1546 - Love Will Find A Way

2011-01-09

You who follow my struggles, you know how heroic a fight I fought, but in the end I have lost. Or won.

I’ve got an iPad. Or better: my father has, but he still doesn’t know and technically I have it. I won’t keep it though.

Years ago I bought a “digital picture frame” for my parents. They are not computer-literate, have no Internet access, don’t understand English and can’t follow my blog. A picture frame seemed like a good idea, but really, it was not. Its resolution was too low, the user interface more than clunky, the colors way off and contrast terrible. This did not particularly bother my parents, but it bothered me.

Looking for a replacement, I suddenly had the idea, that an iPad probably could be a much better picture frame than anything dedicated to that purpose only. The reason is the interface.

I tried it in the store, tried different stores, until I found an iPad with maybe a hundred photos on it. It did feel slick. Absolutely slick, and it was easy as well. Much easier than fiddling with a picture frame’s remote control. And the best thing is, whenever you get stuck, something happens that you don’t understand, there is one single button. You press it and you are back on the home screen.

I bought the 16GB WiFi-only variant, i.e. the cheapest, and then I began researching, installing, trying, playing around, and that’s the reason why my posts were so delayed. At the moment I am looking for apps that may be useful for my father, even without Internet connection. One of them is an offline maps application, and today I have downloaded maps of Carinthia.

The Image of the Day was taken Friday afternoon in a forest east of Klagenfurt. I like the horizontal layers in the background and the almost curtain-like vertical pattern of the trees.

The Song of the Day is “Love Will Find A Way” from the 1983 Lionel Richie album “Can’t Slow Down”. Hear it on YouTube.

There are 3 comments

C. van het Kaar   (2011-02-21)

Checking out your "songs" again after some time; o my what a joy to see you're still going strong with the SIgma 8-16 🙂 , of course the wonderfull environment you live in helps a lot i think.. 🙂 , but still wonderfull work ! One question : do you need xtra processing to make your pics look good (enough) on an iPad , or do you upload them straight from your PC ? ( i do not have an iPad, but it might prove intresting to start using one for "pictures on the road"...) .

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andreas   (2011-02-22)

The only way to get pictures from the PC on the iPad is via iTunes, and iTunes does something. They definitely create thumbnails, maybe they create intermediate sizes, but I suppose they also lower JPEG quality of the maximum size to a degree that is just not recognizable. On my PC the images that I have on the iPad add to more total file size than on the iPad, and that is only possible by lowering quality or by higher encoding quality. Photoshop produces small JPEGs anyway, so I suppose it's quality that is lowered. That sounds scary, but really, the images look just fine.

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C. van het Kaar   (2011-03-01)

Thx for your response Andreas, I'll give it a go with a friends iPad before I decide wether or not it's worth it, otherwise I will have to wait untill a usefull tabblet becomes available out here ( I like the tablet format, but I am a bit suspicious about the quality ......) .

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