kag's tech blog

I’ve had the opportunity to take an iPad home for a few days last week. They’re not available in Canada yet, but my boss brought one from the States. I already have an iPhone 3G so I didn’t focus on the OS or the applications.

First, it’s fast. Like, wicked fast! Moving around in the Maps application is just amazing, especially when you’re used to the iPhone 3G’s speed.

The screen is pretty much like my iPhone, but obviously bigger. The size is just perfect: not too big, not too small. But just like the iPhone, it’s glossy and hard to read outside. And the DPI is pretty much the same as on my iPhone (it’s not sharper). There also seems to be a bit of ghosting under certain circumstances. In other words, it’s not much of an improvement over the iPhone.

They keyboard is an improvement, especially in landscape mode where the keys are much larger. But you have to type with your fingers, as there is obviously no feel (like any virtual keyboard). Typing with both hands proved to be slower because one of my hands would always “drift away” from its initial position. But I must admit that I was surprised how fast I could type with only two fingers. The bottleneck was always with the accentuated characters, as you have to hold a key and wait for its alternative characters to appear (like on the iPhone). I wish the delay was shorter.

The main problem is finding a good position. On a flat surface, the optional casing does a great job giving the iPad a slight angle so it’s a bit more perpendicular with your eyes. But on the sofa or a chair, I found it really hard to be comfortable. It’s a bit heavy so holding it with one hand is only when you want to do something quick. Plus, you can’t type with both hands in that position. You really have to lay it down some way, and it’s not always elegant.

Last but not least, it desperately needs multitasking. I want to use it like a real computer, not like an iPhone! In Apple’s defense, the next version of the OS is going to come out this summer and it will have multitasking (among other things).

Is it a nice toy? Definitely. Is it worth $600+ bucks? I don’t think so, especially if you already have an iPhone.

There are countless tooltip plugins using jQuery. But not many of them use title attribute. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I based myself on vTip and added live() support and tweaked a thing or two.

Download it here (2.25 KB)

By default, it will only show custom tooltips for images, but you can tweak the jQuery call on line 74 to suit your needs. You can also edit lines 40-42 to change its appearance.

Last but not least, you can also edit line 17 to edit the default values for the delay and offset position.