The Mirror’s Edge iPad launch has had quite an interesting story. Initially, it was planned to launch for iPhone and iPod Touch early this year, but then it was mysteriously delayed. Why this delay? Well know we know. EA decided to wait for the iPad to launch, and it was well worth the wait.

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I once read the best way to test a tech product’s design is to give it to someone who’s not tech savvy and see what’s all the interaction about. What better than a 2.5 year old to test the iPad? We’ve stumbled upon this post over at Laughing Squid, and the result is very interesting.

From the post:

“My iPhone-savvy 2.5 year-old daughter held an iPad for the very first time last night, and it turned out to be an interesting user-interface experiment.

As you can see, after geeking out on my Sutro Tower homescreen, she took right to it — including figuring out how to enlarge some of her favorite iPhone-legacy apps to 2x to display full-size on the iPad screen. If you’re good at understanding kid-speak, you’ll also notice that she immediately saw its potential as a video-display device. She lamented the lack of a camera, and wondered about its potential for playing games.”

Watch the video after the break. As Cody also said, “she’s a good example of why there’s the big bezel.”

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Latest post by Marco Arment on his blog:

“iBooks’ use of tons of private APIs is frustrating on a few levels, the biggest that it makes all third-party reading-related apps second-class citizens.

I won’t be able to offer many features that iBooks has (such as a true brightness control or integration with the system dictionary), but my customers will expect them, making my app inferior to Apple’s in key areas.”

Now this is an important problem developers have to face right now. Apple’s official applications (the iWork suite, iBooks. I expect MobileMe to join the list in the near future) make use of private APIs that enable features, like the aforementioned system dictionary, 3rd party developers don’t have access to. And as Marco reports, it’s a huge problem, especially to the average customer’s eyes who doesn’t know anything about APIs and frameworks.

Say you want to develop an alternative spreadsheet application because you have a good idea, you’re most likely headed to fail when it comes to implement the basic functions you can see in Numbers, from Apple.

Now you can either give up or come up with a custom solution for your needs. As it stands now, you simply don’t have access to those APIs, and there’s nothing you can do about it but complaining, hoping Apple will its their decision. It’s time to be creative again.

Now that we know all the fonts included in the iPad, it’s time to analyze the web fonts situation. The Typekit guys have published a post about their test with Typekit library and Mobile Safari.

The results are interesting:

“It turns out that iPad ships with a version of Mobile Safari that is almost identical to what ships with the iPhone. And while it supports CSS @font-face, it won’t work with OpenType or WOFF fonts. Instead, using @font-face on the iPad requires fonts to be converted to the SVG format.

Rendering multiple weights from a font family can cause Mobile Safari to crash, even when the individual font file sizes are small (<5k). In our testing, using two weights from a family caused Mobile Safari to crash on up to 50% of attempted page loads, and the crash rate seemed to increase as we increased the number of weights we added. “

Read the full post for all the other technical details, but I think all these errors will be fixed with an OS update.

Link

Interesting overview of font faces / styles available for the iPhone and iPad. I didn’t know the iPad had Papyrus.

The Guardian has launched a new application for the iPad called “The Guardian Eyewitness” (available for free here) which, just like the Eyewitness series launched by the newspaper in 2005, focuses on news photography, one photo at the time.

From the official article:

“The Eyewitness series was launched in print at the time of the Guardian’s switch to the Berliner format in 2005, and consists of a daily full-colour, double-page spread devoted to the most compelling news photography. The decision to dedicate so much space to a single picture was a revolutionary move for a newspaper.

The Guardian’s head of photography, Roger Tooth, describes the philosophy behind the series as one that is devoted entirely to showcasing the world’s best photos in superb detail: “We want to hold your attention for more than two seconds … we want you to appreciate the work that the photographer has put into the image,” he says. “We’ve been waiting for a chance to replicate the scale and impact of the newspaper’s Eyewitness spread series on the web - and I think this is it.”

The app seems pretty simple, as its only purpose is that to showcase photos and describe them with a few lines of text. As you can see from the screenshots after the break, the application makes an interesting use of popover menus and thumbnails. Overall, it looks good.

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We’ve seen so many magazines trying to port the experience of “the real thing” to the iPad. And from the videos we’ve seen, most of them have miserably failed: they either tried to overload the experience with tons of advertising, or they simply thought it would be a good idea to put 5 videos and 10 audio tracks in every virtual page. As always, those who find a good compromise win, and AutoWeek is an excellent example.

The AutoWeel iPad app looks great, and there’s no doubt about it. Just take a look at the preview video after the break to get the hang of it. Thing is, from an editorial standpoint this application makes a lot of sense. It’s a rich experience, with pages and pictures, videos and interactive advertisement. You can interact with, say, the Opel brand and see the nearest reseller to give a test drive to a specific model. All with embedded ads and maps. It’s gorgeous, it’s fluid and it could be a terrific revenue model for publishers and advertisers.

Of course there’s some iPad-specific goodness like thumbnails, page effects and scrubbers, but I think the point is that AutoWeek showed us the way magazines should be ported to the iPad. Like I said, check out the video after the jump.

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I don’t have an iPad (yet), but Tidbits’s Adam Engst nailed it in his latest post:

“So what’s the difference between a Mac and an iPad? It’s that blank slate thing. No matter what you do on a Mac, the keyboard and mouse and window-based operating system make it impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a Mac, and it’s often equally as impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a particular program.

In contrast, the iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.”

You’re not holding a device that runs apps. You’re holding apps that create a different device every time.

Comprehensive post over at Threepress blog regarding iBooks and books in ePub format. Seems like a pretty good start.

[via Daring Fireball]