Macworld — I've just seen a TV piece about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Like the Rolling Stones, it seems to be (a) on a permanent world tour of North America and Asia, and (b) composed of members who are indestructible by any known means.

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Unlike the Stones -- who are by all accounts skeletal and tiny, sized for convenient packing and transport -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is distressingly huge. As in "somewhere between Texas and the continental United States." It's composed of a huge cloud of dispersed plastic. Trash from land and ships goes into the water. Part of the plastic breaks down after prolonged exposure to light; the rest breaks up into particles that just sort of stand around dumbly, like when Keith Richards looks at Ronnie Wood during a guitar solo and tries to figure out why Brian Jones looks different all of a sudden. We can only assume that this slow process of laminating the ocean in plastic can't have a net-positive effect on the environment.

But this isn't an ecological column. Naturally, I'm only bringing up the slow destruction of all life on the planet to make a point about Apple (AAPL). This big trash continent was the gradual residue (literally) of a problem that went on quietly for decades. Now that it's here, the only thing we can do about it is race to become the first explorer to plant a flag in this big plastic landmass and then see if there's any native peoples living there that we can then exploit economically.

Apple's Great Garbage Patch is its corporate culture of secrecy. It once served the company and its products very well but it's steadily becoming a liability. And in the iPad, we could be looking at the first event in which the price of secrecy is paid by the users.

I ask you: just how the hell are software developers supposed to build software for this almost-unprecedented new computer without having access to a living, breathing sample?

Up until a week ago, I didn't have have an iPad either. Instead, I installed apps into the iPad simulator that Apple includes with the Xcode development system, and ran them in a window.

I plugged my graphics tablet into my MacBook so that I could get some kind of a tactile experience. But I needed to use my imagination and when I thought a certain feature of an app had been implemented poorly, I was uncertain of my reaction. In a graphics app, I kept thinking I was supposed to tap on the circle icon and then draw it in my document. I was actually meant to drag it out of the tool palette and drop it where I want it to go.

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