You may have seen the video below as it went viral a few weeks back when the iPad launched here in Japan. It is magician Shinya Uchida. After this video went viral he has appeared on numerous TV programs here in Japan. Today he appeared on one that was a live broadcast. Of course he went there to perform magic with the iPad. He did a few of the effects in the video below but he had a number of new interactive effects that interacted with real world objects and the iPad with audience participation. Great creativity and I hope to see more of him in the near future. Below is the video that went viral with English subtitles. Enjoy!

Aaron

Evernote For iPhone

In August of lat year I blogged about how I take and keep notes on my magic here. I still use the the systems I blogged about but recently I have been using Evernote for a lot of my note taking, show development, planning, and brainstorming. The reasons I like Evernote are that my notes can be stored as different notebooks and these documents can hold pictures and sound files as well. They are also synced between my MacBookPro, my iPhone, and my account on the Evernote site. This way I always have access to my notes and have backups of them. Using Evernote has been great for me and has helped a lot in keeping my projects organized. Evernote as well now works for the iPad, which I can imagine will be good for working on my show like a electronic clip board. Evernote is free they also have a paid account if you use  a higher volume of files. For me it has been a great system and I highly recommend it if you are into keeping notes and plans electronically.

Aaron

I know this is mostly a magic blog but I am also a fan of tech so I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and blog about the new Apple iPad and write about some of my thoughts and how it relates to me in Japan. I am not an Apple fanboy but I am a recent “convert” to the Mac platform after years of being frustrated with Windows. This December I gave up Windows and bought a MacBook Pro. After over a year of using the iPhone I was convinced. Anyways back to the iPad. Firstly I have seen many people complain about what it lacks the biggest being a camera for pictures and or for video conferencing. Now lets go to what Steve Jobs talked about at the iPad presentation. It is a device between the smart phone a regular computer, a kind of bridge. Smart phones and computers have cameras so why need a third? I know, I know, people said this about cells phones a few years ago. But imagine holding the iPad out to do a video conference, your arms would get tired and the video would be all bouncy like bad home videos. It would only work well if it was on a kickstand. So it seems to use this tablet this way is perhaps awkward and not so elegant. This is the reason I see for it not having a camera as well as keeping the price down and the device light and thin. Remember you have to think of this as a new device not as a net book, nor a laptop, nor as a tablet PC using a normal desktop OS. This is something new easy to use and something convenient when you want t relax or are sitting on a plane, train, or bus. I can also think of many business applications for this device for record keeping.

Ok what about here in Japan and would I buy it. Well I might, the problem is the Japanese iTunes store has no movies or TV shows, one of the main features of the iPad. Of course you can convert current DVD etc. but that takes the beauty and ease and loses the point of the system. It also looks as if there won’t be a iBook store any time soon as well. A work around for this is of course to use the Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone. It seems for me anyway that until the Japanese iTunes store gets upgraded with movies and TV’s shows and gets the book store in Japan I don’t see myself using this device soon. I do however see how I can it use at show venues for setting up and prepping my show but I just use my iPhone and my MacBook Pro for now. I do hope to see it get these features here with cheap 3g connections then I will probably pick it up.

Written on my iPhone.
Aaron