Fear not my friends… come next Friday you can have one of your own. :-

UK pricing from Apple’s Press Release: £429 (inc. VAT) for 16GB, £499 (inc. VAT) for 32GB, £599 (inc. VAT) for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and £529 (inc. VAT) for 16GB, £599 (inc. VAT) for 32GB and £699 (inc. VAT) for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models.

There’s also rumored Euro pricing here.

Aside from all the really interesting philosophy stuff which might give insight into the design decisions Apple have made, my interest in the iPad and ELN is as follows:

• Finally we have a practical device which allows access to “The Cloud” in a magazine form factor.
• They’ve sold 1m in the first 28 days, with supply restricted to the US. There are no credible alternatives announced. This is Apple’s segment to lose at the moment. If you want The Web in your hand, Apple is the place.
• Because it is in consumer space, pricing and volume are almost commodity-like.

It might not currently be positioned as an enterprise device, but the above make it viable to evaluate. Turning to the ELN:

• It has a proper web browser on it – no compromises (except for the lack of Flash – but HTML5 is here). The keyboard is ok ish and you can always use an external one – but it isn’t intended for content creation, really – this is a consumption and annotation device.
• It is relatively cheap so accidents won’t break your heart. But it is sturdy enough for kids… it isn’t an executive toy.
• Apple’s control-freak side mean this can be one of the most secure devices around.
• You can use it in a plastic bag, with gloves etc.
• Which makes me wonder – is this a hint of what we need to take the ELN to the science?

It isn’t perfect, but for my money it has earned a decent evaluation. It doesn’t replace the laptop, the desktop, etc. – but it does fill a gap which opens new possibilities. This is version 1 and I wouldn’t go out and buy them for everyone in my lab just yet, but I’d buy a couple and use those to understand the impact.

My conclusions so far are:

• If you get one and take it home, be prepared to get one for your significant other. It is the only way to maintain harmony. Having said that, I rarely get to use mine when my children are awake, and I don’t know how to solve that yet (I am not getting them their own!).
• This is a content consumption device, with the ability to annotate and make small contributions. It won’t replace your computer as the place you write.
• Applications – web or otherwise – need to be re-visited in the light of the iPads characteristics. Straight ports won’t work.
• The ecosystem is still settling down, you can tell that people have written apps not having seen the UI metaphors everyone else use. I suspect it will take at least 6 months for things to settle out.
• This really is very interesting. I suspect it could be as profound as the the introduction of the Mac.

This post is interesting as an insight into what Apple are probably doing with the iPad. This is more about changing our entire relationship with computers than merely the choices they’ve made for this one device.

If you haven’t seen it, I covered some more about this on the morning before the possible iPad release in my Chairman’s remarks at the SMI ELN Conference (this was just before the iPad announcement – apologies to my dinner companions who had to suffer my addiction to Twitter that evening!).

Apache Lucene/Solr is used in more companies than a large majority, if not all, of the commercial vendors out there combined

I’m not sure how you can “prove” this but anecdotaly I suspect there’s a lot of truth there. Which is a good example of the use of Open Source components Vs “more Enterprise capable” bits.

Fact is, Lucene works and it works better (for our purposes) than any other search engine – commercial or open source. We’ve look at a whole bunch, both standalone and those embedded in SQL Databases.

Not only does it scale well, but it was easy for us to customise it to work with the specifics of our problem domain – for example, allowing users to search for sample IDs within the text of a document, even when they are formatted in a way that causes most text engines to treat them as “noise” words. And when a customer does have a problem, it is really easy for us to see what’s going on and tweak as required.

The only problem we have is when we meet an IT dept who is used to traditional search engines – we say “It’ll work like this, it will take this much resource, and will easily scale to X” and they don’t believe us – “it can’t be that easy surely? – you guys can’t have done this.”. Which is a little energy sapping… but nothing that can’t be resolved with a Pilot, and once we’ve reassured them about that, they tend to respect the other engineering calls we’ve made.

Our selling style (if you can call it that) is very “soft” and respectful, so we’re not looking for hard-charging sales people. But if you’ve an interest in helping people improve their lives in the lab, or you are a sales person and understand the concept of “Trust based selling”, do get in touch – jobs@amphora-research.com.

I agree with her definitions and to some extent frustration with the mis-use of the term, as I think it causes customers to get misled – intentionally or otherwise – by the sales team.

At the risk of provoking Gloria I will confess that we’ve coined the term “Configlet” in PatentSafe, which is “One or two lines of code which do something customer-specific”. PatentSafe has a whole bunch of places where it can call these Configlets and it is proving to be a really easy way to make the system extremely flexible without being overly complex. You can do pretty much anything in Confliglets and people are, which is quite pleasing even if we do get surprised sometimes!

I wouldn’t call this kind of stuff Configuration – you’re writing code, even if it is just a little bit of code. But we don’t consider it to be fully-fledged Customisation, at term we use for “We needed to get really intimate with the product’s source code and do things specifically for this customer”. Configlets are sort of in between the two, as they are generally fairly straightforward and often portable between customers.

As an aside, we are planning to create a library of Configlets for customers to build on/copy.

InformationWeek | Open Source | Minnesota Considers Mandatory Use Of ODF | April 7, 2006:

“A bill ‘requiring state agencies to use open data formats’ has been introduced in the Minnesota state legislature….. The legislation proposes the use of open data formats throughout the agencies of the state government’s executive branch… Specifically, the bill states:

• ‘The development of this information architecture must include the establishment of standards and guidelines to be followed by state agencies…
• ‘The standards and guidelines much emphasize uniformity that is cost-effective for the enterprise, that encourages information interchange, open systems environments, and portability of information whenever practicable…
• ‘The office (OET) shall assist state agencies to avoid the purchase or creation of data processing devices or systems that do not comply with open standards for the accessing, storing, or transferring of data…’

(Via Bob Sutor.)

So if you notice a bunch of old posts appearing in your feed reader, apologies… normal service (e.g. fairly sporadic posting will now resume.