Currently clocking in about 4 hours per day on the device, not counting desktop time.

Main usage – newspapers and iBooks (zinio mostly).

What sort of time are others doing and what App is the main offender?

My reply is:

Main offender? Where should I begin…?

I didn’t buy an iPad… I bought two.  One 16 Gb wireless for my wife and daughter (with a pink smart cover) and a 64 Gb 3G for me (with orange smart cover).

Mine gets disconnected from its charger just after I’ve made breakfast and gets propped on a stand for me to read email or watch NHK World News with my daughter as we eat.  Then, as I settle down with a coffee at my computer to contemplate replying to and sorting out whatever chaos has manifest itself overnight, my daughter sits on the sofa with “pink” to watch an episode or two of Curious George, or more, because she figured out how to use the controls…cheeky bugger. But at least we get to have coffee in peace.

I make sure I’ve pre-loaded whatever files I’ll need for the day onto Orange via Dropbox or Evernote to Pages and sync Bento from my Mac’s database. Then Orange goes into my seriously-overbuilt bag, a Redoxx Gator, along with files, textbooks and whatever random crap I need and off to work I go.

In the car, Orange comes out and, using a piece of velco stuck to the back, becomes my navigation system using Itsumo Navi (I’m in Japan), sometimes with the aid of Google Maps.  While waiting at long traffic lights, I can flip to check email as it comes in (no time to reply though) and flip back to the navigation as they turn green. If I do feel the need to urgently reply to a message in only the 1-2 minutes I can sit at a red light, Dragon Dictation comes to my rescue, allowing me to speak the message and copy it into an email or SMS.

At work, I set up Orange at a low angle using the smart cover with a Japanese/English dictionary open. I also have Pages open and a page set to a large font so I can type out what I used to write on the whiteboard, then flip the iPad straight up for them to view, since the display rotates automatically.  If I’m teaching small kids, I can help them learn to write ABC or numbers with iWriteWords, learn letters, spelling and other things via the Montessori programs or just show off with Gravity Clock.

If a topic is brought up in class where I wish I had a picture, I don’t have to look any further than Google to bring up a picture I can show them on the spot.  Then all that I’ve typed or shown can go into Bento or Evernote, including a screenshot of the whiteboard if I decided to use that. After class I may need to confer with other teachers about the contents of the next lesson. I open up Pages and write out a plan on the spot, which in the future will get auto-synced via iCloud to my other computers/devices for review before the lesson day.

The only thing I can’t do yet is prepare lesson materials to print at schools on the spot, but I’m working on that.

During lesson breaks I have iBooks, The Guardian, news web sites, forums or anything else I can read or ponder. However, for Facebook and Twitter, nothing beats reading them magazine-style with Flipboard.  As I ponder Japanese I’ve learned or critical things I need to buy when I go shopping, AwesomeNote is too beautiful to not use.  On the way out the door I check my schedule is correct using Pocket Informant, which makes the regular iPhone or iPad Calendar look primitive.

And finally, back home we sit and watch NHK World News and chat while having dinner. Once the little one has had her personal language lesson with me and gone to sleep, I can start up Need For Speed and relax, plug in the Camera Connection Kit USB adaptor and use it via USB to a DAC as a music server, or plug in an iMSO adaptor to turn my iPad into an oscilloscope and play around with measuring the gear that forms part of my audio electronics hobby instead of listening to music with it while my wife surfs the web and does her email on Pink, occasionally bringing it to show me something interesting.

Anyone around who can top all of that? Surely there is…

..but beware, you can only set them up for one Apple ID.

The admission that MobileMe wasn’t Apple’s finest moment was one. Steve talked about email and calendar syncing as if MobileMe didn’t exist, which it does. By that I feel he is saying “Give us a second chance to get this right and make it really ‘just work’ for you”.

The Reading List and proper tabs in iPad Safari really addresses one critical issue that plagues the iPad – a lack of memory. Honestly, on my Mac, the only programs that use more RAM than Safari are Aperture (I shoot at 12mp RAW) and Photoshop. Browers easily chew up a gig or two of RAM. So on the iPad, every time, just about, I tap on a tab in Safari, it has to reload the page as there presumably wasn’t enough memory to store the contents of it.

The lock screen improvements are incredibly welcome. When I first bought an iPhone, it annoyed me with how tedious it was, compared to a regular flip-phone, to make a call to my wife, who was first in the list on my phone. With my old Motorola, it was: Flip open, press the down button, press the call button. On the iPhone however, it was: Click the home button to wake up the screen, slide to unlock, tap the phone icon, tap on address book, scroll through the list to find the number, tap to select then tap to select which number to call. Six actions, half of them slow, versus three quick ones. Once I’d worked out how to use favourites it was a little faster, however, but it still doesn’t beat my old phone.

In Mac OS X, saved sessions in programs such as Pages has been a feature that people have wanted FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS. This is not a joke. The Sun Solaris terminals at university had this feature before Mac OS X existed and it has taken Apple that long to implement it. They had spaces too with most of the features. Apple is the king of rehashing old, good ideas, or in the case of those ideas that are similar to good features found elsewhere, from other people.

Does anyone else see how ironic full-screen apps are, considering how many times over the years we’ve had to explain to people switching from Windows that Mac OS X isn’t designed in a way that you’d use your apps full-screen?

Versions is brilliant. This is why Apple writes great software – they think about building the features that would be really useful and that they themselves would like and use, just as we would.

Autosave too. I think Apple has to continue in the direction of making software that “just works”. The only problem I worry about is, if something breaks, how readily will we be able to fix it? Where are app sessions stored? In the application’s preferences?

Being a victim of your software’s success can have a different meaning in Apple land. Instapaper and Dropbox are examples – if your idea is too good, if you aren’t bought out by Apple, customer demand will result in Apple creating their own, if not as good, version of your software.

Dropbox emailed me (well, all their customers presumably) straight after the keynote trying to persuade me to upgrade to a paid service with 50-100 GB of storage. While I feel that iCloud will impact them, I’m sure they’ll take advantage of the API for it quickly to build something more advanced for users who want more flexibility and control. This keynote, while it seems on the surface bad for them, could be very good if they see it as an opportunity, such as Instapaper has.

Mission Control looks pretty, but as someone who never got enthusiastic about Exposé and uses the Dock, Cmd Tab + Spotlight for just about everything, I’m not sure I’ll be particularly interested in Mission control without deliberately forcing myself to change habits.

The music matching service is meh. All my music is lossless as my audio gear is high-end and I don’t purchase from the iTunes Store.

It was interesting noting what garnered the most and least applause too. The most went for finally being able to activate and use an iPhone or iPad without a computer. This requirement alone prevented me recommending the iPad to various acquaintances for whom it would be a great device, being that they are computer illiterate. It sure would have been great for my parents. I can’t help wondering what my late father would have made of reading the newspaper and magazines on one.

Ultimately, however, it is interesting to ponder how much we pick the finest details about what we don’t like about the iOS devices, despite the wonder and convenience that they have brought us. As much as we may joke about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, there is no doubt that he has revolutionised personal computing from a chore to something wonderful that will define our lives as much as electricity did a century ago.

A very handy tip: Restrict access to “Accounts” and “Location” in General -> Restrictions to prevent a thief deactivating them after stealing your phone (at least before they can restore it).

That example par excellence of stellar journalistic accomplishment The Melbourne Age, tells us this morning that iPods and iPads are nothing less than the Typhoid Mary of the looming global apocalyptic pandemic. Well, they stop just short of putting it exactly like that, but it’s hard to understand exactly why they’re running an article headlined ‘Apple Store Teeming With Germs’, if not to warn good citizens about the looming plague.

Because they surely wouldn’t be doing it just to bash Apple.

via iPads Will Kill You! « Tetherd Cow Ahead.

But great advertising comes from great clients. The best creative people want to work for the best clients. If you are a client who doesn’t appreciate great work, or a client who won’t take risks and try new stuff, or a client who can’t get excited about the creative, then you’re the wrong kind of client.

Also interesting considering the iPod is how Jobs looked up to Sony, and was given one of the first Walkmans, which he then disassembled.

Hey, I didn’t call Sculley a business genius, you can thank Del Yocam for formalising & restructuring Apple into an efficient and accountable world-class company. And it was Mike Spindler who was responsible for the split personality product lines that caused more confusion than anything else. Gassee was charismatic driving force that refined the Mac line, as well as coming up with the original idea to keep prices high. Co-founder Mike Markkula admired Sculley’s vision, but deplored his lack of direction, so Sculley had to go. Unfortunately, his choice of replacement — Spindler — wasn’t any better, and in some ways much worse. It wasn’t uncommon to find Spindler curled up in a ball under his desk with a panic attack due to stress. Gil Amelio was just Markkula’s yes-man, the only right thing he did was over-ride the Board and choose Jobs and NeXT over Gassee’s BeOS and then piss off to the park with his platinum handshake.

Jobs did revitalise Apple, but not because of OSX, nor his recruitment of Jon Ive as lead designer. He did the right thing by killing the clones, but the wrong thing in completely closing down the ATG. Apart from his uncanny eye for (as lavo put it) finding an idea and tweaking it, Jobs’ first and foremost skill is purchasing. No matter who had the components he wanted, he could swing the most incredible deals and get pricing and supply contracts that were the envy of Silicon Valley. His first baby, the original iMac, despite its record low price, had a post-production margin higher than any other computer in Apple’s history.

A visionary isn’t going to be able to cut corners, find something that catches the eye of the general public in the fastest way possible, and then produce the goods for the lowest cost possible. No, for that you need a ruthless, utter bastard who is prepared to exploit any opportunity, who wields dictatorial power over the corporate entity as if it were his own personal feifdom with his hand in every pie and eye watching over every shoulder. And the Board let him get away with it because the money started flowing back in hand over fist, with revenue flows not seen since the early part of the Jobs / Sculley / Gassee golden years, when Apple could do no wrong.

Jobs holds all the cards now, and he may have had a vision of bringing the graphical interface to the masses, but he was never ever a visionary.

“Brains” on the return of Jobs to Apple.

/dev/why!?! – /dev/why!?! – Its all about the framework….

Via: Office Snapshots » Apple HQ – Cupertino Campus.

DIY obsolete iBook logic board repair :: projects :: geek technique.