I have a Kindle.

I have a Mac.

So, naturally when Amazon announced that there would be a “Kindle for Mac” application, I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I signed up to be notified by e-mail when the application would be available.

Yesterday, I read on the blogs that the much-awaiting “Kindle for Mac” Beta had been released. Naturally, I immediately downloaded and installed it.

Then I thought, “Hey, didn’t I sign up for an e-mail notification months ago?” I thought it was odd that Amazon wouldn’t have made good on their promise to let me know when they released the application. I looked through my Inbox for an old confirmation e-mail, but couldn’t find one. I was pretty sure I had signed up, but finally, I decided that I was misremembering.

To my surprise I got an e-mail today from Amazon telling me:

Since you requested to be notified about the new Kindle for Mac app, we are excited to tell you that it is now available for free download.

Amazon really missed an opportunity here. Clearly, I and presumably thousands of other people signed up for the notification, because we were interested in the software. However, Amazon notified us after the general press release to the rest of the world. Why have the sign-up in the first place if you’re not going to tell everyone the news until after it’s old news?

You might say that I downloaded the software anyway, so I should quit whining about it. But what if instead, Amazon let those of us who signed up know about “Kindle for Mac” the day before the general public? They had a chance to make us feel more connected and “inside” by saying, “Hey, we wanted to let you know, Kindle for Mac will be released tomorrow. Since you signed up for the e-mail notification, we’re giving you a sneak peek.” Even better, what if they gave us special codes to download the app … gasp … one day before everyone else?

How cool would that have been? Would that have affected my review of the app for the positive?

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My Review of Kindle for Mac

Kindle for Mac is thoroughly mediocre, with severely limited functionality. The only positive is that you can finally read your Kindle books on your Mac. However, you can’t zoom, annotate, or search any of your books. It’s actually less functional than a paper book.

My take: Amazon feels Apple breathing down its neck with iPad and is spending the bulk of its development budget on Kindle v3. Kindle for Mac is a total afterthought.

Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced the world to Apple’s latest creation, the iPad. Say what you will about the name (you may have seen links to an old MADtv sketch for a completely different product of the same name), I believe Apple delivered a fantastic product. Does it live up to the hype? If it worked by mental telepathy instead of multi-touch, I don’t think it could have lived up to the hype. That’s the blessing and curse of Apple product launches.

While I expected the reactions both of the “gotta have it no matter what” fans and “gonna hate it no matter what” critics, I thought the general reaction would be something along the lines of “looks really cool but I’ll wait and try before I make up my mind.” To my surprise, the refrain I keep hearing is a rumbling disappointment that iPad is “only” a big iPod Touch.

The big revolution the iPhone brought into the mainstream was the idea that a smartphone shouldn’t be a phone with a few computer-like features. Rather it should be a pocket computer that among other things has a phone application. In fact, there was so much perceived value in this proposition that Apple realized that you could remove the phone from the iPhone and still have a product that lots of people would want. Thus was born the iPod Touch – the pocket computer that would replace your media player, give you access to thousands of applications and give you a great web and email experience.

That’s the innovation – pocket computing for the masses in a stylish device with a simple and intuitive user interface.

Personally, when I got my iPhone, my computing habits changed almost instantly. Very quickly I found that I did about 80% of my computing on my phone. I reserved booting up my Macbook Pro for media stuff and my PC for gaming.

But like many other people, I found there was a gap. For me specifically it was e-books. The phone screen was too small and the laptop too heavy and hot. So, I bought a Kindle for my “in-between” needs. It has it’s quirks but I am generally very happy with it. For other people, their “in-between” needs were met by small inexpensive basic laptops that came to be called netbooks.

As Steve Jobs pointed out in his presentation yesterday, the challenge of filling this “in-between” space between smartphones and laptops is what drove the design of the iPad.

So what would that device look like? It would give you a great web and email platform, play videos and music, let you update documents and presentations and read ebooks. It would be bigger than a smartphone and smaller that a laptop. It would be light and thin and have use a touchsreen for its primary interface. The screen would have to be big enough to give you a nice experience watching videos, browsing the web and typing on the virtual keyboard. Portable but not fit-in-your-pocket small. It would be built to leverage the scarcities of the mobile environment as strengths not to avoid them as weaknesses. Its underlying concept would not be a laptop with features removed, but rather a smartphone-like pocket computer with features added.

In other words, the perfect “in-between” device is a big iPod Touch. And if iPad isn’t seen as being a game-changer it’s because Apple already changed the game. Based on his opening remarks, it’s clear Steve Jobs intended iPad to further cement Apple’s identity as the company that defines how we do mobile computing.

And by filling the “in-between” ecological niche between smartphones and laptops with a big iPod Touch, I think he succeeded.

I had a great conversation last night with my friend Mark. Among many other things we talked about, we came around to the topic of the paperless office. For about a decade now, we’ve heard that we are at the dawn of the paperless office. Documents can be virtualized, then organized and re-organized on a whim. Data in XML format can be ported and shared between people and applications with very little loss due to “friction” in process. We are no longer beholden to the costs of filing and storing physical paper pages.

So, why do we still use paper?

I think there are two main reasons:

• Paper is cheap.
• Paper is simple to use, and as a technology, provides additional functionality over what current computer displays can provide.

Since I know very little about the economics of paper production, I can’t really address the first point, other than to say if paper suddenly jumped in price the way gasoline has, I doubt you’d see nearly as many people in the office sending those 200 page reports over to the LaserJet.

The second point however is firmly in techno-weenie land (my happy home). What kind of digital technology can compete with paper for functionality and ease-of-use?

Readability
Face it, computer screens are hard to read. If you look at them too long you go cross-eyed. Innovations like the Amazon Kindle make me hopeful that in the near future, all monitors will be similarly optimized for document readability.

Organizing, highlighting and notetaking
The one thing you definitely learn after you’ve shuffled papers around your desk for any length of time is that paper is easy to shuffle around. If you want to combine a spreadsheet and a document into one report, all you need is a stapler. Marking up printed documents is simple and quick.

Touch screen interfaces seem to be the best prospect for easy manipulation of digital documents. Personally, I think the best current implementation is Apple’s iPhone. Microsoft also has an exciting offering in this space, called Surface. Rather than being a touchscreen you can fit in your pocket like the iPhone, with Surface, the interface is a multi-touch tabletop. The demo shows applications in the home, restaurants, bars, etc.

Imagine a different application where your physical desktop is replaced with a Surface interface instead. You can do your regular computing with your standard keyboard/mouse/monitor. Then, we you need to, you just drag your document over to your Surface desktop, where you can use the touch interface to flip through documents, shuffle pages, blend documents together, insert photos, markup documents with a pen or stylus … whatever you want to do, all with the same relative ease of manipulating paper documents. The best of both worlds.

The biggest downside to this is that currently Surface is not available to consumers. Also, it’s very expensive, the main current target market being hotels, resorts, casinos, trendy high-end bars, etc. Also, let’s face it, as this hysterical Surface parody from SarcasticGamer points out, Surface is a big-ass table. There is a long way to go before this could be integrated into the workplace.

Power Consumption
You don’t have to plug paper in. Not sure what we can do about that one.

I believe the paperless office can actually become a reality, but we’re not really there yet. Why do I care so much about it? Because even though I’ve never hugged one, trees are nice. They provide shade, they make the air smell nice, they use up carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, and it sounds cool when wind blows through their leaves. We should cut fewer of them down.