A quick summary after 2 days intermittent use.

• It is a little too heavy at first. I suspect my arms will get used to it, or I will learn to hold it the right way – we never thought people would write essays with their thumbs on mobile phones. This is no doubt related to battery weight. I’d rather have the battery life – but a few 100g less would stop this being something people mention. Hardback books are heavy.
• The photos app is an instant winner. All they need now is selection of which you want to order prints for and ordering prints direct from iPad using iTunes account. Oh, and they do need wireless smart syncing of photos from MobileMe, Flickr etc. So you can publish from your other Mac/PCs and the ipad syncs them over the wire in the background.
• Typing is much much better than I thought it would be. With practice I can be as fast or faster than on a regular Apple keyboard I’m sure. I just need to get used to the slightly differently layout and tactile differences. So much so I could consider writing code on it. There are already some HTML editors for iPad.
• It would be really nice to set an App to be used as the lock screen, not a wallpaper. Eg set Weather HD or Guardian Eyewitness, Calendar month view, or the built in picture frame app – to come up when you press the lock button.
• I actually like some of the iPhone apps at 2x zoom. Most iPad native apps seem to be taking the fonts a little too small, and losing the benefits of larger font clarity / greater distance from the eyes that iPad screen should be affording you.
• Some apps definitely need further optimisation. E.g. Omnigraffle is not a bad first stab but there is no justification I can see for the UI being so laggy when dragging a single rectangle around the screen on a trivial diagram. Calculating the guides cannot be that intensive! Art authority is nice but the image quality of the marble UI backgrounds is really nasty, and the UI is rather sluggish with no indication it is busy at times.
• A little gripping surface around the edges would make you less scared when carrying it without a case. The front surface is very slippery, the back isn’t.
• I find it hard to find apps in home screen – they are too far apart and with an image background, it is hard for icons to stand out visually – I often have to resort to using search to find apps! This is reason enough to not have the option to set custom wallpaper… or at least it should be default reduce the intensity of wallpapers by 50%
• I miss the magazine rack metaphor from NewsRack for iPad. Seems much better fit for iPad than iPhone, I hope it comes back
• The lameness of many apps is more obvious on iPad than on iPhone. You’re more happy to “make do” on iPhone but the bar is being set higher on iPad by very good UIs e.g. Penultimate, Elements, Weather HD, Virtuoso HD piano. Omnigraffle is a good first stab but feels too awkward still.
• iBooks better become like iPod app and allow third party PDFs/ePub files to install easily w/o buying from iBooks store. All other e-book readers I can find seem completely lacking the Apple polish – slow, unintuitive touch interactions etc.
• Smaller text sizes on webpages will be much more readable when they eventually upgrade the display to higher dpi. It might be a year or two though…

I can’t vouch for Pages, Numbers, Keynote or iBooks yet – they aren’t available in the UK app store (which you can only access from iTunes currently anyway).

Aside from all the basics, they allowed 3rd party applications on the device AND the desktop to talk to each other directly to sync custom data. I’ve bitched about this before.

As an avid Mac, iPhone, MobileMe and soon to be iPad user, I have to wonder what is happening with this at Apple. My real-world gripe is this:

I was just about to open OmniFocus on my iPhone specifically so that it would sync with the latest data on my MacBook Pro, which is set to sync via MobileMe (using a pretty ugly file based solution). Why am I even doing this? Why isn’t this data synced (a) when I dock my iPhone to sync all the other iTunes stuff, and (b) why can’t it automatically sync wirelessly

Well part (b) is easier to answer, although it is a three-fold answer. First, there’s no background app support to allow automatic sync of the OmniFocus app on the phone. That should be addressed by the Push API functionality except that OmniFocus doesn’t support Push API (server cost to them to do so) and even if they did support Push, iPhone SDK Push is not able to automatically pass the data to the application to force it to sync – the user must acknowledge the event and run the app on the phone manually. It’s a pile of suck, surprisingly, with a real feel of “disconnected device”.

Part (a) is more tricky to answer. It must be trivial for Apple to add this kind of support for direct-to-app syncing. They already have/had Sync APIs for OS X for a long time. Lack of support for this apparently makes no sense.

In conclusion I am very surprised that Apple has not updated the OS X Sync APIs so that:

• Third party apps can sync any data they like to/from the iPhone/iPod/iPad with iTunes as the conduit (that was the concept’s name in PalmOS if I recall)
• The transport for sync is completely hidden from the applications such that sync will happen transparently via Dock, Wifi (direct between devices on local Wifi network), and via MobileMe cloud if the device is not on the same Wifi network.

This is not rocket science after all. And yet we still have to know / think about what networks our devices are connected to, manually make sure we run them frequently etc. It is pretty lame, Mr. Jobs.

Ironically, I think that there will not be that much hardware “frill” with the Apple tablet. I think that actually this is really all about software and the masses of computer users who are not “power users”.

Follow the logic:

Net books are very popular.

The iPhone and the new breed of beyond-smart phones is incredibly popular.

What is the common thread here? Both devices are very portable and offer most of the basic computing that people need day to day. What is it that most people – which I’m afraid guys means non-geeks, the truly massive market beyond geekdom – need?

1. Email
2. Web

That’s it. That’s what most people who are not raving geeks need. In fact some geeks may need only that. After all there isn’t much you can’t do with web apps now (e.g. bespin). Google OS/Chrome stuff has been geared to this from the get-go, its not a novel idea.

Functionally, most people also need to be able to write/edit documents that can be read by MS Word – not that they need MS Word, they just need to write out .doc files. This can be done via web apps or via lightweight local apps.

However Apple would not do something like this unless it also offered uniquely integrated stuff.

So on the back of this I reckon the tablet will:

• Not be that revolutionary hardware wise – eg physically this probably is like a giant iphone
• To include some web-hosted (with local offline usage) iWork for Pages (= docs & spreadsheets writing. maybe keynote too)
• Full access to all your iTunes audio and video media and photos (cloud or not) – I would be surprised if this is 100% cloud done at this stage, what with the awful 3G coverage and slow speeds to sync photos and videos. Access to this done “ipod style”, which is a killer recipe as the market has shown
• A first class large-form factor email app, geared to multitouch
• And as suspected the delivery of formerly-print media, possibly opening up iTunes marketplace to any author who wants to prepare and sell content. Who knows perhaps you will even be able to create new textual/mixed content on the iPad and sell it via iTunes. This content provision is probably the one really new thing that helps make such a pad a really attractive proposition.

In a nutshell, a beautiful portable computer that is most definitely NOT a laptop because a great deal of people will never see themselves as the laptop carrying kind. However they are likely to part with cash for something that is much smaller than that but a true lifestyle accessory that “just works”. Obviously it will support custom apps and app store too – which has already shown on iPhone that a lot of people just want little stuff that makes life easier.

Several programmers including myself have wondered “Why do I need something like that?”. The answer is if you have an iPhone and laptop, you don’t. The big market win here is not people like us, its everyone else in the real world! Laptops are complete overkill for a lot of people and the netbook market has sort of shown that. They’re not so much winning against laptops as a result of price, they’re winning on form factor and simplicity. If people really needed high-end laptop features, they’d still buy a laptop instead of a netbook.

I’m pretty sure netbooks aren’t aimed at programmers either – although I am confident some masochists code Perl on them and swear that its the best calculator computer they’ve ever had. The tablet on the other hand, is squarely aimed at attacking the netbook and light-use laptop market.

Let’s see what Wednesday brings!

Many many people have this desire: a single place for all their media: music, videos etc.

A NAS device is the place, backed up suitable. The problem is iTunes / Front Row just does not fit with this strategy if you have more than one computer / Apple device.

The core issue is that iTunes does not automatically rescan the media folder for new files. So you can point as many iTunes as you like to a shared location but they will only see the files they add to their libraries via purchasing or importing media.

So you end up with many devices in your house, all with a different view onto your shared media.

To access that new album you imported, you have to manually Add To Library on that iTunes instance, hoping it isn’t set to duplicate the files on the server. When this happens, as it certainly used to for me, you then end up with many copies of albums as you re-create your library from scratch on the various computers over the years.

Add to this the fact that if for some reason your connection to the NAS goes down when you run iTunes, it will revert the media path to the local folder, and you end up with a total mess – a bunch of machines with files only on some of them, their media split between local and NAS, and only the ones that added those files having them listed in their library.

The experience is so un-Apple it is shocking, and it causes daily pain.

It is important to remember that the iTunes Media folder is where it PUTS files that you buy/import – and that is ALL. (There is a new “Automatically add to iTunes” folder there, which seems half-assed to me). The iTunes Library is specific to each computer and is the list of media and the file path to each. This, unlike the media folder that actually stores the media files, is something you do not want to share between computers in many cases.

Now, iTunes 9 added Home Sharing. But guess what, this sucks and blows! Why? It (a) only shares iTunes-purchased content and (b) it duplicates the files to your local HD. Home sharing, I believe has a lot more to do with the iSlate/tablet and their new datacenter – music in the cloud crap – so you can sync your iSlate content without a cable.

Please Apple, it needs to work like this:

How it should work

This is relatively simple:

1. First, never change the media path in iTunes if the previous path is not reachable. Tell the user what is happening so they can fix it
2. When new files are added, make a bonjour announcement to any other iTunes running (perhaps even wide-area bonjour to make iPhones/Slates pick it up) so that they can instantly add the file to their iTunes library
3. When a file is not located on the local disks, have a local cache for stuff that the user ACTUALLY PLAYS. My wife doesn’t like all that heavy metal I listen to, so let’s not fill her hard disk with a clone of it eh? iSlate and Apple TV / mac mini media hubs etc can pick up just the files that are needed.
4. For the occasion when not all the machines / iTunes are running, have iTunes do daily rescan in the BACKGROUND for any new files in the media folder and AUTOMATICALLY add these to the Library. This is not rocket science.
5. Maintain an “excludes” list on each iTunes library so the user can remove items from their local itunes Library (without deleting it from the NAS) and they will not be offered the file again in a future background sync.

Don’t give me stuff about non-purchased media not having ISRC codes to identify them and de-dupe. You can dedupe on SHA hashes of the media (calculate once and embed in the metadata of the file) and failing that trackdata, and then failing that – USER INTERVENTION eg “There are some new media files added and we don’t know if they are duplicates or not – help me”.

You can even put all these newly discovered files into a special “Newly discovered” place in iTunes where the user can yay or nay them – or have it set to auto-accept (default).

The more and more macs and related devices are sold to households the more shitty this problem becomes and you REALLY REALLY need to fix it Apple. Without the cloud. The cloud is not a solution for terabytes of media being instantly accessible in your living room.

Please. Just do it. iTunes Home Sharing was nearly it, but sadly failed completely to address this.

It is noticeable that Mac OS X and related apps are moving to user interface paradigms that will work much better than conventional UIs on (touch controlled?) TVs and multi-touch tablets.

Some examples of this growing trend:

• Front row started it really
• Several Apple apps with full screen modes. Especially the new quicktime X and its large transport buttons, iTunes/Front row with Coverflow, iPhoto with multitouch trackpad support
• The new exposé screen layout, touchpad gesture and per-app exposé
• Spaces – something that will prove MUCH more useful if every application is full screen, and effectively each Space is a single Application. Then Exposé sort of becomes the current spaces “zoom out”
• Safari “Top sites” is, in my opinion, clearly targetted at touch (tablet) displays.
• iTunes LP media format
• This is the big one – iTunes “Home Sharing”. This is required to solve the problem of your TV/tablet as a media purchase platform. You will typically buy content at home on a TV/tablet and then expect it to be on your laptop and hence iPod.

So I expect, within a few years, for us to see a new paradigm at least for TV and tablets where apps run full screen and you swipe to switch application… and wonderfully simple UIs as a result.

If we can only do away with the keyboard, we might finally be rid of these rather old fashioned apps with lots of menus and shortcuts and yada yada.

Basically when I try to update apps on the phone itself it tries installing it as a new icon instead of replacing the old one, and then fails at the end leaving 2 icons.

If I try to update from iTunes as the phone tells me to, it fails with a hex error code. The only solution is to delete the apps on the phone and in iTunes and use the store to ‘purchase’ them again which now requires an extra step of running ‘Check for purchases’.

Poor show.

Thankfully the SMS and contacts performance improvements are working really well.

I noticed that where previously I had some double entries of albums in my library, one on a shared NAS and one on my local HD (local one being a re-download from iTunes – yes they can let you do that if you have a problem!), iTunes has made them both point to the same shared NAS version. An annoyance I’m sure some will complain about – “lost” music is possible depending on how iTunes decided it was a duplicate, although I imagine they did this because it is an itunes purchase and those tracks have unique ids.

ANYWAY… I had a nose around to see what else is different. I noticed this in the iTunes preferences:

I don’t recall seeing “Allow iTunes control from remote speakers” before. Perhaps I’m wrong. Anyway this, coupled with the Remote app for iPod Touch / iPhone and the lack of AirTunes/Airport Express refresh for years surely points to some future wireless speaker + wifi repeated product, that you will be able to use to control itunes either directly with buttons on the speakers, a local remote, or over wifi to the speakers (even if out of range of your iTunes machine) via iPod or iPhone.

I just hope they make humidity resilient versions for the bathroom!

Now I find that all of my paid applications – Super Monkey Ball, Band, Enigmo, OmniFocus and Drum Kit have been removed from the phone. Any free applications I have installed over wifi over the weekend are all still there, as are all the other free apps. However every paid app is gone – for good. They are no longer listed in iTunes either.

So now I have to chase iTunes Store to reinstate these for me.

Nice bug guys.

All seems pretty good, feels like the dawn of a new era – although something in me dislikes all these extra cluttering apps I now have, instead of just the basics. The coherent design feel is lost with differing icon design approaches etc.

Anyway, for my sins I used to be a Java mobile games developer (J2ME). As a result I have quite a lot of experience with mobile development APIs and approaches. With this in mind, I have some iPhone 2.0 / SDK observations:

1. App Store is genius. App developers on mobile have never had it so good. This is sweet, trivial to use, works great OTA installation in a way that no Java phone I’ve seen ever could (i.e. proper install progress, keep on using the phone during dowload/install etc). No "where the f**k is my app" syndrome. However what’s with the long delays when Installing… is at 100%, even for trivial apps? The CPU slow at unzips / dmg extraction?!
2. Quite a lot of apps crash – much more than iPhone 1.x where safari and maps did occasionally crash for me,
3. Shock horror, running an app occasionally causes instant phone reboot! WTF?! I worked with a LOT of really bad Java mobile phones (aaahhhh anybody fancy a Sharp GX10 or an O2 X1?), and even then I never saw a phone spontaneously reboot when running an app. Having viewed some of the SDK videos, I think I have a clue – it could be memory leakage somewhere as… and this is also quite horrifying … iPhone OS X will spontaneously reboot if it runs out of RAM! "What?!" I hear you say. Yes, its true. I can see that without true garbage collection and a VM to run the apps in, memory leakage is a very real problem and the only solution may be to reboot rather than lock up. However I would have thought with unix under the shell it would be possible to kill just the application process and free its resources, not "shutdown -r now" !
4. The push stuff is good BUT… why the hell no preview popup message for pushed mail, like the SMS popup? Come to think of it, why can’t you see more SMS/push mail previews than 1 at a time when the phone is locked? Why aren’t we seeing the photo of the sender next to the message?
5. The push stuff uses sockets. This makes sense for iPod Touch and when you have wifi, but it drains the batteries bad. For iPhone they should really be using custom SMS data ports like J2ME’s  Push Registry API. The phone is already waiting for SMS packets all the time so this would mean ZERO extra battery usage, instead of keeping this stupid data socket open all the time. A custom data SMS comes in from Apple’s data center, and bingo, it fires up the correct application / does the badge thing etc. Keeping this keepalive connection going is insane on iPhone.
6. The push stuff, as discussed at WWDC but not documented yet, is unable to launch your application as far as I can tell. This is bad. You need to be able to automatically invoke the target application (with user consent) to provide a nice user experience
7. Again, unlike in J2ME, there is apparently no way to set a timer on iPhone from your custom application, such that the iphone will start your application again – this precludes a whole range of apps and is particularly painful in light of the inability to run background applications (which is understandable as this raises the spectre of high cpu load and multitasking task manager stuff as well as the battery drain)
8. Apple should have stolen the sweet idea from Palm OS where your app is automatically "frozen in time" when deactivated. There was no multitasking on Palm OS when I wrote stuff on it, it just seemed like it because all apps ran directly from Flash RAM and when switching to another it just move the execution pointer to another part of RAM. Simple but very effective. Not quite so workable on this basis with unix underlying, but I would have thought "hibernating" apps would give a better impression of multitasking without actually running multiple apps at once, without the developer having to detect application de-activation, preserving state etc. At least offer some kind of declarative "serialize this" indication on objects/state data that allows the app to restart with prevous data with no developer effort.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I imagine they may add some event hook mechanisms to further simulate background applications in future, with strict design guidelines / enforcement of maximum execution time when the hook is called. Eg hook into system location changes, and get called back a max of once per minute, and have 500ms to do something with the data or die.

However my experiences of the last week have been… bemusing.

First there is the dead iPhone saga – PRE 2.0 firmware release. I was in a café on a Saturday morning, whipped out the iPhone to add weather for a town I’m soon to visit, to see what it is going to be like. Anyway, I add the town, using weak 2.5G signal, and then go back to home screen. Decide to check on AAPL share price in the stocks app… hmm locks up for 5s. Then comes up. Locks up again for 5s. It enters this lock 5s, work 10s loop. Nothing shakes it, I press sleep button. Hard to re-enter PIN when it wakes as of non-responsiveness. Hard reset it, reboot the phone. Takes forever to boot up, presumably as of this locking up cycle.

Try to Restore firmware in iTunes when I get back home. Reboots the phone, ready to re-install… boom phone doesn’t respond quick enough and bang – I have an iBrick in permanent "Restore mode".

So I call to Apple care, establish that it needs to go back to base. I pay the £20 for the rental iPhone. Service is amazing, I have rental phone the next day, postage paid UPS stickers and packaging and instructions to send the old phone back. Restore the rental phone with all my data – better than I could ever have imagined, SMS history comes back, notes, camera roll everything.

So the next day I send my original iBrick back. I muse to myself that the rental scheme is VERY clever. Great customer relations, the £20 covers the UPS carriage. I see that they will let me keep the rental phone if mine is indeed totally dead, rather than ship me a new replacement and force me to ship the rental phone back.

Next day get email 11am saying they’ve received it. By 4pm I get another email saying they’ve finished the repair request and new phone on its way. Gobsmacking.

Next day the phone turns up. A letter in there says that I did indeed have a brick and they have given me a new refurbished iPhone. Hmm ok. Must have been something pretty bad in my old phone then, that just happened out of the blue with no physical damage. Worrying.

Anyway I fire up the replacement phone (remember I still have a good rental iPhone I paid for). Immediately I see them. 3-4 evil white glows at the very top of the display either side of the lock icon in the midde – backlight leakage of some sort that is plainly visible in restore mode thanks to the black background. Euuuuw! Neither my original nor the rental iPhone have this, it is visually disturbing and obviously sub-par.

Now, I phone Apple to tell them this replacement phone is a dud for me in display terms. They say OK I have to send it back pronto using a new repair box they will send out, and do this immediately or the 10-day limit on my rental phone will expire and I will have to pay for the full price of the rental handset! Obviously I point out the vital consumer relations error in this, given that I have a replacement iphone that is functional but worse in display terms than the one I used to have, and that is unacceptable. Furthermore I paid for the rental phone, and have done nothing wrong. If they sent me a smashed iphone in the post, I should not risk having to pay the full handset fee for late return of the rental one.

Off the very helpful AppleCare person goes to talk to a customer relations manager. Eventually we come back and find they have agreed to extend my rental period, and are immediately sending a new "return to base" box and UPS label for the replacement phone that is dud. This box arrived next day (today). Very efficient.

So I still have my rental phone.

Only one problem – remember that I mused that they would logically let me keep the rental phone if my original phone was DOA? What happened to this peice of sanity?

Why the hell am I shipping back another dud phone when I could have kept the perfectly good rental one I have. Why, assuming the 2nd replacement phone I get is OK, do I then have to help destroy the atmosphere of our precious globe by having UPS take back a PERFECTLY GOOD rental phone, after they’ve brought me two other replacements?!

Utter madness. Logistics / systems design gone stupid. Really really stupid. Apple, you are wasting lots of your own time and money on this.

Let people keep the rental handset if theirs is DOA when it gets to AppleCare. Save everybody a lot of pain.