2) they were easily replaceable by a different iPod model. A customer who owns an iPod shuffle now can replace it with an iPod classic in minutes, because all they do is play back media.

Let me explain what I mean, starting with two. Apple’s purpose with selling the iPod was simply to sell more iPods.¹ All they did was play back the user’s media, so Apple could create as many new iPod variations as they’d like to, since their purpose were all precisely the same. The cheapest model did the same thing the most expensive model did: it played music. Any music you purchased for your iPod shuffle would work just fine for the iPod classic.

This wouldn’t be true for a small and large iPad, however. The iPad’s equivalent to the iPod’s music is applications. That’s what we use them for, that’s what we spend our money on. But here’s the problem: applications designed for the large iPad are not necessarily going to work so well on the small iPad. Let’s say the small iPad’s screen resolution is 1024×768, so it could run current iPad apps at a reduced physical size: many applications are going to be way too small. Applications designed for the large iPad’s 10″ screen can take advantage of that size to include more controls and content on screen at once that, if shrunken down to fit on the small iPad’s 8″ screen, would be too small to use.

In other words, to take full advantage of each device, developers would need to build applications specifically for each screen size, like they do for the iPhone and iPad already.² As a result, this isn’t so much the introduction of a smaller iPad that users can replace with a large iPad as easy as they do the iPod—it’s actually the introduction of an entirely new device between the iPhone and iPad with its own advantages and disadvantages that must be designed for.

So a small iPad would probably force developers to build applications specifically for each iPad, and thus wouldn’t necessarily lead to the “start on the cheap iPad, then move up to the better, larger iPad” effect people assume. But this also points out something really, really important: a small iPad and the large iPad have very different reasons for existing.

So back to reason number one. With the current iPad, Apple’s intent seems to be to replace the PC as we know it for many purposes. Not for all, and certainly not for all users—but for regular people who use PCs for web browsing, sending email, taking notes and managing their music and photo libraries; and increasingly, for new uses altogether and some creative work, like Square’s point of sale application and painting. What’s more, as the iPad becomes more capable, more involved tasks—like word processing and creating presentations—are also easy to do on the iPad, and that will only be more true as time goes on.

That isn’t true for these small tablet devices, and it wouldn’t be true for a small iPad, either. A relatively large screen is necessary to do these kinds of tasks, and no matter how advanced the software gets, it’s going to be difficult to create a presentation or take notes or make a painting on a 7-8″ screen. These devices are ideal for reading, watching video, playing games and, to a slightly lesser extent, browsing the web. In other words, they’re entertainment devices. And that’s fine—this isn’t a moral judgment—but their size makes their purpose very different from the large iPad’s purpose.

This distinction is important because if Apple is attempting to make tablets the next central computing platform, creating a small iPad could undermine it. Many people do buy the current iPad for the same reasons they might buy these smaller tablets, but once they’re using it, they could begin using it for more uses than they envisioned—like editing video or their photos. But if they buy a small iPad, that isn’t possible. It’s an entertainment device. Someone who purchases a small iPad rather than a large one is someone who may never use an iPad for any more than reading a book, browsing the web and watching a movie. And that’s a lost opportunity for Apple.

Perhaps Apple believes a smaller iPad could be capable enough to achieve their goal. And it’s certainly true that a small iPad could be more useful in certain circumstances than a large one, and thus could expand this new era of computing even farther. But what’s also true is that this nascent tablet space is very much in its infancy and there’s still no telling where it could go. It could end up being that tablets are the new personal computer as we know it, as Apple seems to believe; or it could be that the tablet is more an entertainment device, not a replacement to the PC in any sense of the word. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is unambiguously in the latter camp, and introducing an “iPad” which has a similar purpose to the Fire could swing momentum toward that line of thinking for what the tablet’s purpose is.

While even in that case it wouldn’t be a bad business for Apple—Apple could certainly sell a ton of entertainment-focused tablets—it would also short-change Apple’s capabilities and advantage Amazon. Apple is positioned to deliver this post-PC tablet device in a way that no one else is, but if they’re simply entertainment devices, Amazon can and will challenge them for dominance. Apple’s vertical integration of software and hardware, and their unique position as both a computer and consumer electronics company, is much more of an advantage if tablets are the new PC than if they are just a newer, better iPod.

So What Should Apple Do?

I don’t know what Apple will do. They could introduce a new iPad within a year. I really have no idea.

But I don’t believe they should. In fact, I think at some point, they will introduce a smaller iPad. But I think it needs to be at least several years from now, probably more like five years, because they must establish the iPad—and thus the tablet—as a personal computer, both because I believe it’s what tablets should be and because it’s a better market for Apple to be in.

Price competition from smaller tablets like the Kindle Fire certainly is a concern, but I don’t think Apple should compete with it by introducing a similar device. That only entrenches the market position Amazon carved out. Instead, Apple should compete with it by making the iPad—a much more capable device—increasingly more affordable. Move into lower price-points, which they did by keeping the iPad 2 around at $399. If at all possible, I think they should try to get a model at $349 or even $299, to reduce the Fire’s price advantage even more.

By making the iPad—still just as capable—cheaper, they not only reduce less capable tablets’ price advantage, but they also make the iPad easier to justify for schools. I think targeting education is an especially powerful strategy, because it puts into brilliant relief how different the iPad and smaller tablets are (on the iPad, you can read textbooks, take notes and study in a way that isn’t really possible on a small screen), and it gets them in children’s hands. And when a kid uses an iPad as a computer from the beginning, it’s a lot more likely they’re going to use it as a computer when they grow up, too. For them, the PC will look like an archaic contraption meant to torture users. Sit at a desk and move a little pointer around the screen? Yuck!

So no, I don’t think we’re going to see an iPad mini any time soon.

1. Turning them into Mac users was a nice side effect, but that’s a separate issue entirely. [↩]
2. Of course, relatively simple applications like games could adapt with few changes, but that isn’t the case for all applications. Think about trying to adapt Apple’s iWork suite—it’s not that it can’t be done, but that controls that are large enough on the large iPad’s screen would be much too small if shrunken down to fit on an 8″ screen. [↩]

There’s been rumors about this for a while, but Les Moonves, CBS’s CEO, confirmed that Apple approached them about a subscription TV service for AppleTV. CBS said no:

“I told Steve, ‘You know more than me about 99 percent of things but I know more about the television business,’ ” Moonves said, citing his concerns about providing content to a service that could disrupt CBS’ existing revenue streams. Moonves said Jobs, in characteristic fashion, strongly disagreed with his assessment.

As usual, sounds like cable operators are the biggest impediment to the evolution of television.