With the iPhone, the screensize limited new or unique gesture methods. But with the iPad’s bigger screen developers are free to play around with new gestures, like three or four fingers swipes. While this is fine, there needs to be some user conventions that will hopefully happen over time.Just watching someone who is used to the iPhone will show this pretty quickly – you often see them repeating gestures with small adjustments in either speed, motion, etc. As Nielsen mentions:

“iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.”

This does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the platform, instead developers need to focus on certain aspects to ensure that their apps perform well on the iPad:

Even our limited initial user studies provide directions for making iPad designs more usable:
• Add dimensionality and better define individual interactive areas to increase discoverability through perceived affordances of what users can do where.
• To achieve these interactive benefits, loosen up the etched-glass aesthetic. Going beyond the flatland of iPad’s first-generation apps might create slightly less attractive screens, but designers can retain most of the good looks by making the GUI cues more subtle than the heavy-handed visuals used in the Macintosh-to-Windows-7 progression of GUI styles.
• Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness. Better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on your content instead of wondering how to get it.
• Support standard navigation, including a Back feature, search, clickable headlines, and a homepage for most apps.

If you want to go read the full 93 page usability report, you can find it here. This is a truly valuable resource if you are currently experimenting with touch interfaces.

Thanks to Albert for the pointer…

Solutions like iTunes for multimedia proves that people are willing to pay for content, provided its easy to do, and universal in terms of scope. And this is where Cred comes in, created by South Africans Saul Kropman, Jason Kramer and Toby Kurien. Instead of having to register at every content site (for example like The Times), users will use the Cred micropayment system to purchase credits to buy access to the relevant article. Cred is not only applicable to text based content like news, but multimedia sources as well.

At present, one Cred is worth one South African Rand, and publishers can charge up to a maximum of 20 Creds. At present  different denominations are available, starting from around R50 up to R150. In future users will be able to define their own amount. At present the system uses your credit card to pay for these, but Paypal support is coming in future.

For more info, here is the official press release:
As the developed world moves towards spending more online than on traditional media such as television and print, you’d assume that monetization of the Internet would come from advertising. With advertising revenue come massive expenses as journalists, technology and marketing come into play.  Internationally, media mogul Rupert Murdoch runs around calling everyone on the Internet a kleptomaniac for stealing his content and is aiming to lock down his online portals and go so far as to remove them from Google.

The fact remains that even with a full advertising complement, revenue simply cannot outweigh costs.

This is essentially where Cred comes in, we allow content providers to monetize their websites by charging users for content with individual micropayments or subscriptions. We at Cred love content; we personally create and consume content on a constant basis and it was this passion for excellent quality that led to the idea for Cred. With online text, audio and video being free there is little ascribed value and if there’s no value, what pressure is there for excellent content to be produced? Cred aims to preserve quality content by putting a value; we believe that the cream of content will then rise to the top.

Currently in the final stages of testing, we’re accepting sign ups from content providers looking to prove their content is worth charging for. Initially we’re available for the WordPress platform and eventually will expand to other platforms such as Drupal, Joomla as well as provide documentation that will allow developers to hook into their own niche content management systems.

The revenue model affords content providers 80% of all revenue without having to worry about fraud, payment gateways and are linked to a ubiquitous payment system thus allowing for easier access to your content by users with a Cred account. Cred scales perfectly for larger organisations as they can white label the Cred offering if desired.

Whether a small, niche publisher, band, photographer, author or massive media conglomerate anyone can start charging for their content with Cred.

Go to www.yourcred.com to sign up and follow us on twitter: @yourcred

This year’s Tech-Ed conference is once again in Durban, and is one of the premier training oppurtunities for just about anyone who works with Microsoft’s suite of products, technologies, solutions and services. If you are a technology professional involved with building, deploying or maintaining IT solutions, Tech-Ed Africa is a great conference that will give you many insights into dealing with present and future challenges.

I attended last year, and I have to say it is one of the most well organized, informative conferences I have ever attended. The sessions are informative, and I really appreciated the information on upcoming products, and how businesses should ready themselves.

This year there is more than 200 technical solutions, all delivered by Microsoft and industry experts. These technical sessions are very open, and attendees always get an oppurtunity to get there questions answered.

Tech-Ed is running from 17 to 20 October, and if you book within the before 30 July, there is a super early bird special.

If you want more info on Tech-Ed 2010, click here.

Looks like the next logical move in Apple’s “everything touch” strategy. Curiously absent: Touchscreen Macs. New iMacs maybe? Stay tuned.

Update: New iMacs and Mac Pro also released. The iMacs are all upgraded to the Core i range, starting from the Core i3 upto Core i7. No touchscreens though. Mac Pro is now upgraded to the Intel hexacore processors, giving you up to 12 cores if you feel you need that kind of power. With hyperthreading, that results in 24 threads at once. Nifty.

Apple 27 inch Cinema Display

Apple also announced its new 27 inch Cinema Display. With a 2560 x 1440 IPS panel, this is clearly for the professional or very well heeled crowd, at $999. Keep in mind the display also comes with USB hub, built in iSight camera and a Magsafe charger for your Macbook. Think of it as a very expensive docking station with a beautiful display attached.

Greg's Cable Map

With the flurry of underwater fibre cables reaching the African shores, it can be tough keeping up with all of them. While not all of them are operational yet, it is pretty great to think how Africa will finally get out of the dark ages with regards to internet connectivity.

South African developer Greg Mahlknecht built an excellent free resource to quickly check out the current cable situation. Its pretty easy to use – if you want to know where a cable is, just click on “list of cables” on the right, and then click a cable. For example, Seacom. That cable will then appear in white.

Here is Greg’s description:

Greg’s Cable Map is an attempt to consolidate all the available information about the undersea communications infrastructure. The initial data was harvested from Wikipedia, and further information was gathere by simply googling and transcribing as much data as possible into a useful format, namely a rich geocoded format. I hope you find the resource useful and any constructive criticism is welcome.

All in all a very cool little tool.

If you want to check it out: http://www.cablemap.info/

Just about any techie would tell you that the slowest part in a modern computer is still the harddrive. In fact, 90% of the time you wait for your computer is because that little needle is busy reading sectors from a very fast spinning disk (not counting waiting for Seacom delays…). True, hard drives have become very quick over the years, but the other components in a computer has just progressed at exponentially faster pace.

Its for this very reason why you might have the latest Core i7 machine with large amounts of RAM, but still can go make a cup of coffee in the time it takes to boot up. Luckily solid state storage has come along – this does away with the moving platter inside a hard drive and instead replaces it with chips that do away with access times (the average time the needle takes to find that little bit of data) and also makes the drive silent and uses less electricity. Sounds like a terrific solution, except for price. Whereas a 500GB 7200rpm hard disk drive costs R800 today, a similiar size SSD costs around R15000. No, that is not a typo. So people who wanted the speed of SSD were forced to buy smaller capacities – 64GB currently goes for about R1800 for a decent Corsair SSD.

And this exactly what makes the Seagate Momentus XT so special. Seagate refers to it as a “hybrid hard drive”. The XT has a 500GB traditional HDD merged with a fast 4GB SSD chip. Now 4GB might not sound like much, but you do not have to manually choose which files to drop on this SSD portion. As you use the drive, it keeps track of what files are used often, and stores these files in the SSD. These typically include files that are used by the OS often, your most used apps, etc. The Momentus XT is not only a laptop drive – in fact, it will beat most standard desktop hard drives as well. In many benchmarks it beats the WD 10,000 rpm Velociraptor drives… Its also operating system independent, so you can go ahead and use it with Windows, Mac or even Linux. The adaptive memory just keeps on doing its thing.

Now you might think 4GB SSD is not enough – but here is some of the changes I noticed using this drive. Just for some background – I installed this drive into a late 2009 Apple Macbook Pro 13inch, with a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. It used to have a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 320GB 7200rpm drive installed, which was pretty quick already. Here is the boot times of a full Mac OS X install. Take note this not a clean fresh install, but instead a install that is made from time machine restore for both the old and new drives. In fact, I havent reinstalled or reformatted my machine in more than 2 years. Time Machine just does such a good job of that, another thing where I really do believe Mac is still better than Windows. This install is full of apps I run often, but also small utility apps that I like to use every now and then. All in all a pretty representitive Mac install. You can expect the same performance improvements on Windows as well.

Both the old and new image is defragmented and then left for about 10 minutes so that the adaptive memory does its thing.

These speeds are carried over to shutdown speeds as well. Again, once the adaptive memory gets used to the shutdown procedure, speed increases as well. Very impressive.

So how does it affect everyday apps? Just everyday apps like Firefox load in half the time (and this does not include timing from cached apps in memory, this is after reboots). Larger apps like Photoshop get even better performance. iTunes gets zippier as well. Here is some timings I did with the drive. iTunes load time for a 60GB library. (Take note this is timed after a reboot every time).

Here is the startup times for Photoshop. This is a standard install without any plugins. Again, this is a startup after a boot every time.

I did not time everything, but here are some things that improve as well:

• You know that little wait while you type into the Spotlight search box? Thats gone.
• Virtual Machines are faster as well. I know an average VM is much larger than 4GB, but over times these do become faster. I guess that adaptive memory looks for files within the VMs as well.
• Everything is snappier. The stuff you do most often on the computer just happens so much faster. Makes me only wish for the day when SSDs will be cheaper.

I did notice that the drive is a little more noisy than the previous drive, but I can only hear it it if I put my ear right against my laptop. Other than that I did not find any other negatives when using the drive on a day to day basis.

Just a tip to Mac users who would like to install one – do not use  a tool like SuperDuper, rather do a Time Machine backup, and then restore the image during the install process of Mac OSX. For some reason the drive doesnt cooperate with those image cloning tools. This goes the same to Windows users, do not use DriveImage XML. Do a reinstall, I know its quite a process, but the performance boost is well worth it.

The best part of the Momentus XT is that it costs only slightly more than a standard 7200rpm notebook drive. I payed R1200 for the 500GB model. And the performance in real life use is much faster. While it wont quite reach the speed of a fast SSD, it is a fraction of the price. And that makes it a very good deal. So you might want to know if it makes more sense to rather spend your money on a full on SSD or even more RAM. Suppose you have a machine with a normal 250GB 5400rpm drive and 2GB of RAM. Here is a pretty handy chart to put hybrid hard drives into perspective:

So if you want large capacity plus fast performance, it seems like a hybrid hard drive might be the ideal middle ground before SSDs become affordable. I am willing to bet that Seagate will spread this hybrid technology to its other hard drives as well. I think the sweetspot will be a desktop drive with 8GB or 16GB of SSD memory. Hopefully in a few years we will laugh at this as SSD have finally become comparable in price with hard drives… Bring on the speed.

The Seagate Momentus XT reached South African shores last week, its currently only at suppliers, but should reach stores soon.

Highly recommended.

- Mobile apps are cheap, or free. More than half of apps are below $2. So developers who charge high prices, remember, the large group of users out there should make you worry less about profit per sale.

- The iPad’s current application seems to cost a bit more than the iPhone. This can be attributed to increased development costs, but I have to commend developers who write universal apps. Universal apps you purchase once, and they run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Dont make me pay twice for two devices.

- The Android market is made up of more than 57% free apps. Why? Is it because Android users are less likely to buy apps than on other platforms? Or is it because the free apps are good enough?

- Games are still by far the most popular apps. Out of the top 10 paid for apps on the iPhone, 8 was games.

- Amazon’s Kindle app seems to be under fire. Apple’s iBooks app is the number one app on the Appstore. But its still great that Amazon is making their platform available to other platforms as well. After using the iPad, I have to say my Kindle has become neglected. And with good reason.

What is interesting is seeing how the appstore ecosystem is changing. iPhone still seems to be the one that has the monetary edge, but that might change soon enough. With the number of Android handsets being released, there is plenty of oppurtunities for developers. The number of free apps on Android might sound great, but this does not take into account the quality of these apps. Whereas the iPhone Appstore is verified by Apple on a app for app basis, Google’s marketplace has no such process.

The disadvatange to this is of course that low-quality or poorly designed apps get in there as well. While people criticize Apple’s quality control, there are just as many postive aspects as well.I really reckon Google can do with a similiar process – not to replace the current marketplace, but a “Google Verified” section for apps that Google does approve of. That way you have the best of both worlds.

That way you cater for both developers who want to quickly and easily want to get into the marketplace, but end users who want high quality apps can find them as well. Tools like AppBrain does address this somewhat, but what I am talking about is a official source of apps. Maybe Google should have a chat with AppBrain?

You can download the full Distimo report here.

Here’s a rundown of what you can do with the SA Lotto iPhone app:

• Get results for the Lotto, Lotto Plus and Powerball draws (result are updated 30 minutes after the live draw has taken place)
• See how much you have won based on your number selections
• Enter any set of numbers and see what you would have won had you played them
• Use the intelligent quick pick number generator to generate numbers for a draw

Visit the SA Lotto website, or download the SA Lotto app to your iPhone.

Clearly FNB is trying to foster some development in this regard, and the prizes are quite big:

First National Bank (FNB) and PayPal today announced a new competition to award developers who create innovative applications using PayPal’s payment platform.

The local winner of the FNB and PayPal X Award will receive a trip to the United States to attend PayPal’s second annual Innovate Conference, which is taking place 26 and 27 October. The prize will include airfare, accommodation, meals, conference costs, visa expenses and insurance to an approximate value of $10,000. In addition, developers will also be automatically entered into PayPal’s X Developer Challenge and could receive an award totalling up to $100,000 in prizes.

This year’s PayPal X Innovate 2010 conference will be held at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference will feature presentations from industry experts, new product announcements and sessions that will give developers the tools and support they need to create the future of payments.

“The first FNB and PayPal X Award seeks to reward South Africa’s entrepreneurial spirit and jump start local innovation and new business ventures,” said Chris Savides, General Manager, FNB Complementary Online Services.

PayPal opened its application programming interfaces (APIs) last year, giving developers around the world the ability to monetize their ideas and build new payment applications on new devices and development platforms.

“PayPal has always stood for innovation in payments,” said Oded Zehavi, regional director of PayPal Israel and South Africa. “We are excited to partner with FNB to encourage developers to build their dream apps and make payments safer and easier for people in South Africa.”

How to enter

To submit for the FNB and PayPal X Award, log on to x.com and click to register for the PayPal X Developer Challenge. Select the box for the FNB and PayPal X Award.

Technologizer did a survey with 6000 iPad owners and asked them a range of questions about the device. Here are some of the standout results:

The next one surprised me – because I also wonder why someone would use a iPad if they could use their smartphone. Guess I was wrong:

And finally:

What you have to keep in mind here is that this subset of survey responders are most likely early adopters who do get excited by new technology. People with strong opinions about something is also more likely to respond to survey.

But still – it does make the naysayers rethink there arguments somewhat.

Of course there are a lot more questions: The State of iPad Satisfaction