From Gruber here is a mention of another product (this one is the ASUS Eee Pad) that is dropping Windows CE in favor of Android. Gruber points out that you can see the same graphic (minus robots) in Steve Ballmer's presentation slide here. A couple of thoughts:

1) there will be many iPad rivals

2) most of them will probably not use Windows

The new competition is between Apple and Google. We will see some astounding products come to market in the next few years. Almost as many will dissapear as this rapid evolution runs its course. The winner in this competition will be consumers no matter who captures the most hearts and minds.

Shawn Blanc here suggests that CSS is the new Photoshop and points to some great examples. I argue that CSS is not the new Photoshop. CSS and HTML5 and Javascript together form the new PostScript. What PostScript was for desktop publishing, CSS, HTML5, and Javascript are for the modern web page. What is missing is the new PageMaker.

Most people don't know much about PostScript except maybe that it was Adobe's first product. The founders of Adobe wrote this powerful graphic programming language to describe pages for printers. Their first customer was Apple. PostScript was used as the page description language for Apple's first laser printer. It enabled the desktop publishing revolution by becoming the lingua franca of printers and publishing systems. Very few people directly wrote PostScript. (I did, but that is another story.) It was usually generated by publishing applications like PageMaker or Quark. It was also generated by print drivers on Mac, Windows and Unix. In those days, mostly programmers who wrote printer drivers wrote PostScript code. The point here is that designers did their layout  by drawing and moving objects on a screen, not by writing code.

CSS, HTML5, and Javascript combine to form the way to describe pages on modern browsers much like PostScript was the way to describe pages on printers. In some cases PostScript was even used to drive displays. Steve Jobs licensed Display PostScript from Adobe as the display language for the NeXT computer before he returned to Apple.

What is missing today is the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and Javascript. Designers and artists should not need to directly write code to express art or layout. I suspect that many are working in this area. Any day now, I'm hoping that someone or some company will start to release products that bridge this huge gap.

Part of the problem is how to make a tool that will have the universal appeal of a PageMaker or Illustrator. Those applications were massively popular because of how well they solved the problems of laying out a page and drawing in vectors. Given the broad and somewhat disjointed characteristics of CSS, HTML5, and Javascript, coming up with a UI to rule them all is a big opportunity for UI gurus. How to make the result efficient enough to be useful in a production environment represents a significant programming challenge.

Adobe is the most likely to succeed in this if they can figure out how to market such a thing without undercutting Flash. Apple may also do something here.

On Boingboing here is a presentation pointed to by a Steve Gibson tweet (@SGgrc) by Philip Zimbardo on how individual perspectives of time affect our lives. The ideas by Zimbardo are interesting and the animation by RSA Animate is wonderful.

Many people complain that Apple's iOS app approval system is too tightly controlled and like the ease with which Android apps can be distributed.

From Mashable here is news of a report from SMobile Systems providing a threat analysis of Android apps. Their report discusses a review of 48,000 apps which show issues that should be of concern to Android users. They include 5% that can call anywhere without the user's permission, 3% that can SMS anywhere, 383 apps that can read or use authentication credentials from another service or app and 29 apps that request permissions similar to spyware. Many or all of these apps may be fine but it is impossible for an app purchaser to have complete confidence in them. Finding a way to vet apps may be a good idea since, back in January, as reported by Gizmodo here there were some 'banking' apps that were used to phish for Android user banking logins.

From a consumer's viewpoint, Apple's checking of apps sounds like a great idea to me. Even if Apple misses something, if a problem comes to light then Apple can remotely revoke a specific app. These seem like strong selling points to businesses and concerned consumers.

The report pdf is available here.

Here Gruber points to a wonderful Google site here that has great HTML5 examples.