Corvus Consulting

I’ve been watching reviews of RIM’s Playbook keenly, not because I particularly want one but because I’m curious to see how this company faces what is now clearly a turning point in its life. Pressure has been building up on RIM to deliver something that reinvigorates its place in the market as an innovator and leader, having coasted for almost a decade on its early product language and culture.

The reviews are easy enough to find. The consensus: there’s real promise in the Playbook, but it’s been shipped half-baked, rushed out with a list of promises as long as its list of debut features. Taking a step back, the only question I’m left with is ‘why’?

Why did RIM feel it had to ship in April? In the tablet market there’s only one real entry so far: the Xoom is a flop, the PalmOS devices are still in development, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab offerings are amusing snoozers as well. Nobody gives a hoot about any of the iPad’s competitors; so, RIM, what was the hurry?

Had RIM’s executives stopped hyperventilating in the press, they could have seen that they were racing to a party that’s really still getting under way. Apple’s lead is too far for Playbook 1 to come close to catching. By spending a a couple more months, maybe even just a few more weeks, they could have shipped a far stronger debut tablet and come out a strong first-among-second-place entries.

There’s a big chunk of the market that iPad is not right for: corporate types who trust and are invested with the Blackberry brand, people who want a smaller tablet, and nerds who want to hack around on the high-horsepower QNX operating system. It would still be there, not embracing the iPad, in say June or July. Instead of doing their best to serve that market with a complete product, RIM has been spooked into releasing early with something confusing and far less than it could be, getting them nothing but a fumbled launch and scattered, halting applause from a press desperate for a tablet worth talking about that doesn’t start with an i.

Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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A few months doesn’t seem like very long to look for changes in the landscape of wireframing apps for the iPad. But this is the App Store where life moves fast. In the realm of apps for wireframing, those reviewed last time around have made steady progress while a snappy new player has entered the field to challenge their early dominance.

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Meetings of any size suffer the moment a laptop comes out; the open screen creates no end of distractions pulling participant attention between shared and private contexts. For that reason alone, I’m a paper notebook guy at meetings. But the iPad seems a way to have the benefits of a digital device without the weird social barrier that laptops create, so I’ve been on the hunt for a note-taking app that could replace the Moleskin.

It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.

After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.

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Consider, for a moment, a table.

Knowing where the table’s edges are make the experience of using a table possible. If you don’t know where it begins and ends, things will just fall off. Hold that thought, as I think it’s a good metaphor for exploring the point that content publisher brands have found themselves at, and the bets that they’re placing on the app-format being spun out of the emergence of the iPad.

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A week into having an iPad in my tool (and toy) lineup I’m still sussing out what aspects of work this new beast can take on, and what parts are still best suited to my main workhorse, a 15″ Macbook Pro. As my work involves a fair bit of wireframing, I was keen to see if the touch interface could serve as an effective design tool.

Two early contenders have popped up in the App Store to meet that need and I’ve spent a few hours with each of them, with some mixed results that other iPad early adopters may find useful: Omnigraffle and iMockups.

The reviews here have been updated to reflect recent developments.

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Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

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