I know I know, I'm pretty late to the game, but hey, I'm in Germany and Apple decided to let us wait. I have spent two days with the iPad now, and I think that is enough time to form an opinion, so here it is.

You can't form an opinion from blog posts or from spending 30 minutes with the device! I spent about 30 minutes over the weekend to play with various people's iPads. It was fun. I liked it. Then on Tuesday my own iPad arrived and I have now had two days with it. Spending two days with one is definitely different from spending 30 minutes with it. I am looking at it with different eyes now. There are many little things that you can't grasp in a short time. Especially not if you stay at a level where you only compare features and leave out all the interaction details that make or break a device. Let's face it: the most complete feature set can be useless if the interaction with it is broken.

Flash? Didn't miss it in the past two days. Yes, I ran into the odd website that was 100% flash, but it was never something that couldn't be easily worked around. A lot of embedded videos (especially those from YouTube) are now HTML5 anyway, and those play just fine embedded into web sites.

Battery? The advertised 10 hours of battery life are pretty accurate. As with most Lithium Polymer batteries I expect things to become even better after a few charge/discharge cycles.

Weight? It is a bit heavier than I thought it would be, but after handling it for two days the weight is basically a non-issue. Reading in bed works, but not with holding it up above my head. Same as with a big book. Lying on my side with the screen locked is great.

How to hold it? The iPad is a new class of device. Yes, there were tablet computers in the past, but they were the size of laptops, none of them was ever this thin and had such a large screen. Which means we will have to come up new ways of holding it. When sitting down I tend to prefer the landscape orientation holding it with both hands, using my thumbs to interact. A lot of apps and games seem to follow this model quite well, so most of the time it's very convenient.

I can totally see the upcoming iPhone 4 with its super high-res display to take the "reading in bed" spot.

Which case? I don't have a case yet, but played with the Apple case on the weekend. I like the fact that it can easily be used to put the iPad on a flat surface at an angle in horizontal mode. I've been propping the iPad up exactly the same way here on my table and it felt very natural. I also like the flip-over cover, easy access is king.

Consumation or production device? The iPad is awesome to consume content. I like reading on it. I like watching videos on it. I don't really use it a lot to listen to music a lot. I downloaded some magazines (Spiegel, Popular Science, brand eins) and Zinio (a magazine store) to test the interaction model. Everyone is doing their own thing right now, and I guess it'll be a while until some sort of a standard emerges. Or maybe they don't want that to be different.

Production-wise I got Pages, Keynote and Numbers and I played with all three of them. Easy enough to manage, and I can totally see myself using them. Let's see what the next 6-hour train ride will bring. From a photography point of view I can see myself importing selected pictures on the road (I'm still waiting for the camera connection kit) and putting some touches on them right where I am to show a customer an idea or a concept. Or to do a quick upload to flickr. But then this is early days and I didn't really have the opportunity to put that side of the iPad to the test yet.

On-Screen Keyboard Usable. I touch type and as long as I can get the iPad into a comfortable position (see Apple case above) I can type quite well. Maybe at 50-70% of the speed I would get on a hardware keyboard. Good enough to answer emails or even write longer texts. Painting brush strokes into a picture during editing (for example with Filterstorm) is fun and easy.

Apps! The iPad would be nothing without its apps. Here's a small of mine: AirVideo (plays my video collection over the air), 1Password (stores and protects all your passwords and more), Outliner (does what it says, syncs with iPhone version, has a web interface too), Evernote (I love the iPad version), Osfoora (great Twitter client), Pinball HD (bye bye productivity..), GoodReader (get and read your docs from virtually anywhere), Photogene (image editor), Filterstorm (more control over local picture changes), Delivery Status (very useful and beautiful, Junecloud's design rocks), WolframAlpha (yey, big screen geekiness), Pulse News (a beautiful great approach to news reading).

There are probably more to come, but hey, I've only had it for two days...

Two apps I hope will be out as iPad versions very soon are Pocket Informant (calendaring, gtd-style todo management, etc.) and Reeder (Newsreader that syncs with Google Reader. I've briefly played with a beta on the weekend, it rocks!)

iPhone apps They work. Some of them scale up nicely, some of them are better used in their native resolution. Switching between the iPad keyboard and the iPhone keyboard on the same device is awkward. Many iPhone apps will upscale much nicer soon, as Apple has come up with some easier ways to make higher-resolution artwork available for developers even in standard iPhone apps. This is a side effect of the higher-res iPhone 4, but the apps will look much nicer on the iPad then too.

Games Yes, games. The iPad is a great gaming platform. Pinball HD is fast and fun, play Flight Control HD together with someone else on one iPad, and Mirror's Edge is exciting and really well done. Can't wait for all the great titles that will be released on the iPad!

My conclusion is this: The iPad is an awesome media consumption device, and it has a huge potential to become a production device as well. Not on the level of your Mac Pro, it doesn't have the horsepower for that, but that's not what it was made for anyway. It's all in the apps, we see that with Apple's own apps Pages, Keynote and Numbers. All three of them are capable and follow a new interaction model. We are already seeing a lot of promising apps that take advantage of the zippy hardware and bring with them a much more natural interaction model than it was ever possible with the mouse-screen disconnect. I'm happy with the iPad, and being able to say that after just two days, I know I will enjoy it even more as the platform evolves and new and well thought out apps come along. And looking at the simplicity of the just-point-your-finger-at-it interface, I know that the iPad will open up computing to a whole new range of people who up to now had all the reason to be afraid of computers, even of Macs.

It's pixel peeping time again. And today's question is: How accurate do the colors in our pictures have to be?

Compare the following two images and then tell me which of the two is more accurate.





Hard to tell, right? Both images are based on the same RAW file from a Canon 5D Mark II, managed in Lightroon, neutrally white-balanced using Lightroom's WB eyedropper on the middle grey patch in the lower of the two rows of grey patches in the color chart on the top. Both files were then exported to JPG with sRGB profile embedded. The only difference is that the top image uses the camera profile that Lightroom assigns to camera images by default ("Adobe Standard"), and the second image is based on a custom-built camera profile based on the ColorChecker card present in the image.

(Note: Lightroom's "Camera Profiles" are not the same as ICC profiles)

The differences between the two images are subtle indeed, the camera and the Adobe Standard profile that gets applied in Lightroom do a remarkably good job, especially with a custom white balance. In fact I'd happily use this outcome for all sorts of professional projects (and have actually done so in the past) - as long as the spectrum under which those pictures have been shot is at least somewhat daylight-ish. With daylight-ish I mean an as full as possible spectrum, one that you'd get outside in the shade at 3pm on a summer's day. Not one that you'd get from a yellow sodium light at the side of the road.

So the question is: why would anyone want to use a camera profile if the output is as good as it is?

Let's first take a look at what profiling does. Consider the color chart in the image below.



In the lower half it shows four rows of color swatches, and all of these are very precisely manufactured to be of a very specific color. Whenever you take a picture, there is an analog process involved where photons hit light-sensitive cells that accumulate a charge based on the amount of photons, and are then read by circuits and converted to numbers. These numbers are then read by software, magically converted into other numbers and finally interpreted as colors and translated into brightness levels of individual red, green and blue pixels on a screen. Or converted into various amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink and squirted onto paper. It seems like a miracle that in the end we get to see our pictures at all.

But I guess you get the idea, it's a very complex process with quite a few areas of variability, and in order to make sure that we get consistent results, a profiling process can be of great value.

So back to the color swatches. The manufacturer knows pretty much exactly what color values the individual swatches have. If you shoot a picture, it's very likely that your camera and the attached software don't interpret the colors exactly the same way. Blue tones might be a bit more violet than you saw them, greens might be a bit less vivid and reds might be slightly over-pronounced. In an every-day snapshot type of situation this is no biggie, in the analog world, this is even the norm, because every film you choose will have different color and contrast characteristics, but we're in the digital world here and what if you want to get just that little bit more accurate?

Here's where the profiling software comes in. It looks at the picture, finds the swatches (that have been shot with your specific camera under specific light conditions and therefore look slightly different than expected) and it can easily tell that the blue in your picture is different from what it should be and the green is too bright and the red is too dark and so forth. Based on this information the software builds a profile, which in fact is just a lookup-table with mappings from wrong to right color.

All in all this used to be a tedious process that required a great deal of care, expensive software and hardware, and could only be afforded by the professionals who had to get color exactly right, for example in areas like product photography.

Enter ColorChecker Passport by x-rite. After reading up on it and receiving a few recommendations I've finally spent the 100 bucks for this little gadget, and I must say I pretty much instantly fell in love with it.

The chart comes in its little rugged plastic case, so the delicate color swatches are well protected, and it can be swiveled so you can set it down and it will stand by itself.

And if you are a Lightroom user, the process couldn't be easier. In fact this solution is built around Lightroom and RAW and it won't make much sense on its own.

All you have to do is install the software (make sure you download the latest version from their website) which adds an export plugin to Lightroom. Then during your photo session (which ideally takes place under consistent light conditions) you shoot a well-exposed reference picture of the ColorChecker chart and that's all you need to think of during shooting.

After importing your pictures into Lightroom find the one with the ColorChecker, and export it using the ColorChecker export preset. Within less than a minute the software will analyze the picture, find the ColorChecker automatically, create a new profile and prompt you to restart Lightroom to make it aware of the new profile.

Now all you do is switch to the develop mode, select the newly created profile from the Camera Calibration section and you're mostly set. For more accuracy you can also white-balance based on the grey swatches in the upper chart, the bottom middle one is neutral, the ones to the right create warmer tones, the ones to the left make the image slightly cooler.

Still sounds difficult, but after working with it for 5 minutes it was second nature.

This is the first camera profiling solution that I can envision using regularly because it's not only fast, it also almost seamlessly integrates into my existing Lightroom-based workflow.

Move your mouse over this picture to see the differences the profile can make:



Is the difference so big that I'll from now on use it everywhere I go? Absolutely not. It's great to get that extra bit of accuracy where it's needed, and it's definitely quick and simple enough for me to use, so it'll be more than just a paperweight (believe me, I have too many gadgets that I don't really use because they are either too complicated or because they don't add enough value to my photography). It'll clearly help me get better colors in some situations where the light spectrum is difficult, but on the other hand there are many light situations that I don't want to correct for, many of them for creative reasons, so that's where I will happily leave it in the camera bag or at home. And this is true for both my personal projects as well as customer projects.

Is it as accurate as the bigger and much more expensive systems? Probably not. I've never had the need to work with one of those, and with the type of photography I do, I doubt that I ever will. But under light sources with an uneven spectrum (fluorescents for example) it's clearly more accurate than just using the good old white balance and it renders very pleasing colors. It's a logical next step that is lightweight enough in its approach.

Is it for everyone? No. It only makes sense if your workflow is RAW + Lightroom. There it integrates nicely and takes a lot of pain out of the camera profiling process.

Will you be a better photographer if you use the ColorChecker Passport? Let me ask you this: Has buying that new lens made you a better photographer? How about that new camera body you got for yourself last Christmas?

In short: nope.

Photography is still about capturing wonderful moments, telling stories with your pictures and making an emotional impact.

And I would even go further and argue that getting more accurate and neutral colors in your pictures can do both, help the story and the emotion or be completely in the way of telling the story that you want to tell.

Try to imagine the following images perfectly color balanced - I bet you most of them would lose their impact right away.

Workshops, workshops, workshops... 2009 was such an exciting year in so many respects and I am very grateful for being able to do the things I do.

With Brooklyn Cookin', the workshop that I held together with Chef Mark, this year's season is now over, and what a great final workshop that was. Both Mark and I found that we'll have to do a workshop along the same lines again next year. The concept is perfect: the target audience is couples where one half is into cooking and the other half is into photography, and here they have a way to learn and spend time together.

Even though this year is over from a workshop perspective, it actually isn't. At least not for me. I am going to spend most of November preparing everything for a smooth 2010 launch. My goal is to have everything ready by December. And there are a lot of things to be worked on. Luckily most of my workshop locations are already nailed down, some helpers need to be briefed, and then there's the whole registration process. I have looked into offers in the cloud, but there is no workshop/seminar management system that even remotely seems to fit the bill.

All I need is to manage the registration process and payments for about ten workshops. Internationally. With deposits. And limited number of seats. For a decent price. And no, in an economy where everyone needs to think twice before spending anything, I consider taking 10% of the workshop fees *not* decent, because that would eventually increase the workshop price by that same amount.

So in short, I haven't found a good and easy way to automate this yet. Which is why I've taken things to the cloud in a different way for 2009 and why I'm going to go even further in 2010. In short: I'm using online services and forms to handle the sign-ups, I have simplified the confirmation and registration process using Services on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, I use PayPal to handle the bulk of the payments, and I use my own time to keep it all together. Not ideal, but workable. The KISS principle applies. Keep it simple, stupid. I don't need a full-fledged database to handle a couple of hundred participants. Every participant ends up in a spreadsheet with a status field depending on where in the registration process they currently are, and if I need to send out a bulk mail to all participants of an individual workshop, a simple copy/paste of the email address column for that workshop will do just fine.

The biggest item are the workshop pages on the web site. This is where everything is supposed to come together in a nice and easy to navigate way. I have spent hours and hours to design something that ties together everything from basic information about the workshop ("why would I want to come to this workshop?"), the agenda ("what are the workshop details?"), timing ("when does the workshop start and end?"), accommodation ("what hotel is near by?"), navigation ("how do I find my way to the workshop?") and pricing.

Obviously I design this once and duplicate it for all the workshops, but the content will be different for each workshop. The overview, the detail description, the example images, the example video, the FAQ. And the language.

So I guess I better get busy and finally start tying all those lose ends together to bring you not only an excellent 2010 workshop season, but also a great experience when it comes to finding the right one for your needs and going through the registration process.

If you want to be notified as soon as the 2010 workshops are ready, please make sure you are on the newsletter (get the newsletter here).

Got a way to help me simplify the registration process? Leave a comment!

I've just found the solution! You can help me save a lot of time, which in turn will allow me to concentrate more on the production side of my shows instead of the planning side. And it's simple: all I need is the help of 94 of you clicking a vote button.

update: just one day later and 34 of you awesome individuals have already clicked. thanks!!

Okay, hear me out, my logic on this is impeccable, I'll just need a few sentences to explain.

If you've read this post about my new iPhone calendar app you know I've become a big fan of Pocket Informant on the iPhone. And you also know that I am still searching for an app to help me with year planning. Each year around this time I'm knee deep into planning next year's workshops. And each year I spend hours trying to find out if anyone has written an app that will help me doing that.

I have very simple needs:
- a view that shows me the entire year with my workshops as time blocks
- a fast and simple way to move around these workshops
- calendar data linked/synced with my existing calendar (currently Google cal)

There is no such application for the Mac. Or the iPhone.

So every year I fall back to a stone-age year spreadsheet and changing cell background colors to indicate events. This takes time. Lots of it. And this is valuable time that I can't use to bring you exciting episodes of TFTTF, HS, Daily Photo Tips and so forth.

Here is where you come in.

If you're a fan of any of these shows, or the workshops, you want to help me finally get such a year planner, right? (See? I told you my logic was impeccable!)

But this is not just for me, it's useful for everyone. Plan out vacations, keep track of your kids school projects. Name it.

So you can imagine how happy I was to find the Pocket Informant feature request list. If anyone can pull off that year planner feature, it's these guys with their mad coding skillz! The feature request list is powered by Uservoice and you can vote for features. Three votes per person and feature. 280 votes to get to the top of the request list and a chance to be looked into. 280 / 3 = 94 people.

Please help vote this feature request up to the top of the list!

Instructions

1. Go to the log in page of the voting site


2. Click the login provider of your choice (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID,...)


3. Once logged in, enter "year planner" in the search box


4. Click the vote button next to the "Year Planner" title and leave three votes.

Let's move it up to the top of the list!!

Warning, this is another iPhone post. No photography here. Move along, nothing to see here...

Every year I reach the point where I need to start planning the workshop schedule for the next year. This usually takes place after summer. And every year I find myself trying to find an application that helps me do that. A simple year planner. One that allows me to see the entire year on one screen, and where I can define time blocks and move those around on a calendar. Preferably it integrates with the calendar on my Mac. Shouldn't be too hard to find, right?

Wrong!

This is the third year where I've spent hours to try and track down this software. I would happily pay for such a software. But no luck. I've looked into project management software. Too bulky or too expensive, not elegant enough, or simply too big and complex for my purposes. I've looked into calendaring software. None that offers me a decent or usable year overview. Or if they do show the entire year, they really only show you the year but they don't populate it with any of the calendar information.

The situation is even worse on the iPhone. The built-in Calendar app is nice, but if you want to get more serious, it's pretty much useless. Look at the month screen for example. Just a dot on the days that have entries, and the day overview hidden away in a tiny portion of the window on the bottom. This would be a perfect opportunity for app developers to come up with great calendars, but Apple has put the kibosh on that by not providing a calendar API. That's right, no iPhone app can directly interface with the iPhone's calendar data, so all of them have to be isolated applications.

Google Calendar to the rescue!

And that's where my recent research weekend where I found the solution to unfreeze my iPhone 3G 3.1 helped in a way.

Apparently Apple doesn't mind iPhone apps to sync with Google apps, and that's true for Google Calendar too. So there are quite a few iPhone calendaring apps out there that work just fine using Google Calendar.

And as I have already moved my calendar subscriptions over onto Google Calendar and as it's working flawlessly so far, why not go he whole hog and move my main calendar over there too?

So my next steps were to a) find a great iPhone app that syncs with Google Calendar and b) move my main calendar over to Google.

Twitter to the rescue!

What a great community! Just a few tweets later, and @stke was there with a great app tip: Pocket Informant. Thanks for helping trigger one of the biggest calendar reconfigurations I've done in a long while.

Admittedly, it doesn't really solve my year-view issue, and it isn't necessarily a planner, but it solves a host of other problems that I've been having with the built-in Calendar app and it throws in some new and awesome todo features on top.

Introducing Pocket Informant

Where its previous versions seems to have had some issues, version 1.1.0 of Pocket Informant is one of the best mobile calendars I have seen in a while. It's not for everyone, it will require some level of configuration, but when it comes to my personal preferences, I believe I have found a keeper here. It will happily run in its own little sandbox, but if you are ready to switch to Google Calendar and set Informant up to sync that to your iPhone, you will unleash its full potential by enabling iCal sync functionality, albeit indirectly through Google. This way you can see and edit the same data on both the iPhone, iCal, and even online in the Google Calendar web interface while you're away from your beloved gadgets.

Pocket Informant gives you an agenda, a day view, and a month overview. Nothing special so far, until you see everything in action. Where the iPhone's Calendar app does its job .. well, in a doing-its-job kind of way, this one is on steroids. What I haven not mentioned yet is the week view, and for that view alone I would have made the switch. Why? Simple: Apple's Calendar app doesn't offer that. And for the way I work with calendars, a good week view is essential. In the month view, Informant will even give you tiny little time bars on every day that show you which portions of your days are booked. You can even opt for small text entries. And these are just a few of the cool things it does.

Generally Pocket Informant is highly configurable. Actually it might be even too configurable for some. Luckily there's a free light version of the app to find out.

But what really blew me away is its todo integration. It allows you to keep a todo list GTD style. With projects, contexts and the whole thing. Or do you prefer the Franklin Covey style, giving you the active, in progress, overdue and due items? It can do that too. If a todo item has a due date, you can see it on the calendar. And if that isn't enough, get this: this is not an isolated solution. It syncs with the cloud, or more specific with the Toodledo service. All you'll need is to get a free account there and you're set. Even better, Toodledo itself lets you integrate your todo lists with other things, such as Twitter. When I'm in Twitter and I all of a sudden I think of something I'll need to do, I can just send off a direct message to @toodledo and it'll end up as a new todo in my list. In Pocket Informant. On my iPhone. I have also added Toodledo to my iCal, so now I can even see (but not edit) the todo directly in iCal on the Mac.

There is a free version of Pocket Informant [App Store link]. The full version [App Store link] isn't cheap (€ 10.49 as of writing this), but after working with it for a day, I can say it's worth every cent.

Just for disclosure: I'm not affiliated with these guys.

Memory management

What's even more interesting: After I have moved my high-volume calendars to Google and now syncing my calendar(s) from Google back to the iPhone using Pocket Informant, I can all of a sudden use all of them again without running into the low memory issue that killed my iPhone experience since the upgrade to 3.1 - something that I believe has to do with how efficient this app manages its memory. And it has to do with the fact that the Apple Calendar app stays open in the background - something that only a few Apple apps are privileged to do - and thus permanently uses a lot of memory if you have a lot of calendar entries, while Pocket Informant doesn't run in the background and frees up the used memory once you leave the app.

Alerts

Calendar alerts are provided by making use of the push notification feature. Or you can opt to use Google Calendar notifications via text message, web alert, and so forth. Or in my case, I have added my main Google Mail/Calendar to the iPhone as an Exchange account, which syncs the calendar entries of my main calendar (and only those) with the iPhone's Calendar app and therefore gives me the alerts this way. I know I know, things could be a bit easier, but this way works just fine for me.

Shake to sync

The app is pretty smart about how and when it syncs with Google Calendar and Toodledo, but if you want to force a sync, you can enable the shake to sync feature, something that I initially thought was just a gimmick, but that I have come to like quite a bit during testing of the app. I'll probably disable it though after the honeymoon is over and I go on to use the app as a simple every-day work-horse.

Conclusion

No, this isn't the year planner that I was hoping for. If you know an app for the iPhone or for the Mac that provides that in an elegant way, please please please let me know about it.

What it is though is a really powerful calendaring and productivity application that - used correctly - will put a lot of oomph at your fingertips.

Integrating it with Google Calendar and Toodledo allows me a lot of flexibility about how and where I use calendars and todos, and keeping that data in the cloud makes it much easier for me to access everything.

And using the pretty well integrated GTD part of Informant, I will probably stop using Things, which I sill love, which I think looks much nicer, but which simply isn't as fast and integrated as Pocket Informant is.

Wishlist

Here's my very short one-item wishlist for Pocket Informant:

Please think about year planning, if anyone can pull it off, it's you guys. I'd love to be your guinea pig! But whatever you change in the future, please don't sacrifice speed and integration.

Do you use an alternative calendar on the iPhone? Let me know in the comments!