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I made a 1:1 scale cardboard iPad to start thinking about ways we can use it for artists and music in general. Some of the findings from playing with it on this scale are that interactivity on the device is really going to come down to what you do with one or both thumb regions in every orientation.

I traced my thumb boundaries in both orientations here and it will be interesting to see what developers do with these primary interactive regions, especially with gaming. I can imagine main controls on the left or right thumb, with contextual controls for your other hand and directional through accelerometer.

A lot of possibilities for sure.

Two videos surfaced of me speaking on a panel about musicians and social networking. I focused a lot on artists owning their own data:

Fastest, perfect, revolutionizes, complete, powerful, comprehensive, affordable, funnest, smallest, thinnest advanced.
[From Apple - Public Relations - Products]

We all have a lot of big ideas. Big ideas that could be transformative. I have a lot of big ideas that I view as being transformative to my industry.

What the challenge is is communicating those big ideas in a way that is indeed transformative.

Our mode of conveyance is variable: text, images, powerpoints, video. The struggle for information transmission is documented and known, parodied and lauded, and more often than not, for the innovators, difficult.

I struggle with it constantly. To explain something that took me a year to make in six words is near impossible. You want to shout about all the features, the capabilities, the subtleties and the geek qualities.

Take a look at the page Apple has on their media info site however, where they show product info for all their products. Take a look then at the single sentence product descriptions.

iMac – “The all-in-one for everyone.”

Logic Express – “Advanced music creation. Affordable price.”

Mac OSX – “The world’s most advanced OS”

Apple Keyboard – “The new ultra-thin aluminum Apple Keyboard”

iPod touch – “The funnest iPod ever”

I have no doubt a ton of thought went into those descriptions, but it’s telling that Apple actually put the thought in in the first place. Try to find a page like this on Dell, Microsoft, or Sony. You can’t.

I think the key difference is that Apple built products that could be summarized in one sentence.

Compare a Dell U2711 (I have two, I love them) with a Cinema Display:

“Experience remarkable color accuracy, precision and performance with the Dell UltraSharp^TM U2711 27”W Monitor with PremierColor technology.”

vs.

“Big ideas need a big canvas”

Of those, which conveys desire for purchase?

I think the lesson here is that as we engineers and geeks build things, build not toward the feature list but toward the one sentence description.

The vision of clarity and purpose through the economy of language.

I wonder what Scott McCloud is going to make of the iPad?

[From Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod]

if just half of the iPad book apps are going to be like this, and I was Amazon or Dell, I would be having some crisis meetings in conference rooms right about now.

[From First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad | paidContent:UK ]