This time last year, Tim Sears and I released Ramps 1.0 to an unsuspecting public. A couple weeks later, Apple featured us as an iPhone Game of the Week. In May, we doubled the game’s content with the dark world update.

During that time, we received one request more than any other: iPad support. It took a while to do it right, but that request is now a reality.

Ramps 1.2 is universal, a free update for existing users, and available now!

Get Ramps in the iOS App Store

For more info, check out my post on the Backabit blog. Happy holidays!

The Cosmonaut was the first Kickstarter project I contributed to, and it’s also the first I have something to show for. The project reached its funding goal on April 20 thanks to the contributions of more than six thousand backers. Eight months later, I’m holding the end product in my hand.

So how’d it turn out?

The pitch

I’ve been a frequent user of Wacom tablets for years (at one time using a “Penabled” tablet PC as my primary laptop), so my quality bar for styluses is set pretty high… every capacitive stylus I’ve tried has failed to meet my expectations. Because of this, I ignored most of the initial Cosmonaut murmurings on Twitter.

Luckily, Calvin Ross Carl mentioned the campaign to me again, suggesting I at least watch the introductory video.

Despite my initial skepticism, I was impressed by the concept. Instead of attempting to circumnavigate the touchscreen’s limitations to deliver a compromised fine-tip writing tool, Studio Neat embraced the lack of precision, drawing inspiration from dry-erase markers and emphasizing the weight and feel of the object itself. I appreciated that thoughtfulness and forked over a paltry sum for the opportunity to try it firsthand.

The stylus

The Cosmonaut arrived in a stylish-yet-understated cardboard box, the soviet space theme lovingly maintained throughout the presentation. It made me smile.

The stylus itself feels very substantial in the hand. It’s a little heavier than a whiteboard marker, moreso as it comes to a point. I had to look up antonyms for “slippery” to describe its rubberized, outer coating, but “unslippery” is still the best description Thesaurus.com or I could come up with.

The pen tip feels firm and plastic to the touch, but it’s actually squishy and flexible. It’s tough to describe, but a brief tap with the tip of your finger will feel very resistant, whereas a firmer tap and hold will make it flex inward. It’s a surprising combination that makes the stylus feel sturdy and reliable without risking damage to the screen.

In use

I tried the Cosmonaut in my two favorite iPad sketching apps, Adobe Ideas for whiteboard-style doodling and Procreate for painting.

When sketching in Ideas, I found I had to press just a little more firmly than I would have with my finger, but once I learned to do this without trepidation, writing and doodling began to feel natural. While it didn’t feel quite like a dry-erase marker on a whiteboard in terms of effortlessness, I definitely felt my dexterity improve with the stylus.

This improvement was even more noticeable when painting. Procreate’s interface is so well-designed to begin with that, combined with the comfort of the Cosmonaut, I quickly forgot about either tool and just enjoyed the act of making a fun little Mickey Mouse sketch. For me, that’s the mark of a great design… the object disappears, allowing you to focus on the task itself.

The verdict

I feel a strange sense of pride in writing this review. While Studio Neat clearly deserves 99.9% of the credit for the Cosmonaut’s existence, it feels great to have been an early supporter.

This is easily my favorite capacitive stylus. By abandoning the goals of traditional, resistive touchscreen input devices and instead focusing on comfort and contextual appropriateness, they’ve successfully created a useful and charming tool that’s earned a spot on my desk (in the Gorillaz mug, next to my Wacom pen and my favorite mechanical pencil).

Now I just have to count the days until I get to watch Indie Game: The Movie…

Near the end of yesterday’s unveiling of the iPad (that’s really the name, cue middle school jokes), Steve Jobs presented this slide (Gizmodo):

While I cannot weigh in on the magical properties of the iPad until it flies from Hogwarts on its broomstick into the hands of perspirating Apple fanboys the world over (narrowly missing its chance at catching the Golden Snitch), I believe we have enough information to contest how revolutionary it actually is.

Princeton’s WordNet defines revolutionary as “markedly new or introducing radical change.” How so?

The device uses an improved version of the iPhone OS, and its apps are written using the same SDK. Applications are accessed via a paginated grid of icons (as on the iPhone). Like the iPhone, only one application may run at a time with occasional, Apple-sanctioned exceptions (such as iTunes playback).

It connects to the web via WiFi or, if you pay for a premium model and a monthly subscription, a 3G connection (just like the iPhone or Kindle, minus the subscription fee in the latter case).

The hardware is essentially a cross between a first-generation iPhone and the top half of a unibody MacBook. The screen is capacitive multitouch, with an onscreen keyboard larger than that of the iPhone or Windows 7. The display size is 10 inches (about the size of an average netbook). The display resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels, the same as Lenovo’s Thinkpad X61 Tablet (released in 2007). It is roughly the same thickness as the MacBook Air.

The iPad introduces an iBooks store that sells basically the same catalog as Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer for their respective e-readers, though slightly more expensive. The books are downloaded in ePub format, the standard for most reading devices with the exception of the Kindle.

The cheapest iPad model starts at $499, a few hundred dollars more expensive than a typical netbook. The most capable model is priced at $829, a couple hundred dollars more than a multitouch laptop.

What’s “markedly new?”

I anticipate many will respond “the product category,” but that’s a flimsy explanation at best. The iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch with optional 3G, no phone service, no camera and no additional storage. Apple continually questions the legitimacy of the netbook category, but they’re in a glass house on this one. If “giant iPod Touch with optional 3G” is a product category, then so is “cheap, tiny laptop” (also with optional 3G).

Even newly-introduced features like iBooks barely surpass the competition, largely through the use of superfluous interface niceties like page turns and three-dimensional bookshelves.

In nearly every respect, the iPad is a strictly evolutionary product. Cool-looking, probably fun to use, but not revolutionary in any sense.

What could have been

Like many, I had high hopes for the iPad. I was enamored with the possibility of the additional screen real estate coupled with multitouch and a 3G connection.

I thought for sure that iBooks would include support for periodicals. As nice as the iPad’s screen looks, what a waste for it to render page after page of black-and-white text! I want to flip through WIRED or Communication Arts on this thing. Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder, which just bought Marvel Comics for crying out loud! Support for the magazines and comics I love without having to wastefully plop them into the recycle bin each month would have made this a no-question purchase for me.

Video on the iPhone is impractical due to a dearth of storage space, with tiny screens banishing playback to the realm of mere novelty. The iPad has a gorgeous screen, but no additional storage and no subscription-based service or even Hulu/Netflix integration to circumvent it. In foregoing these possibilities, Apple may have inadvertently allowed a natural successor to the Apple TV pass them by.

I’m not shocked that they didn’t include a front-facing camera for video conferencing via iChat or Skype, but the exclusion of any camera at all is quite baffling.

iPossibility

While the iPhone innovated both as a device and as a platform, iPad’s future seems wholly staked in the latter. As mentioned earlier, it shares an operating system with the iPhone, and for good reason. As much as I love my tablet PC, traditional desktop paradigms do not translate gracefully to a touch interface. Apple wisely decided to force developers to create touch-friendly interfaces through a familiar SDK rather than offer clunky support for more open OS X applications. The unfortunate side effect of this is that the iPad’s usefulness is reliant on developers and the App Store approval process.

An iPad version of the Adobe Creative Suite would be a killer app for artists and designers, but creating a device-centric version of necessary scope would require a daunting amount of time and money to develop for a market largely dominated by 99-cent applications. This makes the future of these platform-specific productivity apps uncertain at best.

This doesn’t mean the iPad isn’t right for anyone. If you were planning on buying a netbook in addition to an e-reader and a 3G card for your laptop, the iPad is a usable and comparatively affordable convergence of all three. If you find desktop computers scary but enter a calm, trance-like state while using your iPhone, you might avoid a Mac or PC in favor of one of these puppies.

Otherwise, my verdict is to hold off. In a year or two we’ll likely see more revisions of the device, and developers will have either breathed life into the platform or let it die on the vine. Personally, I’m hoping for the former.