Great post by R. Miguel, editor of a blog with the same name, about the way he write blog posts on his iPad.
I suggest watching the screencast as well, in which R. Miguel demonstrates the integration between Writing Kit and Terminology, a useful dictionary/thesaurus app for the iPad.
His post made me reassess Writing Kit, which I put aside for a few weeks in favour of the more minimalist Byword. I also purchased Terminology but that’s another story.
I’ve found a neat and free application for your Mac that allows you to map the strength of the WiFi signal in your house. You simply need to have a floor plan for your house and then you can simply walk around to obtain a beautiful graphical representation of the signal’s strength.
The software is available from netspot. Useful if you are planning to add a new WiFi repeater or understand where to install your wireless router.
This is an interesting one. AppleInsider reports that a user has filed suit against Apple for dissatisfaction with Apple’s cloud service.
Among the complaints included in the class-action are problems with MobileMe migration, inability to merge Apple IDs and iCloud downtime.
More precisely the user claims that iCloud system status page often reports iCloud as up and running whereas it is not.
The lawsuit doesn’t make much sense because you cannot guarantee in any system that there won’t be problems but there are some bits that are interesting.
As I previously noted with MobileMe, the system status page for iCloud and MobileMe is totally useless. Too often, downtimes are recorded after the problem is fixed and do not contain any valuable information.
I wish Apple employed a system similar to Google in which users are kept up to date through a dashboard and twitter updates.
I like iCloud and in many ways it is light years ahead of MobileMe and the competition but since its introduction I’ve found a few problems:
(Via AppleInsider.)
If you’re using the iCloud email web interface and are not based on the west coast of north America you might have noticed that all your emails have the wrong time stamp.
More specifically all sent/received emails have Pacific Standard Time (PST) time, that is eight hours behind Dublin time (GMT).
Obviously the first thing that I did was to check if iCloud was set to the correct time zone (correct) and the behaviour on my iOS devices and Mac (correct there as well).
According to the Apple Communities quite a few people are affected by this problem. It’s obviously a bug that I hope Apple is going to solve soon.
In the meantime the best thing you can do is to submit a feedback to Apple by visiting this page.
If you’re serious about making the iPad your only device, being independent in all situations is very important. This applies to RSS feeds as well.
As much as I love Reeder user interface and speed, I always find it annoying that you cannot add new feeds through it. I usually end up logging into my Google account and add the feed from there.
Mr Reader is a less known RSS reader that has a ton of functionalities useful to any power user. The primary reason I bought it is because it allows me to search and add feeds directly from interface.
Today Mr Reader has been updated to version 1.9 that brings improvements and new functionalities such as the possibility to manage more than one Google account.
You can find the list of new features, improvements and fixes at this page.
Mr Reader is available on the iTunes app store at $ 3.99.
We all know how many resources Apple is putting into iCloud. The cloud service will be part of Apple’s strategy for the next decade according to Tim Cook.
What I didn’t know is how robust and straightforward is for a programmer to implement iCloud sync compared to Dropbox.
Fletcher Penney – the genius behind Multimarkdown and its text editor Multimarkdown Composer – describes in his blog how difficult it is for a developer to use Dropbox as a a sync engine.
As a developer, however, I have come to realize how iCloud is years ahead of Dropbox.
Fletcher continues by explaining that whereas writing and reading from the Dropbox folder is quite easy using the API available, file syncing is a different thing altogether:
By leaving the sync algorithm out of the SDK, Dropbox leaves this up to each developer to reinvent.
…
As a developer, however, Dropbox has been the bane of my programming existence for the last couple of months.
On the contrary, using iCloud appears to be the equivalent of a programmers paradise:
It probably took me a couple of hours (if not less) to code the sync routines in my app to work with iCloud, once I had the basics of how it worked figured out.
And then the final paragraph which pretty much forecast – in my opinion – how pervasive and common iCloud sync will become in all apps we currently use:
I still use Dropbox. I’m glad exists. But I think as more developers begin to understand how easy iCloud is, they’re going to wonder how much time and effort it is worth reinventing the wheel in order to support Dropbox when iCloud support is relatively effortless. If I didn’t think users would cry foul, I would strip out Dropbox support from my app and make it iCloud only (with improved support on the Mac end for the iCloud data).
I wrote before, and I confirm it here, that iCloud is a work in progress for Apple. The limitations that the service currently have will be solved in such a way that many apps that we currently rely on in our workflow will become redundant.
(Via Fletcherpenney.net)
This is for the engineers, mathematicians and scientists among my readers. According to 9to5 Mac, Mathematica – the most complete mathematical analysis tool available – will soon come to the iPad.
I cannot help but express a feeling of envy for any current student of a scientific discipline. The tools that you can now use pretty much anywhere are just amazing.
When I was an engineering student, laptops were something that only a handful of professors had, and I could use software like Mathematica and MATLAB only on the slow Wintel computers at the department of electronics.
I am not saying that it would have been easier but definitely funner!
Great repost from DaringFireball of an infograph showing how rich Apple is:
Apple sell 267 iPhone and 90 iPads per minute generating about $7 million an hour.
(Via DaringFireball)
Last night, after not using my MacBook Pro for a number of days, I picked it up to do some work. The moment I started typing, it occurred to me that something was not right.
I kept on writing but instead of concentrating on what I wanted to say, my mind focused on why using the Mac felt so weird. Only a few minutes later I found the answer. The Mac felt old.
Not old in the way I need a new computer but more like this technology is old. What really struck me as old were three things:
It is absurd to think that only after a few weeks of using an iPad I find the mechanical parts that are still part of any laptop so annoying. Hearing the noise of the fan, the hard-drive head ticking, the DVD-ROM spinning made me cringe.
Suddenly all those noises that have been so familiar for the past 28 years, since the first moment I typed on a Commodore 8032, felt wrong. They were not supposed to be there.
In the quest for perfection, Apple went as far as to consider small things like this. Reduce, take away, strip away until you get a bare bone device. The iPad.
After the iPad, everything seems so old and inessential. A normal laptop feels bloated and I wonder what Apple will be able to come up with when it releases the new models with Ivy Bridge processor. What could they strip away from a laptop to achieve that sense of completeness that an iPad portrays? We already know that the new MacBooks will not have an old fashioned hard-drive and a useless DVD-ROM, but what else?
While watching some videos on the web on my aging Mac I could not help but wonder why the fan had to run full speed whereas the iPad gets barely lukewarm when watching the same videoclips (easy answer: It was Flash). Still, I could only marvel at the technology and power (comparable to a Cray 2 supercomputer from the ’90s), that a device like an iPad brings to the masses.
This occurred to me while using Pages. I started manipulating an image and even though the trackpad was responsive I couldn’t help but think that the user experience of using Pages on the iPad is at a different scale. It’s almost as if the software was designed to be used on a touch surface rather than through an indirect device such as a trackpad.
The technological intimacy you get when you are able to manipulate objects on your screen as if they were real gives you a higher level of interactivity and therefore effectiveness in your work.
Not only that but the fact that you can interact directly with the entities on the user interface has allowed Apple to considerably simplify the apps by leaving out superfluous functionalities and settings.
Don’t get me wrong here, there are situations when you need to use software with detailed options to achieve your goal. The point is that in 80% of cases you don’t need that. That is the genius touch of Apple’s designers, having stripped out all the superfluous.
Having the possibility to directly interact with the objects has helped achieve that result with less effort and better results if the technology had not existed.
In this post I like to define the degree of freedom as the positions/locations in which you can use a device. Under this definition I would call a desktop computer a device with zero degree of freedom. The computer pretty much stays under your desktop.
A laptop would likely be a device with two degrees of freedom. You can either use it on your desk or on your lap. There are variations but you can’t really work on a laptop using other positions for a prolonged amount of time.
On the contrary, the iPad is probably the first device – apart from smartphones – which gives you a higher number of degrees of freedom. For instance, I am typing this post with the iPad placed on my knees and my head propped up on two pillows. A totally comfortable position that I could not keep if I wanted to use a laptop.
I can also use an iPad while on my couch with one leg crossed over the other, standing, and so on.
You can apply the same concept to the location where you can use an iPad.
One of my closest friend has recently received an iPad from his employer. He told me that now he is able to use the computer at home even in the short time he has between taking care of his one year old kid and the usual family matters. There’s no need to sit down, wake up the laptop from sleep and wait for the computer to resume. You can just pick the iPad up from the couch and in no time you can be productive.
I really look forward to using the iPad in my next business trip be it at the airport, on the plane, or on the chauffeured car on my way to the hotel.
The freedom you get by being able to use your computer anywhere and in any position can in many cases turn into creativity. Breaking habits – in this case the way you use your computer – can help increase the creativity to the discredit of people claiming that the iPad is a device to consume information rather than to create it.
Rumours are abounding that the next iteration of iOS, will abandon Google Maps for an Apple in-house solution.
Apple in recent years have acquired three different mapping and 3D technology companies and many people were wondering what happened to those acquisitions.
According to some sources AllThingsD reports that
The new maps will blow your head off.
As my recents doubts about Google become more and more substantial I can’t wait to see the solution that Apple might unveil at WWDD in one month.
Post-PC