I’m glad that streaming the keynote turned out not to be part of a huge PR plan, and mostly just a nod to the fans. (It’s not like they thought streaming the keynote only to Apple devices was gonna convince PC-using iPhone owners to buy a Mac. That’s a job for the Windows version of iTunes.) I hope they didn’t see it as a full-scale test of their video streaming architecture, because by the second half-hour it started blinking and skipping on me — but I guess there are vastly different constraints when it comes to streaming live video.

Although, considering how trigger-happy QuickTime is when it comes to beginning to play a video while it’s loading, even though it hasn’t buffered enough to last for more than ten seconds, I wouldn’t want to be watching rented videos on an Apple TV. But I digress.

iOS

The first thing I typed into my Twitter client was “Today Apple killed photography." (I am among those who despise HDR when it’s used poorly, and find that it’s almost always used poorly.) Then Steve showed examples and I stayed my hand. It is possible to make good photography using HDR, if you don’t abuse the filtering, and it looks like iOS 4.1 may be erring on the conservative side here. You can be sure I’ll do some extensive testing when I get the update on my iPhone.

Game Center is nothing we didn’t expect, but the same can’t be said of that Epic Games demo. Better place the Playstation team on suicide watch tonight, because those visuals were stunning. (But damn those stupid virtual-stick controls.) Sure, if you play this game on your iPhone, I expect your battery will be empty in an hour and you’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere with no means of communication — but this is all about the iPod touch as a game platform.

As for iOS 4.2 for iPad, I’m guessing it will be the first time I can’t resist installing a beta OS on one of my devices — can’t wait for multitasking until November. I was afraid for a while that Apple intended to keep the segregation going between iPhone and iPad, to maintain separate version numbers for each (which would have been insanely dumb), but it sounds like 4.2 will also bring new functionality to the iPhone (starting with AirPlay), so I figure it should exist for iPhone.

I kinda hoped there would be more enhancements, or tweaks, to the multitasking dock and home screen folders, though, to make better use of the iPad’s form factor. Oh well.

iPod shuffle

It’s always nice when Apple can admit that it made a mistake. Well, not exactly “admit” nor “mistake,” but they can just come back and fix it. So… yeah, buttons.

iPod nano

That form factor just looks insanely inconvenient to me. Holding this tiny thing between your fingers while fiddling with the on-screen controls… I’m sad that Steve actually made a joke about wearing it as a wristwatch, because that’s in fact the only way it would be convenient to use. I think it’s an actual missed opportunity.

Instead, we get the rotating-screen gimmick, which is cute, but dictates a square form factor that’s not gonna help watching videos. Oh, wait, this thing doesn’t play videos at all anymore — you’re just expected to buy an iPod touch instead.

I never thought it made much sense to watch videos on a Nano, but it still a little weird to go from the 2009 model that can play and shoot videos to the 2010 version that does neither. (And I always thought there was a market for the Nano as a camcorder. But maybe I’m wrong and real-world users didn’t actually use it.)

iPod touch

Nothing unexpected here, I’m just curious to hold one; the previous Touch was already impressively thin, and the thinner those devices the more they feel like magical artefacts — Harry Potter playing cards (especially with the Retina display).

iPod classic

Well, it’s still on the site even though it didn’t get the faintest mention in the keynote. I find more significant, however, that it doesn’t appear in the iPod comparator page either. It’s clear that Apple only reluctantly keeps it in the store until it becomes pratical to offer a 128GB iPod touch. (Which I assume should be next September.)

I’m sincerely curious as to what would be the reason not to just make a separate iPod touch line with 160GB and 250GB drives. Or did they do too much SSD-optimization on iOS for that to work?

iTunes 10

Oh god, like, whatever.

Just who approved those window control widgets?

And you better hope that Facebook already infringes on some Apple patents, or there’s a lawsuit coming. Never mind that I don’t think Facebook should have been able to patent the news feed concept; the Ping pages might as well have been ripped straight from an Apple engineer’s Facebook account, CSS and all.

Apple TV

I actually burst out laughing when Steve showed the photo comparing the older and new model’s sizes. Most of the changes — including the price — had leaked in the last few weeks, so there wasn’t much to be surprised about, yet nobody thought it would be that small. The drastic simplification of the device is a great idea, and at this price it’s getting hard to argue against buying it (if you have a living room TV, which I don’t). The interface is terribly bland, though; I’d even take the very first Apple TV’s navigation over this.

If it weren’t for Netflix (not that it applies to us in Europe), the rental prices would be a joke. Prices so low you can afford to rent the same video several times and it’ll still be cheaper than buying it, the guy said. Well, at $0.99 the TV show episode, you’ve got to be some serious OCD bean counter to agree.

As for AirPlay, is it anything other than a license to add a "Buy an Apple TV" button on all iPods and iPhones?

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Oh, it’s smaller than I expected. Oh, it’s heavier. Oh, it’s shinier and I really don’t like to see my face in it. Oh, and the pixels are so big and pixely, and there are no goddamn folders on the home screen (that’s much worse than the lack of multitasking).

And, well, I love it.

Like the iPhone 4 (and much more so), the iPad looks better in person. The overall proportions, the bezel’s size, everything, is much more appropriate to its real size than to blown-up photos on apple.com. It just looks really nice, and works fine (excepted for the aforementioned lack of iOS 4), and damn if this isn’t the best netbook ever imagined, let alone manufactured.

The first few minutes were really a bit hard for me, mostly because of iPhone 4 — this post’s first paragraph accurately describes my reaction step by step. But once I installed and sifted through all the many, many apps I had on my account, I was convinced: I love this thing in just about exactly the way I expected to.

The lack of iOS 4 is a torture, and it’s going to be really painful next year when they introduce the new model with a Retina screen and more RAM (which is why I didn’t get the 3G model this year — actually, I realized today that, contrary to what I had assumed so far, they could very well introduce a new model this fall, in tandem with the availability of iOS 4). But this thing is great, and fully satisfying, as it is already.

I’ll spare you the rest of the superlatives, because everything’s already been written about this thing in the past two months. Just know that everything’s true, and it is worth buying (assuming that the resale value next year will be good — and unless, of course, you never ever spend any time idling in your couch or bed, as those are definitely the settings the iPad is made for).

Just a double nitpick to justify my salary: First, the screen spinning every single time you put the iPad down on a table (because the movement itself is interpreted by the accelerometer as an orientation change) is really annoying, and I wonder if having a gyroscope like in the iPhone 4 would help.

Second, and related, it’s really annoying, when you want to quit an app, to find out that you’ve ended up with the Home button on top. When I read about the development prerequisites (it is pretty much forbidden to have an app that supports portrait but not upside-down portrait), I thought it was a weird idea; I was right.

(Although it is convenient that you can read a magazine with the iPad resting on your lap while charging, with the power cord pointing out the top rather than digging into your thighs. But that would have been solved by putting the dock port somewhere else or engineering it differently.)

After the break: all the apps you should or shouldn’t download.

{lire la suite sur le blog}

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I still don’t like the design, but it doesn’t look as bad in real life as in a photograph — the device is just too small and thin and tight for you to start noticing the seams; as soon as you hold it in your hand, the very first thing that’s striking is how masterful the engineering is. There isn’t a micron of wasted space, not the tiniest gap in the assembly; you can just feel that everything fits together better than if it had been sculpted in a single block of marble.

The second thing you notice, though, is that it’s uncomfortable to hold. I don’t know, some people don’t seem to mind, but I don’t really like having it my hand: it’s way too angular. Touching it and holding it just confirms the impression that Apple has simply decided to sell the innards of their new phone as a module, a black box, that you’re supposed to clip into interchangeable covers.

Which turns out to be true in more ways than one (I couldn’t personally reproduce the reception drop when touching the bottom of the frame, but I always intended to buy a Bumper for it anyway, because I don’t want to be touching the antenna at all times).

At first glance, the Retina screen is noticeable, but not that impressive — that is, until you start running apps that really take advantage of it. Most obvious is Safari: it’s properly amazing to load up my blog and be able to read the small text without having to zoom. But the biggest shock came once I re-synced my photo library, updated for the higher resolution: I didn’t expect it to make a huge difference, but it does. What you have with the iPhone 4 is, simply, a slab of interactive photo paper in your hand — the most stunning way to display your photographs (until the iPad gets a higher-resolution screen in a year or two). The first iPhone already felt a lot like science-fiction, but this goes that much further.

And there’s the camera, which was my second reason to upgrade (after the CPU power — I’m coming from an old 3G — and before the screen, which is gorgeous but not exactly indispensible): being able to make good photos at any time, and capture high-def video.

The iPhone absolutely delivers on both of those fronts, and I’m probably going to post stuff (as in, cat videos) to YouTube semi-regularly. (Although it’s really annoying that you have to download the video to your computer first if you want to upload to YouTube as proper 720p; posted straight from the iPhone, it’s over-compressed. Thus making iMovie for iPhone perfectly useless.)

Upgrading from an iPhone 3G is a no-brainer (as is switching from another phone; Android phones aren’t going to catch up in any way that matters before iPhone 5 comes out). If you have a 3GS, it’s probably a tough decision — the majority of apps will work just as well for you, but the screen is an actual usability boost, and the video camera brings definite value. The best reason to stick to a 3GS is certainly that the iPhone 4 will make you look at your computer’s big obnoxious pixels with disgust (and, what’s worse, your iPad’s as well).

It used to be that Apple’s product cycle relied on making your device feel obsolete after ten months, when the new version was introduced, but with the iPhone 4 they’ve definitely fucked the iPad’s early adopters.

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Hrm. The RSS feeds I use to import my tweets onto the blog have been broken all day. If that lasts, you won’t get digests here anymore and have to follow me on @garoo.

But it better not last, because it’s not acceptable for my tweets to be locked into Twitter — I am not going to make an OAuth app just for that, and Twitter over OAuth is completely broken anyway.

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Back then I wrote that it was unpossible Apple would go with this design. Guess I lost that one. I acknowledge the validity of Steve’s explanation for the seams in the metal casing, it’s clever (and more importantly I appreciate his addressing the complaint of how un-Apple-like that thing looks), but I’m still not happy with it.

On the other hand, I’ve got the hots for the high-resolution screen (despite the ridiculous name), the processor and battery life, and the 720p video capture (which we should have expected, but forgot to). Pretty on the inside, and a pretty face as well (as in, the screen), so all in all I’ll forgive the unimaginative body and pre-order mine as soon as I can.

FaceTime: Don’t care, never have, never will. Not surprised that it’s wifi-only “for now,” but wondering why it isn’t called iChat, and doesn’t interface with iChat. Is AT&T really trying to pretend that people aren’t using every possible medium rather than spending money to send SMSes? (Actually, I’m afraid I have to admit it would make a difference if the Apple included an internet-based text messaging system on the iPhone. So it does make sense.)
I’m also really curious as to how they’ve implemented the system: your contact list will apparently know automatically, without any input from either party, which of your contacts have iPhones 4. Are you happy with Apple having (presumably) a secret list of all the phone numbers of iPhone 4 users? More to the point — is that quite legal in every territory where the iPhone is available?

Retina display: So, yeah, that name is only a little less stupid than “FaceTime.” I never dreamed that existing applications would be allowed to take advantage of it, without the developers even needing to recompile and resubmit their apps. I can’t wait to see this thing in real life, through my defective… retinas.
Even without the other additions, this alone would make me drool for the iPhone 4.

720p video recording and 5MP camera: I’m not willing to make any judgment based on the samples posted on Apple’s site; what matters is that you always have your iPhone in your pocket, so it doesn’t matter how much it can or can’t approximate the results of a professional camera (well, it matters if iPhone shots do look like they come from high-end cameras). Now that iMovie is ported to the iPhone (which, wow) comes a burning question: how the hell are you supposed to live with an iPhone limited to 32GB?

iBooks was fully expected, and should indeed go along splendidly with a high-resolution screen. Interesting, by the way, that it’s now a full-fledged PDF reader — I’m not even sure I should still bother with my plans for a fanzine publishing app for iOS (ugh, also) devices.

I can’t imagine for what purpose a gyroscope would ever be necessary. But, hey, Wii Motion Plus has got one, and everybody says Apple is the new Nintendo, so gotta have one too.

I find it pretty interesting that Google remains the default search engine in Safari, despite the introduction of Bing and the praise it just got from Jobs. Or is it contractual? Now that I think about it, maybe the iPhone’s access to Maps et al. is tied with Google being the default search engine.

I hate that there’s a version with a white faceplate, because some apps’ design (case in point, the app I’m working on right now) is based on the idea that the screen is surrounded with black, so you can try and mesh with it. So now you have an app in the center, and a tiny black border around it (the white faceplate can never be quite flush with the contents of the screen), and then white. Ugh. Can’t design for that; I’ll just go on with my life as if the white iPhone didn’t exist at all.

And the upshot is: this thing is damn hot, and I can’t wait to get it. Have to see now what upgrade options my carrier is going to offer.

But where’s everything else? Where’s my trackpad? And Safari 5, and MobileMe for free, and so on? I can see the trackpad being silently introduced soon, and Safari being presented by someone else during WWDC, but MobileMe for free — that would be a major functional upgrade for the iPhone, more than worthy of a keynote mention (especially as a weapon in Apple’s cold war against Google). So, not coming this year yet? But it can’t just be a coincidence that the “Full Member” language appeared on MobileMe accounts just a few days before WWDC.

And my trackpad?

My trackpad!

Come on, I want my trackpad!

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N’oubliez pas que votre netbook tout neuf tout beau est proprement inutile si vous n’achetez pas l’indispensable Unicode ! Hop, hop, on clique ! On clique même si on n’a pas encore son iPad, puisque l’application est universelle, et tout aussi indispensable sur iPhone.

(Avec un peu de chance j’aurai bientôt mon propre iPad pour tester l’interface en live et améliorer ce qui pourrait en avoir besoin.)

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No Pic No Dial n’est pas Facebook : la suppression du profil n’est pas cachée, elle n’est pas dissuasive (bon, le site commence par proposer de désactiver temporairement le profil au lieu de le supprimer, mais je vois ça comme un service — je pars du principe qu’une des premières motivations pour supprimer son profil est le fait d’avoir trouvé un mec, et c’est plus simple de désactiver son profil que d’avoir à le recréer un mois plus tard, et oups c’est peut-être un peu cynique / désabusé en fait ?), tout ce que vous avez à faire pour quitter le site, c’est cliquer sur le bouton bien visible dans la page de gestion du profil, et taper votre mot de passe pour confirmer.

Pourtant, une fois par semaine, j’en ai un qui vient me poser la question, parce qu’une fois qu’il a décidé de se désinscrire il ne veut plus chercher. Il a réussi à créer son profil tout seul, à le remplir, à mettre ses photos, à discuter, mais, non, maintenant qu’il veut partir, il est hors de question qu’il se serve de son cerveau.

(Ma réponse était plus longue et aimable, les premières fois, parce que je pensais que ça devait être ma faute, mais elle est devenue de plus en plus laconique au fil des itérations, et la conversation d’aujourd’hui prouve qu’il n’y a pas besoin de plus : son profil a disparu du site dans les dix secondes.)

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I couldn’t find a single page listing all the improvements, so here it goes, app by app (that I care about).

Photoshop: Everybody already knew about content-aware fill, but puppet warp looks extra-fun. (Like everything that uses the new content-aware algorithms, it’s not gonna be enough, by itself, for professional work on photos, but it’s going to be a huge time-saver for everyone.) And I can’t wait to see if the new magical selection is finally the real thing — just like CS4’s new selection tools were supposed to be, and CS3’s (or CS2’s? not sure) Extract filter before it. Someday they’ll give us something that really just works.

Illustrator: Looks like they’re taking a few hints from Flash to simplify vector drawing and compositing, which is great. (“Draw inside” was an amazing revolution when Macromedia introduced it in Flash, like, twenty years ago.) But the most important thing here will be “Align to Pixel Grid”… if it’s also in Photoshop’s vector layers — and I’d bet that will not be the case until CS6.

InDesign: Nothing major, but multiple page sizes in a single document is going to be useful for a project I’m currently thinking about. And I’m quite curious (conceptually, not for practical purposes, of course) about the ability to export to Flash.

Flash: No, of course I don’t care. I’m just curious. Ooh, elaborate text controls with flowing text boxes — I would have been so excited about that, five years ago.

Dreamweaver: Come on, it’s called intellectual curiosity! Besides, if the WordPress / Joomla / Drupal integration really works as you would want it to (there isn’t enough of a description to confirm that), it could be a selling point all by itself.

For that matter, BrowserLab could also be a selling point. It makes a lot of sense for Adobe to offer its own service for previewing your site in different browsers, and it looks like they did it rather well — love the “onion skin” view. (Even though, as sites are more and more interactive, those quick and easy solutions are less and less appropriate for real-world development; nothing can replace testing locally on virtual machines.)

CS Live: Not sure what’s new or not in this list, but what exactly is “Adobe Story”? With a name like this, it should be an editor for movie scripts, but the description doesn’t make it sound like one. Oh, and CS Review sounds like it could be a contender to replace Version Cue as this year’s iteration of the framework that Adobe embeds into all its apps and that you’d pay to be allowed to disable.

But none of that will run on my iMac, of course. And that’s even the suite’s strongest selling point, as I believe it’s the version that’s supposed to have finally been rewritten from scratch in Cocoa and should be stable on Intel machines.

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engadget.com

I can’t figure out why they’re launching those phones under the Microsoft brand. Sure, the Sidekick name is pretty much dead after the recent cloud fiasco (and it belongs to T-Mobile, which is probably not that interested in working with Redmond again), but there are other names, and how can it make sense to anyone that the only phones that directly bear Microsoft’s logo are not really running any of the OSes known Windows? (Yes, according to the articles, technically they are, but nobody cares about that.) If at least the platform was officially known as “Zune phone,” it would be defendable. But a new brand? (With yet another awful name?)

As for the phones themselves, they seem like they would be the ideal teenagerphones… if the iPhone didn’t exist. The interface is nicely visual, and the scrapbook-like mosaic of your friends’ photos is a nice idea — but it seems to be very laggy. And the iPhone does exist.

The “Spot” is a nice concept, and indeed reminiscent of the Courier’s dock/hinge. I just hope that is not the only thing we’ll ever see out of the tablet concept.

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Well, that was rather less spectacular than I expected/hoped — as usual. Congratulations to Apple for the 450,000 iPads sold, that’s a nice number, and for the three million iPad apps sold, of which a whopping fifty sales or so were mine, oh yay.

The preview page on Apple’s site is surprisingly succinct; somewhat appropriate to the amount of changes in the new OS, but not to its version number.

Multitasking: As a developer, I’m not immensely excited by the way they’ve implemented it, because it’s limited to whatever Apple has thought of providing (and I’m incidentally curious to see if/how the API restricts your choices when it comes to VoIP standards and streaming formats). But, as a user, I must admit that it’s somewhat elegant and well designed.

It’s very interesting that location-tracking background processes will be limited to cell tower triangulation instead of having access to the GPS hardware (except for navigation systems, of course); that sounds like a clever way to save power.

And I can’t wait to see how fast application switching is implemented from a developer’s point of view — if it’s simple and reliable enough, it could provide a pretty awesome user experience.

I’m sad, but not really surprised, that none of this will be available on my old iPhone 3G; I always expected that they would have a hard time fitting any kind of multitasking within its limited RAM and CPU. It was time to upgrade anyway.

Folders: Well, that was overdue, wasn’t it? I find the graphics a little odd, and I agree that “Stacks” would have made more sense and been prettier, but who cares when all we ever wanted was some way to organize our goddamn deluge of iPhone apps.

I’m not sure it’s been mentioned, but judging from the 2,160 app limit (surely someone somewhere will manage to reach that ceiling, and possibly complain about it) it seems like you can’t have more than twelve apps per folder; I guess that’s okay. Multiple pages plus multiples folders — and, most important of all, the ability to have folders in the dock — sounds like it should be enough to handle the organizational needs of most people.

Mail: His Steveness had pre-announced the unified inbox not long ago, so no surprise there. And I’m not sure I’ve ever even tried to have Mail display message threads on my Mac. In short, unlike Jobs, I don’t really “live in Mail” so I don’t care too much as long as I can receive messages and occasionally reply to them.

iBooks: Obviously.

Enterprise: Interesting that, still today, business improvements get mentioned prominently at the keynote, and even deserve a whole separate page on Apple’s site. I guess, with businesses finally beginning to acknowledge non-BlackBerry, non-Windows smartphones, this isn’t the time to let Android slip into any cracks.

I’m curious about the data encryption APIs, and surprised that SSL VPNs weren’t already available.

Game Center: What? Now I didn’t see that coming. (Funny, it’s not mentioned on Apple’s page.) If there’s one thing I would never have envisioned Apple getting into, it’s automatic matchmaking and game achievements.

That’s good news because I hate most existing “networks” on the iPhone (OpenFeint et al., with the exception of Facebook Connect, which absolutely every game should integrate), and even better news in that it shows that Apple is actually listening, sometimes, to all those game developers that have been invited to iPhone keynotes over the years.

Who knows, that recent patent for a PSP-like shell to snap around your iPhone could actually be a real upcoming product.

iAd: Really, that’s one of the seven “tentpoles” (ugh) of OS 4.0? By which I mean, really, it’s part of the OS at all? That’s just weird, and awkward, and ethically dubious, and this whole thing rubs me in a lot of wrong ways.

It makes me wonder if they’re not running this thing, not because they want to profit, but purely and solely in order to fuck with Google some more. And, on some level, I think I’d rather that was really their main motivation.

Yet, for all the borderline abuse of monopoly, it’s going to be really convenient for developers, so I have to acknowledge that it does have merit. Still, ugh.

And what wasn’t there: No new iPhone. Which, apparently (I can’t be bothered to remember or check), is the usual way Apple handles those iPhone OS announcements.

But, if Apple was a couple of months away from launching an iPhone HD — which would undoubtedly require a little work from third-party developers to take advantage of the extra pixels — you’d think the release of a beta SDK would be a perfect time to mention it.

Just before the keynote, John Gruber predicted:

If I’m right that the next-gen iPhone will have a 960 × 640 display, they might start talking about higher-res iPhone apps today, and spin it as a way to make iPhone apps look sharper when run on iPads.

Yes, that would have made sense, wouldn’t it.

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The selection is more and more random, as apps are pretty much public now, there are apparently thousands of them (with each new estimate my hopes of striking gold in the Second Great Gold Rush are further dashed), and I just notice some of them and not others.

Twittelator looked ugly and weird on the small thumbnails I’d seen, but real screenshots seem nice. Reading Twitter doesn’t require a full iPad screen (just like you’re not going to run it full-screen on your computer), so having a lot of prettied-up empty space makes perfect sense.

…unless of course you’re a TweetDeck kind of guy. This looks good for power users, if the performance on a real device is adequate (which the developers can’t have tested, obviously). I’m downloading it right away, since it’s free.

Box.net has a — oh my god, run for your lives! — giant Windows icon as a home screen. Guys, who did you think the iPad’s early adopters would be?

Evernote looks prettier than I would have expected. (Though, for the record: blending in with the environment is good, but it becomes an issue when each new declination of the client looks completely different from every other version.) With its syncing abilities and cross-platform compatibility, you’re probably not going to need anything else. Too bad I find the Mac client a little too bloated for my taste, so I’m reluctant to switch.

Weather HD makes a very interesting choice for its home page, with a huge background and a tiny operational window, which works perfectly for the app’s purpose. And the graphics inside are very nice (although some work should probably be done on the text legibility). I’m surprised it isn’t more expensive.

The Wall Street Journal app looks splendid, and I’m glad they let you play a bit with the free version. (I don’t care about the outlandish subscription prices, since I was never going to be interested anyway.)
The New York Times is much less fun. (Okay, “fun” is definitely not the right word there.)

Zen Bound doesn’t make a huge deal of sense to me on the iPad. I know that it was originally on PC, so it was played on even bigger screens, but I just feel that having it in your hand, in the iPhone’s format, was the perfect venue for that game.
And I also feel that its fifteen minutes of fame have passed.

The Gmail web app looks fine and that was nicely reactive of Google. Of course, it will also work on Chrome OS-based tablets, I’m sure.

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Memeo looks lovely (ignoring the exaggerated drop shadows) and makes me want to use Google Apps more. Unless there’s a catch — and there has to be one, if they intend to release an app like this for free.

CourseNotes looks even lovelier and may be my first must-buy if it’s versatile enough. I particularly like how you can apparently set any given article to become a to-do with a due date.

smartNotes feels to me like a dedicated, limited version of Illustrator, and that’s the wrong way to go about it. But there’s probably a market for it, in geeks who wish they had a touch-screen MacBook and bought an iPad without understanding what’s good about it.

Auditorium has nice graphics and evidently records audio while you take notes, which is the only (efficient) way I can imagine for anyone to take notes on an iPad during a meeting or lecture — no matter how big the virtual keyboard is, you’ll never be able to type reliably without keeping your eyes on the screen. And bringing a dock and keyboard along with you isn’t that convenient.

Things for iPad looks pretty and simple, which is a good way to go. Now the question is how well the user interaction has been adapted to the iPad, and whether it’s really worth $20. (I mean, as a standalone, I’m sure it is, but if you’ve already paid for the Mac app?)

The Early Edition looks like a fine way to read RSS news, but I’m sure there will be other offerings with an even more thought-out interface. Not a fan at all of the page slider at the bottom, in particular.

AIM is nice, but who cares?

More App Store leaks: the AP app looks pretty, but weird (i.e., hard to judge from screenshots)

AppStarAwards Finalists: Nothing of interest. (Well, the Thumbelina interactive book looks cute. The iPad is obviously a perfect fit for pop-up books.)

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I’m gonna have to dismiss this dialog for every single app I use that’s based on WebKit. That’s many. And, presumably, I’ll have repeat the entire process on April 2nd when you release an update that un-updates this update.

ClickToFlash is a lifesaver, the best plug-in that was ever written, and it has become essential to my sanity as I browse the web on my old G5 — not to mention the security advantages. I’m forever grateful to everyone involved for creating it. Yet I’ll have to repeat this:

Fuck. You.

(And no, I’m not going to check the auto-update box. I don’t do it for any piece of software, because I like to know what’s happening on my computer — you know, that’s kinda why I’ve installed ClickToFlash in the first place — and I’m especially not gonna do it for developers who like to post frivolous updates. Just because you provide a useful service for free doesn’t give you unlimited access to my computer to do with it whatever you think is hilarious.)

P.S. Oh, and it’s buggy, too. And it’s a known bug that doesn’t deter them from running jokes like this. Fantastic.

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Words with Friends HD makes me want to play Scrabble again — nothing very special about it, it just looks good. But there are really negative comments about the iPhone version (yeah, I do know that scaling servers is hard when you do social stuff) and I wonder if the board’s squares aren’t going to be a little too small for your fingers’ comfort.

Game Table is something I really wish I had thought of doing (well, not really, because then I’d be competing with that app and it looks good enough). No artificial intelligence to program, no hurdles, just a bunch of images that you move with your fingers. It looks nice and, if you’ve got an iPad, why wouldn’t you want to carry a multipurpose board game in your bag?

Design Brief is another app for designers that doesn’t look so good. (And you should remember that, without a stylus, the iPad just isn’t really for designers. Even though designers like to develop for iPhone OS.)

Yellow Pages makes a half-assed attempt at a physical metaphor that I find worse than doing nothing: if you’re gonna pretend that the user is interacting with paper, then I don’t think you can afford to have standard toolbars at the top and bottom. It doesn’t work for your pseudo-book to only have vertical edges.

I have no idea how Globetrotters is supposed to work, but I just can’t imagine it very fun or convenient to have four people play at the same time on one iPad screen. Two people, no problem; four, I think it’s too small.

Air Harp is nice.

Neon wallpapewwwww.

Commandments, an iPad app that only shows the ten commandments. On stone tablets. Well, to be honest, it looks pretty, but… oh, why the hell not.

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Yup, it’s gonna be iPad week (if it wasn’t already last week), and the first official screenshots and demos are coming up. Let’s get our drool on!

Apple guided tours: those aren’t really replicating the magic of the iPhone’s first guided tours; in fact, just like the January keynote, it only really starts to get interesting when you reach the iWork demos — which is unfortunately too late for the nay-sayers who will stop at the first couple of videos (if not earlier).

I hadn’t realized that Videos was a separate app from iPod; that’s interesting. I also hadn’t realized that the iPad is replacing the iPod touch as the perfect home stereo solution for the filthy rich. And, coming back to iWork, I’m confused as to why the iPad doesn’t display the next slide under your fingers when you’re running a presentation on an external screen; I thought Keynote was supposed to do such useful things.

The Yahoo app looks uncharacteristically sleek. Well, it’s not so uncharacteristic when you consider their iPhone app; and seeing as that is just a rebranding of Inquisitor, which they purchased, you can see how the same developer-designer might be at work here. (Gotta love the iPhone OS for bringing back the one-guy shop.)

Bento (there were more screenshots somewhere else at some point, I think) is a perfect fit for iPad, but who’s gonna need it when Numbers has forms?

Twitterific is doing it wrong; enlarging a single timeline view is not functional. But then, Twitepad is doing it worse — so much worse. Which makes me wonder what Seesmic will look like on the… no, it’s not gonna look too good either. Well, what I’m really wondering is why Tweetie’s developer hasn’t said anything about an iPad update, as far as I know. It looks like he’s been focusing on the next Mac version and will probably wait until he can play with an iPad for a while before he starts developing for it, which is perfectly sensible and so frustrating for the users.

And a bunch of stuff: iMockups is a concept that will speak to any designer, but it’s rather ugly and doesn’t look very functional. SketchNotes is okay and I’m certain there will be better implementations of that simple idea. You can barely make out the “2x” button at the bottom of the BuzzVoice demo and the geniuses at Mashable write that “it looks very similar to the iPhone app.” Kobo has some nice touches, but what’s the point when you’re going against both Apple and Amazon on the e-book market.

I could have embedded small screenshots, but if you’re interested in the topic you’ve already watched all the videos.

And I really need to start making videos for my own apps.

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tuaw.com

Upload your apps by 5pm, Saturday, March 27th, and the App review team will e-mail you with submission feedback about the readiness of your application for App Store distribution.

Well, so much for the very sensible speculation that Apple might wait until developers had been able to play with their iPads for a couple of weeks before the iPad App Store actually opened.

Actually, the announcement e-mail is so vague as to when and how the “grand opening” will take place that I wonder if they’re going to look at the quality of the apps and then decide when they’ll be ready to open — estimating when the apps can be good enough not to embarrass them.

Interestingly, though:

Only apps submitted for the initial review will be considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store.

It’s really kind of a tortuous process. Upload your app now and we’ll tell you how far you are from the mark. But if you don’t upload your app right now and wait until you get your iPad, well, you’ll miss the grand opening. Because we emphatically want to see how well you people are doing. Now. Hurry. We wanna know.

Meanwhile, another sensible speculation is denied: I took a look at iTunes Connect, and applications that work both on iPhone and iPad will definitely be one single binary.

I haven’t installed the iPad SDK, so I have no idea if some mechanism makes it simpler for applications to switch context depending on which platform they’re launched on, but I suspect that there’s no such mechanism and you gotta handle it all by yourself.

Which isn’t the most horribly difficult thing with OS X development, but still a hurdle — and a good reason, or excuse, for developers to offer the iPad version of existing iPhone apps as separate downloads… that you’ll have to buy again.

(But then, if the iPad version is actually well designed, it might not be dishonest to ask you to pay for that amount of work.)

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Obviously inspired by Panic’s dream setup that’s been making the rounds for two days. I can’t afford a 46-inch industrial screen (slurp), but I have a Mac mini with a web-based screensaver and I know JSON. (Actually, I didn’t, but that way I got to learn.)

It looks all gray on the photo because everything’s working right and there are no warnings. (Except for the chart of online users on No Pic No Chat, I need to fix the script.) And the photo’s not as cool as Panic’s because, hey, 46-inchers are photogenic, but it’s pretty nice in person.

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Les modes de consommation des RSS changent avec le temps ; mes habitudes d’ēcriture aussi. D’une part, je ne poste plus autant de courts liens qu’ā une ēpoque, et je doute que ça revienne prochainement (en partie grāce ā Twitter, en partie parce que ma façon de bloguer a changē). D’autre part, tout le monde lit ses blogs dans Google Reader, de nos jours, dans une interface qui change des agrēgateurs ā l’ancienne — les articles sont affichēs d’une traite au lieu de vous faire choisir dans une liste (je sais qu’il y a une option pour afficher les articles sous forme de liste, mais qui l’utilise ,), et le rēsultat est plus appropriē aux articles courts. En outre, Twitter a aussi changē les attentes des utilisateurs quant ā la façon de recevoir le contenu.

J’ai donc changē aujourd’hui la façon dont mes feeds gērent les posts courts et liens : le feed principal (index.xml, celui que tout le monde suit) recevra chaque article court dēs qu’il est publiē, au lieu d’attendre un rēsumē quotidien compilē ā minuit. Et, pour ceux qui trouvent que ça fait trop d’articles dans leur lecteur RSS, il y a un feed de rēsumēs (remplacez index.xml par digests.xml) qui reprend le fonctionnement prēcēdent.

Ces modifications ne s’appliquent pas ā mes posts sur Twitter, qui seront toujours repris une fois par jour, parce qu’il est assez clair que, si vous voulez recevoir mes tweets dēs que je les poste, vous devriez me suivre lā oū je les poste.

Tant que j’y suis, le compte Twitter qui prēvient de chaque nouveau post sur mon blog est renommē en @garooRSS (ceux qui le suivaient dējā n’ont rien ā modifier, c’est automatique).

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incident57.com

This. Is. Magical.

If you don’t know what Less is (I didn’t — or I must have heard about it once and promptly forgotten), it’s a Ruby application descended from Heaven to let you write parametric CSS files.

You can set up variables (e.g., color values) in the beginning of your file, reference them everywhere and only have to change the value once when you want to update the look of your entire site. You can do some math on those values (e.g., dimmer or brighter variations of those colors for some elements). You can create helper classes to include into the definition of other classes (e.g., cross-browser shadows or rounded corners), and they can even behave like functions (e.g., take the corner radius as a parameter). More info on lesscss.org.

It becomes annoying, though, in that every time you edit your CSS you have to run the file through a compiler — you can’t just upload the parametric CSS as is, you have to turn it into a regular .css file (at least as far as I know; maybe there is, or will be someday, an Apache plugin or whatever). Nobody wants to have to bother with that, and that’s where this excellent new app comes in: just give it a list of folders containing your .less files, and it will watch them and compile them into .css files every time they’re updated. There you go, .css files ready to be uploaded. (For now, the Less app doesn’t automatically send the compiled files to your FTP program, but the developer assures me that’s coming.)

If you’ve ever maintained somewhat complex CSS files, you know you want this.

A hint: if you want to install the Less compiler on Leopard (the application doesn’t install it by itself, for some reason), you’re going to need one more command-line instruction than documented on lesscss.org.

Also, the compiler can be a little picky about the CSS it wants to compile. For instance, having a comma-separated list of CSS selectors, with some of them commented out, will throw a syntax error. Just work around it.

via daringfireball.net

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Well, that was… something. I just about went through all phases of grief during that one-hour keynote, starting when Steve Jobs announced that name and when, a minute later, the first official screenshot of the iPad’s home screen appeared on the web. Omigod, it’s just a giant iPod touch.

Or is it?

The thing is, Steve Jobs pulled the wool over our eyes from the start, when he said again that netbooks are crap, and it only became evident at the very end, when he announced the list price: the iPad is Apple’s netbook.

That’s what it is and nothing else.

And it’s offered at an okay price for a product you’d define as “Apple’s netbook” — the upper limit of what could be an okay price, but that in itself was to be expected.

It’s not at all what I hoped for, but it’s not just a giant iPod, either — and it’s also noticeably cheaper than I expected. The special version of iWork (I so didn’t see that coming) and the starting price point are what define it as a netbook; as such, it’s not something anyone absolutely needs, but it’s something many people will want, and I’m thinking that a large enough number of those people will buy it. (Of course, unlike netbook makers, Apple will actually make a profit on those sales.)

And if you take the optional 3G plan, that makes it that much more of a bargain. Unlocked device (heh, fool Steve Jobs once…), no contract, very competitive prices? Here’s hoping Apple manages to negotiate equivalent offers in the rest of the world — but if they managed to get AT&T on board, how hard can it be? (It’s kind of a bargain for a carrier to support both iPhone and iPad anyway, as there’s bound to be customer overlap and customers will end up paying twice for the same unlimited data.)

Now, the ball is in Microsoft’s camp, to release the Courier or not. But I’m very afraid Redmond doesn’t have the guts. (Just as afraid as hopeful, really. I need to sell apps on the iPad, so I need to buy an iPad, so that makes the cheap part of me not so eager for Microsoft to offer a decent competitor.)

A few additional thoughts, as usual:

{lire la suite sur le blog}

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kara.allthingsd.com

Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission. That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact.

It’s hard to blame Facebook here. When Apple brags about having 160 million users, with credit card number on file, and decides to sic all of them (and simultaneously) on a Facebook app that will harvest the social network which Facebook took pains to cultivate for years (and for no other purpose than the harvesting itself — unlike, say, Zynga games which bring a lot of page views back to Facebook), you can’t quite fault Facebook for wanting to get some kind of compensation. Apple isn’t building something on top of the Facebook platform here, they’re trying to piggyback and supplant it.

It’s also easy to imagine Steve Jobs deciding — at the last moment, after long, failed negotiations — that Apple is big enough not to need Facebook at all, that it can just as well construct its social graph from scratch. Because that’s how much Steve Jobs and Apple know about social networking: not very.

If Apple is serious about Ping — and they should be, since music recommendations with inline preview have the potential to push a good deal of product — I wager that they’re the ones who will have to give in. Sure, people are signing up for Ping, but if my “entourage”’s experience is any indication, they’re not making a lot of friendship connections and, on Ping more than anywhere, the social graph is where the money’s at.

(I’m assuming that the provision regarding a compensation for extensive use of the API does exist in Facebook’s terms of use, but I see no reason to doubt it — and I’m too lazy to check — because it just makes sense.)

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ilounge.com

According to Apple’s pages, the three-button remotes that were previously integrated into the headphones packaged with the iPod shuffle and iPod touch are now gone; all of the iPods are shown as coming with the same plain old earbuds, which would mean that the iPod touch now needs to rely on its rear-mounted microphone for audio input unless there’s something else hidden inside, or attached as an accessory. Apple’s base model Earphones with Remote + Mic sells for $29 as an upgrade.

Wow, that sucks. It isn’t absurd to make you buy a new set of earphones if you want to use your iPod touch for Skype (although, well, it’s a little absurd in that Apple wants you to use FaceTime), but it’s particularly annoying for the Nano.

In my writeup of the keynote, I was going to say that the new Shuffle had become the only iPod you can conveniently use without looking — whether in your pocket, or while doing something else. Then I edited the words out when I figured that the Nano would have a remote on the earphone cord. Without it, the touch-screen iPods offer terrible UI for real-world usage.

(And I can’t check right now because apple.com is hammered by people who desperately want to play with the new iTunes.)

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engadget.com

I like card stacks — navigating both the list of running applications, and the list of open Safari tabs, is pretty much a chore on iOS, and Palm has a big advantage there by treating each web page as a separate open app (um, I think that’s how it works?). Just Type, or Quicksilver for mobile, is very promising if the API is well structured. And Exhibition, which lets apps display ambient information when the phone is docked, is something iPhone users have been dreaming of for years.

Nothing huge so far, but very nice refinements; I can’t wait to see what devices HP proposes to run this OS on. (Is there any chance at all we could be spared the inevitable iPad clone?)

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slashgear.com

As for those small square things above the bigger cases, those are supposedly for the sixth-generation iPod Nano. The case seems to be created specifically for a touchscreen device, as the entire back of the gadget would be covered, but the whole front would not be. And considering we’ve heard rumors that the new Nano will lose that trackwheel, we’re beginning to think those earlier leaked images of the iWatch (or whatever) were indeed showing off the iPod Nano.

Oh man, it totally is time for an Apple watch, isn’t it? Just have the iPod nano display the time of day (with an OLED screen — where only the active pixels are lit — it may be possible to make the battery last, like, a whole day!), put interchangeable straps of leather on each side and, boom:  Watch.

And, yes, I’d buy it even though I haven’t worn a wristwatch in a year.

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theappleblog.com

I’m reluctant to give my Google account credentials to a third-party app, but having bought an iPhone 4 and iMovie for iPhone in order to make pretty 720p videos [of my cat], I just can’t avoid it.

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sfgate.com

"How could this possibly work?" said IDC Financial Insights analyst Aaron McPherson, adding that eliminating a merchant account is akin to dangling fresh meat for criminals. "They are just so overhyped and it seems to be entirely based on Dorsey’s celebrity."

First time I see anyone actually make sense in a Square writeup. (But the rest of the profile on Jack Dorsey is interesting.)

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slashgear.com

Truth be told, it can all be summed up in just a few sentences: “I’m the last person on Earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that ‘Flash has had its day.’ I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.”

Laughing Out Loud.

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valleywag.gawker.com

"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple." But in fact, as Chen shows, three of Shoemaker’s seven apps went onto the app store weeks after his employment began, according to dates gleaned from Shoemaker’s Twitter accounts and from the iTunes profiles of his apps. In one case, a Shoemaker app was published over a month after Shoemaker started work at Apple; in two other cases, they were published nearly three weeks after his work began.[…]

Shoemaker himself is in the fart-app game with his pre-Apple offering Animal Farts

I don’t give a damn that the guy in charge of the App Store follows escorts on Twitter — it is a bit weird, but none of our business. But, really, Apple hired to direct the App Store a guy who made a fart app, a pee simulator, and poetry magnet apps?

Just… why?

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jquerymobile.com

Great news! jQuery is updating for mobile platforms, I’ll finally be able to use it everywhere again! Oh, wait…

Note that we’re not releasing a separate “mobile only” build of jQuery. The bug fixes and workarounds that we develop will be included directly in mainline jQuery. You will be able to continue using the single script file containing jQuery and get all the benefits of working across all the new mobile browsers. Thus far these changes are only yielding a minimal increase in file size (no more than a couple hundred bytes) and no appreciable change in performance.

Well, that’s great, isn’t it — because jQuery is already too big to fit in most iPhones’ web cache* (meaning it has to be reloaded with every page, meaning page loads are slow, meaning you just can’t use it on an iPhone site**), so bigger is… better than… a mobile-only version… that would have been smaller… and would have worked.

I used to think that jQuery was the work of geniuses. But it seems that no open-source project can ever escape entropy. (It would be so simple to selectively load a different javascript file depending on the platform you’re running on — you know, if you intended to actually optimize for mobile browsers and mobile networks.)

* In case you want to tell me that jQuery is 24KB when gzipped: The object size limitation in Safari is based on the decompressed file. I just downloaded the latest minified jQuery, and it’s 70KB, so it would be cached on no iOS device except the iPhone 4.

** Unless you make it one single page that loads everything in Ajax, which is… well, I think it’s more acceptable on the mobile web than on the desktop, but it’s still poor form. And if you’re doing a full-on web-app, people want App Store apps instead anyway.

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blog.twitter.com

You can very easily transform their branded button into a “Post to Twitter” bookmarklet for you to use anywhere, and it’s silly that they didn’t think to publicize that fact (but then, geeks haven’t been their main target for a while). I’d been looking for an official bookmarklet for a while now, one that wouldn’t need to go through third-party servers, especially since I’ve gotten my iPad: having to copy and paste URLs is a pain when hitting a bookmarklet should work just as well.

So here’s the bookmarklet (which you could conceivably extend to populate the tweet with selected text when appropriate, but I don’t care, and I don’t mind using copy-and-paste for that):

javascript:window.location='http://twitter.com/share?text='+ encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+ encodeURIComponent(window.location);

If you don’t see anything above, that’ll be because I put it in a textarea so it could easily be copied and pasted on the iPad. You can also drag this link to your bookmarks bar if you’re on a platform that provides such elaborate functionality. (You’d think maybe someday iOS would let users create bookmarklets without jumping through so many hoops?)

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macgasm.net

That’s not a bad idea at all.

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chipotle.tumblr.com

I’ve noticed the same effect: Mac and iPhone zealots tend to talk up how much they like their devices, while Windows and Android zealots tend to talk up how much they hate Macs and iPhones. This asymmetry has always struck me as odd.

Heh.

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beautifulpixels.com

Every evening, at 8 p.m., you get an email asking you what your day was like. Reply, and send.

That’s an excellent idea, and the site looks pretty. Not that I would ever trust a third-party with my diary.

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engadget.com

For the first time I can unambiguously write that the Kindle is a nice object. And it’s now quite affordable. Not to the point of having to lug it around in addition to my iPad, but for everyone who isn’t going to buy an Apple tablet, it’s time to get the Kindle.

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engadget.com

The design is clever enough (except I don’t see much in the way of protective padding for the iPad’s front glass) and it includes a battery for when you’re using your iPad literally all day long (as I am), so it’s awesome, right?

Well, if I’m reading the info correctly, they didn’t care to pay Apple the dock connector tax, so… if you want to use the included battery, you’ve got to connect the iPad to the stand with a USB cable. That’s a great deal of inconvenience for no less than $130.

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benward.me

The problem is because people don’t think about what they’re doing. People are infuriating like that, but it’s the truth of the matter. People see the function to pair the FourSquare and Twitter account so they do, and they see the function to broadcast their check-in to Twitter so they do. They’re in an application context of closed friends, and they don’t consider that they’re spreading information into different places.

Several interesting, well thought-out points about developing a social network or any kind of online service that interacts with them.

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news.cnet.com

This is turning into one of those charming cage matches in which wrestlers desperately try to maim each other with chains and chairs and blows to very private regions.

In a new video, posted to both its own Web site and to YouTube, Apple attempts to show that the dazzling new Motorola Droid X, which many seem to rather appreciate, also has something of an issue when it comes to being held in the Death Grip.

What this is turning into is a little kid who shouts "He does it too! And him! And him!" several hours after the matter has been settled by his parents — mostly in his favor.

We got it, Apple feels wrongly singled out in this matter, and at this point I have no idea and don’t really care one way or the other (even if it’s unfair, it still goes with the territory when you have the best, most adored phone on the market — and when you’re an arrogant ass about it); I just can’t believe they’re still updating their comparative page instead of letting the matter die.

(Yes, it’s only been a few days, but won’t you give the tech press a chance to move over already?)

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azarask.in

Way geeky (as in, you will never ever see that in Safari), but nicely done, for power users who live in their browsers.

I don’t ever have more than four tabs open at any given time now (mostly since I started using Reader Helper, and recently replaced it with either Instapaper or Read It Later), but a few years ago I would have had wet dreams after watching this video.

(It would also be nice on an iPad, though. I’m sure someone will post a half-assed, unusable version of this on the App Store soon enough.)

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slashgear.com

Having seemingly gained a name, HP’s PalmPad webOS based tablet is now gradually getting fleshed out with hardware capabilities, too.  According to The Examiner, their source suggests HP will use a dual-mode touchscreen that combines a Wacom active digitizer with a finger-friendly multitouch capacitive layer.  

If you want to have a shot against the iPad, that’s the only way to do it. A pen+touch webOS tablet would definitely be the second most frustrating product launch for me, as an iPad owner who can’t possibly buy two tablets. (First would have been the late Courier.)

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techcrunch.com

Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on).

The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together. […]

The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19.

I’m sure the algorithm is worthy, but the interface is pretty unpleasant and I doubt it can succeed with the iPad crowd unless it’s fixed — the graphics as well as the way it works. Have to tap ‘more’ before I can scroll down ‘more,’ really? Have you ever used a Twitter client on iPhone?

Actually, the whole interface does scream of never having used even an iPhone (they did develop the app before the iPad was available), and jumping on the bandwagon because that’s where the money is.

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Twitter on iPad has the same problem as on iPhone: it all breaks down if you tap on any menu item before the main timeline is done loading. {@}

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Wait, the Apple TV remote on iPhone… is that yet another separate app, or does it indicate that the Remote app is getting an update? (P.S. Apparently it is the same app. Finally.) {@}

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"Apple to livestream its fall event"
Ooh. Is that significant or anecdotal? (In any case: yay.) {@}

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Oh, right. Can't make my own note-taking webapp, because Safari asks me to confirm the invalid SSL cert and type my password each time. Ack. {@}

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"Synchronicity Lets You Use Your iPhone Even While It’s Syncing"
This time I'm really gonna have to jailbreak my iPad. {@}

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