AirPorts, Friends, & Movies

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In addition to iOS 5, iCloud, OS X Lion, iWork, and iPhoto updates today, Apple has also released (at least) three other new apps in the App Store.

  • AirPort Utility: This is a welcome app for me. You can completely set up and manage a wireless network consisting of Time Capsules, AirPort Extremes, or AirPort Expresses. I’ve been working with my church to build out a building-wide wireless network, and being able to use my iPhone or iPad to manage things around the building will be far easier than walking around with my MacBook Pro.

    This also further opens the door for someone to use just an iPad as their main computer, something I know a few friends are planning to do for their parents.

  • Find My Friends: This lets you easily find friends and family who have shared their location with you, either permanently or temporarily. This could be great for impromptu meet ups, but it will be really nice for my wife & I. Let’s say I’m at a meeting, and my wife needs me to stop at the store. Sometimes, I get that text from her right as I’m pulling in the driveway. Now, she could check first to see whether I’m close to home or not.

  • iTunes Movie Trailers: Not only does this provide a nice way for you to watch movie trailers, but you can pop them up on an Apple TV with AirPlay, and you can check show times at local theaters, and share those with friends via email or twitter. I’m a movie nut, so having a highly polished app for showtimes and trailers is very welcome.

Preparing for iOS 5 and iCloud

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Tomorrow Apple will undertake what is likely the most ambitious software launch in the company’s history. Tomorrow will see the release of iOS 5, OS X Lion 10.7.2, updates to various supporting apps, and the biggest thing since iTunes — iCloud.

It would be prudent to make some preparations for all of this. First, let’s talk iPhones, iPads, & iPods.

iOS 5

iOS 5 is Apple’s latest software for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It has loads of new features that you’ll want. Best of all, it’s free.

The first thing you’ll need for putting iOS 5 on your device is iTunes 10.5, which was released earlier today. I would sync each of your devices before upgrading to iOS 5, as that will create a backup. And just for kicks, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to import your camera roll to your computer, as part of iCloud will include significant changes to how photos are handled within iOS. More on that in a bit.

Also, make sure you check for updates to your apps and install them. Apple is approving app updates like gangbusters right now because developers are adding iOS 5 compatibility. If you have an update for an app that lists fixes for iOS 5 and you don’t install them, don’t complain if the app breaks. Install the updates, okay?

Okay, after all that is done, get a good night’s sleep and plug your device in tomorrow afternoon, wait for it to show up in iTunes, then select the device in the sidebar, and click the big Check for Updates button. Then let iTunes update your device while you get a snack.

After you’re all updated, you can enjoy never having to physically plug your iPhone to your computer for syncing again, as long as you have Wi-Fi. From now on you can sync over your home Wi-Fi, backups happen wirelessly with iCloud, and future iOS updates will be pushed over the air to your device.

iCloud

Where iTunes was the digital hub for the past decade, iCloud is the hub for the next decade or so. iCloud will hold onto copies of your purchased music, TV shows, apps, & books, device backups, contacts, calendars, notes, reminders, documents, photos, and email.

You get a free @me.com email address, which is ad-free to boot. Apps that take advantage of iCloud will be able to sync their data between your devices, as well. iCloud also features location services such as being able to find and lock down a lost device, and even find family & friends that have given you permission to see their location. All in all, iCloud is Apple’s big new amazing technology that will make us feel like we live in the future.

After you update to iOS 5, you will be able to set up iCloud and all its nifty services from the Settings app.

OS X Lion 10.7.2

Ah yes, the Macintosh. The original digital hub. With the advent of iCloud, the Mac has been “demoted” to just another device, and OS X Lion 10.7.2 will bring all the advantages of iCloud with it — including that ability to find and lock down a lost Mac.

The Mac is known for its iLife suite, and part of that will see a little upgrade tomorrow, too. iPhoto 9.2 will include iCloud’s Photo Stream. Take a picture with your iPhone, it shows up in mere moments on your Mac.

A Note for MobileMe Users

If you are a MobileMe user, you’ve probably heard that iCloud is succeeding MobileMe. You’ll still get email, and syncing for calendars, contacts, & bookmarks. You still get Find my iPhone. But a few things aren’t making it. iDisk and Gallery are going away. They are sort of being replaced by Documents in the Cloud and Photo Stream, respectively. And if you’re a multi-Mac user who used MobileMe to keep dock items, Dashboard widgets, and keychains in sync — well, those are going away, too.

But honestly, things like iDisk, and the syncing for dock, Dashboard, & keychains — they never really worked well. So, when you migrate to iCloud, be prepared. On the bright side, iCloud is likely to work much more effectively, and hey, it’s free. Enjoy it.

Tomorrow is a big day. Things are about to get a lot more awesome.

¶ Remembering Steve

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Hero
Hero

Earlier this evening, I was at my church helping the worship team prepare for this coming Sunday’s service. I was running the iMac that we use for showing lyrics and video, and for recording the sermon. My iPhone was next to the keyboard, and it lit up to notify me of a text from a friend, which contained a solemn link.

One tap later, my heart sank. Sadness came over me. I wasn’t even sure what to think.

Steve Jobs has passed away.

I am still unsure of what to say. I’ve spent the past couple hours being busy with my duties as a daddy, getting my son to bed. Then I sat down and slowly read through my twitter timeline. Everyone — everyone — I follow is remembering Steve tonight.

Steve truly changed the world. He has left a legacy in the lives of anyone who has used a computer, whether that is Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and the list goes on. None of it would have been the same without a young man’s vision of the future in a garage in Palo Alto in the early ‘70’s.

In 2005, Steve delivered the commencement address at Stanford, and the following is very fitting today:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Seth Godin writes tonight:

It’s one thing to miss someone, to feel a void when they’re gone. It’s another to do something with their legacy, to honor them through your actions.

And Sebastiaan de With writes:

If you want to honor Steve, don’t mourn. Do your best work every day. Live your life to the fullest. Never settle. His spirit lives on.

We have nothing to lose in this life except life itself. Follow your heart. Never settle. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Zero Dollars

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3GS

Another little tidbit of news is that the iPhone 3GS is still for sale, but now for the wallet-busting price of free. Granted, there’s a two-year contract attached to that, and only available on AT&T. Still, for anyone who was holding out because they considered the iPhone too expensive, well, it’s now less than the price of lunch.

Wonder how Android is going to fare over the next year…

¶ S

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Turns out I wasn’t too far off on my late-night predictions yesterday.

The iPhone 4S sports an A5 processor, 8MP camera with vastly improved optics, and 1080p video recording with stabilization. It also features an AI assistant called Siri. It looks exactly like the iPhone 4, which is great because the the iPhone 4 is awesome. It has an improved antenna that can handle both CDMA & GSM frequencies, and is coming to Verizon, AT&T, & newcomer Sprint on October 14.

iOS 5, iCloud, & OS X Lion 10.7.2 will be dropping on October 12. And iCloud did get one more new feature: Friends & Family. This looks like it could be kind of neat for my wife to able to see how close I am to home before calling me to tell me to stop at the store.

And the iPod nano and iPod received very slight revisions. The nano no longer needs a dongle for Nike+ and has more clock faces to choose from since some people have taken to using them as watches. The touch now comes in white (seriously, I don’t think anything has changes as far as specs).

However, I was wrong about the iPod classic. It lives on for yet another year.

¶ Predictions

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It's the eve before Apple's big reveal on the new iPhone. I always like to give a few predictions, of which I am usually terribly short-sighted or flat-out wrong. So I'm going to try to be a little more conservative this year, and just give my gut feelings on the some of the rumors.

  • We will see a new iPhone, and it will be available very soon.
  • We will get a release date for iOS 5, iCloud, and OS X 10.7.2. I would wager a couple days prior to the release of the new iPhone.
  • iCloud will have one more really awesome thing to make it that much more of a big deal. I have no idea what that may be, but I have a hunch. Come on, this is Apple's baby for the next decade.
  • We'll hear some news about refreshed iPods for the holidays. Nothing major. The classic will be dispatched to its Great Reward.

Magical Weather

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I’m a bit of a weather nut, and I primarily get most of my forecast needs from the excellent My-Cast for iPhone. But sometimes I am using my iPad and want to check the hourly or daily forecast, yet the iPad doesn’t even come with a built-in weather app.

I’ve tried a few different apps, and my current favorite is the newly released Magical Weather by Sophiestication. Magical Weather is a gorgeous weather station providing the essentials for current weather at a glance. You can check weekly forecasts by sliding a panel up, and hourly by pulling that panels out from the side. There’s also beautiful animations that reflect the current conditions.

It’s a buck in the App Store for a limited time. Check it out.

¶ The New Kindles

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There is no doubt that my favorite company is Apple. Amazon, however, is a close runner-up. One of the driving forces of that is their Prime membership. It’s a fantastic deal if you order often from Amazon. Since getting Prime, my wife and I order just about anything from Amazon that is cheaper than buying locally. Heck, I even get my razor blades off Amazon with the added bonus of frustration-free packaging.

But I like Amazon for more reasons, and one of those is the Kindle. My parents gave me a Kindle 2 a couple years ago and it has been a great way for me to enjoy books. My wife likes our Kindle for reading while at the gym. And recently, our local libraries have added support for borrowing eBooks via Kindle. The Kindle is to books what the iPod has been to music for me.

Now, wait, I have an iPad, as well. Surely that is good for reading books? Well, it is, but the Kindle has its advantages. John Gruber’s thoughts reflect my own:

I got a Kindle about a year ago, and I use it much more than I expected to. I like reading on e-ink. I look at glowing backlit displays all day, every day. I’ve been obsessed with computers my whole life. I love glowing screens. When I’m away from my computer for days, I’m happy when I sit down in front of it. There’s a certain feeling I get when I use any computer — a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, my TiVo, even an ATM or the credit card slider at the supermarket. Cool, a computer.

I read books on my iPad, too, but reading on the iPad doesn’t have the same mental-mode-switching effect. When I read with the iPad I feel like I’m doing the same basic thing I do as I read on my Mac all day long — just with a different device. It’s more pleasant, in many ways, and definitely more personal. But I’m still in the same mental mode — fully aware that anything and everything is just a few taps and few seconds away.

E-ink feels peaceful to me. The Kindle doesn’t feel like a computer. It feels — not to the touch but to the eyes and mind — like a crudely-typeset and slightly smudgily-printed paper book. That’s a good thing. Battery life is un-computer-like as well: Amazon measures e-ink Kindle battery life in months, and they’re not joking. It’s a surprise when the Kindle actually needs a charge. I was a doubter until I owned one, but now I’m convinced that e-ink readers have tremendous value even in the post-iPad world.

The Kindle brings a different mood and mindset to reading. In a nutshell, I prefer web browsing and reading articles on my iPad (and my Mac). But when it is time to read a long-form book, I prefer the Kindle.

The New e-Ink Kindles

One thing I don’t care for about my Kindle 2 is the wasted space taken up by the physical keyboard, which rarely gets used. Amazon finally ditched the keyboard from their baseline Kindle. Instead, when you do need to type, you use the d-pad to navigate around an on-screen keyboard. Certainly not very elegant, but I would trade the physical keyboard for a more compact reader, and I think many other folks would consider it a fair trade-off. And at a jaw-dropping $79, I think a lot of people will be getting new Kindles.

The elegant solution, however, comes in the form of the Kindle Touch (3G variant). The Kindle Touch dispenses with most hardware buttons and relies on an infrared e-ink touchscreen, like Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch. At $99 ($149 for 3G), this is going to be the Kindle everyone actually wants. This Kindle has all the fantastic qualities about reading on an e-ink display, without all the clunkiness of previous Kindle models’ cheap-feeling buttons.

Needless to say, my Kindle 2 is in serious jeopardy of being replaced by a Kindle Touch.

The Kindle Fire

Amazon has dipped their toe into diversifying the Kindle family outside of e-ink readers. The Kindle Fire is a 7-inch LCD touchscreen tablet, playing to the strengths of Amazon’s music, video, app, and book offerings. All for $199. It runs Android, but you wouldn’t know it from the complete customization Amazon has done. In fact, the only mention of the word Android is in the Amazon Appstore for Android.

I’ve already seen many people saying the Fire will eat the iPad’s lunch, but I don’t think so. Marco Arment explains:

It’s definitely going to compete with the iPad for some customers, but I doubt it’s going to make a significant dent. It’s probably a high-end Kindle, not a low-end iPad. But this will almost certainly hinder the already negligible sales of other Android tablets.

What we’ll see with the iPad depends on why people buy iPads. My theory is that there’s an iPad market, not a “tablet market” — that people want the iPad and specifically seek it out without comparing it to other tablets.

The iPad was never positioned by Apple as just a “content consumption” device. The media did that. Apple kicked off the original iPad with the entire iWork suite, and on it’s first birthday added iMovie and GarageBand to the mix. And don’t forget the thousands of developers who have made fantastic creative apps for the iPad.

In contrast, Amazon demoed the Kindle Fire entirely as a device for enjoying content. They tacitly tack on at the end of the feature list that is has an email client — which is hardly much in the way of content creation.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Kindle Fire will be a great device. In fact, I think it will be the first great Android device, and I think it will harm its fellow Android tablets more than it will the iPad. The iPad targets one aspect of the market, and the Kindle Fire targets a different one. Unfortunately for companies like Motorola and Samsung, they and Amazon are targeting the same market. And Amazon knows how to sell to people.

If you’re thinking of picking up one of the new Kindles, I just wanted to let you know that all the Amazon links within the articles are my affiliate links. A purchase through one of those links helps keep the lights on for this site.