I love my iPad.  I think Apple has put together a fantastic device, and if it had a complete web experience (aka Flash Player), it would be nearly perfect.

I think Apple could be hailed as the king of user experience (UX).  With the release of iOS 4.2, Apple continued to improve the device.  The addition of folders, multitasking and quick access to display brightness and volume were welcome additions.  Apple did however make one huge blunder in their upgrade to iOS 4.2 – the changing of the toggle switch on the right side of the iPad from ‘orientation lock’ to a ‘system mute switch’ is completely wrong.

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It doesn’t take you more than five minutes to breeze through an  museum, book or gallery to realize that “fine art” often times means “fruit art.”  Maybe that’s why so many artists are starving – they would rather paint their food than eat it.

I’ve never been a fan of doing still life art.  I did a few drawings in high school, but avoided the subject completely until after college.  My first real still life was in 2006.  It was a present for my mom, and included:  1 teddy bear, 1 bottle of wine, 3 books, 1 glass of wine, vines with fruit and and a red velvet blanket.  Needless to say this was filled with bad decisions for a budding still life painter!  Fuzzy fur, flowing fabric, foliage, clear glass, shiny glass, liquid… The painting still turned out pretty well, but I realized then why artists tend to stick to simple bowls of fruit!

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The original AppleTV didn’t excite me much.  While the HDD space seemed huge at the time, I knew that if I really committed to it, I would eventually fill it up.  Since the new AppleTV streams all your media digitally, you are only limited by the size of your own HDDs.

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While I’ve been developing Rich Internet Applications for the past five years, it has been a long time since I’ve had to program true HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.  The last time I wrote a legitimate HTML based webpage, the industry standard was laying out the content in tables.  Attempting to dive in and learn all the new pieces seemed daunting.  I decided to start my focus on the Canvas component in HTML5 because of its relative closeness to the Canvas component in Flex.

My goal was to develop something that was animated,  took advantage of keyboard and mouse clicks, and could be used on mobile devices.  I created the classic game Snake. Use your WSDA keys to control the movement.  Alternatively, for mobile devices without key support you can click in the top, bottom, right and left purple squares to move the snake in that direction.

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