Predicting the Future of iPhone OS

In a few hours time, Apple will pull back the curtain on iPhone OS 4. As you’ll recall, Apple’s invitation stated that invitees would “get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS.”

Prior to Apple events, I tend to throw in my predictions. Last time I was wildly wrong. So this time I am going to keep things conservative. The usual suspects have spoken, and I am going to ride their coattails. There are three things I think will be added to iPhone OS:

• Multitasking of some sort for third party apps
• An advertising platform for free apps, and
• Support for higher screen resolutions.

 Multitasking and screen resolution are the things Apple has been getting slammed on since the Motorola Droid and the HTC Nexus One Android phones came a-knockin’. Now, I’m sure Apple will have many more things to trumpet about. I’m just not sure what those will be.

I do, however, have my own little wish list.

Mail

• Unified inbox
• Threaded messages

iPod

• Folder support
• A freaking quick-scroll bar in the Playlist section
• Get rid of cover flow

Lock Screen

• Status summary of notifications/upcoming events/weather/etc.

Notifications

• New system for presenting these. The blue grey pop up box just doesn’t cut it.

Tethering

• I’d like to see AT&T actually support this here in the US. But, I’d actually like to see this taken one step further. I’d like to see the iPhone gain support for mobile hotspot. Some new smartphones are featuring this ability to take the phone’s 3G signal and then turn the phone into a WiFi hot spot for other devices. I’d love to see this feature, but I have doubts as that would cut into sales of 3G+WiFi iPads. 

Those are a few things I’d like to see happen with the iPhone. Some, like mobile hotspot, would likely require new hardware. Support for higher screen resolutions could be in advance of new iPhone/iPod hardware and/or taking a step toward unifying the versions of iPhone OS that iPhone/iPod run on versus the iPad’s flavor.

All will be revealed soon. Any last minute comments from the peanut gallery?

Apps Are the Name of the Game for Kindle

I remember on January 28, 2010, when Steve Jobs unveiled the long awaited iPad, I immediately looked at my month-old Amazon Kindle with a feeling of pity. It was soon to be obsolete. By far the best e-book reader in the world was going to be outshone. Sure, eInk is nice, but no one will deny that a color screen is truly captivating. 

And the greatest contrast is the capability of the hardware itself. The Kindle does one thing — read books. At least that’s the only thing it really does well. The iPad can become just about anything one can imagine. An eInk screen can’t stand up to that. And Amazon knows it. 

Have you taken a look at Amazon’s home page in the past few days? No? Here’s a screenc apture of the relevant part, which is front and center at the top of the page.

Amazon is really pushing the free Kindle reading apps across a whole lot of platforms including, you guessed it — the iPad. Even more interesting is the tiny image of the Kindle hardware at the bottom. It’s basically waving about screaming, “Look at me! I’m still relevant! Buy me instead of any of those!”

Come on. The Kindle hardware is likely going to be put out to pasture. My guess is that Amazon really cares about selling eBooks, and they seem more than happy to provide the software for any device you want to read those eBooks on. 

Apple Sends Invites to iPhone OS 4 Event

Moments ago Apple sent out invitations to an event demonstrating iPhone OS 4. The invitation shows a partial 3D model of a number 4 casting a shadow  onto a blue background. The text on the invitation reads “Get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS.”

The event will take place at 10 AM PDT on 8 April, 2010 at Apple’s Cupertino Campus. Let the wild speculation begin.

Addendum: It just clicked after the initial jaw drop that this is in 3 days. THREE. DAYS. Color me officially shocked.

Magical

I awoke this morning with the scheme in my mind of running out and buying a wifi-only iPad. The Best Buy in Fargo, ND (where I am visiting family for the holiday) would surely have some in stock, and it opens at 9 am. At 8:50, I sat in my hotel room, telling myself to let it pass. So at 9:40, I assumed the store would be sold out, but have display models available. So I went to play with a demo unit, just to say I had touched an iPad.

Well, Best Buy had received 30 of each capacity, instead of the rumored 15 total. I called my wife. She said, “It’s up to you.”

iHave an iPad.

Thoughts:

Regarding the Keyboard

The portrait style keyboard is small. Whereas on the iPhone I prefer the portrait style keyboard, the landscape keyboard is superior. The portrait keyboard is too small to treat like a normal keyboard, but the iPad itself is too wide in portrait to hold and thumb-type at the same time.

The landscape keyboard darn near perfect for those of us used to the MacBook family’s keyboard or the Apple Wireless Keyboard. I can nearly touch type.

(Speaking of wireless keyboards, you can connect them via Bluetooth to the iPad. I haven’t tested this as my wireless keyboard is several hundred miles away.)

Regarding iPad Apps

Astonishing. Sure, many that I have tried have slight bugs, but considering nearly all of them were built on a simulator and not actual hardware, I’m amazed. Twitterrific for iPad is fantastic, but you can definitely tell that it was rewritten from the ground up in 60 days. Delivery Status Touch is eye-catching. The Kindle app for iPad is far superior than the Kindle hardware itself! All of this is amazing. It’s inspiring to see how many iPhone apps were made more functional just by allowing a larger canvas on which to paint.

Regarding iPhone Apps on iPad

Garbage. The only pixel-doubled app that looks good is Canabalt, and that’s because it’s intentionally pixely to begin with. Everything else looks like garbage. iPhone apps need to be given a facelift to compete on iPad.

Heck, you can tell the iPhone apps are pretty much running in a simulator on iPad, (akin Rosetta on the Mac) because when you go to enter text you get a pixelated iPhone keyboard instead of the iPad’s keyboard.
Regarding Browsing

Joy. Browsing the web is a fantastic joy. The Facebook app (which hasn’t been redone for iPad) has been all but obsoleted by the fact that Facebook.com works great on the iPad! Except for chat.

Websites render quickly and, most often, correctly. I expect many of the fraction that doesn’t render correctly soon will. Yes, I’m looking at you, Sites Made in Flash.

Regarding Reading

Reading is so nice on the iPad. Even outside. Outside there is glare, but text is still crisp and readable. The Kindle app is very nice, but iBooks takes the cake. It comes with a complimentary copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which is nice, as I have a toddler. It’s also a classic.

The interface melts away and allows you to focus on reading. And I actually like the page curl animation, and how the page turns only as fast as you turn it.

It doesn’t feel exactly like a paper book, but it’s not supposed to. It does, however, feel like a digital book should — casual.

Final Thoughts

There is so much more to cover on the iPad than I can possibly handle in the first brain dump. Overall, I am convinced that the iPad is the forerunner to the future of computing. I imagine that at the end of this decade, personal computers will look more like the iPad than a laptop.

The iPad feels less like a large iPhone, but rather a more casual MacBook. When Apple first described it as magical, I thought it was a little corny. I stand corrected — the iPad is a truly magical experience.

One More Thing

This review was written in Pages on the iPad, save for then being edited on my MacBook Pro to insert some links and header formatting, as the Squarespace app hasn’t yet been updated with an iPad interface.

Apple Highlights Sites with HTML5 as iPad-Ready

Earlier today Apple launched a new section on the iPad page detailing popular websites that are iPad ready. There’s quite a few heavy hitters on that list such as CNN, The New York Times, Vimeo, and Time. All of those sites and more are making sure when you, the consumer, visit from an iP.ad, you can see everything without needing Flash.

It isn’t secret that Apple dislikes Flash. Heck, it isn’t a secret that I loathe Flash! Anyway, I thought the fact Apple is giving HTML5 video was worth mentioning.

My ultimate thought: You want your site listed on that site.

It's Officially Crazy Week

The iPad arrives int he hands of users in just a few short days, and it has officially become crazy week. Yes, I have tried to convince myself to run out and try to grab one on Saturday (for review purposes, natch), but honestly, I am waiting until the WiFi+3G version comes out. And I really want to try to hold out for the second generation. So, you won’t be seeing a review on this site until anywhere from a few weeks to a year. That said, I will try to get hands on one to play with for a bit, and give my impressions as soon as I can.

But users aren’t the only ones preparing for the iPad. Our favorite fruit company has been issuing software to us all left and right for days. Aperture was recently updated with iPad compatibility (along with many other fixes in general for the program), Mac OS X 10.6.3 was released, and today iPhoto was given compatibility along with the latest version of iTunes, version 9.1.

Now, I’ve been saying for at least a year now that iTunes needs to be rewritten from the ground up. It’s just been feeling like it is getting more and more bloated. I also think it could benefit from being rewritten into Cocoa from Carbon. OS X has many technologies now that only Cocoa apps can utilize. The Finder, in my opinion, saw a great boost in stability and speed by transitioning to Cocoa in Snow Leopard. Also, there has to be a metric ton of legacy code that is just cruft waiting to be discarded.

I still hope that the next major version of iTunes (iTunes X sounds like a good name, doesn’t it?) will see at minimum a rewrite into Cocoa, and on the more extreme end of the spectrum, a reimagining of the user interface.

But let’s get our heads out of the clouds and discuss the present — iTunes 9.1. Maybe it’s just me and my lofty hopes, but it feels — dare I say — snappier. It’s still definitely a Carbon app, but it seems faster at just about everything. And it throws in some new features such as iPad support, finer control of Genius Mixes, support for ePub books and books purchased from the iBookstore, and a handy checkbox to allow you to compress the music that goes into your iPod or iPhone to 128 kbps on the fly instead of loading the full 256 kbps songs that you get from the iTunes Store. 

All-in-all, iTunes 9.1 is a modest feature update, but performance seems to be enhanced, and to me that is an unsung hero of the feature list.

Yahoo! Search for iPhone has Inquisitor DNA

Back in the day before Snow Leopard, there was a lovely little search replacement for Safari called Inquisitor. Back in may of 2008, Yahoo! acquired the rights to Inquisitor, and ported the browser extension to Firefox and IE. Unfortunately, due to changes in the Snow Leopard version of Safari, Inquisitor no longer works in Apple’s browser.

About a year later, this handy little app was also made into an iPhone app, which was a quick and easy way to perform a search on the iPhone. Seriously, it was fast and didn’t seem to require as many taps to get things done. However, just as Inquisitor faded into obscurity on Snow Leopard equipped Macs, a change in iPhone OS 3.0 caused Inquisitor to type everything in the search bar in all caps. This didn’t appear to affect search results, but as Yahoo! never addressed the issue, it looked as if this app would be neglected. 

(I’ll admit that I am a stickler for perfection, and an annoying all caps bug was the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me. I quit using the app solely for this reason. Yes, I’m a snob)

It appears that Yahoo! has breathed new life into everything but the Inquisitor brand. On March 23, 2010, Yahoo! released Yahoo! Search, and you can definitely tell this app’s daddy is Inquisitor. The similarities are unmistakable. See for yourself.

Even the icon is similar, with only color changes being the obvious difference.

But differences are abundant between the two apps. The new Yahoo! Search can display maps as you search. Entering Starbucks as a search term yielded (ironically) a Google map (I assume using the built in iPhone Maps API) showing Starbucks stores nearly my current location. Enter a stock symbol such as AAPL and you’ll see the current stock price and whether it has gone up or down. Enter a movie title and see showtimes at theaters near you. 

Overall, it is refreshing to see the Inquisitor app live on in this new name. I do, however, find it odd that the original Inquisitor iPhone app is still available on the App Store. As for Inquisitor for web browsers, I haven’t kept up on the news of its support for Firefox and IE (as I don’t use those browsers) but I think it is safe to say that the Safari version has reached the end of its life. And that is truly a shame. 

 I honestly think it is too bad that Apple didn’t acquire the technology long ago. Hopefully Yahoo! can keep it alive.

iPad Already Putting Nails in Flash's Coffin

Just a tasty little nugget from Macrumors:

…if you visit CBS.com using the iPad SDK Simulator or spoofing your browser’s User-Agent to impersonate an iPad, you are sent to a different version of the video: [image]

This new version of the video does not yet work but appears to be based on HTML5. The css filesreference HTML5 and have a number of “webkit” specific calls. Webkit is the browser engine used in the iPad’s mobile safari. While the videos don’t currently play, the “fullscreen mode” reportedly already works in the iPad simulator.

and:

Apple has been a strong proponent of HTML5 and has suggested it as an alternative solution to Flash. It appears at least one major network will be supporting HTML5 alongside Flash video to deliver their content at iPad launch.

Imagine if Hulu were to do something like this. I can’t wait for most of the Internet to transition away from Flash.

9 Years of Mac OS X

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the release of Mac OS X. I’ll admit that my knack for early adoption of technology hadn’t bitten me quite yet 9 years ago, so I was still on OS 9 at the time. I actually didn’t jump to OS X until 10.2 Jaguar in 2003, when I bought my first Mac that I could truly call my own when I went to college. 

I remember how much it changed my outlook on how to use a computer. Everything seemed much more simplified and colorful. It was a rich experience that made computing fun. I also remember starting my college experience by ditching Internet Explorer for Mac in favor of the brand new Safari browser from Apple. A browser I still use as my primary window to the Internet every day, whether that is on my Mac or my iPhone.

Two months into my college career, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was released, bringing with it a lovely feature called Exposé. This little bit of software allowed Mac users to see all open windows at once by tapping the F9 key. F10 would show you all windows within the current application, and F11 would push all windows aside to reveal the desktop. On current Mac keyboards, the F3 key has been assigned the duty of handling Exposé, with control-F3 performing windows within the current app and command-F3 whisking windows aside for desktop viewing.

In April 2005, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came upon the scene, bringing Dashboard widgets and Spotlight search. Dashboard is a nice way to see little mini-apps that provide a quick burst of specific information such as current weather, stock prices, or what is on your calendar for the day. Spotlight proved to be the shining gem for me, as I much prefer searching for a file rather than digging through Finder. I also quickly learned to use Spotlight as a quick application launcher.

Apple isn’t often credited as having a major OS X release in this fashion, but in January 2006 Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.4, which included support for the latest iMac and the new MacBook Pro, which utilized Intel processors. Even though 10.4.4 is numbered as an incremental release instead of a major release, I think it is fair to say that supporting the same OS on two entirely different architectures is a milestone accomplishment.

October 2007 brought forth Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard after a 6 month delay due to Apple needing to borrow engineers to get the iPhone ready for prime time. 10.5 changed mainly the appearance of OS X. Many of the default apps on the Mac took on the user interface theme, the menubar was given the option of subtle transparency, icons jumped from a size of 128x128 pixels to 512x512 pixels, and the Dock took on a 3D look. Overall, Leopard took steps to bring polish to Mac OS X, but Apple was just getting started with tidiness.

In August 2009 Apple took Leopard and refined it. Mac OS X 10.6 was released, featuring very little in the aspect of marketable features. The big features were tidiness. PowerPC processor support was dropped, and many components of OS X were optimized. This process shaved off 7 GB of the standard install size of OS X. The Finder was rewritten from the ground up from Carbon to Cocoa, and OS X became fully 64-bit. Also, Snow Leopard allows developers to easily optimize their apps for multi-core processors, and to even hand off processing tasks from the central processing unit to the graphical processing unit. The result is a much leaner, faster OS X. I believe Apple took these steps to also put things in place to build upon newer features for future versions.

Out of the 9 years of OS X, I have enjoyed 7 of them as an avid user, usually moving to the latest and greatest version of the OS on the day of release. I can’t wait to see what is next.

Hard Drive Failure is a When, Not an If

I know I’ve harped about backing up your data many times, but it’s something that can’t be stressed enough. Why? Because no one listens. Even people I know with Macs running Time Machine — the most drop dead easy solution I’ve seen — forget to plug in or power on those external hard drives for weeks to months on end. So I’m going to take the Louisville Slugger to the proverbial dead horse, yet again.

I was reminded of all this yet again from one of my favorite writers, John Gruber. He experienced a hard drive failure a few days ago. Thankfully, he was prepared. And he was nice enough to chronicle his data restoration adventure for you. You can read it here. Go read it. Pay particular attention to the seven bullet points at the end. I’ll wait while you read it.

Good. Take all of that to heart. Go buy a hard drive. Or a few.

Now, plug in your external drive and run a backup. Rinse. Repeat.