What do you mean that aGPS is not true GPS? aGPS is not triangulation, if that’s what you’re thinking of. It’s an enhanced version of GPS that uses additional data in poor conditions to improve start-up time. Or is this what you mean, that it’s not plain vanilla GPS, but a better version of it?
Hmm? A-GPS is true GPS, but enhanced by the ability to use cell-towers to determine location (roughly) when GPS signals may be week. The first0gen iPhone lacked true GPS hardware and had to rely on Cell-towers (and wifi-points) alone.
Has anyone used it for recipes, cooking, that sort of thing?
I’m thinking of getting one with a few cooking apps and a subscription to cooksillustrated.com (I sure hope they have an app soon) as a gift. 
I’ve been hearing really good things from multiple review sources about the “Epicurious” app, and I think it’s free. It turns up on most of the “best iPad apps” lists, so it’s probably worth a download. (I can’t cook without burning water, so I didn’t check it out 
)
Epicurious is good, but I’ve heard that Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything app is the best possible application available (but a bit pricey).
Only 3G iPads have ‘real’ GPS - it is assisted, meaning it can lock in a location faster by using cell signals has hints. Assisted, or A-GPS info here.
WiFi only iPads use data from the Skyhook system. This uses your WiFi MAC address to look up your location. These addresses are gathered by Skyhook ‘war drivers’ who drive around neighborhoods sniffing out access points. You can enter your own location on the Skyhook site if you find the iPad has no idea where it is. You need to run a program to get the MAC address of your router and get your lat/long from Google Maps.
The point east phrased well, and it wasn’t even relevant to the statement I was making, so Im not really sure what i was getting at.
The overall point i was trying to make is that the wifi model of the iPad doesn’t have gps or agps.
I wish my car GPS had cell tower assist to align itself faster. That’s a nice feature.
As I said before, this has a tremendous, and I do mean tremendous, amount of worth in a cockpit and will certainly be a hit with pilots. It’s just a matter of time before someone creates a companion link that gives the ipad XM satellite radar connections. It doesn’t have to be certified to be useful in a plane. Currently a nice radio stack that gives you a moving map display with storm scope and XM radar overlays are upwards of $80 to $100,000. This is a poor man’s version of real time weather for a fraction of the cost plus a nice backup for a GPS failure.
With built in GPS and accelerometers an ipad could easily be made into a glass cockpit display showing altitude, direction of flight, rate of climb, and artificial horizon. In a complete loss of power this could provide everything necessary to land a plane.
I would easily buy one for this purpose alone.
Didn’t 2 Northwest pilots just get into a big jam because they claimed they were looking at their laptops? They flew past their airport. Or are you talking about this for a private plane?
Does something like this exist for regular laptops? If USB based, it might not be too much work for the vendor to adapt it to an iPad 30 pin connector. Add some custom display software, charts and checklists and you are close to an EFB…
Have you seen any of the existing Weather applications like WeatherBug? It has an animated weather map.
I would also check with these guys. There seem to be a few more iPhone apps for aviators.
They did bring something new – machine aluminum unibodies to laptops. For mass production, aluminum is ridiculously expensive. I make those sorts of sourcing decisions for the products my company makes, and for the products my company buys. For mass production where pennies count, aluminum is a luxury. The fact that Apple is doing it on products that are otherwise low margin (compared to automobiles), is noteworthy. I’m not talking about 200 gun arms where we have the choice of brass or aluminum, and the incremental price is only $20,000 or so, but for thousands and thousands of copies. Are you willing to sell aluminum trinkets at the same price as iron trinkets?
Well, duh, versus other machining methods. :rolleyes: Remember that in manufacturing, dock to dock time is real money. Machining solid blocks of metal is a hell of a lot slower than injection molding or stamping.
Do you know what an asterisk means? Did you see the asterisked explanation in the place generally intended for asterisked information? I certainly do know what I’m talking about.
You’re really bad at groking the content of messages. CNC machines in and of themselves are nothing revolutionary. The use of them in this instance really is.
What’s the volume of your “small” shop? I’m responsible for building 600,000 cars per year.
I’m in complete agreement re: Apple’s lamentable attitude of an almost untouchable *ethereal *superiority to pretty much everything. The closed platform idea is so over. And I think that the religious attitude isn’t yours, it’s Apple’s. Apple users, friends of mine, will take on that attitude at times scoffing at anyone not using an Apple device. Look at the commercials, the Apple commercials. The whole thing with sad-sack Justin Long supposedly acting the casual, with-it, better-than guy just brimming with cool independence and non-compliance with corporate America (huh?) vs. the lamentable, doughy, fat guy who stands in for PC/Windows OS ('cause he wears a suit, see? something Apple’s Justin Long would *never *do). It’s laughably antiquated thinking from Mr. Jobs. Both platforms get the job done and can use each other’s programs, so…where’s the beef?
Please stop talking about CNC machining in this thread. Go and make your own thread.
Motion seconded.
Vote taken.
Motion passed.
How about this - ForeFlight Mobile HD?
Cool. Pity there’s no real support for Australia (charts and approach plates.)
I don’t think these guys think it’s overpriced, that’s fer damnsure.
Getting back to the point… I’ve had the iPad 3G for several days now. I’ll refrain from repeating my complaint about the lack of a stylus and why that limits its usefulness.
Some random impressions, treating it strictly as a mobile internet device:
-
It feels heavier than I expected. I can’t just hold it in the air for a long time, like I do with the Kindle.
-
The e-mail reader is very nice. I have two Gmail accounts (one personal, one through my university), and it tells me if I have new mail on either account. I haven’t even figured out how to do that on Google’s own web site. Also the preview works for most common file formats (attachments), which is more than I can say about my Android phone.
-
The display is fantastic, perhaps even better than my Fujitsu tablet PC.
-
Screen auto-rotation is annoying, but fortunately there’s a physical switch to lock the screen orientation. I’ve pretty much kept it in landscape mode.
-
GPS receiver is very sensitive and accurate. I tried it indoors (in our single-storey house) and Maps showed the current location to the correct part of the house. This alone is a good reason to choose the 3G model over the WiFi-only model, which does not have GPS.
-
In a fairly bright light - like restaurant tables right at the window, at lunchtime - the Kindle is much easier on my eyes than the iPad.
-
I hate the way the zoom works in Safari. With FireFox on a PC, when you zoom in, it increases font size but also reflows the text, wrapping the text to the window width. On the iPad Safari, it literally zooms in to a section of the page, so you have to keep scrolling sideways. Maybe that made sense on the iPhone but it’s stupid for the iPad. I can’t even find the settings for the font size for Safari.
-
The on-screen keyboard is disappointingly bad. It has no feedback, not even that pop-up thing that the iPhone on-screen keyboard has. And why can’t they display the whole keyboard including the number keys?? It’s not like there’s a shortage of screen real estate. It’s really annoying to have to hit a key to switch between the alphabet and the number/symbol keyboard.
THAT’S what I was missing! I kept thinking that it was clearly different somehow - how else was I making so many more mistakes with bigger targets? I may be missing the “K”, but my brain processes that for the next letter my aim’s off by half a character.