In the category of ’speculation’: The three weeks between when iPad pre-orders start and the April 3rd delivery date sounds like just enough time for Apple to gauge what proportion of iPads to make in each of the 16/32/64GB configurations.

In the category of ‘wild speculation’: It would be interesting, given a high enough proportion of buyers opting for the higher-margin 32 and 64GB models, if Apple were to decide to order the build with cameras included since, if they’re not currently slated for inclusion there seems to be plenty of evidence that they were at one time, and may simply be a drop-in part at build time.

John Gruber seems to have it on good authority that the missing iPad apps are missing because Apple couldn’t figure out how to keep them elegant in a large-screen environment, and that no ‘Dashboard view’ is in the works. I don’t doubt his sources, but I’m frankly very surprised.

Looking on the bright side, the absence of these core apps will pave the way for hundreds of developers to try innovating on their own to make a better version, knowing they’ll be vying for the attention of an entire iPad user base with no built-in calculator, weather, finance or timer app. There should be a lot of interesting innovation in the space (and yes, a lot of nickel and dime crap).

At the end of the day though, the problem persists: If Apple can’t come up with a suitable usability model for small ’subtask’ apps like peeking at stocks, responding to an instant message or performing a quick calculation then it’s unlikely that third-party developers will be able to, because the difficulty is inherent in a large-screen, completely modal interface.

Considering that Apple’s been thinking about tablet devices for over a decade and has held beck because the prototypes didn’t meet Steve’s high bar, it’s extremely surprising to me that they’d launch without a real answer for such simple tasks. April 3rd notwithstanding, this is a problem that Apple will absolutely solve at some point. The only question is when.

I made a 3D pie chart that, while absolutely accurate, is an example of why 3D pie charts are bad:

Yesterday I shut down the 9 year old url shortening service qwer.org. I pointed all traffic from qwer.org to a penguin flash game with a banner ad at the bottom.

Scandal! Uproar! Mea Culpa! The kind of scandal that lead a social media pundit to email me this morning asking me to explain the series of events that led me to turn a link shortening service into a profit vehicle. The kind of uproar that causes a person to make an anonymous Twitter account for the sole purpose of asking me to explain my path to the dark side.

It all sounds pretty nefarious and nasty until you discover that the site was shut down because it had only two users: one a black-hat SEO driving traffic and pagerank to illegal pharma sites and a person who used the content-hosting features of Qwer to host Second Life patterns in a way that could be accessed in-game, and that his pages have been whitelisted for 4 weeks until I shut down stuff completely.

Average number of daily visitors to qwer.org? 11. Average number coming from somewhere other than Second Life? 3.

I hate being such a boring scandal.

Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, asked about the prospects of an Apple phone in November of 2006 (two months before the iPhone unveiling):

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.’”

‘We’ve struggled for years’ may not be the best phrase to convince people that you’re going to stay the market leader.

[side note: 'struggle' has now joined 'acquitted' on my list of words that probably shouldn't make their way on to your resume]

9to5mac reports on the conspicuously blank function key at the iPad demo and speculates, quite reasonably, that it may be more evidence of the dashboard functionality I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Given that the iPad doesn’t have the concept of F#-style function keys, each key on that row has one and only one dedicated purpose. Other buttons in that row include ’search’, ‘home screen’, ‘photos’, brightness and audio controls, and a lock button. The deliberate hiding of a button’s functionality, in my mind, can only mean one of two things: A dashboard widget screen toggle or a Camera app button. Either one would point to a feature announcement coming in the next few weeks.

Jesse Schell’s talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it’ll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you’ll spend all week.

Dell’s VP of Mobile Devices John Thode, speaking to the Wall Street Journal about, what else, mobile devices:

If anybody tells you they know exactly what’s going to happen here, they’re either Apple or they’re smoking dope.

Somebody give this guy some weed.

Apple’s gone a bit wonky on its naming of things. In the beginning there was iTunes, then came the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Eventually the iTunes Music Store became the more general iTunes Store. When the iPhone came out it had an ‘iPod’ app, and an ‘iTunes’ app was added later, linking specifically to the store. Later on an ‘App Store’ was added for the part of the iTunes store that sold apps.

When the iPod Touch came out, it it split the ‘iPod’ app into a ‘Music’ app and a ‘Video’ app presumably because, unlike the iPhone, the Touch is an iPod.

Now the iPad appears to follow the iPod Touch’s convention of splitting video and music into two separate apps, though the music app is again called ‘iPod’ because the iPad is not an iPod.

Each decision has a certain logic to it, but it leaves us with some strange inconsistencies (or are they?):

• Both the iPhone and iPad have an ‘iPod’ app, but on the latter videos live in the ‘Video’ app.
  
• The primary task of Videos and YouTube is the same: Watching videos.
  
• There are two stores on the iPad, ‘iTunes’ and ‘App Store’, but one is named after a free music player and the other is a self-described store, but the one that distributes more free items is the ‘Store’ and the one that charges for almost everything isn’t labeled as such.
  
• App names are self-describing using english terms except for apps that weren’t originally developed for the iPhone: ‘YouTube’, ‘iTunes’, ‘Safari” and ‘iPod’.
  
• The word ‘Music’ doesn’t appear on the factory-issue home screen at all, and if you didn’t already know that an iPod was a music player then neither the word nor the ‘Classic iPod’ icon would give you any indication that that’s what it was for.
  
• The same is true (perhaps to a greater degree) with ‘Safari’ and a compass. If you weren’t already familiar with the app you’d think it was probably a game.
  
• There are two default apps on the iPhone with a compass as the icon. One is a compass and the other has nothing to do with a compass or maps, despite there also being a ‘Maps’ application.
  

Finally, this one brings up an interesting point:

• The iPod Touch and the iPad have both ‘Videos’ and ‘Photos’ apps, but user-shot videos reside in the ‘Photos’ app, not ‘Video’.
  

The argument could be made that the iPod Touch can have a ‘Videos’ app because there’s less likely to be user confusion than there would be on the iPhone, where users can shoot their own videos with the device. The iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera, hence no device-created videos, so there’s less likely to be cognitive overloading of the ‘Videos’ term. If this is the rationale for why the Touch has a ‘Videos’ app while the iPhone doesn’t, the implication would be that the presence of a ‘Videos’ app on the iPad signifies that it won’t have a camera either.

Or maybe they just kept ‘Videos’ and ‘iPod’ combined in the iPhone because, hey, too many icons to fit on one screen already. Which makes me wonder: How many more Apps does Apple sell because they pushed the Address Book app to the second screen and left an open square on the home screen? I’m guessing a lot.

Now, more than ever before, I’ve got to develop a strategy for where to post, and which services cascade my posts to other services.

[cross posted to Twitter, Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook, GTalk status and Google Reader]