Last month I changed my email workflow to only allow myself 44 minutes per day for email checking — one 22-minute segment in the early afternoon and another 22-minute segment towards the end of my day. And I’ve been using Visual to budget that time. 1

There is no shortage of iPhone timer apps. iOS comes with a built-in timer, and if that’s not good enough for you, Due is a highly-recommended and splendid alternative. What I like about Visual is that the face of the iPhone doesn’t say exactly how much time I have (well, it does, in ultra-fine print at the bottom of the screen for those who just must know).

Instead visual conveys about how much time is left through the nature of the visual timer.

A countdown timer like this would never fly in a NASA control room, but for my office it works quite well.

My only two gripes with Visual are:

• The icon. I’m not sure where it came from, but it sure doesn’t seem related to the rest of the app which is simple and well designed.

• If you launch the app after the timer is done you are greeted with the “timer’s done” screen, rather than the launch screen for starting a new timer. Since you’re pretty much always are launching the app to start a new timer the app always requires an extra tap to get to the settings pane.

Visual is just a buck on the App Store. And be sure to check out the promo video, it’s pretty great as well.

The first computer I ever used on a regular basis belonged to my tech-savvy grandfather. I’d play games on it during the weekends when my family visited, until one summer when he upgraded and my folks inherited the hand-me-down IBM. Many years and a few family computers later, I bought my own computer: a Dell laptop that went off to college with me.

After the Dell was my first Mac, the iconic 12-inch PowerBook G4. A few years later, in the spring of 2007, I bought a Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is a beast of a machine. So beastly, in fact, that it doesn’t come with a single peripheral attachment — you have to pick out your own monitor, keyboard, mouse, and anything else you may need. And so, for the first time, I got to pick my own keyboard. At the time, I didn’t know any better and so I went with an off-the-shelf Bluetooth white plastic Apple Pro Keyboard.

The white and clear Apple Pro Keyboard was perhaps the worst keyboard ever designed in California. It was dull and soft to type on, it was neither quiet nor loud, and it had a see-through casing to display all the food crumbs, wrist hairs, and dead bugs that fell between the keys.

In the fall of 2007, Apple redesigned their keyboards to the new slim aluminum keyboards they still sell today. I eventually bought one of those to go with my Mac Pro. Though the thinness of the keyboard made it seem to me like a less-serious keyboard for folks who type a lot, it looked extremely cool. And we all know how important it is to have a clean and hip-looking desk.

It turns out, however, that Apple’s slim aluminum keyboard is quite nice to type on. I’ve been typing on them in some fashion or another ever since 2007. In addition to the full-sized USB version I bought to replace my clear Apple Pro Keyboard, I also bought one in Bluetooth flavor to pair with my original iPad, and the MacBook Air I bought last summer has the slim chicklet-style keyboard built in.

Recently, when I was interviewed on Daniel Bogan’s site, The Setup, he asked me what my dream computing setup would be. My reply was that thought I pretty much already have a dream setup, the one component that I have never truly considered is that which I interface with nearly the most: the keyboard. I wrote:

I think I might like a better keyboard. I’ve never thought anything bad about the slim Apple bluetooth keyboard I use, but recently I spent some time using my cousin’s mechanical keyboard and there was a completely different feel to it. I’ve never been a keyboard snob, but considering my profession, perhaps the time to get snobby about keyboards has come.

As someone who writes for a living it befuddles me why I never thought to research a proper keyboard.

As a computer-nerd-slash-writer, I am always looking and advocating for the right tools. But for years, I have always equated “writing tools” with “software” — I own more text editors than I have fingers to type with — but it never dawned on me until recently that a good keyboard could be equally as important as a good text editor.

I own a dozen different writing applications, a programming application or two, an email application, and a blog-posting application. And what do they all have in common? They all get typed into via a single, solitary device: my keyboard.

A month ago I ordered a Das Keyboard for my Mac. Not because I was dissatisfied with my beautiful and trusty Apple keyboard; rather, I needed to know if life could be better with a bigger, louder, and uglier keyboard.

When I placed the order, I had no idea what I was getting into. Owning a mechanical keyboard is like owning a Jeep Wrangler — there is an unspoken fraternity amongst owners that others don’t quite “get” and which I honestly don’t think I can explain in a blog post of only a few thousand words.

Mechanical keyboards like the Das are bulky, loud, and fantastic for typing. Compared to the slim Apple keyboards, the Das is different in every way except that the end result is still the same: words get onto the screen.

How I felt when I upgraded my keyboard to a mechanical one, reminds me of the excitement James Fallows felt when changing from a typewriter to a personal computer for the first time:

What was so exciting? Merely the elimination of all drudgery, except for the fundamental drudgery of figuring out what to say, from the business of writing.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Das Keyboard has eliminated all computing drudgery, but I would say that it has greatly enhanced the act of typing. Especially the act of typing for long periods of time, which I happen to do on a daily basis.

The construction of a mechanical keyboard is much more friendly to typing. As I discovered by taking several typing tests (the results of which I share below), a mechanical keyboard actually does help me to type both faster and more accurately. The sound of the keys clacking and the feel of the key switches clicking makes for an aura of productivity and work that fills the senses.

When using a mechanical keyboard you don’t just see your words appear on the screen as you type them, you also feel and hear them. A mechanical keyboard engages all the senses but smell and taste. Which is why you should always type with a hot coffee at your side.

The Keyboards

The sound, size, and durability of a mechanical keyboard make it a device to be reckoned with. It is a wholly different keyboard than the slim Apple ones, but that is not to say I have been turned off to the slim Apple keyboard. When I’m working on my iPad (using the bluetooth keyboard) or my MacBook Air’s built-in keyboard, I still type quickly and comfortably.

This review has been typed out using three of the most popular mechanical keyboards for Mac. They are:

• Das Keyboard Professional Model S: This is the keyboard that I started with. I pre-ordered one a few months ago for $113, and it arrived about a month ago. The Das Keyboards begin shipping on Friday, April 27 for $133.

• Apple Extended Keyboard II: Bought on eBay, the keyboard itself is circa 1990, uses Alps switches, was not made in Mexico, and cost me $31.45 shipped. I also had to purchase an ADB cable for $8.35 and a Griffn iMate ADB to USB adapter for $25. Total cost: $64.80.

• Matias Tactile Pro 3: A well-known 3rd-party keyboard that bills itself as the modern version of the Apple Extended II. It seemed unfair to write a review of Apple mechanical keyboards and not include the Matias Tactile Pro. These sell for $149, but Matias was kind and generous enough to send me a review unit.

Further down I have written more in-depth about the sound, feel, and overall typing experience of each of these three keyboards. But, before we get into that, let’s first check out some side-by-side statistics to give context for the general differences between these three keyboards.

Weight & Size

Typing Scores

They say that using a mechanical keyboard doesn’t necessarily make you a more productive typist. But based on the typing tests I took it would appear that a mechanical keyboard does improve your actual typing productivity.

I took this typing test to measure the speed and accuracy of my typing. As you can see, I typed the slowest and the least accurate on the Apple slim aluminum chicklet-style keyboard that I’ve been using for over 4 years. My fastest and most accurate test was performed on the Das Keyboard.

I typed a staggering 15 words-per-minute faster on my Das Keyboard than on my Apple slim keyboard, and at least 10 words-per-minute faster than on the Matias or the Apple Extended keyboards. And the words typed on the Das were more accurate. The difference in speed adds up to at least 900 additional words (with fewer typos) for every hour of typing.

Of course, nobody types at a constant rate, especially when the typing is creative. But nevertheless. Considering I spend nearly 6 hours a day at my computer, mostly typing, that difference in speed and accuracy is not insignificant.

Sound

Not all clicky keyboards are noisy, but I greatly enjoy the sound of the mechanical keyboards. At first I was timid about the noise coming from my home office, but I have since become acclimated and comfortable with it. Even proud of it.

Each keyboard I tried has a different sound. The Apple Extended II is the quietest and has the lowest tone of clack. The Tactile Pro 3 is the loudest and has a hollow ring that accompanies the clicks of the keys (more on this later). And the Das Keyboard has a crisp higher-pitched click.

Of the three I prefer the sound of the Das Keyboard the best. But, if I could mix and match, I would place the letter keys of the Das with the spacebar of the Apple Extended II and the Backspace of the Tactile Pro.

Here is a brief audio overview of the sounds between the Das Keyboard, the Apple Extended Keyboard II, and the Matias Tactile Pro 3:

Mechanical Key Switches

As I began researching mechanical keyboards and the different types of switches they use, I had no idea the rabbit hole I was crawling into. For brevity’s sake, I’m only going to share a little bit about the differences between the switches found in the 3 keyboards I have.

If you want to learn more about mechanical keyboards and the various switches used, then I’d start with this Mechanical Keyboard Guide. The writer of this thread wrote a well-said opening paragraph for why you want a mechanical keyboard:

For most people it’s all about the feel. With the keyboard you’re typing on right now you’ve got to press the key all the way down to the bottom to get it to register. This wastes a lot of energy and causes fatigue, as most of your effort is spent pushing against a solid piece of plastic. Mechanical keyswitches are designed so that they register before you bottom out, so you only need to apply as much force as is necessary to actuate it, not wasting any. And with as many different types of switches as there are you can pick and choose which one you’re the most comfortable with, as each one has a different feel to it. And most people who try one can never go back to using rubber domes, as they realize just how “mushy” they really feel.

As I quickly discovered, not all mechanical key switches sound or feel the same. Not only are there many different designs of switches, but some are better for typing, some are better for gaming, some have a slight snap-resistance that provides a tactile feedback as you press the key, and some give off a noisy click or clack.

Of the three keyboards I tested, they use two (yea three) different switches:

• Blue Cherry MX switches in the Das Keyboard
• Complicated white ALPS in the Apple Extended II
• Simplified white ALPS in the Tactile Pro

For reference, the slim Apple keyboards shipping today all use plastic scissor switches. Most all laptops use scissor switches because it allows for about half the travel of the more common dome switches used in most all commodity keyboards.1

Cherry Switches

The Das Keyboard uses blue Cherry MX switches. The blue Cherry MX switches have a very pronounced 2-stage travel with a very audible click that happens upon activation.

The total travel of a Cherry Blue MX switch is 4mm; the switch actuates and clicks half-way down at the 2mm mark.

This two-stage click is not nearly as pronounced on the ALPS switches, and it is this pronounced two-stage click that leads many people to consider the blue Cherry MX switches to be the best for typing. They have low resistance and a very noticeable tactical “bump” or “click” that can easily be felt when typing.

You don’t have to bottom out the key to get it to activate. Once you’ve pressed past the “click” at the 2mm mark, that is when the key switch activates and the keystroke is registered by the computer. It’s hard to explain the tactile sensation of typing on the Das Keyboard compared to using the Apple Extended or the Tactile Pro. I would say that because of the pronounced 2-stage switch, the Das has a more defined tactile feel, is less work, and is more enjoyable to type on.

ALPS Switches

ALPS switches are not only a type of switch, but also a brand. Tokyo-based Alps Electric Co., Ltd. makes the switches. You may have also heard of their brand of car audio gear: Alpine.

The Apple Extended Keyboard uses white Alps switches, as does the Tactile Pro. However, the Apple Extended Keyboard uses what is known as “Complicated ALPS” switches, while the Tactile Pro uses “Simplified AlPS.” This is because the complicated switches are no longer in production.

Over time, the complicated ALPS switches can be known to generate resistance because of dust and other elements that can build up within the switch. The Simplified ALPS switches, which the Tactile Pro uses, are less prone to this.

Based on my typing experience with both the Tactile Pro and the Apple Extended II, the Simplified ALPS switches give a bit more resistance than the older Complicated switches. The newer ones seem to have a more pronounced “click” or initial force of resistance. They are also louder. This is not necessarily a bad thing — one of the things that makes mechanical keyboards so great for typing is their click and their clack.

Apple Extended Keyboard II

Before you’ve even typed a word, the first thing you notice about the Apple Extended Keyboard II is how huge it is. The AEK is the widest keyboard of the bunch. It measures just wider than 18.5 inches. My son, Noah, was 19.5 inches when he was born. He could have taken a nap on the Apple Extended Keyboard. Who knows, he may have written something clever in the process.

With the AEK on my desk, my 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, which measures 21-inches across, now seems tinier than it used to. When I used the thin and sleek Apple Bluetooth keyboard, the cinema display seemed so large in contrast. With the Apple Extended Keyboard in front of the monitor, the screen now has a peer it must reckon with.

Next, you realize that the Home Row markers are on the “D” and the “K” as opposed to the “F” and the “J”. The latter is now the de facto standard and it takes some time to acclimate to the feel of the markers being under my two middle fingers rather than my two pointer fingers.

Lastly, the Apple Extended II uses an ADB cable. The keyboard I bought off eBay didn’t come with the cable, so I had to buy an ADB cable separately ($8) along with a Griffin iMate (an ADB to USB adapter that cost me another $25 on eBay).

I had been typing on my Das Keyboard for nearly two weeks before the Apple Extended II arrived. I expected it to sound and feel nearly the same as the Das Keyboard, but the complicated white ALPS switches are quite different than the blue Cherry MX switches. It is true that they are both clicky mechanical keyboards, but if you did not know that and you were only to type on each of these you would not classify them as being the same type of keyboard.

My Apple Extended II feels softer and sounds quieter than both other mechanical keyboards I have here. If you’re listening to the different audio tracks I’ve recorded, the MP3s may sound a bit deceiving. Sitting here, in my office, the Apple Extended Keyboard II is the quietest of the bunch. It is certainly not quiet — but it does not have the same high-pitched click. The Das is like a snap, the AEK is like a clap. The AEK has more bass to it, and the sound is more muted.

Again, I don’t know if the stark differences are because the ALPS switches in my Apple Extended II are used and 22 years old, or because they are the complicated ALPS switches. Perhaps I will never know because I don’t feel compelled to invest nearly $200 for a “brand new” 22-year-old Apple keyboard. The $32-find I got on eBay is simply the best one that was guaranteed to work and which was not assembled in Mexico.

Matias Tactile Pro 3

The Matias Tactile Pro bills itself as the modern version of the Apple Extended Keyboard II. Though the look of the Tactile Pro is patterned after the design of black-keyed Apple Pro Keyboard circa 2000, it uses white ALPS switches, akin to the 1990-era Apple Extended and Extended II keyboards. But the switches are not the exact same because those used in the Apple Extended are no longer made today.

The key switches on the Tactile Pro feel very different than those on my Apple Extended Keyboard II. The click-down on the Matias is much more pronounced than on the AEK II. Though I am not fully certain that this is because of the difference in switches rather than the age of my Apple Extended keyboard, the reviews I read online about the differences between the complicated and the simplified ALPS switches did seem to be concurrent with my experience.

Typing on the Tactile Pro is bittersweet for me. The tactile feedback of the key switches is quite pleasant, and there is a firm resistance within the switches that gives the keyboard a sturdy and hearty feel. I like the slightly higher resistance that the Tactile Pro gives.

Moreover, the sound of the Tactile Pro when typing is much louder than the Apple Extended II. I like the louder volume, but unfortunately it has a hollow sound to it that seems incongruous with the sturdiness of the switches. Additionally, there is a ringing that echoes around in the chassis of the keyboard itself.

Here is an audio recording which tries to catch the ringing that reverberates after a keystroke. You may need to turn your volume up to hear it:

After typing on the Matias for two days, as much as I liked the tactile feel of it, the sound was constantly a distraction. I asked Matias about the ring, and was informed that the noise comes from the springs in the ALPS key switches. Matias tells me they are advancing the key switches to remove the ringing in a future version of the Tactile Pro. Also, the chassis design of the original Tactile Pro is built in such a way that the spring ring is not nearly as audible.

Das Keyboard

This new model of the Das, which has the keys mapped out especially for a Mac, seems to be re-kindling the interest in mechanical keyboards. It is the first mechanical keyboard I got, and before that the first (and only) mechanical keyboard I had ever used was my cousin’s Adesso MKB-125B. Both the Das and the Adesso use the blue Cherry MX switches. It was through using the Adesso that I first began considering upgrading my typing tool.

Unfortunately, the Das (like the other 2 keyboards I tested) is big, bulky, and generally an eye sore. In fact, of the few other reviews I’ve read about it, the general consensus is: it’s ugly, but it’s great to type on. The clickety-clack quickly makes up for the aesthetic sacrifice by telling everyone within earshot that you are getting some serious work done.

The aesthetics of mechanical keyboards today baffle me. Just because it has mechanical switches, which were especially common from keyboards of the ‘80s and ‘90s, doesn’t mean it should also look like it’s been rescued from 20 years ago.

In addition to being the ugliest of the three mechanical keyboards currently in my office, the typeface used on the key caps of the Das is horrendous. Perhaps the worst offender is the single-quote / double-quote key, which rests just to the left of Return. At a glance, it looks like a period and a single-quote.

However, the Das Keyboard has two great things going for it. More than the other two keyboards, I prefer the tactile feel of the blue Cherry MX switches and the audio click of the Das. Since you don’t buy a mechanical keyboard for its aesthetics, for those looking to get a clicky keyboard, this is the one I would recommend.

Mapping the Special Function Keys

Though the Das Keyboard for Mac has custom modifier key commands drawn onto its function keys, those special modifier keys aren’t recognized by OS X. The “F14″ and “F15″ keys work to dim and brighten the display (rather than the traditional F1 and F2), but in order to control the previous track, next track, play/pause, and volume up/down/mute you have to press the Function Key which is awkwardly placed under the right-side Shift Key.

Since the System doesn’t recognize the Das Keyboard’s special keys, you can’t tell it to treat F1 like it would on an Apple keyboard without pressing that Function key. For the life of me, I don’t know why this is, but it just is.

Fortunately Keyboard Maestro is a keyboard’s best friend. A little bit of fiddling with the Macros and I was successfully able to map F6 all the way through F11 to act as the blue markings say they should act.

Moreover, since I use Rdio as my tunes source, I hacked together a rather clever if/else macro that allows me to control iTunes if I’m in iTunes, but otherwise to default to controlling Rdio from anywhere else in OS X.

With the Keyboard Maestro hacks in place, you may have trouble using your normal modifier keys on your MacBook Air (assuming you use your Das Keyboard with your laptop in clamshell mode). If so, check out this cool little utility called Function Flip.

Outro

After a month of using and testing the three most popular clicky keyboards for Mac, I am extremely glad I jumped into these waters. The sound and the feel of a clicky keyboard only takes a few days to get used to, and what follows is this intense feeling of productivity that now accompanies anything I type.

Something I like about mechanical keyboards is that each key has its own unique sound and feel. You could tell how many words someone types, and how many in-line typos they fix, simply by listening. Space Bar, Backspace, Return, and the letters — each produce a unique sound and have their own tactile feel. There is variety when typing on a mechanical keyboard. All of these keyboards are just so darn loud that there’s no ambiguity as to if I am typing or not — I know it, Anna knows it, and heck, the neighbors probably know it. When I set out to type a sentence, I am committed — it is like the typing equivalent of writing with ink.

If you too want to adorn your desk with an ugly keyboard — one with a loud personality and which increases typing productivity — then I recommend the Das Keyboard. I prefer both the tactile feel and the sound of the blue Cherry MX switches, and though I find the Das to be the ugliest of the bunch, a serious typist knows you shouldn’t be looking at your keyboard while you’re typing.

11:51 am CST: With a thermos full of coffee on my desk, half a dozen Safari tabs open, and Twitter in the corner, I am ready to watch the liveblogs.

12:21 pm: Tim Cook announces the new iPad!

12:23 pm: Phil Schiller is now talking about it. Overview of features: Retina display; better camera; 4G LTE; voice dictation; and 10 hours of battery life. Wow.

12:38 pm: Phil Schiller: “This new iPad has the most wireless bands of any device that’s ever shipped.” Wi-Fi, GSM, UMTS, GPS, CDMA, LTE, and Bluetooth to be exact.

1:13 pm: Phil Schiller: “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t create on an iPad.”

1:45 pm: Schiller says that the non-Retina-optimized apps will still look great on the new iPad’s screen. I disagree. They will look blurry and poor, especially when contrasted against the apps which are Retina optimized.

1:21 pm: Apple is calling the new iPad the same thing everyone else is going to call it: “The new iPad.”

Later this year? “The new iPhone.”

1:30 pm: “Resolutionary” is a brilliant tagline. Reminds me of “Thinnovation” and “The Funnest iPod Ever”.

1:49 pm: Now attempting to order a 16GB, Black, AT&T new iPad.

2:49 pm: Make that trying to order a 16GB, Black, AT&T new iPad.

3:09 pm: Got through. But it looks like the LTE models are not available for in-store pickup when pre-ordering. I’d prefer to wait in line, but I’m not going to wait inline without a pre-order guarantee to get the right model.

Thursday, March 8

1:14 pm: Well, apparently AT&T’s map of 4G coverage (which is linked to from Apple.com’s website talking about LTE coverage) doesn’t actually mean LTE coverage.

I went with AT&T because I thought they had LTE in both Kansas City and Denver, but turns out they do not in Denver. Now canceling my AT&T order and going with Verizon instead.

2:44 pm: Just received the order confirmation email, and fortunately the new iPad is in fact expected to arrive on Friday the 16th. I’m a bit bummed that I won’t be standing in line this time. Me and two other friends were all planning to pre-order for pickup but the Apple online store didn’t have pickup available at the time and so we had to choose to get it delivered to our house.

And, I see that my time spent refreshing store.apple.com yesterday was pretty much in vain.

Wednesday, March 14

7:12 pm: Watching a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation with Anna while we wait for the reviews of the iPad to hit the wire.

7:14 pm: Okay, fine. While I wait for the reviews to hit the wire.

8:31 pm: Looks like the embargo has lifted. Reading the Reviews.

Using my “old” iPad 2 to read reviews about the new iPad seems like some sort of cruel joke.

11:57 pm: I dig the long-form, personal, in-depth stuff. Folks have been griping about bullet point posts for years but I read this type of writing as entertainment. I especially enjoyed Jason Snell’s review.

Friday, March 16

8:00 am: Brewing coffee and getting ready to wait out the day.

8:32 am: Just got a text from my friend who is at the local Apple store and he says there is no line. He just walked right in and snagged a 64GB Black Verizon model.

Well, in that case, why should I sit around and wait for FedEx? Moreover, I’ve been thinking about how 16GB may not be enough any more. Already my iPad 2 is maxed out and I’ve had to delete all my music off of it. I think I’m going to cruise over to the Apple store and pick up a Verizon 32GB model instead. I can simply return my 16GB later.

I guess 32 is the new 16.

9:52 am: After waiting for Noah to go down for his nap, I am now leaving for the Apple store. Anna jokes with me that she’ll sign for my FedEx iPad while I’m out.

10:04 am: I arrive at the Apple store. It’s weird to be here on launch morning but with no huge lines out front. There are the customary police officers, carts of Smart Water, big signs on easels for the pre-order line, and dozens of blue-shirted Apple employees… but only a handful of customers.

I ask the employees manning the front door how the morning has been. They say that yesterday at around 11:00 am the first person arrived and that this morning when the store opened at 8:00 there were about 80 people in line. I hope that guy who waited 21 hours didn’t stick around to see the line totally dissipate after just an hour.

10:11 am: New iPad purchased. This is the 3rd iPad (3) that I’ve bought. (!) First was the AT&T one, then was the 16GB Verizon model, and now this 32 GB Verizon. Oy.

10:43 am: Now back home and beginning setup. The first thing I notice, right away, is the weight. The new iPad is obviously heavier. I think it feels thicker, but if I didn’t know that it was thicker, I’d probably chalk it up to the fact it weighs more.

And since this is a 4G-equipped iPad it’s even a bit heavier than a Wi-Fi-only iPad 3. To get nitty gritty: according to my kitchen coffee scale, my iPad 2 weighs 613 grams and my new iPad weighs 663 grams.

10:44 am: The second thing I notice: the screen. It looks familiar and yet not at the same time. I’m not as shocked to see the iPad’s Retina display because I’ve seen one before (on my iPhone). And yet, I am so thankful that a device which is pretty much just a screen, now has such an incredible screen.

10:53 am: Doing a quick iCloud backup of my iPad 2 so I can restore from that backup to the iPad 3. Since I don’t charge my iPad 2 in on a daily basis, I don’t have a recent iCloud backup of it.

10:58 am: Initiating iCloud restore onto the new iPad.

10:59 am: 21 minutes remaining. Time to brew another cup of coffee? I think yes.

11:40 am: While waiting for all my apps to finish downloading, I set up my Verizon service. I imagine that I could use 1GB without trying too hard, so I’m going with Verizon’s 2GB for $30/month plan. but I guess we’ll see in practice. How often will I take just my iPad when out and about? And how often will I need the cellular data?

It seems Verizon wants me to set up my own account and enter in my credit card info. I was hoping they would charge me through my Apple account and so I could just enable it via my iTunes password, but I had to enter in complete billing info. If I cancel my data plan next month but want to enable it the month after that, will I have to re-enter all this billing information again?

The 4G cellular connection works different than what I thought. For some reason I thought the cellular connection would be off most of the time and if I wanted to turn that on then I would have to manually switch it on each time. But no, it works on the iPad just like it does on my iPhone — it is always connected. If it has a Wi-Fi signal nearby then it grabs that, but if not then it uses the cellular signal. Thus there’s no interruption of connectivity.

I could manually turn off the data connection but I’ve read that leaving it active has a negligible drain on battery life, so I see no point in keeping it disabled when I don’t need it.

11:52 am: The apps download in order of priority. Apps in the Dock download and install first, then left-to-right and top-to-bottom starting on the first Home screen.

Sadly, the apps did not download their latest versions. They downloaded the version I had on my iPad 2. Now go into the App Store and update them all. So more downloads

3:04 pm: FedEx finally arrives with my Apple.com-ordered 16GB iPad 3 and my Apple TV they tried to deliver yesterday. The FedEx guy looks tired.

7:25 pm: The battery was at 94-percent this morning when I first turned it on. I’ve been using surfing, reading, tweeting, and emailing pretty much nonstop since 11:00 am and it is now at 40-percent.

8:30 pm: Hey! The Retina update to Instapaper is now available. It looks fantastic. Loving Proxima Nova.

Saturday, March 17

7:42 am: Rearranging my iPad’s Home screens and apps. What else would I be doing on a Saturday morning?

8:32 am: Setting up the last of the apps that need new passwords entered and to sync their data: Rdio and 1Password.

Apps that are not updated for Retina yet don’t strike me as being as blurry as non-Retina iPhone apps were. Perhaps it’s because I am further away from the iPad screen than the iPhone’s? Or perhaps because the iPhone’s Retina display has a higher pixel density than the iPad’s?

9:10 am: Battery is currently at 22-percent. Letting it charge for a bit while I make my morning cup of coffee.

9:37 am: People on Twitter are talking about difference in color temperature between the screens of the iPad 2 and the 3. I see a color variant but it’s not a temperature difference — rather my iPad 3 is more vibrant and rich.

2:15 pm: The battery is now fully charged, but I’m not sure how long it’s been there. Based on the past few timeline notes, it seems like the iPad charges at about 15-percent per hour.

11:02 pm: Doing my first LTE speed test. It’s averaging 10Mbps down and 3Mbps up. That’s here in the south end of KC, where I live. So it’s not quite as fast as my home broadband connection, nor is it as fast as some of the jealousy-inducing speeds that some folks are tweeting about, but it still pretty impressive and nothing to complain about.

11:14 pm: Streamed an HD video trailer (Unraveled) over LTE with only one minor hiccup at the front end. The HD looks stellar on the new iPad.

Sunday, March 18

9:53 am: Decided to move the Mail app out of the iPad’s Dock. I have every intention of using the iPad more and more as a serious work device. And a serious work device needs its email application in a place where it is least likely to wiggle its way into the center of attention.

Monday, March 19

1:25 pm: After recording Shawn Today and listening to the Apple financial conference call this morning, I’ve been spending the rest of the day working solely from the iPad. Writing, reading, emailing, and linking — all from the iPad while I watch Noah in the living room so Anna can get some down time.

What I like about working with the iPad is that I feel like it’s just me and my work. Even if there are other distractions available (like Twitter) they are not present. They are in the background and in another app, not peeking out from behind the frontmost window.

I remember two years ago, when the first iPad came out, I very much wanted it to be a laptop replacement but it couldn’t be. For me, at least. When the iPad and its 3rd-party apps were still in their infancy I couldn’t properly manage my email workflow, my to-do list, nor could I write to the site or even have synced documents.

Since 2010 so much of that has changed. In part, my own workflow has simplified and can now acclimate mostly to what the iPad is capable of. But also the apps for the iPad have come such a long way, that in some regards (to-do list management, for example) the iPad is a better tool than my laptop.

4:01 pm: While visiting my sister and her husband, I thought I’d bring the iPad so I could do a speed test at Mark’s house and wow, Verizon’s LTE is much faster here than at my place. Seeing speeds around 30Mbps up and 20Mbps down.

9:07 pm: I haven’t touched the older iPad 2 in a few days. But I just now picked it up to do some comparisons of websites rendering on the different displays and it’s amazing how much lighter and thinner this thing feels.

I’ve gotten used to the thickness and the weight of the new iPad and in day-to-day it doesn’t affect its usefulness, but it still is interesting that the difference is so noticeable when picking up the iPad 2. Or, put another way, the difference in weight and thinness is much more noticeable when going from heavy to light than the other way around.

The second thing I noticed with the iPad 2 in hand was how horrid the Internet looks. Everything is fuzzy. Text isn’t clear; Retina display-optimized header graphics look just as blurry as non-optimized graphics on the new iPad. There is no going back.

9:51 pm: It strikes me that the Retina display is the other side of the coin to iOS. Meaning, iOS is the software and the screen is the hardware and that’s it. Those are the two sides to this coin. On a laptop or desktop computer you have three user interface components: the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen where you watch the user interface. On the iPad you have one user interface: the screen. And you touch and manipulate what is on the screen.

I love the way Ryan Block explained why the new iPad’s Retina display is such a big deal:

The core experience of the iPad, and every tablet for that matter, is the screen. It’s so fundamental that it’s almost completely forgettable. Post-PC devices have absolutely nothing to hide behind. Specs, form-factors, all that stuff melts away in favor of something else that’s much more intangible. When the software provides the metaphor for the device, every tablet lives and dies by the display and what’s on that display.

Ever since 2007, one of the hallmark engineering feats of iOS has been its responsiveness to touch input. When you’re using an iOS app it feels as if you are actually moving the pixels underneath your finger. If that responsiveness matters at all, then so does the quality and realism of the screen itself.

Highly-responsive software combined with a dazzling and life-like screen make for the most “realistic” software experience available.

I don’t know how this relates exactly, but it makes me think of how I would flail my hands and the controller of my Nintendo Entertainment System when I was trying to get Mario to jump over a large pit. As if, by moving the controller around I could give Mario that extra boost of speed for his jump. Have we always had that natural tendency to relate our physical actions to the manipulation of pixels on a screen?

10:12 pm: My only disappointment with the new iPad’s display is that it’s not laminated to the glass the way the display of the iPhone 4/4S is. The iPad’s screen is significantly larger than the iPhone’s, and so there is an epic element in that regard, but there is a unique beauty to the iPhone’s Retina display that the iPad does not have.

Tuesday, March 20

1:30 pm: Putting Noah in the car seat to take him to his one-month doctor checkup.

1:38 pm: I need a sleeve for this iPad because, already, taking it out on its own is becoming more common.

This X Pocket iPad case from Hard Graft looks absolutely stellar, but do I really want only a sleeve? If I’m going to be leaving my Air at home it’d be nice to have an iPad bag. My beloved Timbuk2 is already the smallest size they make and though it’s perfect for holding my Air, iPad, keyboard, and other little peripherals, the iPad alone seems to swim in it.

Another option could be this sweet bag from Hard Graft, but it may be just a little bit too small because I’d want to be able to fit my bluetooth keyboard in there as well. My pals Ben Brooks and Brett Kelly both use Tom Bihn’s Ristretto, but I prefer cases that are horizontal rather than vertical.

2:09 pm: Did a quick speed test here in Overland Park before going in to the pediatrician’s office. The LTE service here is faster than by my place, but nowhere near the speeds it was seeing at my sister’s home.

You know, all these speed tests keep me thinking about what I’ll do if and when an LTE iPhone comes out. Will I cancel my AT&T contract and switch to Verizon, will I stick with my 4S for an extra year and move to Verizon when my contract expires, or will I stick with AT&T and get one of their LTE phones?

2:13 pm: Anna’s looking at me like can we go in now?

Wednesday, March 21

12:13 pm: I remember when the iPad was a luxury item and I was embarrassed to use it in church or the local coffee shop. But now? Now it seems everyone has one. I walk into the coffee shop and half of the people here are reading or working on their iPads.

Two years ago, we didn’t know where the iPad fit in. It was a $500 luxury item that went somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop. But now, people are using iPads as their main computers. As a $500 computer replacement the iPad seems sensible, not extravagant.

10:48 pm: Whoa. Turn a page in iBooks.

Thursday, March 22

9:58 am: I have figured out how to properly classify the three generations of iPads: * Vintage * Old and Busted * New Hotness

Friday, March 23

12:45 pm: Ugh. Hit with the stomachs flu; I’m taking it easy today. But while I’m upstairs in bed, trying to relax, I’d like to do some work on my development site. Surely I can do this from the iPad, no?

I search the App Store for “FTP” and come across two apps which allow me to access and edit FTP files: FTP on the Go PRO, and Markup. However, asking for recommendations on Twitter yields a single answer: Textastic.

1:28 pm: Coding on the iPad is a much more delicate process than coding on my Mac. When on my Mac I have at least a few Safari tabs open with the site launched, and Coda going with 3 or 4 or more tabs worth of documents I’m working in. On the iPad it’s a bit more uni-tasky, and you can’t see as many lines of code all at once on the smaller screen.

While I don’t see myself ever doing large-scale coding projects solely on my iPad, it’s nice to know that if I need to jump in and make edits or changes to my site I could do so. Also, it’s nice to be able to make small tweaks to current back-burner projects.

Saturday, March 24

8:37 am: Downloading songs for Anna on the iPad 2, and again I’m reminded of how thin and light this device is compared to the new one.

It is an interesting juxtaposition of the senses to hold the iPad 2 after getting used to the new iPad. The older hardware feels superior according to the physical senses — eyes closed (or screen off) and you would assume you’re holding the latest and greatest iPad. However, one look at the screen and your mind wonders how it was that your hands could have deceived you. How can this lighter and thinner device have such a vastly inferior screen?

John Gruber describes it well:

Apple doesn’t make new devices which get worse battery life than the version they’re replacing, but they also don’t make new devices that are thicker and heavier. LTE networking — and, I strongly suspect, the retina display — consume more power than do the 3G networking and non-retina display of the iPad 2. A three-way tug-of-war: 4G/LTE networking, battery life, thinness/weight. Something had to give. Thinness and weight lost: the iPad 3 gets 4G/LTE, battery life remains unchanged, and to achieve both of these Apple included a physically bigger battery, which in turn results in a new iPad that is slightly thicker (0.6 mm) and heavier (roughly 0.1 pound/50 grams, depending on the model).

The trade off is worth it. After a short while of using the new iPad I quickly acclimate to its size and weight. And who among us would vote for a new iPad that didn’t have 4G LTE, or that didn’t have the Retina screen, or that didn’t have 10 hours of battery life and was instead as thin and light as the iPad 2? Not me. And, well, if you did vote for that, then you can just buy an iPad 2 and even save $100.

11:12 am: Anna’s friends are over for brunch to celebrate her birthday. One of them is currently in nursing school and we all get onto the subject of studying, textbooks, laptops, and iPads.

Her school is excited about the soon-coming transition to when textbook money will be a part of the tuition cost and it will be used to buy the student a new iPad and cover the cost to load up that iPad with the course-necessary electronic textbooks.

But these girls are not excited about that. They don’t want textbooks on iPads because they can’t write in them, can’t highlight them, can’t spread them all out and reference multiple pages simultaneously. And they don’t like the idea of needing a laptop and an internet connection either because it means you have to study at home or at a coffee shop or library, and you can’t go somewhere outside and away from it all.

Sunday, March 25

7:29 am: Checking my iPad to see when the latest iCloud backup was, and yes: the iPad automatically backed up to iCloud last night. This has got to be one of the most underappreciated features of owning an iDevice. Automatic iCloud backups are like Time Machine but better. All my apps, all my settings, all my pictures, backed up to the cloud while I sleep and while my iPad charges.

Remember when we had to plug into iTunes and manually sync? Ew.

Monday, March 26

11:27 am: Finally able to pair my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to the new iPad. In short, this keyboard seems to only want to be paired with a single device at a time. I had to tell my MacBook Air to forget the keyboard (plugging in my Apple USB keyboard instead). Though I like this keyboard more for typing, I had been using the Amazon iPad keyboard with the iPad 2 and, though it is a great and inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard, it isn’t quite on the same par as Apple’s.

Coincidentally, this Apple Bluetooth keyboard is the same one I bought two years ago when I bought an original iPad. I always intended to use it with the iPad but it ended up becoming my desktop keyboard instead.

12:05 pm: Was planning on heading out for the afternoon to field test the iPad some more, and to wrap up this piece, but Noah is having a rough and fussy afternoon. I’ve opted to stay home and give Anna some time off. So hey! I’m “field testing” in the backyard.

I’m in my camping chair out on the back patio, a baby monitor by my side, my lunch shake resting in the cup holder, and the new iPad resting on my lap in its InCase Origami Workstation.

It’s unfortunate that the iPad’s glassy screen doesn’t do well outdoors. If the screen is light and the text is dark, it works pretty well, but only so long as you are away from sunlight. And I notice that there’s virtually no difference of increased visibility between 50- and 100-percent brightness.

12:15 pm: The thing that bothers me the most about promoting the iPad to a more regular work device is that it still doesn’t fit my email workflow. On my Mac I have many rules in Mail that process and file away those “bacon” emails that I want but never want to see. Also, I get a lot of receipts via email, and most of these are for tax-deductible items that I need to keep and process. I can’t do that on the iPad because I use AppleScripts and Yojimbo…

Hmmm. What if there a way to send an email to a Dropbox folder?…

Doing some research reveals there are a few options. Send To Dropbox looks to be the best. It’s a service that connects to your Dropbox account and then gives you a unique email address. It will store any attachments as well as store plain text or HTML version of your emails. Sounds ideal.

12:35 pm: The sun is creeping over to my shaded spot. I may be forced to move inside.

1:02 pm: For the past 30 minutes I have carried on a couple of iChat conversations (thanks to Verbs App app), researched some ways to send an email to Dropbox, worked on this article, and changed a certain baby’s dirty diaper.

However, my backyard is now completely bathed in sun and I have no choice but to move back inside. Noting that the battery level is currently at 68-percent; about an hour ago it was at 82.

1:21 pm: Since I am “field testing,” I’ve been using LTE instead of my home Wi-Fi. This morning I checked my Verizon data plan and it reports 307MB used since the 16th. Today is the 26th, and so that averages out to 31MB per day so far. My plan allows me 2,048MB per month, and that averages out to 66MB per day — twice what I’ve been averaging so far. I think the 2GB plan will prove to be just right.

3:11 pm: Now taking that field trip and driving to the Roasterie.

3:23 pm: The weather is so nice today that everyone else thought they’d head over here as well. I could sit inside, but that’d be a disservice to the weather.

So here I am on a sidewalk bench down by Le Creuest, some kitchen accessories store. This is where the oddity of using an iPad in public comes in to play once again. Sitting on a bench in front of a kitchen store drinking an Italian Soda and tapping away on my new iPad. I’m too timid to bust out the Origami Workstation in this environment.

3:29 pm: Alas, I cannot connect to the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi from way over here on this bench, and Verizon service seems to be poor on this side of town. Ah well, I am mostly only writing and therefore Internet speeds are inconsequential to me at the moment.

You know, it’s funny. I bought a 4G iPad and signed up for a data plan so that I could take the iPad anywhere and still be able to use it with an Internet connection. In some ways the data plan is a safety net — if I find myself in a place with poor or no Wi-Fi, then no problem because I can use my data connection. But in some ways the data plan is a permission slip — if I’d rather go work at the park instead of a coffee shop I can.

In my mind I imagine the permission slip mindset as being the more exciting and freeing option. I mean, that is one of the great advantages to cellular data and it’s certainly the main reason for why I bought the 4G model. Yet, I find myself too timid to take advantage of it in fear that I’ll use up my data plan too fast and then not have it when I need it, or pay unnecessary overage rates.

Tuesday, March 27

11:13 am: Checking the Verizon data usage and today it reports a total of 350MB used. So yesterday, while on the field and using my data connection what seemed like a lot, I only used 43MB. That is still under my daily allotment of 66MB.

3:49 pm: Finished setting up my Send To Dropbox workflow, and I now have a Folder Action and an AppleScript working on my MacBook Air so that any receipts I get via email I can simply forward on from my iPad or iPhone and they’ll safely land in Yojimbo.

And, relatedly, thanks to Printopia I can also now print from my iPad (since I don’t have an Air Print-enabled printer).

All these tricks and workarounds and 3rd-party services that make my iPad work better with my Mac strike me as an odd necessity for a “Post-PC Device”. In some ways it makes the iPad seem more like a thin client rather than its own, stand-alone computing device. Perhaps it’s not a fault of the iPad so much as it is my own desire to fit the iPad into my particular and age-old workflows that I’ve long since gotten used to on my Macs over the years.

Yet, even with my workflows aside, I suppose the iPad is still, in a way, a thin client — a thin client to the World Wide Web. How many of the apps on my iPad have need of an Internet connection? How many of the tasks I do on the iPad require an Internet connection? How often do I front load Instapaper and Reeder before getting on an airplane?

The answer is: a lot.

Because the iPad works best when it is connected to the Web. It is intended to be connected.

Having an iPad with a cellular data connection instantly raises the overall utility of the device. Because it takes it from a device that works best in the comfort of a home or coffee shop Wi-Fi connection and turns it into a device that works virtually anywhere your feet will take you.

This tablet is extremely portable. And its software makes it usable as a work and entertainment device. These are the things that excite me most about the iPad. And I don’t mean this specific new iPad that I am using to write these very very words. I mean the iPad as a product category — as the next generation of devices where things are versatile, robust, and yet simpler.

If you do a lot of writing, I see no reason not to find an application that has been built to best suit your needs as a writer. Sure, you can scribble something down on the back of a cocktail napkin using a mechanical pencil, but why torture yourself like that?

What I find so compelling about these simple writing applications is that they are custom tailored for writing, especially if you’re writing for the Web. In contrast, I never write in Pages.

Off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen or so minimalistic writing apps, and I’ve tried them all. Writing is my job, and it behooves me greatly to find the best possible writing app that I am comfortable in and that keeps me moving the cursor to the right.

Over time, the writing apps that have stuck for me are: - Simplenote + nvALT combo - iA Writer - Byword

Preferring Byword over other similar apps is not to objurgate or even criticize them. As water naturally flows downward, it seems that I naturally gravitate toward Byword. I like it so much, in fact, that it tied for my favorite new Mac app of 2011.

I am also a fan of iA Writer. I love that big blue cursor and the elegant way it stylizes my Markdown-riddled writing. But even still, Byword usually wins my writing attention due to its basic typographic options. Writer, on the other hand, is famously free from any and all settings. The only option you have in Writer is to use the app or not.

Byword, by comparison, is rich with preferences. However, compared to your standard-issue text editor or word processor, Byword is slim in this area.

On the Mac, Byword’s settings pane looks like this:

You choose a typeface and size, a column width, and decide on light or dark. I write mostly in Menlo at medium width, and it seems I flip between light or dark mode depending on the weather or time of day. Springtime morning? Light mode. Rainy afternoon? Dark mode.

I’ve been using Byword since its debut last spring. But for any and all documents which I want to have available on my iPad or iPhone I’ve used the nerd’s common Simplenote+nvALT combo of apps. However, a good audit of one’s workflow is often in order and I’d like to start using a single text editor for my article drafts rather than spreading them out across multiple apps and folders.1

Therefore, with the advent of Byword for iOS and its iCloud document syncing, I’ve decided it’s time to evaluate and upgrade my writing workflow.

This isn’t a spontaneous decision. More and more I have been wanting to promote my iPad to a stronger work device. If I need to get “serious” work done I rarely turn to my iPad. I think that could change, and I think I could be the better for it.

For my trip to Macworld this past January, I took the Apple nerd’s three standard-issue gadgets: my MacBook Air, my iPad, and my iPhone. For the first time I can recall, I didn’t even use the Air. Nearly all of the reading, writing, linking, emailing, and tweeting I did was via my iPhone. And the rest of the reading and writing I did was on my iPad.

It’s one thing to look at a spec sheet, nod in agreement and say that yes the iPad has most of the tools I need in order to do my day-to-day job. But it is another thing entirely to actually put that into practice. And so my time at Macworld, working almost solely from my iPhone, was a bit of an eye opener for me.

The linchpin for me to use the iPad for work is the ability to write from it. But this is a bigger issue than just needing a text editor — the iPad is not in want for writing apps. What’s important is that whatever article I’m writing be available to me on my Air, my iPad, and my iPhone.

Enter Byword

Today the Mac app I write from so frequently was updated to accompany the launch of the its iPhone and iPad siblings. What’s new in Byword for Mac is little more than integrated iCloud support. With the new iOS apps, Byword now ships out of the box with the ability to sync all your documents via iCloud or Dropbox.

The iCloud integration is, as with most other apps, painless and quick. I’ve found that apps which sync their documents through iCloud are quicker and more reliable. However, what I don’t like about using iCloud syncing is that it is application-specific. And so, in a way, an app becomes a silo of my work. There are definite advantages to using Dropbox instead of iCloud (and I’m not just talking about Byword here), but the latter is new and still feels novel.

In addition to the new iCloud support, here are a few things about Byword for Mac that have always been there:

• QuickCursor support.

• Exporting of your markdown as HTML. Meaning, you write with Markdown and then copy and paste, but when you paste it’s been converted to HTML. I have a WordPress plugin that converts my Markdown to HTML when I publish, but there are times when I need an HTML formatted page (such as a Craigslist listing) and so I write it in Byword and then just export. Handy.

• In-line stylizing of Markdown syntax. This has become standard practice for minimalist writing apps, and I like the way that Byword and iA Writer do it best — though they are somewhat different in their styles.

• All the other Lion-specific features, such as versioning, auto-saving, and glorious full-screen mode.

Byword for iOS

Byword on the iPhone and iPad has a very distinct, subtle design to it with very low-contrast buttons and a monochromatic look throughout. All the interface elements and popovers are custom drawn to fit into the “style” of Byword, and yet they are still familiar and follow standard conventions of a familiar iOS app.

When Apple began introducing monochrome icons to OS X I rejoiced. I prefer the more simple look that’s now found in the iTunes and Finder sidebars, and I like the simple and subdued look found in Byword for iOS as well.

It’s this custom yet simple design aesthetic seen in the app that carries throughout the whole of the app.

Custom but Simple

Obviously the main feature of Byword is the writing window. And, I’m pleased to say that it’s pretty much just a single text entry window. Unlike Byword on the Mac you cannot adjust the width of the text column, nor can you choose between light or dark themes.

The features and highlights of Byword on iOS include:

• Typography: There are four typefaces to choose from. Two familiars — Georgia and Helvetica — and two custom fonts from the M+ outline family.

  The Byword default typeface is “M+ C Type 1″. It’s a nice sans serif with monospace overtones, and I like it. The other custom typeface, “M+ M Type 1,” is a monotype font that I do not like. The other two, Georgia and Helvetica, I consider great for reading but I do not prefer to write with them.

• TextExpander support: This is stellar. I have quite a few custom snippets I use in TextExpander on my Mac. The TextExpander iOS app can sync all your snippets via Dropbox so that whatever abbreviations and shortcuts you use on your Mac can also be used on your iPhone and iPad. And, though it’s not a system-wide availability on iOS like it is on the Mac, TextExpander for iOS can be utilized by other iOS apps if they wish. Simplenote takes advantage of this, as does Byword. And so, my TextExpander library is available to me when typing in Byword on my iPad or iPhone.

• AirPrint: If you have an AirPrint-capable printer you can print your Byword document. If you don’t have an AirPrint printer, check out Printopia.

• Word count: To give a little bit of breathing room at the bottom of the text-entry window there is a small footer. In the footer by default it displays the word count. Tap it and you can see character count instead. Tap it again and you get words + characters.

• Custom Soft Keyboard Keys: Swipe the footer and you get a custom set of keyboard buttons. Including brackets, parens, and shortcuts for inserting Markdown links, images, headers, etc. As well as one-character-at-a-time cursor navigation.

  Those familiar with iA Writer know that custom keyboard buttons are not a new idea. However, I’ve found that I don’t use Writer’s custom buttons all that often, yet they take up the full size of an additional row from the on-screen keyboard. And so I like the way that Byword has implemented its custom on-screen buttons because they are smaller, more subtle, and easily forgettable if you are not using them at the time (this is especially true of the iPhone app, where screen real estate is at a premium). But they are there when you need them. It’s good to see a useful feature like this implemented but re-thought out.

  

  Worth noting is that the custom soft keyboard keys are not available when a Bluetooth keyboard is in use. When you’ve got a full-blown keyboard you don’t exactly need custom soft keys for inserting common Markdown syntax like brackets, asterisks, parenthesis, or pound signs, but it would be nice to have quick access to the link or image formatting.

• Automatic list continuation: This is nice, and it’s something that bugs me when I’m typing in Simplenote, TextEdit, or iA Writer. When you start an ordered or unordered list in Byword then the next line is auto-formatted for the next list item. You don’t have to continually re-enter a new asterisk, dash, or number for each list item.

A Trick and Quibble Wrapped Up in One

There are a few quibbles I have with the iOS apps, and though I dedicate an inordinate amount of space to it in the below paragraphs, this is something I’m confident will be worked out in a near-future version of Byword.

The way Byword is designed, the settings button doesn’t show when the on-screen keyboard is brought up. This is because the entire top menu bar is intentionally hidden when you’re typing. This allows the most amount of space to be dedicated to your typing field as possible. Which is as it should be because when you’re working on a screen the size of an iPad, and especially the iPhone, you need as much space as possible to see the text you’re working with.

However, this makes for a bit of a quibble to get to a document’s settings, as well as being able to get to the list of documents.

On the iPad the only way to access the in-document settings is to hide the keyboard. When the cursor is active in the document then the Title Bar is hidden; when the cursor is not active the Title Bar is visible. On the iPhone there is no native key to hide the on-screen keyboard. Fortunately Byword provides one within the custom keyboard keys that are built in to the app. However, those custom keys are only visible if you swipe the word count over to the side to reveal the customized software keys.

Why not simply bring up the document’s Menu Bar (and thus the settings button) when the user taps within the text field?

Moreover, I discovered (while in the process of writing this review) that it can be quite tricky to get at the in-document settings when you are using a Bluetooth keyboard.

Since the Title Bar is hidden when you’re typing, you cannot “hide the keyboard” to disable the cursor. Thus, when typing with a Bluetooth keyboard, the only way I’ve found to get to the in-document settings is to swipe on the document from left to right. This will slide the active document over to the right and un-hide the document list. In the process the document’s Title Bar returns to views. Next, just tap the “3-bar” icon and the document will re-enter full-screen mode, but with the Title Bar still in view, and from there you can now see and tap on your current document settings.

This left-to-right swipe trick also works well as a shortcut on Byword’s iPhone and iPad apps even when not typing with a Bluetooth keyboard.

The Final Word

This review was written and edited exclusively in Byword.

I began this article on a Tuesday night from my iPhone around 11:30 pm while my son, Noah, was up for his late-night feeding. On Wednesday morning I picked up where I left off by opening Byword on my MacBook Air while in my office. After lunch, I grabbed my iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard and visited my favorite local coffee shop where a latte accompanied me as I finished the article.

This is exactly the sort of writing workflow that I’m looking to adopt.

That’s not to say I will always be writing articles in an assortment of locations and on a plethora of devices, but it’s nice to have a text editor on all of my gadgets that I enjoy using, and it’s nice that all my currently-working-on articles are now synced and easily accessible from within that application.

For me, a good list app needs to be both fast and available. Clear is both of those while also managing to be unique and quite unconventional.

As any reader of this website knows, I am an avid user of OmniFocus. Any list I may jot down will eventually work its way into OmniFocus. But the biggest caveat with OmniFocus is its speed. It takes more than a few seconds to launch the iPhone app and enter something in. New OmniFocus items beg to be given contexts, projects, start dates, and due dates. While this is OmniFocus’s greatest strength, but there are moments when this is also OmniFocus’s greatest weakness.

And so there are two things I like about Clear:

• As a list app it is fast to use and to navigate. It launches up very quickly, you can enter in a slew of items in no time, and you can get to a particular list very quickly as well.

• As a man who simply has an affinity for fine software, Clear stands apart as a very unique and clever app. I dive into this a bit more in my review below, but even if you are not in the market for a new list app, Clear is worth checking out if only to experience its unique design and user interface.

Clear

Clear is a list app for the iPhone like no other. When you’re in the app you only see your color-based lists. Clear is an app without chrome or buttons or menu bars or metadata. Each item holds just 30 characters of text, and there are no due dates or notes or projects.

It has the underlying simplicity and ease of use that an app with just a white background and an unordered list of items would have. And yet, through the use of color and actions and gestures, clear has a surprising amount of life to it.

Clear is literally just pixels and gestures. But combined in just the right way to make an app that is a unique and clever blend of simplicity and spunk.

Action-Centric

Clear relies heavily on the use of color and gestures to navigate. It is very action-centric. Nearly all the gestures that you normally do on the iPhone — swiping up and down, left and right, pinching open and closed — are the ways that you navigate the app. The way Clear works is quite unconventional compared to other list apps, and yet all the actions feel natural because they are common gestures for anyone that’s used an iPhone for longer than their lunch break.

When you’re in a list, you pull the whole list down to create a new item at the top of the list. Or, if you want the new item inserted somewhere other than at the top you can pinch open the list and insert a new item anywhere you like.

Swiping left-to-right completes a task, swiping the opposite deletes it. Swiping left-to-right again on that task un-completes it. Pulling up on your list clears out all the crossed off items, and pinching the list closed takes you up a level to see the menu of all your currently active lists.

In addition to pulling down or pinching open, you can also add a new item to the list by tapping in the blank space underneath your list. A new list item “drops down” and you can then fill in its contents. If you want to quickly add a series of new items, then pull down from within the item creation pane. This is actually an extremely quick way to add new items to your list as fast as your thumbs can tap them out.

Even though Clear relies heavily on the iOS pinching gestures to navigate within lists and for adding new items, the app was still designed so that it can be used one-handed. For example, when pulling a list to add a new item, if you continue to pull down you will get an option to switch lists:

You can navigate through the whole app this way.

Despite its extreme reliance on gestures and actions, I found Clear to be surprisingly discoverable. And if that’s not enough, a brief pre-launch tutorial guides you through the first time you launch the app, and you’re even presented with a list of pre-populated to-do items which inform you how to use the app.

Colorful

Like I said, Clear is just pixels and gestures. The lists are color-based with the darker colors at the top to signify greater importance.

You can re-order items by tapping and holding to move them. And as you navigate through the different hierarchies of the app the colors change as well. The default color scheme has “red hot items” as the individual list pane, cool blue items as the pane showing all your lists, and then a cooler slate grey for the menu.

You can change your color scheme in the menu. There are red, green, pink, grey, and black themes. Also there may or may not be some easter eggs to be found in the app related to themes. But that’s all they’ll let me say.

Hierarchy

One of the things that instantly struck me was the spatial stacking that Clear uses to convey hierarchy.

A typical iOS app has a hierarchy that goes left to right. Meaning, the left-most pane is the highest level and the right-most pane is the furthest drilled down into the app. For example, in Mail if you hit the back button enough times your left-most pane will be the list of your mailboxes; as you move deeper into Mail it takes you to the panes that exist on the right until you get all the way into an individual message.

For Clear, the hierarchy goes top to bottom as you can see in the image above. Also worth noting is that Clear’s bottom-most pane is an individual list — you can not drill down to an individual item. Further emphasizing the forced simplicity of Clear.

This spatial stacking is different than the way most apps work, but because of Clear’s gesture-based navigation it really works well. When you are pulling down to add a new item, the bar for that item “folds up” as if coming from underneath. Likewise, when you pinch open for a new item in a list, the item folds open. The animations are quite clever and fit in well with the unique hierarchy structure of the app.

Clearclusion

For the connoisseurs of fine iOS app or list apps alike, Clear is definitely worth checking out. And it’s just a buck in the iTunes App Store.

And I can think of no other Twitter client that has received more polarized praise and criticism than Tweetbot. People seem to love it or hate it; very few are just “meh” about it.

I check Twitter on my iPhone an order of magnitude more than on my Mac and especially on my iPad. It’s no secret that I love Tweetbot. I’ve been using the iPhone app as my main Twitter client since late 2010 when the app was still in its early beta days.

Up until recently I have always used the “official” Twitter for iPad app. It always struck me as odd that an app on my iPhone (Tweetbot) could serve as a better twitter client than one on my iPad (Twitter). But now Tweetbot has an iPad version. And it rocks.

The most obvious differentiator between Tweetbot and other Twitter clients is that Tapbots-style of design. It permeates all of their apps and it is a part of their brand. But design for the sake of design is never enough.

No doubt that the vast majority of those who read this site are familiar with form-versus-function commandment: thou shall not let form trump function. The way an app works is far more important than the way an app looks.

Tweetbot is that rare bird of an app that carries an extremely strong and unique mix of both form and function.

Every single pixel is completely customized. The Tapbots color pallet of blue and black and grey with textures and gradients is prevalent throughout. So too, every sound is unique with the playful robotic sounds of clicks and swooshes.

But it doesn’t stop there. The amount of custom design in this app is only surpassed by the amount of functionality and usability tucked underneath those pixels.

Tweetbot, even with its extremely custom design, is still an app with greater function than form. Though the first thing you see is the custom designs done by Mark Jardine, and these are the pixels which are always before you when you use the app, what makes the app great is how functional it is.

Over time I’ve become so very used to Tweetbot’s functionality that it’s an app which has stuck on my iPhone’s Home screen since its beginning. And now it’s stuck on my iPad’s Home screen as well.

If you love Tweetbot on your iPhone, you’re going to love it for iPad. It carries all same power-user-friendly bells and whistles that the iPhone version has.

Here are a few of the iPad app’s features which stand out to me:

• Tweetbot for iPad still treats lists as first class citizens. This is one of my favorite bits about the iPhone app and I am glad that on the iPad it is still easy to set lists as your main timeline view.

• Reading articles via the in-app browser is fantastic. You get a full-screen browser along with that same awesome Readability / Instapaper mobilizer toggle that the iPhone app when in the in-app browser. Just flip the switch and you get a text-friendly layout of the site you’re on:

  

• Tapping an Instagram or other linked image in your timeline darkens out the background and expands the image:

  

• Composing a new tweet is a lot more spacious than the official Twitter client, and has the same quick-access buttons that Tweetbot for iPhone does:

  

Tweetbot for iPad is a power Twitter user’s best friend. It’s an ideal app for those who make good use of lists and who follow folks who post a lot of links to articles. You can still apply filters to mute certain users or hashtags, you can see your favorites, and retweets, and more.

I’ve been using it for the past several weeks and the more I use it the more I like it. Highly recommended.

Here’s the iTunes App Store link.

The Galaxy Nexus is the Android world’s version of the iPhone 4S. The software on it is the latest and greatest version of Android, and the hardware is Google’s newest flagship phone made in conjunction with Samsung. As far as Google is concerned, right now, the device and software I have are the best yet. This is the best possible first impression Google could hope for me, an Apple nerd, to have of their products.

I say first impression because this is the first time I have spent longer than 5 minutes with an Android device. I’ve been using the new Nexus as my primary phone to do just about anything and everything I normally would use my iPhone for. Such as: make calls, send texts, check and post to Twitter and Path, listen to Rdio and Pandora, get directions, browse the Web, and read my RSS feeds.

There were things I could not do on the Nexus that I can do on my iPhone, but they were mostly limited to the 3rd-party iOS apps which are not not available on Android Market. Otherwise the Galaxy Nexus worked fine as my full-time phone. Now, if I was impressed and delighted by the hardware and software is another question.

Read on for my review of the Galaxy Nexus and my first impressions of Android.

I. The Galaxy Nexus (Hardware)

The Galaxy Nexus is one of just a few devices that currently run Android 4.0 (a.k.a. “Ice Cream Sandwich”; a.k.a. “ICS”). For me the bigger experience was Android, which I’ll get to later in the review. A device is only as great as the software that runs on it. Moreover, what is good or bad about the Galaxy Nexus as a hardware unit, is not necessarily indicative of what is good and bad about Android. If you don’t like the Nexus you can simply wait for another hardware device that you do like. But if you don’t like Android, then you need to look somewhere else altogether.

Speaking strictly of the hardware, my overall impression of the Galaxy Nexus is that it’s fine from afar, but it is far from fine.

Ironically, the biggest shortcomings of the Galaxy Nexus are also its most-hallmarked features: the screen size and its 4G LTE connectivity.

The 4.65-inch Screen

The screen of Galaxy Nexus is noticeably larger than the iPhone. In fact, it’s larger than any other phone I’ve held or even seen since the ’90s. Every single person I showed the phone to, their first comment was, this thing is huge.

The Nexus is just ever-so-slightly thicker than the iPhone 4S, and it is just ever-so-slightly heavier as well (144g and 141g respectively). But, despite it weighing more than the iPhone 4S, it actually feels lighter when holding the Nexus in one hand and the iPhone in the other.

The huge screen size of the Galaxy Nexus actually made me appreciate the smaller size of my iPhone even more. A smartphone is a mobile device. It is meant to go with you everywhere. It should fit in any pocket on your outfit, it should be tough, it should be easy to use for a few seconds or for several hours, it should have a battery that lasts for a long time, and it should be your favorite gadget because it’s the one that’s with you 24 hours a day.

I never got comfortable with the Galaxy Nexus. I cannot comfortably use the Nexus with one hand because it is just too big. It is too tall and too wide for a comfortable grip, and so the phone never feels balanced and safe in my hand. Professional basketball players may prefer the Galaxy Nexus and its 4.65-inch screen, but I prefer the size of the iPhone.

Not only is the screen of the Galaxy Nexus bigger than the iPhone, the screen technology in the Galaxy Nexus is also different. Both the iPhone and the Galaxy Nexus have gorgeous screens, and I never felt like the Galaxy Nexus had an inferior display — it was extremely crisp — but despite its high density, the Super AMOLED PenTile screen is not a true Retina display like the iPhone 4 and 4S is.

There are two types of Super AMOLED PenTile screens. One type is Super AMOLED plus, and one type is sans-plus. The Galaxy Nexus has a Super AMOLED display (no plus). Which means that it shares sub-pixels, thus even though text looks crisp and colors are bright, if I hold it up close to my eye it is easier to make out the pixels than on the iPhone 4/4S display. This display is nice, but it’s not Retina display nice.

Also, the screen does not do well with large spots of dark color. Dark-colored websites (such as this one) seemed to have textured backgrounds. So did dark apps.

The screen has an ever-so-slight curve to it that I don’t even notice when holding. The curve helps to make the phone more comfortable when held up to my ear when on a call, or when placed in my pocket. And I think it adds a nice aesthetic to the device.

Something else of note about the screen is that it does not have a home button on the bottom. After more than 4 years with an iPhone, I kept going for the Nexus’s Home button, but there is nothing there. To turn on the display you have to tap the “lock/unlock” button which is on the right-hand side of the device toward the top. To unlock the Lock Screen you then slide to unlock the phone, similar to iOS. (You can also use a slide-pattern or even facial recognition to unlock.)

Believe it or not (I bet you believe it), the Lock button and the slide-to-unlock tap target are too far apart from one another. This drove me nuts!

The phone is literally too big to easily and comfortably unlock with one hand. It’s so big, that to hold it in one hand where I can comfortably press the lock/unlock button I am holding the phone in the middle. But in that grip I cannot comfortably reach the slide to unlock slide. And so I would have to shimmy my hand down the phone to be able to reach the slide-to-unlock tap target. Or, I have to use the phone with two hands. It would be better if the “slide to unlock” icon were sitting right underneath the time/date on the Lock screen.

I unlock my iPhone dozens if not hundreds of times per day. It’s a muscle memory at this point and it is a piece of cake. Due to the size of the Galaxy Nexus and the placement of its Lock button, I don’t feel that I have a good solid grip on the phone when holding it in such a way that I can press the hardware lock button and also reach the slide-to-unlock tap target.

This gives the Galaxy Nexus an aura that makes me wonder if it’s supposed to be a tablet that makes phone calls or a phone that you need two hands to use. I realize that’s a goofy and exaggerated statement, but I exaggerate it to make a point I am serious about: the phone is simply too big.

If this were my full-time phone, I’d be sad. It never once was fun or comfortable to hold. I would not recommend this device simply on its size alone.

4G LTE (and therefore, Battery Life as well)

Download and upload speeds on 4G LTE can be crazy fast. When I ran the Speed Test app, the 4G gave me some relatively impressive numbers, with download speeds as fast as 10Mbps and uploads of 5.5Mbps. At times, some of the tests on the 4G network were actually faster than the test run when Wi-Fi was connected — though my 4G numbers were nothing compared to the 44Mbps down and 16Mbps up that Dwight Silverman saw. On average, however, the 4G speeds on Verizon’s LTE network turned out to be comparable to the 3G speeds of AT&T’s network (at least here at my house in Kansas City).

Here are the results from speed tests conducted at my home in Kansas City. These results are the average of 5 consecutive tests I ran using the SpeedTest.net app (which has both an Android and iOS version).

The default of the Galaxy Nexus is to run on LTE and fallback on CDMA. But you can turn off the LTE connection altogether if you want. Which is your only hope if you like battery life.

I would assume that most Android users would like to have the option of being able to turn on or off the 4G connection at their discretion. Because it seems like that is what Android is all about: include lots of options and let the user decide what they want. You get good and bad with this because it means if you don’t like something about the OS you can probably find a hack or a 3rd-party solution to change it. But, on the other side of that coin, you get lots of design and functionality tradeoffs (both in hardware and in software).

Today, 4G LTE may be the quintessential functionality tradeoff. Fortunately you don’t have to leave the LTE connection enabled. Personally, I would like the option of 4G, but in normal day-to-day use of the Galaxy Nexus I would have the 4G connection disabled. I am usually around a hotspot and though the Verizon’s LTE network in Kansas City is pretty good it’s actually not mind-blowing.

With 4G simply being enabled, even if I am at home where I have Wi-Fi, and if I use the Nexus very little, the battery will be dead by the end of my day (about 10 hours). With 4G disabled the phone would last for more than 20 hours with light usage.

Here’s the crazy part: when I am actually using the 4G network for tasks — such as turn-by-turn navigation or video streaming — it will drain 1-percent or more of battery life per minute.

Now, the Galaxy Nexus takes about 90 minutes to charge from 0 to 100-percent when plugged into the wall. Thus, when using 4G data while plugged into the wall charger your battery is basically treading water. If the phone is plugged into a less-powerful power source (such as a USB hub or a car charger) then using 4G will actually drain your battery faster than the power source can charge it — though it will not drain at the same one-percent-per-minute speed.

Earlier this week I spent some time driving around Kansas City in order to field test the turn-by-turn navigation, the LTE network, and the battery life. At 11:30 AM I started out and the battery of the Nexus was at 43-percent. After 25 minutes the battery had drained down to 33-percent even though it was plugged into a car charger.

Think about that. If you’re on a road trip and want to use the 4G LTE network to provide you with driving directions, your drive had better be shorter than 4 hours because even when plugged into a car charger, the battery will not last.

To disable 4G LTE on the Nexus go to: Settings → More → Mobile Networks → Network mode → CDMA.

The Camera

It stinks. It reminds me of the camera on my 3GS.

Here are two pictures of our christmas tree, Doug VI. The one on the left was taken with the Nexus, the one on the right with my iPhone 4S. Both images are straight out of the phones with the default settings.

The lens on the Galaxy Nexus aside, the camera software on Android has some cool features. Including exposure control, silly video effects, and a clever panorama ability.

Hardware Miscellany

• The Galaxy Nexus is glass and plastic. The Galaxy Nexus does not feel cheap, but it does feel lighter and less elegant than the iPhone. Of course, the plastic also helps contribute to the weight. I think if the Nexus were metal and glass like the iPhone it would be much too heavy.

• As I mentioned earlier, there is no Home button on the front. This means, if the phone is on your desk and you want to turn on the display you have to grip it on both sides and press the unlock button. On the iPhone you can simply tap on the Home button. Also, this means if you pull the phone out of your pocket to quickly check the time or see a notification you have to hold the whole phone and balance it properly in order to hit the Lock button and turn on the display.

• The Nexus has “vibrate on touch” on by default. This struck me as annoying at first, but after a few days I got quite used to it. Though I don’t miss it on my iPhone, it is a nice feature that helps with improved typing on the software keyboard.

• The top of the phone got noticeably warm after being on a 15 minute phone call using the 4G LTE network.

• To take a screenshot you press and hold the Lock button and the volume down button. I had to do a quick Google search to figure this out. But apparently screenshots have not always been so easy on Android in the past. I got a lot of comments on Twitter asking how I figured out how to take a screenshot.

  What I also like about the way Android 4.0 handles screenshots is that they go into the Notification Center. If you take a screenshot that you want to use immediately you can swipe down the Notification Center, tap on the screenshot and then act on it.

• There is no branding on the front of the device. The Typography and layout of the lock screen is pretty cool.

• The small, LED notification indicator that pulses on the bottom of the screen is a nice touch. It flashes different colors for different apps that are causing the notification. The colors I’ve seen are white, blue, and yellow. So far as I can tell:

  • White = new email, an update is available for an app, and/or a new message
  • Blue = Official Twitter app
  • Yellow = TweetDeck

• The speaker is pitiful. For such a large screen you would think that the device is primed for media. But it’s not. Even in my quiet living room I could barely make out dialog in a movie. Music streaming was at best light background music. If you plan on using the Nexus to watch movies, keep your earbuds nearby.

Who’s Fighting For the Users?

In short, the Galaxy Nexus seems more like a phone that its makers can brag about making rather than a device that its users would brag about owning. It has all sorts of features that seem great on posters and billboards and board meeting reports, but none of those features enhance the actual user experience.

II. Android 4.0 (Software)

As I mentioned, this is my first long-term exposure to Android. There are several great things about Android that I like, and there are several things about it which drove me bonkers. Some are related to the user experience and some are related to the design and aesthetics of Ice Cream Sandwich.

Android is jam packed with options and customizability. In some cases, these extra options are great. For example, the alarms app and its ability to set multiple repeating alarms, or the battery detail page within the Settings app. But in some cases the extra options seemed annoying .

What can I do on Android that I cannot do on iOS?

Since I’ve been using an iPhone since 2007, it’s easy to list off the slew of functions, features, and 3rd-party apps I’ve grown to rely on over the past four and a half years. But other than the apps, what about Android is different? I asked this question on Twitter, and along with some of my own observations, put together this short list of some of the highest-level things that set Android apart from iOS (not including the two different app store ecosystems).

• Side load apps. This means you don’t have to get your apps via the Android Market. There are pros and cons to this of course. It means you can load any app you want. How many average users do this though?

• Widgets on the home screen. This is one of my favorite features of Android. I have a clock widget, a weather widget, and a quick settings widget that lets me toggle on/off the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and screen rotation lock, and brightness levels. I like how the Android Home screen feels open and functional — it is more than just a springboard.

• Apps are not silos. They can share information with one another and offer services. If you’re in the photos app and you choose to “share” this photo, any app on your phone that can do something with that image is available on the share list. You can mail it, tweet it, paste it into a note, send it as a text message, post it to Path, upload to Picasa, etc. The limit is only the amount of apps you have installed.

• You can replace system apps and services with 3rd party apps, such as the Keyboard (example: Swype).

• Tight integration with Google, and the Google apps are pretty swell — Google Voice, Gmail, navigation, maps — these are all some of the best apps on Android. I use Gmail pretty much like IMAP, so having a native Gmail client on my phone doesn’t have any extra appeal to me.

Android Market and 3rd-Party Apps

Speaking of 3rd-party apps, this is where you can really get locked in to one mobile operating system or another. If you’ve been using one platform for a while you begin to rely on many of the 3rd-party apps that are found on that platform. It’s one thing to learn a new operating system, it is another thing altogether to change your daily workflow and habits because the apps you’ve grown accustomed to no longer exist on your new device.

The Android Market is certainly full of apps, and it gets a lot of traffic. Twitter for Android, for example, has been downloaded more than 10,000,000 times.

To use the market you have to have a Google account. When you search for an app a list of common search terms begins to populate. When you get to an app’s page in the Market you see how many downloads it has had and how many ratings it has. When you download an app you are shown what the app’s permissions are (i.e. what it can access and modify on your phone). For free apps, there is no need to authenticate every time you download an app.

I did not find a single 3rd-party Android app that I felt had the same spit and polish to it as my favorite iOS apps. The Google maps and turn-by-turn voice navigation app were both very impressive, but these are not 3rd-party.

My favorite 3rd-party Android apps were Path and Rdio (which also happen to be iOS apps).

The Difference of iOS Apps That Have Android Versions

• Twitter: The first thing I noticed about the Twitter app was the poor scrolling, and the jankiness when I pulled down to refresh. However, I think this speaks more of Twitter and perhaps less of the entire Android OS because most of the native Android apps scroll very smoothly.

  The official Twitter app does not have an in-app web browser. Thus, links to websites open in the Android browser app. To get back to the main Twitter timeline from a link in an individual tweet means I have to press the Android OS Back button about 4 or 5 times (due to the t.co redirects). Sometimes though I would’t be able to get back at all because the Back button wouldn’t switch me back out of the browser app and back into the Twitter app.

• Path: Path is another app that has an iOS counterpart. There are many things about Path and Twitter that are different on their Android versions than on their iOS versions. For instance, if you’ve used Path then you know how your cover image moves a bit if you pull down on your timeline. On Android the timeline and cover image are static once you reach the “top”. Also the text is much smaller in the Android version than it is on iOS.

• Rdio: I was pleasantly surprised to find Rdio in the Android Market. It is a fine app on Android and works great.

• Square: Another iOS app that also exists on Android. There are more than just these 4 I’m sure.

The Back, Home, and App Switching Buttons

My motto for using the Galaxy Nexus became: “When in doubt, hit the back button.”

When launching an app, nearly every one would place me on the screen that I left it. I would get to an app (such as the settings or email or Twitter) and not be at the “first” screen in that app. If it had been a day or so since last coming into the app I may not have known exactly why I wasn’t looking at the starting screen for that app and so I would simply hit the Back button and see where that got me. Sometimes it would kick me back to the Home screen. Sometimes into another app. And sometimes to the previous page in the app. I’m still not sure I know what the Back button does exactly.

The Home button works as advertised. Tapping it would take you home. Personally, never did get used to this being a software button. I am so used to the hardware Home button on the iPhone, and I often find it through tactile feedback. The Galaxy Nexus’s software home button has to be seen to be touched.

I have read many past reviews about the maddening placement of the home button and how dangerously close to the space bar it is. People would be typing and accidentally hit the home button and be kicked out of their work. I never once had this problem.

The App Switching Button also works as advertised. And is actually one of my favorite little features and UI designs on Android OS. Let’s talk more about it…

App Switching

The fast-app switcher in Android 4.0 is awesome. I love the way it pops up over the screen and shows the screenshots of the apps. I also like how you can swipe an app off the screen to end its background process.

On the other hand, when switching between apps from within apps there is no tip-off within Android to let you know that you’ve switched apps. In iOS this is done by an animations that shows one app’s window moving over and off the screen as another app’s window comes in from behind. You know that you’ve switched to a new app. But in Android there is no such animation.

For example: in TweetDeck and in the Google RSS reader, links to websites would open in the browser app, not the app I was in. There was no animation for it and so I didn’t know I was in the browser app. And so hitting the “Back” button would then take me back to the Web page I had last been on in the browser app, not the screen I was last at in the previous app.

Regarding Options

Android strikes me as an operating system that greatly values having a plethora of options and choice. In fact, if I had to sum up all I’ve learned about Android over the past week it would be about the high value placed on being able to customize your phone.

Compared to Android I can see why iOS seems so “closed” to some people. iOS values simplicity and refinement over tweakability.

Android has options for just about everything. But, in spite of all its options and ability to customize, I didn’t find Android to be more powerful than iOS. Of all the options and choices that I was given by Android, there was nothing in Android that I could not also accomplish on iOS. In fact, the options and choices usually got in my way.

Moreover, of the millions of users on Android, how many exercise this freedom of choice that is a part of the Android OS?

UI Miscellany

I do like the overall “transparent look” of the Android operating system windows. Such as the way the notification panel is semi-transparent over what’s in the background, and the way the fast-app switcher is also semi-transparent.

And I especially love the Android Home screen. Something I have always liked about Android are the way the wallpapers work on the Home screens. Not only the live wallpapers (which I quite enjoy), but also the way that even a static wallpaper will slide slightly in the background as you navigate left and right to different home screens.

I like that you can install widgets on the Home screen that allow you to do certain tasks and access certain settings. I like how many of the Home screen icons are smaller and are not all the exact same square shape with rounded edges. In fact, after using Android my iPhone Home screen felt a bit crowded.

Moreover, on Android your main home screen isn’t the left-most screen. I do not use Spotlight in iOS that often and wouldn’t mind it being two screens to the left.

The Keyboard

One benefit of the larger screen on the Nexus is that it makes for plenty of room to accommodate the keyboard. The Keyboard is one of the nicest things about Android. It felt responsive and easy to tap-type on. It autocorrected nearly perfectly every time. And, most of all, the auto-correct and quick-access bar (or whatever it is called) that sits above the QWERTY keys quickly became an invaluable tool that helped with typing.

Notifications

The way Android handles notifications is excellent. On Android 4.0 the notification only takes over the very top status bar. It is much less graphically driven and is a simple text update. On iOS 5, if you are using it when a notification pops up, it hijacks two rows worth of space on the top of the screen. I like the Android way of doing notifications better.

Scrolling

Scrolling on the Nexus is, for the most part, very fast. Websites that have loaded, list views in native apps and some 3rd-party apps — they all have smooth and fast scrolling. The official Twitter app for Android however is a turd when it comes to scrolling. This is unfortunate because there are no great Twitter clients for Android. In fact, the Twitter mobile website scrolls better on Android than the native Twitter app.

Though Android is responsive, the overall UI still doesn’t feel fast to me. Because it’s not an issue of responsiveness but rather of consistency in design. I can fly through iOS because it’s both responsive and consistent. Android 4.0 on the Galaxy Nexus is responsive, but there are things about it that are inconsistent or confusing. Often times the same actions (such as sharing) in different apps use different buttons stashed away in different places.

Also, the size of the screen really does make a difference. As I’ve said before, I simply cannot easily use the Galaxy Nexus with one hand. That’s not a fault of Android, rather it’s an issue with the Galaxy Nexus hardware. But it does mean the device is slower to use because I cannot get a comfortable grip on it where I can access the whole screen with one hand.

Scrolling a website, like in webOS, is handled better on iOS than on Android. Take a look at this chart I drew comparing scroll behavior in webOS against iOS. Substitute “Android” for “webOS” and the chart is still relevant.

You cannot tap on the top status bar to scroll to the top of the screen. So far as I know, the only way to scroll to the top is to swipe, swipe, swipe. This is a feature of iOS I use all the time.

When you reach the top or bottom of a scroll view a glowing light appears. The scroll view does not rubber band like on iOS. The same goes for left-to-right scrolling. But not so in the Apps and Widgets adder. When I reached the end of the list of pages, the final page acted as if it wanted to turn but could not.

Final Verdict

Android should be reserved for those who know what they are getting into. If someone I know needs a recommendation for what smart phone to get, I would not recommend Android to them.

To those who want to use Android, I say go for it. I don’t think that choice is wrong — there are many fine things about the Android OS and many things it does differently and better than iOS. I can understand how tech-savvy power-users who know what they are getting into would like Android. For them, the trade-offs in certain areas are a welcome sacrifice in exchange for the customizability, the different look, and the plethora of hardware devices to choose from. At the OS level, Android is certainly much more customizable than iOS (you can install a 3rd party keyboard if you don’t like the system’s default one), you can put widgets on the Home screens, and the turn-by-turn voice navigation is killer.

But my overall impression after using Android for a week was that of being underwhelmed. Though the operating system is functional and advanced in certain areas, it still has an overarching feel of still being immature. Moreover, there was nothing on Android that made me feel more empowered compared to using my iPhone.

Sure, there are bits of the Android OS that I like and appreciate, but never once was I wowed or delighted. Which is unfortunate, because those are important elements when you are using a device day in and day out every day of the year.

Disclosure: The folks at Doxie sent me this Go as a gift. No review was promised to them in exchange for me receiving it. The words below are, as always, my honest and sincere opinion.

The Review

The biggest draw of the Doxie Go is that it’s cordless, or rather, that it’s battery powered. Cordless does not mean wireless. You do need a micro-USB cable to charge it, and the USB cable is the default way of getting your scans off the Go and onto your computer.

The Doxie Go can scan about 100 pages before the battery needs recharging. And the internal storage will hold at least 6 times that amount.

The idea behind the Go is exactly what the name hints at. The Go is a portable scanner that you can take with you. And while I don’t have a need for a portable scanner — my other scanner is an iPhone — I do like the idea of an attractive, small-yet-powerful, cordless scanner as part of my office setup.

The Go is small and attractive enough to warrant being kept on a desk top, but it is small enough to be kept in a drawer or on a shelf. And since it needs no wires to be able to function, you really can keep it anywhere you like.

Compared to the original Doxie, the Go weighs 4 ounces more but is an inch narrower. The Go is also cordless and has a much more attractive design (no pink, no hearts (no offense, Doxie)).

The Go scans color as well as black and white. The default resolution is 300 dpi, but you can also choose to scan a document at 600 dpi by a tap of the power button. (Hold the button down and you’ll turn the Go off.)

You copy files from the Go onto your computer in batch. You plug in the USB cable (or you can connect a USB thumb drive or photo card to the Go) and then import the files via Doxie’s own Mac app.

The Doxie software is akin to a simplified iPhoto. I don’t know why, but I half expected the Doxie Mac app to be found wanting. To my delight, I found it was quite the opposite. The app is easy to use, minimal, and it makes importing a cinch.

I’m more than pleased with the quality of the 300-dpi scanned documents. Once the files are imported you can quickly and easily make adjustments if you need to, but I found the auto adjustments that the Doxie app makes were often perfect the first time. If the app auto-adjusts incorrectly, you can re-adjust manually.

It is also relatively easy to name your files (since the scanner doesn’t know what to name them). A clever idea once OCR is implemented would be to auto name the file based on the first line of the document scanned.

The Go treats every single scanned page as it’s own document. And so, within the app is a vital function: you can select multiple files and then “staple” them together with a click. It could not be easier to join multiple scans into a single PDF document.

You can save the scans to you computer or just leave the files in the Doxie app. Unsaved Doxie scans stay in the Doxie app whereas saved scans can be removed from the app when you quit or kept in there indefinitely. You cannot import documents from your computer into the Doxie app. Thus, once you remove a scan from the Doxie app there is no way to get it back into the app other than printing it out and re-scanning it in.

I prefer to save my scans as PDFs. Mostly because I am scanning in documents that I no longer have to keep in a filing cabinet. The default when you hit Command+S is to save as a JPEG. However, Shift+Command+S is the hotkey for Save as PDF, and Option+Command+S for save as a PNG. I like Saving as a PDF because PDFpen can then OCR the document and then I save in Yojimbo. It’s amazing how once a PDF has been OCRed the contents of that PDF are completely searchable. It makes going paperless seem like a no-brainer.

And in my estimation, the Go’s file sizes are quite reasonable. A PDF of my 8.5×14″ Car Insurance Declarations page scanned at 300 dpi, saved at medium-quality, and then OCRed via PDFpen, weighed in at 1.2 megabytes. That is certainly more than a PDF from the source, but it is not bad for a large page that is high-resolution and has searchable, selectable, text.

Welcome to your new paperless office, Shawn.

Simplenote is a prime example. It’s a note-taking app that syncs across all your devices. And it does this task exceptionally well. Dropbox is another example: it will sync the main Dropbox folder with any other computer you have Dropbox installed on. Another example: Yojimbo. Hands down, the finest Anything Bucket out there.

What is now growing as a new type of “thing” is social networks which are built around a singular idea and which implement that idea very well.

Twitter was one of the first examples of this, and is now certainly the most prominent. It has grown a bit more complex since it first began several years ago, but the premise is unchanged: what are you doing? Answer that question in under 140 characters and you can use Twitter.

Instagram is another prime example of a simple social network. The only function of the app and its integrated social network is to post pictures. You have fun with it by applying semi-cheesy filters and exaggerated tilt-shift blurs, but there is little complexity beyond posting your own pics and then liking and commenting on other people’s pics.

I believe it is their simplicity that makes social networks like Twitter and Instagram sticky. If a service is easy to use, people are more likely to use it. The more complex it is, the less likely people are to use it.

Obviously there are additional and very significant things which make social networks appealing, such as the ability to share and connect with friends and family members. But I like how the forced brevity of Twitter and the forced cheesiness of Instagram help to remove the potential for self censorship. The constraints of these social networks also turn into a game — or challenge — for users who adopt the goal of tweeting deeply meaningful or hilarious things or ‘gramming beautiful images.

Stamped is another simple social network. It is more like Instagram than Twitter in that: (a) it currently exists only on the iPhone; and (b) the social network and the iPhone app are one and the same.

I downloaded Stamped last week when it came out and it quickly worked it’s way onto my iPhone’s Home screen, right next to Instagram. I love the simple concept of Stamped: you pick something you like and you stamp it with your stamp of approval. What Twitter is to status updates, Stamped is to our favorite things in life.

Pros

It’s not the simplicity in and of itself that appeals to me. I like the whole idea of the Stamped app. I enjoy stamping things that I like. Who doesn’t?

Beyond that, there are a few things in particular which stand out to me as great:

• The Design: You cannot launch the app without instantly noticing the design. Every pixel seems as if it were put in place with precise intent. The use of color, type, and layout is extraordinary. The interface of Stamped goes a long way in making the app easier to use and more enjoyable.

• The To-Dos: When you come across something new that your friend has stamped, you can add it as a to-do (maybe its a book you want to read or a restaurant you want to check out next time you’re in San Francisco). This is one of my favorite features of Stamped, and is a clear sign that the people who designed this app actually use it as well.

  The way your To-Do list works is simple: (a) someone you’re following Stamps something you’ve never heard of (could be a movie, a book, a band, a restaurant, or something totally obscure); (b) you decide you want to check it out; and (c) you add it as a To-Do item.

  Right now I have 9 To-Dos in Stamped. A few movies, a few books, a restaurant in San Francisco, a Web app, and a kitchen appliance.

• The Liberation of Simplicity: There are no rules for what you can stamp. On Thanksgiving Day people were stamping things like “after-lunch nap” and “pumpkin pie”. Stamped is set up in such a way as to encourage the stamping of whatever suits your fancy. It can be as serious as your favorite book, or as lighthearted as a 2nd cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning. There are no rules.

Cons

I do have a few quibbles with the app.

• New User Discovery: One thing I don’t like about the app is how difficult it is to discover new people to follow. If I don’t follow you on Twitter or if you are not in my iPhone’s contact list then the chances of me finding you are slim to none.

  I don’t just want to follow my friends, I also want to follow people who have impeccable taste. Who in Kansas City knows the best restaurants? Who has the same taste in movies as me but gets out more often? Who reads a lot of fabulous books? Those too are the people I want to follow on Stamped.

  How can Stamped solve this problem? Perhaps give us the ability to stamp a user. Or, when viewing someone’s profile, show a descending list of who they give the most credits to. Just like there are people on Twitter that I don’t follow on Instagram, and vice versa, how do I find the great users in Stamped whom I don’t yet know are there?

• No Business Model, Yet: Build a big and happy user base now, figure out how to sustain the business later. That seems to be the business model of choice for many new startups. It was Twitter’s business model, it is Instagram’s, and it is Stamped’s as well.

  However, I did notice that Stamped has one source of income: affiliate links. When a book or a DVD is stamped and can be purchased on Amazon, then a Buy Now button will show up on that item’s detail page within the App. Tapping “Buy Now” will launch you over to the Amazon site with Stamped’s affiliate ID in the URL.

  Also I’ve noticed that if it’s a movie which is playing in theaters, then you can get tickets via Fandango. Tapping to buy a movie ticket will kick you through a Commission Junction domain.

  I have absolutely no problem with affiliate links. I think the feature of being able to find and buy a Stamped item right from within the app is a great idea. And so if you’re going to be linking to Amazon anyway, there’s no reason not to do so via an affiliate link. It’s a clever and non-invasive way to make a few extra bucks from the app. However, affiliate links require a lot of traffic to generate even a modest income, and they are not Stamped’s primary plan for income.

  I emailed the guys at Stamped to ask them if there were any planned sources of revenue beyond the affiliate links. CEO and Co-Founder, Robby Stein, wrote me back, saying:

  Right now, we are 100% focused on building a product that our users love. We will continue to look at revenue opportunities that make the product more useful by allowing people to easily go try what’s been stamped, but don’t have any specific plans right now.

  Building a large and happy user base is much easier when your product is free. But monetizing later on can be tricky. There are pros and cons to both strategies, and so I hope Stamped has wild success.

Stamping Stamped

One of the first things I stamped in Stamped was Stamped, Inc.

I very much love the categories that this app slash social network is in. It is a simple social network, and, though it is Web based, it is not a Web app. I much prefer native apps over Web apps (on the desktop and on mobile). I also prefer apps which are simple and do just one thing. Stamped is a blend of both, and I think it has a lot of potential to be very fun.

I was familiar enough with the Kindle to know that it is lightweight and great for reading. I knew that they are famous for how effortlessly you can hold it with one hand and how great the E Ink text is for reading.

For the past year and a half I’ve been reading books on my iPad and never felt a need for a Kindle. However, after now using the Kindle Touch for several hours a day over the past few days, I feel as if all the accolades I ever heard about the Kindle were vast understatements.

Hardware

Hardware-wise, the Kindle Touch has several positive things going for it. Most notably:

• Size: The Kindle is small and lightweight; easy to hold with one hand and read for long periods of time.

• Battery life: Extremely long battery life; rarely do you need to consider charging it.

• Touchscreen interface: The only buttons are a lock/wake button and a Home button; the touch UI (though slow to respond in heavy-input areas such as the Home screen or the Kindle Store due to the nature of E Ink) feels natural and is easy to use.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into a few of these:

Size

After using only an iPad for reading ebooks over the past 18 months, it’s impossible not to noticed how incredibly small and light the Kindle Touch is. Moreover, the Kindle’s smallness and lightness are accentuated by a sturdy build and an attractive, simple design. It’s small and light but not cheap or flimsy.

My Kindle weighs 7.375 ounces. The custom box it shipped in, with the Kindle and all other contents still inside, weighed a mere 14 ounces. My iPad alone weighs 1 pound, 6 ounces.

Upon opening up the top of the box the Kindle is sitting there with a plastic sheet attached to the front of the device. There is an image which demonstrates you should plug your Kindle into a computer. When I peeled off the plastic I found that the image was actually being displayed by the screen. I did a double take because it looked so much like a printed image and not like something electronically displayed using a screen.

I plugged the Kindle into my MacBook Air and let it charge. When charging, a small yellow light is on. Once charged, that light turns green. It took about 90 minutes via the USB plug on my MacBook Air to get the Kindle fully charged.

While charging, I registered my Kindle with ease by simply by typing in my Amazon.com email and password into the device. Then I spent some time browsing the Kindle Store, buying a couple books which I am currently reading in iBooks. It’s unfortunate that I’ll have to finish all the iBookstore books I’m reading. The cost of buying those books again just so I can read them on the Kindle Touch is not something I want to do.

Holding, Reading, and Turning Pages

The iPad just cannot be held with one hand. Its weight, size, and slippery aluminum back all force the use of two hands or one hand and a prop. That is not to say the iPad is awkwardly heavy, but it’s not easily held up with two hands for a long time (such as an hour or more).

The Kindle, however, is extremely easy to hold with one hand thanks to its weight, size, and grippy plastic back.

Naturally, when holding the Kindle one-handed, it’s important to be able to progress to the next page without requiring two hands. The past Kindles, and the new D-Pad Kindle, all do this by placing hardware page-turning buttons on both sides of the Kindle. When holding the device (regardless of which hand) you can easily rock your thumb over the button and turn the page.

The Kindle Touch has no such hardware buttons. I was fearful that the lack of buttons would make it difficult to turn pages when holding the device with just one hand. Fortunately that is not the case.

The screen of the Kindle sits about an eighth of an inch deeper than plastic bezel surrounding it. I have found it very easy to simply roll my thumb over the edge and onto the touch screen, and this is all that’s needed to activate a page turn.

However, if you are holding the Kindle in your left hand, rolling your thumb onto the screen will turn the page back, not forward. That is because the left-hand side of the screen is the touch target for previous pages.

Of course, as you can see in the image above, the touch target for turning to the next page is significantly larger than for the previous page. And so, for the times I am holding the Kindle in my left hand, I can still turn to the next page by using my left pinky to support the bottom of the Kindle and then move my thumb over half an inch to reach the touch target for the next page.

Also worth noting is that swipe gestures will turn the pages as well. Left-to-right for the previous page; right-to-left for the next.

The Screen

I had two fears related to the Kindle Touch’s screen: (a) that without the hardware page-turn buttons it would not be easy to turn pages while holding the Kindle in one hand; and (b) that it would gather all sorts of fingerprints and muddy up the reading experience.

Both of those fears, however, were unwarranted. As I mentioned above, turning pages on the Kindle Touch is no trouble whatsoever.

Regarding fingerprints, the Kindle’s touch screen is not a fingerprint magnet. The screen is very matte — like the matte screens on Apple’s laptops from yesteryear but even more matte than that. The screen on the Kindle touch is the least fingerprint attracting screen in my house. Certainly more than the glass on my iPhone and iPad.

A third issue that I’ve heard people talking about is the new way that pages refresh. Now, instead of the full-on black-to-white blink that the Kindle used to do between every page turn, the page only blinks once every 6 page turns. This supposedly causes an increase in E Ink artifacts which get slightly left over from page to page. But with my naked eye I barely tell the difference at all between the sixth page just before the Kindle blinks, and the seventh page just after a blink.

Regarding the E Ink screen, I am still not used to just how kind E Ink is on the eyes. I have read for many, many hours on my iPad and have never thought anything of it. Perhaps my appreciation will wear off a bit once I become more used to the Kindle or when the iPad ships with a Retina display. But after three days with the Kindle I am still very appreciative of its screen.

The only disadvantage to the Kindle’s screen is that there is no light for it whatsoever. I often read through my Instapaper queue or a few chapters of a book when in bed before I go to sleep. But the lights are usually out and I rely on the self-lit screen of the iPad to read in the dark. The Kindle will not be able to replace my iPad for these times of reading.

You can get clip on lights, but I wonder why Amazon hasn’t incorporated something similar to the Timex Indiglo backlight system? Or, why not put a dozen small LED lights around the inner edges of the screen that could illuminate it.

Software

Not only have I found the hardware of the Kindle Touch to be impressive, but so also the software.

Touch-Based OS

I ordered the Kindle Touch rather than the D-Pad Kindle because I was anticipating that the touch screen and its user interaction would be more natural and convenient than using the physical controller.

Of course, I haven’t actually used the non-touch Kindle and its D-Pad controller, and so I can’t fairly judge one over the other. But I can say that the interacting with the Kindle Touch OS has been just fine.

Though the UI is designed for touch input, I still haven’t fully acclimated to the concept of touching the E Ink device. The screen does not look like the backlit touch screens I have been using for the past 4 and a half years. The Kindle looks like an actual printed page, not a screen. And since the display is not manipulated by touch input the same way an iOS device is, I don’t always feel like I’m supposed to be touching the display.

But, despite its vast differences when compared to any other touchscreen device I have used, the Kindle Touch only has one caveat in my opinion: There is no immediate feedback upon tapping a touch target.

On the iPad, tapping a button or a link will cause the state to change as if you’ve truly pressed that button. On the Kindle there is on immediate feedback, you simply wait for a second, and then the screen refreshes to display whatever it is you activated via your touch. (Note that page turns are quite speedy.)

But there are a set of buttons which do show an immediate change of state when tapped: the keyboard. When typing, the keyboard buttons turn black underneath your finger taps. No other buttons in the Kindle OS do this.

And, speaking of typing, I don’t find it difficult at all on the Kindle’s soft keyboard.

Lastly, in addition to tapping buttons and items, you also use scroll gestures to navigate lists or pages. You can swipe your finger from top to bottom or bottom to top on the list view as if you were scrolling it and the list view will refresh with the items moved in the direction of your swipe.

It is a much different feeling compared to iOS where you feel as if your finger is literally manipulating the pixels you are touching. But it is something that I quickly got used to. And, considering the limits of E Ink, I think the way the touch interface works and responds is completely fine. It’s different, but not worse.

Instapaper

Amazon gives you an email address for your Kindle. You can then send articles and documents to your Kindle via that Kindle email address.

Instapaper uses this as a way to send you the 20 most recent items in your queue every 24 hours. You cannot archive or favorite the articles, you can only read them in their purest form: a personally-curated periodical.

Does Instapaper on the Kindle even come close to comparing to Instapaper on the iPad or iPhone? No way. Is it nice to have it there? You bet. Even though I know Marco won’t do it, I’ll still say it: a native Instapaper app for the Kindle would be awesome.

The Kindle Store

Shopping for books, magazines, and newspapers on the Kindle Store is extremely easy. When you find a book you like it’s just one tap to buy and the download begins in the background immediately. If you didn’t mean to purchase an item you are given the opportunity to cancel your order.

The Kindle Lending Library

When I was on Amazon.com making some adjustments to my Kindle options, I went ahead and set up a free one-month trial of Amazon Prime so I could check out the Kindle lending library.

Basically, if a book is available to borrow for free it will say so on the book’s page in the Kindle store. If you are a member of Amazon Prime then you can go ahead and borrow that book. But, alas, right now it sounds cooler than it is.

The Lending Library works like this:

• You can borrow up to one book per month. This limit is not a big deal for me because I cannot remember the last time I finished more than one book in a month. Also worth noting is that it’s one book per calendar month, not one book per 30 days. If you borrow a book on November 30, you can borrow again on December 1.
• You can only borrow one book at a time. So even if it is a new month, you cannot borrow another book unless you’re ready to give up the one you’re currently borrowing (previously borrowed books are removed once a new one is downloaded).
• The Lending Library is sparsely populated. As of today, there are 5,464 total Kindle Books available in the Lending Library. However, there are 1,078,735 total Kindle Books. Which means that just one-half of one-percent of the total Kindle eBook selection is available to borrow. This is due in a large part to the fact that the Big Six publishers (Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan) have not joined the program.

To get to the Kindle Lending Library you go to the Kindle Store home page, tap “All Categories” (which is just under the Menu button), and then tap “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library”. From there you can browse all the items in the Lending Library.

When you find a book is just like buying it for $0. You get an email receipt from Amazon thanking you for your purchase, yet the cost is $0.00.

Right now I am borrowing Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. It is great to see that the books published under Seth Godin’s Domino Project are available on the Lending Library.

Newspaper Subscriptions

I signed up for a free, 14-day trial subscription of The Denver Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Since then, each morning they all 3 have been updated and then automatically moved to the top of my Home screen’s list of items, sitting there just waiting to be read.

Maybe it’s just the honeymoon period of a new device, but having the day’s newspapers pre-downloaded and waiting for me on my Kindle when I get up is pretty darn cool.

But where did yesterday’s papers go? Well, down the list on the Home screen there is an item called “Periodicals: Back Issues”, and it holds the previous issues. So the old ones are never gone, but are always out of the way when the new ones download.

Magazine Subscriptions

The Kindle store has 133 different magazine titles. The top 10 most popular include Reader’s Digest (at number 1), The Economist, The New Yorker, Time, and others. Up until yesterday I was completely unaware of the availability of magazines on the Kindle. I naively thought that when many of these magazines came to the iPad it was their first venture into the non-printed space beyond the World Wide Web.

I subscribed to a free 14-day trial of The New Yorker. The visual layout of the magazine is completely forgone on the Kindle and you get a Kindle-optimized text-version instead. And it would seem that the price reflects the text-only versions. In the Kindle store, a single issue of The New Yorker costs $3.99, and a monthly subscription is $2.99/month; on the iPad, The New Yorker costs is $4.99 and $5.99 respectively.

Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers

I bought the $99 Kindle Touch with special offers, and so the bottom-half-inch of my Home screen displays an ad. At first I didn’t think this would be a big deal because I expected: (a) that I wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the Home screen; and (b) even when I would be on the Home screen the ads are minimal and unobtrusive.

However, after a few days with the device the home screen ads feel more intrusive than I thought they would. I think, in part, because not all the content which is on my Kindle is displayed on the first page of the Home screen. And, knowing that there is additional books and periodicals further down the page, it seems that the (albeit minimal) ad is in the way. Or, put another way, it feels more like one of those ads which are right in the middle of two paragraphs of text on a website, rather than an ad on the sidebar.

You can pay Amazon to remove the ads by “Unsubscribing from Special Offers & Sponsored Screensavers” by paying the difference of your subsidized purchase: $30 for the plain Kindle and $40 for the Kindle Touch.

Playing MP3s

The Kindle can play MP3 files, and only MP3s, that you transfer to it.

You transfer the MP3s onto the Kindle when it’s plugged into your computer. To play them go to the Home screen and tap Menu → Experimental → MP3 Player.

A basic player UI will pop up at the bottom of the screen offering you to skip forward and backward to different tracks, play/pause the audio, and adjust the volume. The MP3 player will always appear at the bottom of the screen, even if you’re not playing audio. It will always be there until you turn it off.

When you are playing music you can either plug in headphones, or listen via the stereo speakers on the back of the Kindle which sound about as good and bass-free as you’d expect on such a device.

Coda

Because it is so inexpensive and all of its content is backed up on Amazon.com, the Kindle Touch is a stress-free device you can take to the beach, the pool, the mountains, etc. Compared to the “eReader” I have been using for the past 18 months — an iPad — the Kindle’s primary user experience is significantly different. For the single-purpose device that the Kindle Touch is meant to be — a device that’s easy to hold and to read — the Kindle does this exceptionally well. And, in many settings, better than the iPad. Moreover, the iPad isn’t something you would take to the beach or the pool without at least thinking twice.

Of course, not every context finds the Kindle better for reading. Obviously in low-light or no-light situations the iPad is better because of its backlit screen. But also the iPad is significantly better for reading RSS feeds and my Instapaper queue. This is not only because the iPad has a stellar RSS app and the Kindle has none, but also because when reading feeds on my iPad I like to fly through them. On the Kindle, tasks take a little more time due to the nature of E Ink.

It is also arguable that the iPad is better for reading magazines. While I like the text-friendly version of The New Yorker that is served up on the Kindle, magazines have always been more than just text. And though I do think that the magazine reading experience could be significantly better on the iPad, I do appreciate the full-color graphics and customized layouts (most of the time).

But who says the Kindle has to replace the iPad? It’s not uncommon for people to own both. I know people who use their Kindle and their iPad. Of course, I also know others who abandoned their Kindle back in April 2010.

For me, I can see the Kindle becoming the reading device I keep on the coffee table and take on vacations. But, if I’m going to head out the door and am going to take just one device, you can bet it’ll be the iPad.

On the other end of the spectrum, what say ye about the Kindle versus a good ole book? Well, compared to a physical book the Kindle is at least as easy to hold and just as easy read from. And if you’re outside on a windy day or if you’ve got a big fat hardcover novel, then I would argue that the Kindle is even easier to hold.

The other advantage of the Kindle over a physical book is that you can have an entire library of content on a device the size of an extra-large wallet. And finding something new to read (a newspaper, magazine, new book, etc…) is just a few taps away. That is why the Kindle has appeal beyond just nerds who practically have it in their DNA to love a new gadget.

Overall I am extremely pleased with the Kindle Touch. Even more than I expected to be when I pre-ordered it so many weeks ago. The quality of the hardware and the usefulness of the device betray its exceptionally low price.

Anna’s white iPhone is the first white iPhone I have seen up close and used outside of an Apple store. And it looks great. I have always gone with black iPhones because, well, it’s black. But I really do like the look of Anna’s white iPhone — it is much more classy and well built than the white iPad.

The two phones arrived around 10:00 am. The delivery driver mentioned how we were the first to get them and he had hundreds on his truck.

About 7 hours later I was finally able to activate the phones.

Frustrations of AT&T’s overloaded activation servers aside, the activation process was incredibly simple. I activated and set up both iPhones without a single cable. My unofficial goal is to never plug my iPhone into my computer again.

After unboxing the phone, I turned it on, unlocked the screen, and followed the on-screen instructions for setup. The iPhone knew my phone number and prompted me to confirm that this was indeed the phone number I was upgrading. I then was asked to enter in my billing zip code and last 4 digits of my social security number to confirm my identity, and then let the iPhone activate.

At first the activation was unsuccessful. And so I started over. The second attempt was unsuccessful as well. I tried again, and again, and again, for over two hours. Then I just let it be and came back a few hours later. Even then, I still had no luck.

It was dinner time when iPhone was finally able to activate. I, of course, was not the only one with activation woes. I read about all sorts of people having trouble activating their AT&T iPhones. And, from what I understand, those on Verizon and Sprint had little or no trouble activating on day one.

Once I was finally able to activate my iPhone 4S, I simply restored it from the iCloud backup of my iPhone 4. The restore took less than 10 minutes altogether and all the apps from my iPhone 4 were downloaded and in place. The only missing data were all my passwords.

Aside from having to wait for several hours to get my 4S activated, this was, by far, the most seamless and easy iPhone setup I’ve ever had.

Those automatic iCloud backups are great. Every evening I plug my iPhone into the wall charger by my bed and every evening all that’s on my iPhone gets backed up to the cloud.

These backups are especially great for my wife. Of the two of us, she is probably more prone to losing or breaking her iPhone than I am. Moreover, she is certainly less motivated to plug her iPhone in and sync it to her computer. Having her iPhone backed up each night means if her iPhone ever does go missing, the info that’s on it won’t disappear with the device.

Big Picture

The iPhone 4S has three headline features which make it superior to its predecessors: speed, camera, and Siri.

• The speed is a combination of the A5 processor and the new antennae design. The former lets the iPhone 4S work and act quicker. The latter helps with better download speeds from the cellular data network.

• The camera is better and faster. More on that in a bit.

• And Siri is, well, amazing. But more on that in a bit, too.

My thought on if you should upgrade? Well, if you are at all an iPhone junkie (as in, you use your iPhone more than the maximum amount even possible) then I think the upgrade is well worth it. The speed, better camera, and Siri are all something you’ll benefit from every day (even if you’re already on an iPhone 4).

Siri

My first impression of Siri is that Siri is to the GUI what the GUI is to the command line. Meaning, using Siri is a far easier and quicker way to navigate certain tasks than using iPhone’s multi-touch user interface. The GUI is still much more powerful, but there are already things which are more efficient to do by using Siri.

The scope of what Siri can do on its is not all that striking — setting a timer or an alarm is relatively simple task. But it’s not the scope that makes Siri so darn impressive.

The practical implication of Siri is that certain things are significantly easier and faster to do by asking Siri to them. Such as: setting a reminder, creating a calendar event, getting the current temperature, setting a timer, or setting an alarm.

Siri is not the first voice recognition software to come along allowing you to make a phone call or dictate a note. But Siri is conversational and accepts a multitude of various types of requests for the same task. Which means you don’t have to memorize what you’re asking for. And because of that, Siri’s usability and convenience become exponentially more impressive and helpful.

Something else that stands out to me about Siri is how well it can understand what I’m saying. I don’t have to talk slowly and in monotone. Nor do I have to hold the iPhone right up to my face to talk directly into the microphone. In my home office I can leave the iPhone on my desk next to my keyboard while talking at a normal speed and volume, and Siri will catch exactly what I’m saying.

Another thing that stands out to me about Siri’s usefulness is that it knows if you are “hands free” or not. And if so, Siri accommodates accordingly. For example, if I have my iPhone earbuds plugged in and I ask Siri to send a message to my wife saying “Hey babe, just wanted to say I love you.” Siri will reply not only that the message was created but also read it back to me. If I were not “hands free” Siri assumes I can read my message as it’s brought up on the screen, and thus I would have to ask to review my message in order to get it read back to me by Siri.

In short, Siri is smart enough to know if I am not able to look at my iPhone’s screen and if so Siri becomes more chatty in a good way.

Talking to and using Siri could easily be maddening. If it took too long to process a simple request, or if it didn’t understand most what I said, then the friction of using Siri would slowly grind away any desire to use it. But it’s the little areas of polish that make Siri usable and enjoyable.

Using Siri in Public

I have not yet been in a large, open, public place (such as a restaurant or coffee shop) where I wanted to use Siri. If I did, there’s a clever feature Apple built in which, if your iPhone’s screen is unlocked, you can raise the phone to your ear and Siri will activate and you can interact with it as if you were talking to someone on the phone.

There were, however, a few times over this past weekend when I was around family and something came to my mind that I waned to set a reminder for. I felt a bit uncomfortable launching Siri and asking it to set a reminder for me because I knew it would interrupt the conversation happing in the next room over and draw attention to myself.

And then, as I thought about how easy it would be to have Siri set the reminder compared to setting it up manually, I decided simply to not set up the reminder at all. Lazy? Perhaps. But it’s also telling. For how many people will Siri become the only interface into their iPhone’s apps for reminders, alarms, and timers?

Phonetics

I highly recommend populating the Phonetic Name fields for common contacts which Siri mispronounces. This will also increase the accuracy of your requests to call, text, or email someone.

To set a phonetic field just go to a contact’s card from your iPhone, tap “Edit”, then scroll to the bottom and tap “Add Field”. From there you’ll find the fields you’re looking for.

Text Input for Siri

Natural language input is one of the primary benefits to Siri. This is what makes the calendar app Fantastical so fantastic. If Siri understands and parses our requests into text, why not allow us to type our Siri requests in from the start?

If I’m not in a place where I can talk to Siri, typing in my request may still be easier than doing the task manually. For example, typing the text: “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home” would still be easier than launching the Reminder app, creating a new reminder, typing in “take out the trash”, tapping on the reminder itself, choosing “Remind Me”, turning on “At a Location”, selecting “When I Arrive”, choosing “Home”.

Easter Eggs

There are a slew of easter eggs in Siri. You can ask Siri to tell you a story or a joke. There are certain phrases you can say to Siri to solicit a clever response, such as: “open the pod bay doors”, “beam me up, Siri”, or even, “klaatu barada nikto”.1

Since Siri is server-side software, it will be interesting to see how it evolves (perhaps not the best word-choice?). Will new easter eggs be added? Will new responses to the same questions be added? Beyond simply wishing for an API so 3rd-party apps can get access, how will Siri’s responses and functionality be updated in the future?

Finding friends and family members

Siri integrates with Apple’s Find My Friends app, and I think this could offer some great functionality. Especially for immediate family members. You can ask Siri things like “where is my wife”, and if the Find my Friends app has their location data then you can see where they are.

Location-Based Reminders

Surely the location-based reminders are one of the coolest “little features” in iOS 5.

Having a phone that’s smart enough to remind us to take out the trash when we get home or to not forget our jackets when we leave the office is the next step in handy task lists.

I’ve added new contacts in my iPhone for Walmart and Lowe’s, two locations we visit often. This way I can create a reminder such as “Remind me to get batteries next time I am at Walmart.”

What would be great is if a location-based reminder could contain a “group” of locations. We don’t buy batteries only at Walmart. There are a handful of stores we go to which sell batteries, and so if we need batteries I want to be reminded at any of those stores.

If I could create a group of contacts labeled shopping which contained all the various stores we regularly visit, then I could say “remind me to get batteries next time I go shopping” and then a geo-fence could be set up around all of those “shopping” locations, and would go off at whichever one I arrived at next.

And what would take that even to the next level? An ability to have shared reminders. Something like: “Remind me or Anna to get batteries next time we go shopping.”

An example of that in real life could look like this: I’m at home and realize we need batteries. I create the reminder and it syncs to my iPhone and Anna’s. Then, suppose Anna realizes she needs to swing by the store on her way home from work to get an ingredient for dinner. When she gets there a reminder pops up notifying her that we also need batteries.

Siri’s Interface Design

I think the look of Siri’s interface design is fantastic. I like the way Wolfram|Alpha results are displayed as well as custom UI elements for native things such as a reminder, an event, or a message. The look for an alarm and the timer are my favorite two designs.

Matt Legend Gemmell has a collection of screenshots on Flickr showing off the look of Siri as well as many of its functionalities.

Network Availability

There are patches of time during the day when Siri simply won’t work. In my usage, it doesn’t have to do my iPhone’s connectivity, but simply that the cloud is too busy. Its must be all those millions of iPhone 4S users.

This surely is why Apple limited Siri to be exclusive to the iPhone 4S. They sold 4 million iPhones over the weekend, but there are 20 million people who upgraded to iOS 5. If the Siri network gets bottlenecked with 4 million users, imagine if it were available to 20 million right now.

It’s one thing for Siri to need a network connection to parse and interpret the voice requests. But it would seem that Siri needs the network connection for everything it does — from the very start to the very end of any task.

I found that if Siri lost network connectivity mid-interaction, it could not complete the task. I had all but confirmed a new reminder when Siri lost network connection, and so the reminder could not be created. Even though I was staring at it on the Siri screen. After waiting about 30 seconds, Siri was able to connect and the reminder was set.

Of course, the non-connected moments are fewer and more far between than the connected moments. And when Siri does work, it’s fast. So fast, in fact, that it feels as if Siri is processing the requests right on the phone. (Part of this speed may be because I think Siri begins streaming your audio request to the Apple servers almost as soon as you begin talking.)

The A5 Processor

The iPhone 4S is significantly faster than the 4, and not just on paper.

The speed increase is especially noticeable in all the little animations and movements you see on your phone all the time. Such as the app launching animations and sliding between home screens and scrolling a list view. They are all more smooth.

Something that the iPhone is so well known for is that as you are tapping on and interacting with the interface, the response time is so good that it feels as if you are actually manipulating the interface with your finger. Well, on the 4S, that perceived manipulation feels even more real.

And, aside from the Camera app which surely has the most noticeable speed bump of all, it’s the Spotlight search results that I’ve noticed as having the most obvious speed increase.

The Camera

It’s fast. Like, crazy fast.

I had switched to Camera+ as my primary camera app simply because you could snap, snap, snap, several photos in a row. But you can now do that with the native camera app.

So, not only does the Camera app launch quicker, but the “shutter speed” is much faster as well. This is a welcome change indeed. But that’s not all. The lens of the camera on the iPhone 4S is also significantly improved. The quality of the photos is higher resolution and better image quality. I am not a photographer, but even I can notice a better depth of field and better color with the camera on my 4S.

Additional Miscellany

• The Home Button on my iPhone 4S sits differently than on my iPhone 4. The button on the 4S feels more flush with the top glass and it has a slightly more smooth transition (from the glass to where the button begins).

• The vibration alert the 4S is very different than on my iPhone 4. It’s more obvious, yet less noisy and less abrasive. It’s hard to explain what exactly is different about it, but it is most certainly different.

  The reason is that the iPhone 4S uses the same vibrator motor as the Verizon iPhone 4 does: it’s a linear oscillating vibrator as opposed to the rotational electric motor that was in the AT&T Version of the iPhone 4.

• The screen on the 4S seems “cooler”, more crisp, and more appealing to look at than the screen on my 4.

• iMessages go to all devices that are set up with your Apple ID and are running iOS 5. However, only the most-recently-used device gets the iMessage notification. So, if you are having a conversation with someone via iMessage, only the device you’re having the conversation on gets each and every notification of a new incoming message.

  And so here’s a thought: if Apple can manage which device gets notified of a new iMessage, then why not use that same logic to simmer down the calendar alerts?

Summary Statement for Skimmers

For a phone that looks so similar, there are so many things which are different. Though the iPhone 4S looks just like my previous iPhone, it sure doesn’t act like it. The 4S is a welcome upgrade for someone who has his iPhone within arms reach just about 24 hours a day.

I don’t just have an iPod with songs on it any longer. I have an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac, and all three of them have all sorts of similar content. If you use more than one computer or device, then over-the-air syncing is extremely convenient.

While browsing Twitter on my iPhone, if I come across a link I want to read later I can just send it to Instapaper. Later that evening I can sit down on the couch, pick up my iPad, and the article is there waiting for me. And this is just one of hundreds of examples of the convenience of using the cloud. Emails, photos, documents, music, notes, to-do items, and ebooks are all prime examples of things we want to share and sync across multiple devices.

The iPhone, announced in 2007, was always meant to be more than a widescreen iPod with touch controls, more than a revolutionary mobile phone, and more than a breakthrough Internet communications device.

Smartphones in 2007 were somewhat smart (they could do email and barbaric Internet), but they were not easy to use. And regular, or dumb, phones were easier to use, but they didn’t do a whole lot.

iPhone was designed to be a device that was very smart and very easy to use. Smarter than the smartest smartphone. Easier to use than the most simple dumb phone. This is a hard position to keep because the smarter (or more capable and feature-rich) a device gets the harder it is to maintain its ease of use.

The launch of the App Store in 2008 made the iPhone significantly “smarter”. That was the intention — Apple wants the iPhone and iPad to run desktop class mobile applications. The more our devices work and function as miniature computers (which is what they are), the more important it is that they work side by side with our actual computers.

That side-by-side functionality started with iTunes and the USB cable. You could plug your iPhone into your computer and sync your music, photos, videos, podcasts, contacts, calendars, notes, Safari bookmarks, and email accounts.

In 2008, MobileMe came along, and for $99/year you could ditch the USB cable at least for syncing contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and email.

But the .Mac re-brand and re-launch to MobileMe was disastrous in some ways. In an internal email to Apple employees, Steve Jobs said, “The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious.”

Over the past 3 years in its current state as “Exchange for the rest of us,” MobileMe has been neither exciting nor ambitious.

What about owning an iPhone is less exciting than having to plug it in, launch iTunes, sync the info, and then eject it every single time you want to get info in sync or transfer over new music?

But now, with iOS 5 and iCloud, we no longer need the USB cable.

In fact, if there were another way to charge the iPhone 4S, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the new phones came only with earbuds. But the cable will be there — if only for the purpose of charging the phone.

I cannot help but wonder if iCloud is what MobileMe was meant to be. MobileMe earned a sour reputation right off the bat. As they say, if you don’t like what people are saying, change the conversation. And so we now have iCloud as the MobileMe successor. It’s better. It’s free. It’s more exciting. It’s more ambitious. It still uses the @me.com email addresses.

iCloud is ambitious and exciting in a way MobileMe never was. This is the foundation, the cornerstone, the hinge, the linchpin, and the future of where Apple is headed. Lion + iOS + iCloud = Apple’s development plans. Their desktop and mobile hardware and software offerings will be unified via iCloud.

On a less dramatic tone, I am very thankful for iCloud because I am tired of plugging in my iPhone and iPad in order to sync them. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I plugged either of them into my computer. I mean, who goes through those iTunes hoops any more? Average consumers never did in the first place unless they had a specific reason (such as to transfer a new album or movie onto their iPhone), and even us nerds gave up on it a while ago.

I sit at my desk for hours every day and my iPhone rarely gets plugged into my laptop. Persnickety power users are surely the most motivated of all to plug our iDevices in and keep things in sync, and yet even we have given up on the chore of syncing.

Ever since App Store purchase became available as over-the-air downloads (regardless of what device the app or song was purchased on) I stopped having any reason whatsoever to plug my iPhone into my laptop.

If I buy an app on my Mac, my iPhone and/or iPad will download it as well. If I buy a song on my iPhone, my Mac will download it as well. If I buy an app on my iPad, my iPhone will download it.

Moreover, since I use MobileMe, my contacts, calendars, and bookmarks are synced. And several of my most-used apps use a web service to sync their data over the air across multiple devices. Apps such as 1Password, OmniFocus, Reeder, Instapaper, and Simplenote.

iCloud promises all this and more. Photos that you take with your iPhone will show up in your iPad’s photo library. Music that is on your laptop will be available to download on your iPhone or iPad. Documents that you’re working on in Numbers will be accessible on your Mac, iPad or iPhone.

“Last Century”

Yesterday I re-watched Steve Jobs’ January 2007 keynote. Something struck me about it when Jobs was demoing the phone app on iPhone he called the number keypad as “last century”. He said:

“If I want to dial the phone, if I’m real last-century, I can push keypad here, and I can dial a call.”

A few minutes later as he was re-capping the phone app and listing the features again, naming them out he again called the keypad as last century:

“Favorites, last century, visual voice mail.”

As if Jobs was annoyed that he couldn’t remove the keypad altogether.

Instead of being “last century” and dialing our calls, Apple wanted us to scroll through our contacts list. They wanted us to tap on names and phone numbers to call people. They wanted us to find restaurants and shops using Google maps and to tap on their contact info to call them. They built the best phone app on any mobile phone — it was one of iPhone’s original killer apps.

Today, iPhone’s “last century” element is the USB cable.

New iPhones will still ship with a USB cable in their box, but Apple doesn’t want you to use it. The only time you should be plugging your iPhone into the cable is to charge the battery. Apple wants you to set up your device wirelessly and let everything sync wirelessly.

What iPhone made the keypad in January 2007 is what iCloud will make the USB cable today: “Last century.”

iMessage

Even iMessages is building on the idea of synced information. Except it’s not syncing media or documents, it’s syncing conversations. You can have an iMessage conversation with someone while reading your Instapaper queue on your iPad, and then continue that same conversation on your iPhone when you’re out of the house. This is something that up until now only Twitter DMs seemed to handle (a DM thread is accessible from the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac), which means the next step will be, of course, iMessages for the Mac.

What else is so fun about Apple’s new messaging service is the fact that you can have delivery confirmation, read receipts, and see when the other person is typing. Alas, for me this means that if I get a text message that I’m not ready to reply to yet the other person will still know that I’ve read it. No hard feelings, okay guys?

Notifications

Other than Siri, the new notifications system may be the most exciting and notable front-end feature to iOS. Put another way, notifications in iOS 5 rock.

For the past 4 years iPhone users have had to suffer through a sub-par notifications system on the iPhone. If a text message comes up, you’re in trouble. If you have a handful of calendar reminders, your phone becomes locked down until you clear all of them. It’s been insufferable.

The new notifications not only work much better, but they look much better as well. There are 4 new or different user interface elements:

• The single-notification window that appears on the lock screen is now black instead of blue, and it has a gradient across the very top of the box instead of the curved bezel.
• If additional notifications appear while iPhone is locked, then the notifications get smaller and form an unordered list on the lock screen.
• Notifications that come when you are using your phone “roll in” on the top of the screen for a few moments, and then roll back out. The animation is really quite nice.
• And there is an entirely new notification pane which houses all your notifications, upcoming events, current weather, stocks, and more. This is accessed by sliding down from the top of the screen.

The new notification system and its accompanying UI elements are great. I think that the look of the lock screen with a few notifications is very cool. And I love the design of the notification slide-down pane.

But a word of caution: don’t overdo it. The temptation is going to be to sneak into the Notification Settings and turn on every app. But my suggestion is to keep it clean. Keep it down to only what’s helpful to you and keep it so that the notification panel doesn’t turn into the new time sink for the Just Checks. Don’t play the notification panel.

When I first installed the beta of iOS 5 a few months ago I turned on just about every notification I could. New emails, @replies and DMs on Twitter, SMS messages, iCal alerts, missed calls, OmniFocus items, and more — all of them were showing up as notifications. I wanted my Lock screen and notification panel to be well stocked.

After enjoying it for a day or two I had to turn nearly all of them off so I could have my life back. It was fun while it was new, but now the only things which alert me are Twitter DMs, SMS and iMessages, phone calls, upcoming meetings, and location-based reminders.

Location-Based Notifications

This is where things get fun.

You can set a notification to remind you of something when you arrive at or leave a place. Set a reminder that tells you to buy some AA batteries when you arrive at Walmart. Or, set a reminder that tells you to swing by the post office when you’re leaving your house.

The update to OmniFocus taps into the location-based API in iOS 5 and you can set the same. Assign a location to a context in OmniFocus and all items assigned to that context will become due upon arrival to or leaving from that location.

Miscellany

Text Expansion Shortcuts

Under Settings → General → Keyboard → Shortcuts you can set up custom shortcuts.

So, for example, typing the letters “omw” will expand to “On my way”. It does not instantly expand like a TextExpander snippet would, but rather iOS treats your shortcut like a misspelling and offers to auto-correct it to the expanded text. Hitting the Space bar launches the expansion, hitting the “x” in the popover box dismisses it.

Faster Camera Access

Double click the Home button from the Lock screen and — in addition to the iPod controls being where they always have been — a camera icon now shows up to the right of the “slide to unlock” slider. Tap that icon and you are in the Camera app. Boom. It is a significantly faster way to get to the camera.

The New Round Toggles and Other Graphical Interface Changes

There are more new design elements in iOS 5 than any previous version of iOS.

• New look of notifications on the lock screen and the new Notification Center
• New rounded toggle buttons
• Camera icon when you double click the Lock screen
• Blue talk bubbles used for iMessage messages
• Siri microphone icon on the keyboard
• Tabs in Mobile Safari

To me, all of these new or modified elements are a welcome change.

What struck me when thinking about the new look of the toggle switches and other new elements in iOS 5 is that this version of the OS has the most new UI elements of any of its previous siblings. Though the iPhone 4S does not have any physical design changes to it, the operating system installed certainly does.

iOS 5 and iCloud mark the next chapter in Apple’s mobile operating system. The groundbreaking and revolutionary new features shipping from Cupertino this week are signposts of Apple’s course for the next several years.

I came across this app while doing research and preparation for our Creatiplicty episode with Trent Walton.

Goodfoot works by taking the most popular spots on Gowalla and then sorting them by distance (walking, biking, or driving distance) from where you currently are. Then it removes all the non-interesting spots from the list (such as big-brand locations, doctors offices, grocery stores, etc.) and does a pretty good job at only showing you worthwhile locations.

As you’re looking at each location Goodfoot has its own built-in Awesometer®. Goodfoot’s Awesometrics System rates the likelihood of that location being awesome by looking at how many total check-ins the location has compared to how many of those check-ins are unique. So, for example, a place with 100 check-ins from 100 unique people is probably a tourist hotspot and thus not that awesome (unless you think gift shops are awesome). A place with 100 check-ins from 20 people is clearly a local favorite and thus more likely to be awesome.

Once you find a spot that you want to go to, you can view that site in Gowalla or use Google Maps to get the exact location and directions.

Goodfoot is just a buck in the App Store and works wherever Gowalla users have been.

Well, that’s baloney. What about the apps I like but which don’t change my life? What about the apps I want to talk about but don’t have 3,000 words for? The weekly Sweet App review is the answer to these conundrums. Enjoy.

Hues

Hues is a simple and useful color finding tool for your Mac. I came across this app when its developer, Zach Waugh, emailed me to let me know about it.

I like Hues because it has the familiarity of the built-in OS X color-picker tool, yet it with a few special modifications of its own:

• It gives you the HEX, RGP, and HSL values for any color you pick. Since I design live in a browser having a light-weight app that helps me find colors and their HEX values is super helpful. I’m embarrassed to admit that used to launch Photoshop for the sole purpose of finding a color I liked and copying its HEX value. Needless to say, Hues is much more economical for that purpose than Photoshop is.
• It has 5 rows for saved swatches instead of one. (Update: news to me is that if you click and drag the little dot underneath the swatch palette you can adjust how many rows of saved swatches are visible.)
• In the app’s preferences you have the ability to remove any of the color pickers from the toolbar that you don’t use. I, for instance, only ever use the color wheel, so I removed the Sliders, the Palettes, and the Crayons.
• It works, looks, and feels just like the native color picker, just better.

Hues is $3 in the Mac App Store.

There was a brief stint where I also owned a Quad-Core Mac Pro. Doing print design on the PowerBook was no longer cutting it, and I needed a better work machine. But, when I purchased the 15-inch MacBook Pro to act as my “secondary computer” I realized that the Mac Pro was overkill and I had no need to own two professional-grade machines.

That Mac Pro was a fine computer. If you were in the next room over when the Mac Pro was turned on you could hear the fans kick in. My father-in-law used to say that if you put wings on it, it would fly. And there was something safe about owning a computer that was easily and indefinitely updatable. More RAM? No problem. More storage? No problem. New graphics card? No sweat.

As great it was, the Mac Pro is most likely the first and last desktop computer I will ever own. At least I went out with style.

Laptops have far too great of a personal value to me. Having a desktop as my only machine would be like a prison sentence. Even while I owned the Mac Pro I had a laptop as a secondary computer so I could still work and be connected away from my desk. My office is not my office, my laptop is. And because of that I have the freedom of being able to work from anywhere.

For instance, my wife’s brother recently got married in Colorado. Since both Anna’s and my family all live in the Denver area, I chose to stay in Colorado for an extra week after the wedding was over. I still worked for 8 – 10 hours each day, but thanks to the fact that all my work is contained on a laptop, I had no trouble being 600 miles from my office. I didn’t miss a beat, and I got to spend the mornings and evenings with my family.

It was from Colorado that I wrote and published my Lion review, and it was in Colorado that I bought this very MacBook Air.

In October 2010 when the MacBook Airs got their first major revision, I couldn’t justify the upgrade from my early 2008 MacBook Pro. The Air was almost the laptop I had been waiting for.

Since I had already put an SSD in my MacBook Pro, the specs between my current laptop at the time and the new Core 2 Duo Airs were nearly identical. Since my MacBook Pro was still hanging in there, I decided to wait until the next major refresh or until my current laptop died — whichever came first.

I use my laptop all day, every day. It is primarily a machine for writing, emailing, and Web browsing. I don’t do nearly as much heavy Photoshopping as I once did. The Adobe app I use the most nowadays is InDesign, and it’s relatively light on the CPU.

That 2010 refresh of the MacBook Air, as substantial as it was, was more like a warning shot — a signal to say that this is the future of the Apple laptop.

The Air is the not-so-secret forerunner laptop among Apple’s lineup. When it was introduced in 2008 it was the first Apple laptop to ditch the optical drive, it was the first to incorporate the then-new black, plastic keyboard, it was the first to offer the larger trackpad, the first to offer SSD drives as a build-to-order option, and it was the first unibody laptop.

In the 2010 refresh, the MacBook Air was the first to offer only flash storage. And now, with its powerful and battery-friendly mobile i5 and i7 processors, the Air is an extremely capable laptop. It is no longer a niche device appealing only to those who live on the bleeding edge.

But what makes the Air so appealing? The fact that it comes with just the bare necessities.

Packaging

As the years go on, Apple includes less and less stuff with our computers.

The MacBook Air box is closer in size to an iPad box than to my old PowerBook box. In fact, I can fit my MacBook Air box inside my old PowerBook box. When I bought my 12-inch PowerBook in 2005 it came in a box that was almost 8 inches tall. In addition to the laptop and power cable, the box had a few CD-ROM discs, a display adapter, a telephone cable, some stickers, and a decent-sized manual.

When I bought my MacBook Pro in 2008 the case was noticeably smaller, and it came with fewer items: the power cable, the recover discs, a small manual, an Apple remote, and a very nice screen-cleaning cloth.

The MacBook Air comes with hardly anything: a power cord, instructions, and stickers. No remote, no adapters, no USB boot drive, and not even a screen cleaning cloth. Is this Apple’s way of cutting costs or saving us from junk drawers overflowing with white cords and unused adapters? Perhaps both.

Form Factor

The MacBook Air is, without a doubt, the most attractive laptop Apple makes. It’s sleek, silent, sturdy, and surprisingly lightweight.

The Air is most attractive when the lid is closed. Every time I pick it up I am still slightly stunned by how light and sturdy it is to hold. At just under 3 pounds the Air weighs close to half that of my previous laptops. And by nature of the unibody design, the Air’s lid closes flush against its body. The lids on those aluminum PowerBooks and MacBook Pros never sat flush against the body when closed, which meant that when holding the laptop with one hand the lid would tap and bend against the body a little bit.

When opening the lid and waking the laptop, there is no optical drive to read and no HDD to spin up. You don’t know if it’s actually going to wake up until the display turns on, which is within seconds.

And with no “breathing” light to wait for when you close the lid, you never know when it has gone to sleep. Which means, that for all intents and purposes, you don’t think about the MacBook Air going to sleep. You are either using it or not. Like the iPad.

On laptops with spinning platter drives, that breathing light is very important. I would never move my laptop until I was confident it was sleeping and thus the HDD had spun down. When I first bought my MacBook Pro, it would sometimes take as much as 45 seconds to sleep because it was writing all the contents of RAM to disk. There are Terminal commands to turn safe sleep off and allow the MBP to sleep in about 10 seconds instead of 45.

But with the MacBook Air, you just shut the lid and put it in your bag. Because there is no spinning hard drive there is nothing to worry about when moving the laptop around.

This is my first unibody Mac, which means that some of the MacBook Air’s features, though they’ve been around for a few years now, are new to me. Such as: the large glass trackpad, the magnetically locking lid, the black chicklet keyboard, the glossy display, and the headphone jack that works with and responds to the iPhone’s earbud controls.

Screen

Pixel junkies have a hard time giving up screen real estate, and the thought of downgrading from a 15- to a 13-inch screen can be enough to keep one up at night. In fact, one reason I didn’t buy a Core 2 Duo MacBook Air last October was in hopes that a 15-inch MacBook Air was just around the corner.

If you’ve read many other reviews about the 13-inch MacBook Air and its 1440×900 resolution, you’ll likely know that the transition from a 15-inch laptop to this 13-inch Air is virtually painless. Moreover, content on the 15-inch MacBook Pro now looks comically large. I’m looking at the same graphics and the same icons, but they look bloated and fuzzy.

All in all, the high-res screen on the MacBook Air is fantastic. Text is crisper and images are sharper. Though it has taken some time to get used to everything being a wee-bit tinier due to higher pixel density.

I have always been a die-hard matte fan. The only thing I do not like about the Air’s screen is that it is glossy. Fortunately it is not the same glossy found on the MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Cinema Displays. In those screens there’s a giant slab of glass over the whole bezel. On the Air there is only a thin slice of glass that sits under the bezel. It is more glossy than the beloved matte displays of old, but it is not as glossy as the newfangled machines.

Fortunately, there is still a matte display at my disposal. When at my desk I put the Air in clamshell mode and plug it into my 23-inch Aluminum Cinema Display. The Cinema Display has an even lower pixel density than the 15-inch MacBook Pro but it does not have the same “comically large” feel that the MacBook Pro does. Since I sit farther away from the monitor and since the screen is quite a bit larger, the Cinema Display still looks fine. Though I am sure that a higher pixel density would look even better.

Here’s a look at the screens I am now using, compared to past screens I’ve owned and compared to some of the latest devices Apple is selling today.

One more minor point about the screen is that the lid hinge opens wider than my 15-inch MacBook Pro did. Though it still doesn’t open quite as wide as my old PowerBook did, the Air’s obtusity is more than welcome in this regard.

Full-Screen Mode and the Full-Screen Conundrum

The smaller the screen the more delightful a full-screen app becomes.

Only a few full-screen apps looked good on my 15-inch MacBook Pro: writing apps (such as Byword and iA Writer) and Safari.

On the MacBook Air almost all the apps that support full-screen mode look good. Right now not many of the apps I use support full-screen mode in Lion, but the ones that do look great. Byword and Safari of course, also Mail and iCal (well, all things considered, iCal looks good in full-screen). And Reeder? Well, Reeder looks amazing in full-screen mode.

Thanks to the MacBook Air, full-screen mode is growing on me in a way that it never did when I tried to use it on my MacBook Pro. Perhaps what I like the most about apps in full-screen mode is the non-cluttered and organized tidiness that seems to come with full-screen mode apps. Each app is in its place, and when I’m using that app no other windows are floating behind it pestering me or getting in my way.

Something clever about Safari when in full-screen mode is that the title of the page you’re on appears in the Address Bar just after the URL. And if the URL is so long that it takes up the whole address bar, you get an ellipsis at the end with enough room to still display the title.

Safari’s title display in full-screen mode:

Safari’s title display in non-full-screen mode:

However, there are a few quibbles I still have. For one, the transition between screens is extremely slow. But it’s only slow when you are switching between screens — switching between apps causes a faster screen-slide transition. Meaning, if you use the four-finger gesture to switch from one full-screen app to the other, the speed at which the screens slide over is slower than if you use Command-Tab to switch between the full-screen apps. I would love for that faster switch to be the default speed.

Secondly is the issue of when I plug the Air into the 23-inch Cinema Display. You can have too much of a good thing, and full-screen apps on the Cinema Display are certainly too much. And so, when I switch to clamshell mode I have to exit all those apps out of full-screen. A system utility that recognized this would be much appreciated.

Trackpad

The larger, glass trackpad of the Air is much nicer than the trackpad I’ve been accustomed to on my older MacBook Pro. Especially when it comes to multi-touch gestures. However, due to the larger size of the trackpad and the smaller chassis of the Air, trackpad is under the inside of my palms when typing and it often throws me off. The Air is smart enough not to respond to mouse movements when typing but there’s still a natural desire to avoid touching the trackpad while typing.

Clicking with your thumb while two fingers are on the trackpad does not always register the “right-click”. You have to click right towards the bottom of the trackpad. Though it works on the Magic Trackpad, and it’s what I got used to for right-click on my MacBook Pro (the kind that still had the actual trackpad button). Moreover, there is no option in System Preferences to enable 3-finger click.

USB and Thunderbolt Ports

My external HDDs are all FireWire — my primary backup drive uses FW800 and the secondary is FW400. I will now have to connect them via USB until I upgrade to either a Thunderbolt-equipped external drive or a Thunderbolt hub. It would be great to get the functionality of the new cinema displays without the cinema display. A Thunderbolt hub with FW800, FW400, USB, and additional Thunderbolt ports would be fantastic.

My 23-inch aluminum Apple Cinema Display works fine with the MacBook Air via a Mini-Display Port to DVI adaptor plugged into the Thunderbolt port. And, worth noting is that the Thunderbolt port in the Air is one-half the power and capacity of a standard Thunderbolt connection.

Keyboard

Since the Air has no optical drive, what would be the eject key on any of Apple’s other keyboards is instead the power button.

Moreover, the F4 key on the Air now brings up Launchpad instead of Dashboard. All of Apple’s new keyboards do this. It’s unfortunate for someone like me who never uses Launchpad, but does use the Dashboard dozens of times a day. There is a workaround, however, using a handy utility called Function Flip.

As you know, the top row of an Apple keyboard has the default hardware control buttons and the row of function buttons. What Function Flip does is swap the default action of those keys. And so when pressing the Launchpad/F4 button, I can use Function Flip to have it default to react to the F4 command rather than the Launchpad command.

With Function Flip installed I go into System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control and set “Show Dashboard” to be F4. Now I have my Dashboard hotkey back, and if I want to activate Launchpad then I can hit fn+F4.

Proper Baggage

The Air is the first laptop I’ve ever owned where I feel that putting it in a case is unfair — I’d rather carry it around caseless like I do my iPhone 4. But it still needs a good carrying case because a laptop and its carrying case go together like a suit and tie.

I am big-bag-averse — I much prefer smaller, rugged bags that don’t look like they belong on a space mission. I never did find a bag that fit my MacBook Pro that was just right. But, for the Air, I already have an old, rugged Timbuk2 bag that is full of character and happens to be exactly the right size for the new laptop.

In the Timbuk2 bag I use a sleeve for the MacBook Air: Acme Made Skinny Sleeve. If I didn’t already have the Timbuk2 bag then I would likely get the Acme Made Clutch bag or the Bomber Jacket Messenger bag from Levenger.

Guts and Glory

My history with computers is that I use them for about 3 – 4 years. Therefore, I wanted to get the most specced-out MacBook Air available. And I did. I picked up the dual-core i7 MacBook Air with 256 GB of SSD storage and 4 GB of RAM. If the Air had wings, it would fly.

Processors

Ordering the i7 seemed like an easy decision at first. For only $100 I could get a newer generation processor with a faster clock speed and more L3 cache. For the 13-inch model, going from the 1.7 i5 chip to the 1.8 i7 chip does not offer a huge jump in performance. In fact, it’s likely that in day-to-day use I wouldn’t even notice the difference. But, since I plan to have this computer for a few years, I wanted to future-proof it a bit by going with the i7 rather than the i5.

The i7 turned out to have a bit of drama attached. But now that the dust has settled, it’s clear that the i7 build-to-order option was the right choice.

When the new Airs were first announced, Apple listed the i7 as being build-to-order only. When buying a new computer, it’s always harder to order it online and wait for it to be built and shipped than to simply drive to the Apple store and buy one that day. However, I was in Colorado at the time and I knew that I wanted the i7 model. So I ordered online, expecting it to arrive back in Kansas City by the time I flew home. However, once I relieved my email confirmation from Apple, the shipping time had already changed from 24 hours into 5 – 7 business days.

The longer the wait, the harder it is to be noble and deny the temptation for instant gratification. So I called the local Apple Store to see if they had any of the new Airs in stock, but, alas, they did not.

The next day, at 7:15 am Mountain Time I got a message from a friend on the East Coast. He was just leaving his local Apple Store with a new i7 MacBook Air in hand. I was shocked that the i7 Airs were available in-store. I decided to do some research about the differences between the i5 and i7 processors — were the speed bumps really worth the extra cost and (in my current case) the extra wait.

I had a very hard time finding accurate reports and information about the latest, mobile Sandy Bridge processors. And therefore, my initial research was way off. At first, it appeared that the i5 chips did not have Hyper Threading enabled and that the i7 chips did. If this were true it would make the i7 chips far superior to the i5.

However, as it turned out, the i5 chip does have Hyper Threading enabled. Making the speed bump to the i7 nice, but negligible. I decided to cancel my online order, drive to the local Apple Store and buy the best MacBook Air they had. If, like my friend on the East Coast, I was lucky enough to get an i7, then great. If not, then I’d be content with the i5.

Fortunately, they had the i7 MacBook Airs in stock and I happily picked one up.

My personal MacBook Air has a Geekbench score of 6281. This is about double the average Geekbench scores of the previous-generation MacBook Airs. The i5 Air scores around 5900.

According to Macworld’s lab tests, upgrading to the i7 chip in the 13-inch Air (which comes with a 1.7 GHz i5 chip) is a negligible gain. Upgrading to the i7 in the 11-inch Air is much more noticeable because the 11-inch Air comes with a 1.6 GHz i5 chip.

Now that I had the i7, next came the concerns of battery life. Sure I had a faster MacBook Air, but just how much is my battery suffering for it?

Battery Life

In my real-world, this-is-how-Shawn-uses-his-laptop tests, the battery easily lasts 5.5 hours. This is with brightness at 80%, a select few utility applications running in the Menu bar (Dropbox, Text Expander, Fantastical, Droplr), and doing work with Safari, MarsEdit, Mail, Yojimbo, Twitter, and iTunes.

No doubt I could get 6 or more hours out of the battery with the brightness turned down. The worst I’ve gotten out of the battery so far has been 4.5 hours. During that time I had Rdio streaming music the whole time, except for a 70 minute stint where I recorded an episode of The B&B Podcast and powered my USB microphone.

When the battery gets down to the red (less than 10%) I still get 45 minutes worth of use. And what else is so impressive about the battery is how quickly it recharges. Just 30 or 40 minutes plugged in and the battery will charge back up and I’ll easily get another 3 – 4 hours.

In short, having a battery that lasts for so long inspires a lot of confidence in your machine. The guaranteed 5 hours of use isn’t mind-blowing, but it isn’t poor by any means either. When you’ve got a portable office, you want to grab it and go.

Moreover, recent tests by Anand Tech show that the battery life of the i5 compared to the i7 was nearly identical. Though the i7 draws more power, it works faster and therefore gets approximately the same battery life as an i5 MacBook Air. However, This Is My Next was able to get just under 7 hours of battery life on an i5 MacBook Air.

Solid State Drive

My MacBook Air cold boots in under 20 seconds. Faster than any other device in the house.

Speedy launch times like these are becoming more and more common, but most of us have been around computers long enough to remember when you would start your computer and then go down to make coffee. Just because a 20 second boot-up is less rare doesn’t make it any less delightful.

In addition to the speed, having a drive with no moving parts can be a relief when you’re using a laptop. No need to wait for the drive to spin down before you toss it in your bag because, other than the fans, everything in the MacBook Air is stationary.

Not every SSD has been manufactured equally. Some of the MacBook Air drives are made my Samsung and some are made by Toshiba. The Samsung drives are slightly faster than the Toshiba drives.

According to Disk Speed Test, the Samsung drive in my MacBook Air has a write speed of 248 MB/s and a reed speed of 265 MB/s.
Compare that to the Toshiba which, according to Engadget’s review of their Air with a Toshiba SSD, has a write speed of 184 MB/s and a read speed of 202 MB/s.

They say the speed difference between the faster Samsung drive and the slower Toshiba drive is not even noticeable. However, as a nerd, that’s not the point. Buying something new that’s even the slightest bit slower than another available option makes you want to shake your fist in the air and shout, “Arrg!”

Fortunately, the 256 GB SSD that came with my MacBook Air is made by Samsung, which means that I have the fastest MacBook Air I could possibly own. And that feels good because I plan to use this machine for several years.

Even if I had gotten a Toshiba SSD, it still would have been faster than the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro that I put into my MacBook Pro less than a year ago. Using Disk Speed Test, my OWC reports a write speed of 109 MB/s and a read speed of 134 MB/s — or, about half the speed of the Samsung SSD that’s in the MacBook Air.

Remote Disc

One of my favorite “features” of the Air is its lack of an optical drive. Too many times have I opened the lid to my MacBook Pro and been forced to listen to that horrendous wailing cry of the optical drive as it checked for physical media.

Moreover, I cannot remember the last time I used the Super Drive on my MacBook Pro. All the music I buy is digital; all the music I listen to is on my iPod or iPhone; all my software is downloaded (now, even my OS); and all my movies I get from Netflix or iTunes.

The only time I need to put a physical disc into my computer is to reinstall Adobe Creative Suite, or if I am sending a large file to print and I have to burn it onto a DVD. You can buy a USB-powered external Super Drive from Apple, or you can use another computer’s optical drive and connect to it remotely. The latter is aptly named Remote Disc.

Setting up Remote Disc is a piece of cake (I used it to install Adobe CS3 onto my Air).

• On the Mac that has the optical drive, go to System Preferences → Sharing, and turn on “DVD or CD Sharing”.
• On the MacBook Air, go to Remote Disc, which is found in the sidebar of the Finder window, and you’ll see the computer that has the optical drive shared.
• Choose “Ask to Use” and a dialog box will appear asking if you want to give permission for the MacBook Air to access the CD drive.
• Say yes, and then in the MacBook Air’s Finder, you’ll see what’s in the optical drive as if it were on the Air itself.

The downside to Remote Disk is that it slower than if the optical drive were internal. It took 40 minutes to install the 2.4 GB of Adobe Creative Suite software (Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop) over Remote Disk. An install speed of about 1.02 MB/s

An alternative to Remote Disk is to create a Disc Image (.dmg) of the physical media and install it that way. This is also a great way to digitally store your physical media and finally toss out those boxes of CD-ROMs.

If you want to take your software that still exists on physical media and turn it into digital disk image files, the process is quite simple. With the disc in the optical drive, go into Disk Utility, select the CD or DVD that is in the optical drive, choose “New Image”, and then save the .dmg file to your computer.

Starting Fresh

When installing a new operating system or setting up a new computer I love to start from scratch. Or, as I said earlier this month, it’s when I do my most serious tinkering.

Starting fresh is a perfect way to re-evaluate what I want to keep on an app-by-app basis. It also assures me that any cruft which slowly accumulated on the previous system is left in the dust.

Nothing makes you appreciate building out your clean install more than the Mac App Store. Once I had unboxed my MacBook Air and done the initial admin setup, I logged into the Mac App Store and downloaded half a dozen apps right off the bat (Byword, Twitter, Take Five, and a few others). There are more in the Mac App Store available for download, but I wanted to wait until I needed or wanted them before I downloaded them.

While the Mac App Store apps were downloading I downloaded and installed Dropbox to get it syncing.

Then I installed LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro because without them I can barely navigate my Mac. Once these two apps were installed I replaced their Application Support files with those from my MacBook Pro, instantly re-enstating my LaunchBar preferences and Keyboard Maestro macros.

While everything was downloading, I took a lunch break. When I returned, and Dropbox had fully synced up, I then installed the rest of my necessary apps:

• 1Password
• Growl
• Google Chrome
• Yojimbo
• MarsEdit
• Coda
• Transmit
• OmniFocus
• Rdio

For Yojimbo and MarsEdit I manually imported the Application Support folders, just like I had with LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro. OmniFocus and 1Password both sync with the cloud so I just logged in and let them do their thing. For Transmit and Coda I simply exported their keychains from the my previous system and installed it onto the Air.

The only other files I needed to manually move over were my music, all my fonts, and a few document folders. Previously I’d been storing my iTunes library on an external drive because my MacBook Pro’s 120 GB SSD wasn’t big enough to hold my music and movies. Since the Air has a 256 GB SSD, I was able to bring my music back to the local drive.

All in all, it took me a whole work day to buy the computer and get it set up and ready to use. I’ve since installed a few more apps, such as iWork and Adobe CS3. And the grand total ads up to 68 applications currently installed and 86 GB total in use.

Nothing beats a new machine running clean.

The New 12-inch PowerBook

After using the 13-inch MacBook Air for almost two weeks, it has been difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about this laptop that makes it so great. I don’t think it’s so much in what the Air is, but rather what it is not — or rather, what it doesn’t have. The Air doesn’t have an optical drive, it doesn’t have many ports, it doesn’t have a removable battery, and it doesn’t have much weight.

It’s the subtraction of all these things that adds up to make the Air such an attractive and incredible computer.

Everyone I know who has owned a 12-inch PowerBook G4 looks back with fondness about that being the best Mac they have ever owned. It was a perfect blend of power and portability, and it invoked an affinity from its owners that few Macs in history have.

A few years from now, I believe we’ll look back and say the 12-inch PowerBook was the best laptop we ever owned until our MacBook Airs. The MacBook Air is the new 12-inch PowerBook — the new blend of power and portability that also invokes a fondness that few Macs in the lineup can.

10:27am: Just called Walmart and Best Buy to see if they would be selling the TouchPad tomorrow.

The lady in Walmart electronics had no clue what I was talking about. She apologized that they would not have them, and that perhaps later they would and I could call and check again in a week or so.

The guy at Best Buy told me they had one on display already, that they had none in stock and that it would be a few days before they got any. I had a sneaking suspicion he didn’t realize that tomorrow was the official launch day of the TouchPad, so I say to him: “Since tomorrow is the day they officially launch, can you look to see if any Kansas City Best Buys will have them in stock?”

He replies: “Oh. Well if they go on sale tomorrow, then we will have them. It’s just not showing up in our inventory yet because it’s not on sale.”

So that settles it. Tomorrow morning I’ll be heading to Best Buy. Will there be a line?

Friday, July 1, 2011

7:15 am: Should I head over to Best Buy now, or wait until they open at 10:00 am? I cannot imagine that there will be more than a few people there at opening to pick one up. Unless there are other tech writers or nerds in Kansas City. Are there any?

Going early to stand in line for an iPad or iPhone has always been fun. You know there’ll be a group of folks there whom you can talk to, and so getting there plenty early is never an issue. Getting to Best Buy plenty early seems more like a faux pas rather than an event. I think I’ll wait.

9:30 am: Leaving for Best Buy. I decided that even if there is a line, I don’t want to stand in it. Standing outside of Best Buy just seems awkward to me, rather than fun.

9:58 am: I drive in to the Best Buy parking lot, and there is no line. As I am parking I see a manager walk out of the store and wave his arms in the air with a “come on in” motion. About a dozen folks all get out of their cars and begin walking toward the door. I think to myself how amazing it is that all these people are here for the TouchPad. Though once we all got into the store, only two of us were looking for TouchPads.

I am one of the first to walk in the doors, and the first display I see is for iPods. The electronics section of the store is toward the right, so I head that direction. I pass the cell phone counter, a display for iPhones, then the Apple section of Best Buy and a display for iPads and MacBooks. Then I pass the display for a Kindle and a PlayBook. Then, the TouchPad. It’s display looks no fancier or newer than any of the others. It’s just there.

Next to the TouchPad was a plastic, fake display version of the Veer. I looked around the display but did not see any TouchPad boxes available to pick up and purchase. Moreover, the display was in pretty poor condition. It was a 3×5-foot table with a display in the center.

It’s just me and one other guy interested in the TouchPad (I sped-walked for nothing). A customer service guy asks the two of us if we need help. I ask him to get me a 16GB version, and my new friend wants a 32GB. We also ask about covers but apparently they are already on back order. (I think in Best Buy when they don’t have something, the default answer is that it’s on back order because it makes the item sound more popular.)

While we’re waiting for the TouchPads, the other guy and I small talk about the TouchPad versus the iPad. His wife has an iPad and there’s no way she’d give it up. He loves webOS and he’s very excited about the TouchPad; he’s owned an iPhone before and didn’t like it as much as his Pre.

I say nothing about how I’ve owned every iPhone and iPad and that I am only here because I want to see if the TouchPad stacks up.

The Best Buy employee returns with our TouchPads. I go check out and return home.

11:04 AM: I have now set up my own WebOS Account so that I can activate the TouchPad and begin using it.

11:37 am: I’m recording some rapid fire thoughts into a voice memo.

• Trying to find a Twitter app. The only one I can find is SpazHD for Twitter.
• Everything is slightly annoying, just a little bit slow.
• The card view is killer. Love it.
• The time is right next to the battery icon, but I thought it was the time left in the battery. It is now 11:38, but that means 11:38 in the morning not 11 hours and 38 minutes left on the battery.
• Typekit does not work on my site. (Note: I found out later from Typekit that they intentionally blocked the TouchPad until they could do proper testing to ensure that their fonts would not cause usability issues on the webOS Browser.)
• The keyboard has little emoticons.
• When taking a screenshot you see a giant yellow orb.
• It appears that instances of a browser are not isolated to the browser app.

11:54 am: Text selection bugs me; Cut/copy/paste is awkward at best.

Something that I love is that I am always just one tap from common settings like turning on/off Wi-Fi, adjusting brightness, etc.

3:01 pm: Attempting to add Instapaper to the bookmarks list. I can’t add it from the Instapaper website, so I try emailing myself the Instapaper javascript URL, pasting that into the address bar and then adding that as a bookmark. But that does not work.

3:04 pm: Go to browser help, and discover there is a place for live help chat. So I jump on, and only have to wait for 1 minute. I start a live chat with “Seth” trying to figure out how to add the Instapaper bookmarklet. (All typos in the transcript are [sic].)

• Seth: Hello.

  Thank you for contacting HP webOS customer support.How can I help you today?

• SHAWN: Hi seth. I’m trying to create a bookmark in the browser, from a URL that is not a webpage.
• Seth: Okay.
• SHAWN: Is there a way to manualoy add or edit the adreses es of bookmarks?

  The examples are for adding a website’s rss feed to Google reader, and adding a url to Instapaper.

• Seth: Follow the steps to create a Bookmark.

  Can I have 3 minutes to work on the issue?

• SHAWN: Of course.
• Seth: Thank you for staying onhold.

  Open the page you want to bookmark.

  Open the application menu and tap Add Bookmark.

• SHAWN: The trouble is that these are javascript bookmark lets. They dont open like a standard website does.

  Does that make sense?

• Seth: Yes, I got it.
• SHAWN: I tried pasting the address cor the bookmarklet, but the page has to load in order to add it as a bookmark, and the browser treats it as a Google search.
• Seth: Can I have 2 minutes to work on the issue?
• SHAWN: Of course.
• Seth: Thank you for staying on hold.

  We can only add the Bookmark it it is a webpage.

• SHAWN: That is unfortunate. And there is no way to edit the URL of a bookmark once it has been created?
• Seth: Yes, we can edit the bookmark once it is created.

  Open the application menu and tap Bookmarks.

  Edit the bookmark name: Tap i to the right of the bookmark name. Enter the new thumbnail, title, or URL and tap Save Bookmark.

• SHAWN: Okay, can I try that real quick?
• Seth: Sure.

  I will stay connected.

• SHAWN: Hmmm. I was able to edit a bookmark once it was created, but it will not take the javascript url as a valid address for the bookmark.
• Seth: May I know the complete Javascript URL that you are trying to add?
• SHAWN: javascript:function%20iprl5()%7Bvar %20d=document,z=d.createElement('scr'+'ipt'), b=d.body,l=d.location;try%7Bif(!b)throw(0);d.title='(Saving...) %20'+d.title;z.setAttribute('src',l.protocol+'//www.instapaper.com /j/WnlMKBaHBm1w?u='+encodeURIComponent(l.href)+'&t=' +(new%20Date().getTime()));b.appendChild(z);%7 Dcatch(e)%7Balert('Please%20wait%20until%20the %20page%20has%20loaded.');%7D%7Diprl5();void(0)

  This is for a web app called Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com

• Seth: Did you try editing this webpage and open from the bookmark?
• SHAWN: Yes. I was able to get the address stored, but was then given an error: "Cannot open MIME type"
• Seth: I'm sorry we cannot open the javascript URL from the bookmark.
• SHAWN: Okay. Can this be filed as a bug?
• Seth: This is not a Bug. We cannot open the Javascript URL from the bookmarks any webOS devices.

  However, I will put forward your concern to the development team.

• SHAWN: Okay. Thanks, Seth.
• Seth: You are welcome!

  Can I be of any further help?

• SHAWN: Nope. Thanks though.
• Seth: My pleasure!

  Thank you for contacting HP webOS customer support and feel free to contact us for further assistance.

  Bye!

  Take Care!

3:54 pm: Downloaded Paper Mache. I can at least use it to read my Instapaper queue. Ryan Watkins gets it. This is a classy app that serves Instapaper well.

5:29 pm: Attempting to get music onto the device. You can run it in USB mode and add DRM-free MP3s. Or you can download HP Play and sync music from your iTunes account to the TouchPad, just like you would on iTunes.

6:44 pm: After plugging it in and ejecting it a couple times from the "USB mode" something changed about the OS. The background turned to a grey slate, all my open apps went away, all my downloaded apps that were in the Launcher disappeared, and certain bits of functionality stopped working.

7:02 pm: I can not figure out how to power down the device. I assumed that you simply hold down the lock button, like you do on an iPad, and that it would power down. However, it's not working for me.

Reading through the instruction manual there are no obvious instructions about powering the device off. Though, I did finally read that I was attempting to power the device off correctly. Alas, my attempts to power it off are not working. There must literally be a bug in the OS that won't allow me to power the TouchPad off.

Fortunately, Martin Dufort reminded me that perhaps there is a way to force reboot the device. I held down the lock and home buttons and it forced a reboot. Afterwards things came back to normal.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

4:41 PM: Log into Mint to check my site stats. It seems that the browser on the TouchPad is the fastest and most responsive app in the whole device. Though Web pages load a bit funky at times, they do load quickly and are very responsive.

4:59 pm: Friends will be arriving for the BBQ birthday dinner tonight, so I grab the iPad to go hook it up downstairs and stream Pandora. But I remember that I’m committing to use the TouchPad for the next week. So I search the HP App Catalog for a Pandora app.

Lo and behold there is one, but it is not TouchPad optimized. No matter, I download it because it’s free.

I heard that some apps that are not TouchPad optimized may not run on the TouchPad. Since Pandora is free, I figure why not give it a shot. It downloads and runs just fine.

When Pandora is running, you get the typical Pandora controls on the front of the TouchPad’s Lock Screen. However, you can’t control the music with those buttons. How odd.

In fact, this is something that is a bit frustrating. Though the Lock Screen displays notifications (such as new emails, Twitter replies and DMs, new IMs, etc…) you cannot act on those notifications.

10:01 pm: After running Pandora radio for 5 hours the battery only drained 13-percent, from 86 to 73.

10:23 pm: perhaps a better Twitter client has arrived? Check the App Catalog. Nope, Spaz HD is still the only one.

10:32 pm: Hey, what's that magazine I heard about? The one that showcases apps? It's not advertised on the Catalog home page, nor is it listed in the featured section of the Catalog.

Ah, I read here in this paragraph of text that the magazine is called Pivot. I guess I have to search for it on my own...

Hmm. Apparently it's not in the catalog; a search for Pivot brings up no results.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

9:00 PM: In an attempt to test the limits of webOS’s multitasking capabilities, I begin opening as many apps and web pages as I can. I launch 15 cards (5 browser cards, email, the App Catalog, pondNotes, Paper Mache, Memos, Spaz HD, Photos & Videos, Music, Video and Voice calls, and Calendar) and then a blank notification appears in the top-right of the screen along with an accompanying alert sound and slight buzz.

I assume this blank notification has something to do with alerting me that there are a whole lot of apps open and I should do something about it. But it’s blank, so I ignore it.

One thing I do like about this notification is that I can continue to use the TouchPad even while the notification is showing. In iOS things come to a halt when a notification appears. Though, never has iOS notified me that I should be a little more prudent in my app launching endeavors.

I go into the Twitter app, Spaz, and find a link. Tapping on the link normally would have opened a new browser window. However, in this case it slides me all the way to the far-left browser card and brings it up. And then the blank notification pops up again… And that Twitter link never did open.

Monday, July 4, 2011

8:30 am: Marinating some BBQ chicken for grilling later tonight.

9:30 am: With a hot cup of coffee in hand, and a relaxing July 4 holiday ahead of me, I'm ready to do some reading. I've searched many times for an RSS reader in the HP App Catalog but there are only a couple, and so far as I can tell none of them sync with Google Reader.

I launch google.com/reader but am greeted with the standard view, which is literally unusable on a touchpad. Is this how it works on the iPad, too? I use Reeder so I actually don't know, but surely there is a way to read your RSS feeds from a touch screen.

I launch google.com/reader on my iPad and am redirected to the mobile version: google.com/reader/i/. Returning now to the TouchPad I manually type in the mobile URL and am greeted with a usable version. (In some ways, I'm a bit bummed that I won't be forced to read my RSS feeds on the iPad.)

10:45 am: Since the Kindle app is still unavailable, I am curious about how the TouchPad handles reading. I do a lot of reading on my iPad through Instapaper, Reeder, iBooks, and a few magazine apps like Wired and The New Yorker. I remember there being demos on the HP TouchPad website about their reading apps, so I go there to see if I can find something.

The whole website has changed. Now there is far less information about the TouchPad and instead lots of links to go buy one.

Side note: Those Russell Brand advertisements are horrendous.

The only reading app that I see advertised is Time Magazine. So I pick up my touchPad, launch the App Catalog and search for Time. It's free to download and you can subscribe to it for $2.99/month which includes both the print and HP TouchPad Edition delivered each week. The first 4 weekly issues are free. If you like, you can just get the digital version for the same price.

Honestly I do not feel like signing up for this. I have a gut feeling that it will be a poorly rendered PDF version of the magazine, and that navigating and reading it on the TouchPad will be more maddening than entertaining. However, for the sake of science, I feel that I must. Maybe later...

10:52 am: I am still wanting to get ahold of their App Catalog app, Pivot. It still does not appear in the search results when trying to find it in the App Catalog. I decide to launch Help and start a live chat with a service rep asking if they know.

The Help screen is taking a while to load; perhaps the TouchPad needs a reboot.

I go out to the card view and begin closing some apps. There are a few websites open that I want bookmarked so I email them to myself. Suddenly, the screen goes blank and I see the glowing HP logo.

10:53 am: I just crashed webOS.

10:57 am: Okay, back to the App Catalog. Well hey, would you look at that! Pivot is now front and center on the App Catalog app. How did they know?

11:04 am: Pivot is a great idea. It's a magazine all about app discovery, which, since Friday morning, is something I have had a hard time with. In theory it looks like you should be able to buy the apps from within Pivot. However, the purchase links are all stuck to the top-left corner of the screen, and you have no idea which purchase link is for which app.

I thought I was re-downloading the Kindle app (because based on Pivot it seems that the app is ready and available), but I actually ended up downloading Royal Opera House. Whatever that is.

11:07 am: I download HP MovieStore (which is powered by Roxio). This is apparently where you can download movies and TV shows right to your TouchPad. Alas, it seems to have the same development team as Kindle...

Now I'm curious if the Software Manager is supposed to notify me when updates are available or if I have to hunt them down myself. I launch Software Manager and am presented with a list of all the Apps I have installed. About 10 seconds later a green button appears at the bottom of the screen letting me know I have 3 updates available.

11:43 am: Okay, I take back what I said about being able to read feeds on the TouchPad — I can't. Sure, I can get Google Reader's mobile version to load, but it doesn't exactly work like it should. Loading more items pops you back to the top of the list, and marking all the currently viewed items as read does just that but without a refresh of new unread items.

The TouchPad may tout that I get the full web because it's Webkit-based browser supports HTML5 and Adobe Flash. But it does not appear to ever want to render the full web in a usable fashion.

11:45 am: I found a good use for Flash: Rdio.

11:57 am: A notification appears informing me that Paper Mache, the Instapaper app, is syncing. I don't even have Paper Mache running. My first thought is, hey, that's fantastic! My second thought is, wait, how much is this affecting my battery?

3:08 pm: Trying to watch the latest episode of Put This On. The Vimeo flash player isn't working well. So I bust out the iPad, because it's about time there was a head-to-head competition between these two. The iPad pulls up the .MOV file splendidly, and plays it in full-screen with no trouble whatsoever. Thank you, iPad.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

10:41 am: The Internet just went out. Delightful.

2:19 pm: With no Internet, I've decided to start writing the review itself.

6:45 pm: Wrote a little over 3,000 words today. Maybe the Internet should go out more often.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

8:41 am: Still no Internet.

8:45 am:I transferred over some old Superman cartoons because that’s about the only DRM-free video I have around here. (One day, if I ever own a Mac Mini I suppose I’ll get around to turning all my plastic video media into digital).

The video transferred over just fine, though the low-resolution cartoon looks pretty crummy. But hey, that’s half the fun, right?

12:58 pm: There are still some final bits of research I need to do and I need an Internet connection. So I am heading over to my local coffee shop to work. The second-half of this review may come across as more caffeinated than I originally anticipated.

10:26 pm: Internet's back!

10:56 pm: Finally published my review. I am a bit surprised by the conclusion I ended up with. I truly did expect the TouchPad to be more than it was. But that’s why I titled the article “The HP TouchPad 1.0”. I think webOS has a bright future. The operating system does seem mostly suited for a tablet device, and I think that with more refinement the TouchPad could be the number two tablet. But, that is not what it is today. It’s buggy and awkward.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

10:18 am: Time to either return or sell this thing.

In the Settings pane there's a way to do a secure erase. I erase the TouchPad, power it off, and put it completely back in all its original packaging and plastic wrap.

Before posting it to Craigslist I decide to call Best Buy. I let them know I bought it last week, but that I don't like it. They have no problem whatsoever with me returning it. So I do.

Over the past several months I have been using the early developer previews of Lion. For me, it is not the headline features of Lion that make it such a compelling and noteworthy release. Rather, it is the thousand little refinements that all add up to what is, in my opinion, the most attractive and usable operating system on the planet.

There are some big things in Lion that stand out as the hallmark features — such as Launchpad and Mission Control — but these are not so much features as they are usability enhancements. And to me, that is what Lion is all about: enhancements.

There are a thousand subtle changes that all add up to something fine. Scrollbars have been removed and now only subtly appear when you are actually scrolling. Buttons are now a more classy square shape. Many icons are now monochrome. For the next several months you’ll be stumbling across all sorts of things that look or act better than they did in previous versions of OS X.

Even Safari’s default page for “You are not connected to the internet” has been massively updated. The old version was jarring; the new one is gorgeous. How many thousands of times have you seen that stark white page because a server wasn’t responding or the public wi-fi was acting up? It has always been jarring to me, and it’s been that way for years. But now, in Safari 5.1, you see a classy, well-designed error page. It is much more inviting and friendly. The former was ugly, but the current is art.

Here’s how Safari 1 looked when you reached a page that wasn’t responding, or if you tried to load a site while your computer wasn’t connected to the Internet:

And Safari 2:

Safari 3 and 4:

And now, Safari 5:

This “You are not connected to the Internet” design is, in a way, the quintessential example of what is different between Lion and all the previous versions of OS X before it.

There are many things like this sprinkled all throughout the OS. There are many subtle refinements which, when experienced, you don’t just think I’m glad they added this, because this is cool. Instead, you think how is it that OS X never had this before? This is the way it should be.1

And so, herein is a list of miscellaneous thoughts and observations about the greatest operating system on the planet:

Launchpad

Perhaps the single most notable new feature of Lion is Launchpad.

With the advent of Launchpad in Lion there are now three built-in application launchers in Mac OS X: The Dock, Spotlight, and Launchpad. It just goes to show what a hurdle it is to handle application installation, organization, and access. In conjunction with the Mac App Store, Launchpad is, in my opinion, a fantastic way to store and access applications.

But do I actually use Launchpad? Nope. Primarily because Launchpad is mouse friendly and I live and die by the keyboard. To activate Launchpad you take four fingers on the trackpad and pinch them together. It is awkward at best on my 2008 MacBook Pro even though I bought a Magic Trackpad to use with Lion. I much prefer to Command+Space into my application launcher of choice: LaunchBar.

Mission Control

The second most notable feature of Lion is Mission Control. Mission Control is sort-of like Exposé on steroids, and I use it because there is no way not to use it if you use Exposé. But, I don’t think to myself how happy I am about Mission Control.

Mission Control truly shines if you use Spaces — which I do not. I have all my application windows stacked on top of one another in just one Desktop space. And so, Mission Control, while more organized and intelligent than Exposé, is not significantly more useful to me.

If you use hot corners they have been improved as well. The hot corner for showing all the windows of the frontmost application now also displays a coverflow-like view of all recent documents:

The Mac App Store

The more I use the Mac App Store, the more I appreciate it. It is great to have all your apps centralized in one hub. You can download them onto any computer and all you need is your Apple ID. It makes switching to a new Mac or setting up a new install much simpler.

The way it works differently in Lion is that apps you download go into LaunchPad, and then the LaunchPad Dock icon bounces once. This is far more elegant and scalable than the way apps installed in Snow Leopard, which was to download right into the Dock.

Full-Screen Apps

I have a love-hate relationship with full-screen apps. Partly because I love screen real estate. But full-screen apps seem to have been made with laptops in mind. Most of the apps look great on the smaller screen of a laptop, but not so great on a larger display.

I have this not-so-special theory that Apple’s flagship Mac is the MacBook Air. Full-screen apps scale best on smaller screens. I believe that Lion has been, in a way, specifically designed for the Air.

Mail

Some changes to an operating system are instantly welcomed, while others take time to get used to. Mail is in the latter camp. It goes without saying that this new look for Mail on the Mac has a very big nod back to Mail on the iPad. I did not like this all-new look at first, but now I have grown to appreciate it.

There are a few bits that I still do not appreciate, however. Such as: (1) the way a new reply message “bounces out” from the original message; and (2) the way a message window slides up and off the screen when you send it.

For those who cannot handle the new look of Mail, there is a setting to go back to the original layout under Preferences → Viewing. Note, however, that even when reverting to the previous layout, the aforementioned annoying animations will still be there.

Perhaps my favorite new feature in Mail is the enhanced search capabilities. When searching for a particular email you are offered suggested search terms — not unlike Google suggestions — that recommend people, subjects, attachments, etc. These search suggestions are both intelligent and useful.

And my favorite new design element in Mail is the look of the popovers you see when adding an event or creating a new contact — both of which are very nice.

Auto-Saving and Versioning of Files

Not all apps auto-save just yet. And for those that do (specifically TextEdit and Preview), I haven’t yet decided if it’s a service or a burden. It’s nice that you can quit without worrying about saving or choosing a spot to save, but I primarily use TextEdit as a scratchpad, not as a writing tool. I am always tossing bits of text into TextEdit that usually have a short lifespan. So, whenever I quit TextEdit, I have to CMD+W and then CMD+Q.

Quitting doesn’t prompt you to save, but closing a window does. I find this behavior to be equally great and maddening. If you don’t want to restore windows when you’re quitting and re-opening apps, you can turn it off in System Settings → General. Though, there is not an option for asking you to save on quit. If you quit with unsaved documents, then they are restored when you open the app again.

Version control, however, is fabulous. Not that I use it often, but it is done so very well. You get to it by hovering over the top titlebar in an application and clicking on the triangle that appears.

You are then presented with some options to revert to the last time this document was saved, lock this version, duplicate it, or compare versions.

Comparing versions launches you into a TimeMachine-esque zone where you have the current version on the left and a pile of previous versions on the right.

Various UI and UX Changes

Miscellany

• The Apple logo on the boot-up screen is more “letterpressed.”

• When launching an app, the window launches from the center of the screen and opens up outwards, like an app does in iOS.

• The classic stop-light buttons in the top-left corner of all windows are now a more muted red, yellow, and green.

• The icons in the Finder window sidebar are now all monochrome. Personally, I like the new color scheme of more muted colors in some areas and the monochrome in others. To me, it all feels more refined and less frilly.

Plug and Play with an External Monitor

I adore the way Lion manages laptops and external monitors. I find it much more user-friendly than the way previous versions of OS X have managed it.

The tried-and-true behavior of how OS X deals with a laptop and an external monitor has been this:

• With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid while an external display is running, the laptop’s screen stays off.

• With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the computer would go to sleep.

In Lion, this behavior has been greatly improved:

• With the laptop lid closed and the computer asleep: Plug an external display in, wake the computer, and the external display will be the only working display. If you were to then open your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen would turn on and you have two working monitors.

• With the laptop lid open and the computer awake: Plug an external display in and you have two working screens. If you were to then close your laptop lid, the laptop’s screen turns off and the external monitor becomes the only working monitor.

In short, opening and closing your laptop’s lid is like adding or removing a second display, and does not affect putting the computer to sleep.

It may sound silly, but this is perhaps one of my favorite new features in Lion.

Rubber-Band Scrolling

Once you get used to the rubber-band scrolling of list views and windows there is no going back. As I mentioned above, I have been using the Developer Previews of Lion since March. When switching over to Snow Leopard, the lack of rubber-band scrolling was the most annoying “missing” features. It is one of those things that once you get used to it, it feels completely natural.

Dashboard

The Dashboard got an unfortunate makeover. Ever since OS X 10.4 Tiger I have found the Dashboard extremely useful. Partly because I use the Mint web-stats widget, but also because I keep a calculator, the calendar, weather, and a few sticky notes there. Hitting F4 to invoke the dashboard is nearly second nature. But now, instead of zooming into focus like it has since 2005, the Dashboard is its own space that slides over from the left. And it brings with it a new dotted background texture which I find highly unattractive.

If you want to return your Dashboard to its previous look and behavior, you can do so by unchecking the option to “Show Dashboard as a space” within the Mission Control settings in System Preferences.

Application Windows

Application windows now have rounded window corners all around. Previously, only the top-left and top-right corners were rounded. Now all four are. And, speaking of application windows, there is less window chrome in general. Thanks mostly in part to the new scrollbar.

The new, minimalistic scrollbar is copied and pasted right out of iOS. It only appears when the window you’re in is moving, and it’s intelligent enough to be a dark color on a light background and a light color on a dark background.

Other tidbits include:

• The ability to grab any edge of an application window and resize it. (Try holding Shift or Alt while doing so.)

• The toolbar in the Finder window no longer has that dotted division line that you can put into a Finder window tool bar.

  

Auto Correct

Lion implements iOS-style auto-correcting of spelling. It literally looks just like on the iPhone / iPad:

It is great at catching misspellings, but I find that often times it will auto-correct to the proper spelling of the wrong word I was originally trying to spell.

If the new auto-correct really irks you, you can turn it off within System Preferences → Language & Text → Text. I appreciate it, but it needs a bit of babysitting from time to time.

The Hidden Library Folder

The ~/Library folder is now hidden. If you want to see it, a simple terminal command will unhide it:

chflags nohidden /Users/YOUR USERNAME/Library

The Dock

In the Dock you can choose to not display the blue icon orbs that glow to show that an app is active. In Dock Preferences there is an option to show indicator lights for open applications. These are turned off by default. Apple wants to eliminate the concept of an app running or not.

This concept won’t be fully realized until Macs are running SSDs and applications launch in split seconds, which means the option to not display the indicator lights for open applications is good news for all of us.

Roar

Lion is what OS X was meant to be: refined, attractive, and user-friendly.

As we’ve heard so many times from Apple, this is a “Back to the Mac” operating system. But Lion is more than just elements that pull from what we see and know on iOS. It is also full of hints that point to the future of Apple hardware and the amalgamation of iOS and OS X. It is exciting to see this big picture slowly coming into focus.

What webOS has that iOS doesn’t is not so much found in a feature comparison as opposed to functionality differences. webOS has some very clever approaches to common tasks and needs: such as the popular card view approach to fast-app switching, global notifications, and a few other things. And though I consider webOS to be very clever in certain areas, I do not find it to be fun.

Packaging

The TouchPad comes in a high-quality box with much attention paid to the packaging. It feels exactly like the box an iPad would come in. The cardboard is the same type of thick semi-gloss board. In fact, it is so similar to the iPad box that on the back of the TouchPad box it even says, “Designed by HP in California.”

When opening the box you don’t lift off the top, you slide out a drawer. The TouchPad itself is wrapped in plastic and underneath it you find a sunken cardboard “pouch” with a thumb tab to pull it out — just like you would find underneath your iPhone or iPad. The cardboard pouch says, “Now comes the fun part.” Inside there are a few documents, including the users manual, and a microfiber cloth with the HP logo embossed in the corner. The only thing missing are a couple of white HP stickers.

Next to where the TouchPad sits is a compartment holding the micro USB cable and the charging wall wart. They are both black and high quality. The wall wart is a round spherical shape with prongs that fold in and out.

Hardware

When I picked the TouchPad up from its box the first thing I noticed was how much heavier it is than my iPad 2. Though, by the numbers, the TouchPad is nearly the same weight as the original iPad and less than a third of a pound heavier than the iPad 2.1

After using an iPad or iPad 2 for the last 18 months, the plastic back of the TouchPad instantly felt cheaper and flimsier. The whole shell is bendable and flexible. If I were to hold the device in landscape mode with one hand on each of the two sides I am confident that I could twist and crack it.

There are some cases when the friction of the plastic back is welcomed. Since it provides more friction than the aluminum back of the iPad the TouchPad is easier to hold or carry without fear of it sliding out of my hand. However, due to the TouchPad’s weight, it is not any easier than the iPad is to hold in portrait orientation using one hand while reading.

Buttons, etc…

On the top of the TouchPad there is a Lock button on the right and a headphone jack on the left. The right side of the device has a volume rocker at the top, and at the bottom is a small pop-out tray with the devices serial number. The bottom of the TouchPad has a micro-USB input. The left side has stereo speakers — one on each edge.

There is no toggle for mute/orientation lock. However, you can quickly access both of those options via a settings pane which is available from anywhere at any time. But more on that in a bit.

On the front of the TouchPad is a camera at the top and the Center Button (Home Button) is on the bottom. The center button is not round, it’s a thin rectangle with rounded edges — the size and shape of a long Tic-Tac. What I like about the Center Button is its thin LED bar which slowly pulses when you have a new notification. Pressing the Center Button will turn on the screen if the TouchPad is locked, enable the Launcher if you are in Desktop/Card view, or it will take you to Card View if you are in an app at full screen.

The screen itself is the same Gorilla glass as the iPad and is just as prone to fingerprints.

To power the TouchPad on or off you hold the Lock button. If the device completely freezes up on you (which has happened to me once) you can hold the Center and Lock buttons simultaneously to force a power-down.

A Landscape Disposition

My TouchPad loves to be in landscape mode. If I’m holding it in portrait orientation I have to watch out because it will rotate into Landscape at the hint of a tilt. Trying to get the screen to then rotate back into portrait usually takes several seconds. Sometimes I shake it up and down to see if that will help but it never does.

USB Mode

Plugging the TouchPad into my Mac via the USB cable brought up a prompt on the device. It told me that for optimum charging I should plug it into the wall. Or, if I wanted to use the device in USB mode then I could. If the latter, you have to tell the TouchPad to go into USB mode.

While in USB mode, the sceen shows a giant USB logo and your computer shows a device named “HP TOUCHPAD”.

USB mode gets you access to certain files and folders on the TouchPad: A PDF titled “Open Source Software Information”, and 5 folders titled: downloads, wallpapers, screencaptures, ringtones, and DCIM. A sixth folder will show up if you download the HP Play app to your computer in order to sync iTunes music to your TouchPad’s library. But more on that later.

Moreover, you can add your own files and folders here (such as a folder with DRM-free music and videos, as well as documents, and/or photos) and the TouchPad will find them and they’ll appear in the relevant apps to display or use that media.

Software

This has been my first extended experience with webOS. The software feels far more engineer-y than I expected it to. This is a broad generalization, but I think it gets the point across: if webOS sits somewhere in between the utilitarian appeal that is Android and the emotional appeal that is iOS, then it is certainly closer to the utilitarian side than I expected it to be.

Highlights of webOS include notifications, multitasking, and a quick access pane to common settings. Lowlights include maddening performance on the TouchPad, a shortage of fine apps (built-in apps included), and several dark corners which need refinement to the user interface and user experience.

I have heard so many good things about webOS that I was truly expecting to be impressed by the TouchPad and to enjoy webOS. Alas, using the TouchPad for the past week has not been impressive or enjoyable. And it’s not for a lack of apps — I was able to find a native TouchPad app for nearly all my “killer app” needs.

There is a significant difference between missing features and broken ones. Features do not a user experience make. In the back of my mind all the while I was using the TouchPad, I kept thinking to myself, “so close, yet so far.”

webOS has an amazing fast-app switching functionality out of the gate. The system-wide notification system is very nice — there is an addicting little settings pane which is available at any time and lets you adjust brightness, etc… But just because there are features of webOS that I would love to see find their way into iOS, I would rather use the iPad and iOS of 2010 than the TouchPad of today. Because webOS — as clever as it may be — is not a delight to use. It is slow, awkward, and requires a great deal of determination.

Or, put another way, webOS is clever but not fun.

Start Up

Booting up the TouchPad takes about 1 minute and 10 seconds. (For comparison: my original iPad boots up in 26 seconds; my iPad 2 in 24.)

While the TouchPad is booting up the HP logo sits centered on the screen. As webOS gets closer to being fully loaded the logo begins to pulse with a white glow coming from behind it. The closer it gets to being loaded the quicker and more radiant the logo pulses. When the TouchPad is finally booted it chimes and vibrates.

Activating

When you start up the device for the very first time you activate it without ever connecting it to a computer, though not without connecting it to Wi-Fi. During the initial setup you are asked to sign in with a pre-existing HP webOS Account or else create a new one.

Setting up my new HP webOS Account was very easy. I was given the options to add email accounts and calendar accounts to my TouchPad.

webOS offers MobileMe as an option for email, but it won’t sync with my MobileMe calendars or contacts. It does sync with Google calendar, contacts, email, and documents but, alas for me, all my calendar and contact info is in MobileMe. You can also sign in to an Exchange account, Yahoo, your own IMAP server, or look for other services.

Once you’ve set your first email account up, you can add more. Or if you want to add more later, you can do so from the Launchpad → Settings → Accounts.

Cloud Backup

Having a webOS account means your TouchPad will automatically back itself up, over the air, once a day. My most recent backup was completed this afternoon at 2:26 as the TouchPad sat in my bag while I was working on this article at a local coffee shop.

From the Backup settings page on the TouchPad:

Your HP webOS Account and other personal data (including potentially sensitive data that may be provided during the use of the device and its features) are backed up automatically every day. This data is stored on secured servers used solely for recovery purposes.

HP hosts a web page listing exactly what does and does not get backed up. Some notable things include the apps which you’ve downloaded via the App Catalog but not their settings and data. Website bookmarks and cookies are backed up, as are memos, and messages and conversations via SMS, MMS, and IM. Photos, videos, and music are not backed up and no passwords are backed up, just usernames.

In short, if you dropped your TouchPad in a lake and had to start over with a new one, certain media would not be recoverable (music, photos, videos) unless you had it backed up on your computer, but the overall setup of your TouchPad (apps, accounts, and some settings) would be restored.

For the paranoid at heart you can disable automatic backing up. And if/when you do, all your backup data that is stored on HP’s servers will be erased. You can, of course, turn backups back on again at your convenience.

Web Browsing

The webOS browser is based on WebKit. It supports HTML5 and has a working version of Adobe Flash.

Web sites without a lot of Flash load very quickly. And there is virtually no lag when scrolling around on a web page. On several common websites that I visit, once the page had loaded I had no trouble scrolling down as fast as the TouchPad would let me and I almost never saw checker boarding.

However, the TouchPad’s browser does not render all sites perfectly. I noticed on a few sites where header divs seemed to get cut off a bit too soon on the right-hand side. Moreover, the TouchPad does not render TypeKit fonts; though shawnblanc.net still looks quite handsome on the TouchPad.

Another oddity is that the TouchPad does not support javascript bookmarklets, such as the one Instapaper uses for adding pages to your queue and the one Google uses for adding feeds to Reader. Which means that when browsing the web, if you find something you want to read later in Instapaper you have to email the link to your Instapaper account.

After visiting my site with the TouchPad and then checking my analytics, Mint logged the TouchPad’s browser as “Safari 534.6″ and the Platform as “Linux”.

Flash

Flash works better than I expected but worse than I’d like.

I was unable to watch a 720p video on Devour’s home page, but I was able to watch some shorter, lower resolution videos from YouTube and Hulu. I also was unable to watch the latest episode of Put This On without it stuttering and downsamping to a lower resolution. So, while waiting for the episode to buffer on the TouchPad, I pulled out my iPad, navigated to the site, and watched the the show in full-screen at 720p resolution. Stay classy, Flash.

In the browser’s settings you can disable Flash if you like, or you can choose to not have it autoload and play when you visit a site. However, the device requires a reboot for the preferences to take place. I had selected to disable Flash yet Flash videos were still viewable and even Rdio worked.

On the iPad, which doesn’t have Flash at all, most video sites serve you the native video file with no trouble. On the TouchPad, when Flash is disabled, you get nothing:

In theory, the TouchPad gives you “the full web”. In reality you get less.

Apps

The 5 apps that come in the Dock are Web, Email, Calendar, Messaging, and Photos & Videos. Additional apps that the TouchPad ships with are Memos, Maps, Contacts, Phone & Video Calls, and Music.

What the Home screens are to iOS, Launcher is to webOS. You can bring up Launcher three different ways: (1) by tapping the arrow icon found in the right-hand side of the Dock; (2) by clicking the Center Button when in Card view; or (3) if you enable “advanced gestures” under the settings for Screen & Lock then the Launcher can be brought up at any time by swiping up from the bottom of the screen no matter what orientation the device is in.

The Launcher has four tabs across the top: Apps, Downloads, Favorites, and Settings.

The Apps tab contains default system apps. Downloads contains a link to the HP App Catalog and is where all the applications you download from the App Catalog go. Favorites is empty and waits for you to populate it, though if you save a Web page as an “app” then it will appear in the Favorites tab. The Settings tab is where the all the different mini-apps are kept for managing accounts, backup, bluetooth, sounds, software updates, etc.

You can move the apps into any tab and into any order you like by tapping and holding them. A grey box appears around the icon and then you can move them as you see fit. And apps you have downloaded from can be deleted by tapping the “x” that appears.

The App Catalog

Finding and downloading an app from the App Catalog is simple enough. You can search on your own, or look through lists of the most popular, or most paid for, etc.

As of this writing, the vast majority of apps in the Catalog are designed for the Pre, not the TouchPad. Fortunately, above the button to buy/install an app it will say “For TouchPad” if it’s optimized for the tablet. According to HP there are over 300 TouchPad-ready apps in their Catalog.

When buying an app you have to enter your HP webOS Account password and then confirm that you do in fact want to purchase the app. If you are downloading a free app you are not asked to authenticate with your password.

When you download an app it installs behind the scenes without kicking you out of the App Catalog. This is quite nice. As the app is downloading the “install/buy” button turns into a loading bar, and once it’s installed it turns into a “launch” button:

I very much appreciate this behavior and would love to see something similar in the iOS App Store. One common hit against webOS is that its App Catalog has far fewer offerings than Apple or Android. My “killer apps” on my iPad are: Instapaper, Simplenote, OmniFocus, Twitter, and Reeder. I was able to find 3 of these apps in the HP App Catalog, along with a few others:

• For Instapaper: Paper Mache is the Instapaper app for webOS. The developer, Ryan Watkins, is clearly an Instapaper fan. The app has all the functionality of Instapaper on the iPad, plus it is able to sync in the background. Even when the app itself is not running.

• For Simplenote: pondNotes is the Simplenote app for webOS. Though it is not as elegant or quick as Simplenote on iOS, it is functional and so at least you can have read/write access to your notes.

• For Twitter: Spaz HD is currently the only Twitter client for webOS. I wish there were other options. And, alas, for some reason I was unable to log in to twitter.com and try the mobile version of the site on the TouchPad.

• For RSS: There is not yet an RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. And using Google Reader’s mobile web app on the TouchPad is nearly useless. It does not render or operate properly in the TouchPad’s browser. And so, the first significant workflow problem I encountered with the TouchPad was an inability to read my RSS feeds.

• Pandora: They have a native webOS app, but it is built for the Pre. However it does work on the TouchPad. Pre-sized apps run in their normal size inside the outline of an HP Pre.

• Kindle: The Kindle app is coming, but right now it is just a placeholder. You get the familiar launch screen as the Kindle iPad app, and it tells you thanks for downloading and that they’ll let you know when the app is actually available by sending a notification through the Software Manager.

• For Writing: TapNote is a very nice writing app, and perhaps the nicest app I’ve downloaded from the Catalog. It cost me $5 and is a bare-bones plain text writing app that syncs with Dropbox and has full-screen mode. I found it much more appealing and usable than pondNotes. If I were going to do long-form writing on my TouchPad it would be in TapNote.

Other apps:

• Exhibition: This is one of the default apps that ships with webOS 3.0 and it is also one of the finer bits of good design on the TouchPad. It is a simple, full-screen app that displays the time, upcoming agendas items, or photos. I’ve always been a fan of the flip-style clock design, and the TouchPad’s looks great.

  

• Dropbox: There is not a Dropbox app in the Catalog, but rather a system-level sign-in for Dropbox. You go to the Launcher → Settings → Accounts → Add an Account → Dropbox.

  To set up your DropBox account you simply type in your login credentials. It doesn’t authenticate at the time of adding because I added my account without a problem despite the fact I had no Internet connection at the time.

  Your Dropbox account can then be accessed through the native apps on the TouchPad. Though the only app that I know of which accesses Dropbox is QuickOffice. It will let you view your documents and photos, but you cannot save them to your TouchPad, nor can you edit them. In fact, so far as I can tell, there is no way to edit documents or spreadsheets on the TouchPad.

Cards and Fast-App Switching

The way webOS handles app switching with its card view is one of the premier features of webOS. I like it, and the more I get used to it the more I understand why some users don’t want it any other way.

Switching between apps by seeing the current screen rather than the icon feels much more natural and user-friendly. If you’ve ever wished that fast-app switching on iOS was more akin to the way you switch between multiple “browser windows” in Mobile Safari then you’ll know why card-view switching in webOS can be so pleasant.

If you are working between two apps, or you open a new app and want to switch back to the previous one real quick, it can often mean scrolling several cards over. iOS attempts to solve this automatically for you by sorting the apps in the task switcher by the order in which they’ve been opened. In webOS you can solve it manually by rearranging and even stacking your cards. You do this by tapping and holding on a card — it will go semi-transparent and then you can move it around.

Multitasking

webOS will let you open as many apps as you like until you reach the limits of your nerves or the TouchPad’s hardware — whichever comes first.

In my own attempt to test the limits of webOS’s multitasking capabilities I was able to launch 15 cards (5 browser windows, email, the App Catalog, pondNotes, Paper Mache, Memos, Spaz HD, Photos & Videos, Music, Video & Voice calls, and Calendar). At this point a blank notification popped up in the top-right corner of my screen along with an accompanying alert sound and a quick vibration.

I assume the notification had something to do with alerting me about the amount of apps I had open. But it was literally blank so I had no choice but to ignore it. It disappeared after a few seconds, but when I tried to launch a website from within Spaz, the Twitter app, I was taken to the leftmost browser card and then the same blank notification popped up, and the Twitter link did not open in the Web page.

However, when not connected to the Internet the TouchPad handles multiple apps much better. When not online I was able to have 23 cards open without a problem or a blank notification.

Apps remain open until you quit out of them. You do so by flicking the card up and off through the top of the screen. When you toss a card away it makes a nice “whoosh” sound.

Something fun: if held in portrait orientation with the speakers on top, pulling down on a card makes a “crunching” sound, and then if you let go at the last second the card flies up and off the screen while shouting, Weeeeeeee! Here’s a homemade video of this in action.

Another perk of webOS’s multitasking capabilities is that apps can update in the background if they want, even if they are not launched at all. Paper Mache, for example, can update its Instapaper queue so that it’s always up to date whenever I launch it.

Scrolling

There is no way that I have found to quickly and simply scroll to the top of a page or a list view. In iOS you tap and hold the top of the status bar. In webOS if you’ve reached the bottom of a website or are 30 deep in your email inbox, you have to scroll, scroll, scroll all the way up.

Secondly, you know how in iOS when you start scrolling down on a web page then the scrolling will “lock” in and it only scrolls down and up no matter if you move your finger left or right? The TouchPad doesn’t do that. The web page follows the movement of your touch pattern to the letter.

Here is a chart illustrating those differences in scroll behavior for iOS and webOS:

Music and Videos

To get music onto my TouchPad I started by launching the music app. It told me to go to hpplay.com or copy music to my device while it is in USB mode.

So I put the device into USB mode (as discussed above) and since there was nowhere to put the music I decided to create a folder titled “Music”, put some DRM-free MP3s in there, and assumed that the TouchPad would find them. And it worked — once I had ejected the TouchPad from my laptop the songs appeared in my Music app and I could play them in stereo.

Next I add some protected M4P files that I’ve bought from iTunes. I put the TouchPad back into USB mode and the files copied over just fine and they even showed up in the TouchPad’s music library. But the tracks would not play. No errors or anything; they were simply unresponsive to the play button.

So then I downloaded and installed HP Play (which is currently in beta) onto my MacBook Pro. (HP Play looks like what an app would look like if someone built an iTunes clone using Adobe Air while imagining the year was still 1998.) I transferred over those same DRM M4P files from before as well as some m4a songs, but this time by syncing them via HP Play. The M4A files played just fine, the DRMed M4P files would not.

HP Play does not sync video to the TouchPad. Which means the only way to get video from your computer to your TouchPad is to transfer it manually with the device in USB Mode or buy it from HP’s Movie Store app. I copied over some video files and they showed up in the Photos & Videos app just fine. The title of the video is the name as its parent folder. Protected videos, such as those I’ve bought from iTunes, will not play on the TouchPad.

And the HP Movie Store app? Well, like the Kindle, it is also MIA.

System Notifications

System-wide notifications are the other premier feature of webOS. They work the way a notification should, by being simultaneously useful and unobtrusive.

Because just about any app can hook into the notifications, you can be notified about anything: new email, new mentions on Twitter, new Facebook messages, instant messages, the current song playing, and more. If you Pre is paired with your TouchPad then you can also get text and MMS messages on your TouchPad. Only apps that are running will send notifications.

When a notification comes in, the text of it scrolls across a small area at the right-side of the status bar. Then, a small icon is left behind to remind you that you have a notification. If it’s an email, then there is a small envelope, if music there is a note icon, if a Twitter mention then it’s the star that Spaz HD uses in its unique icon.

Tapping on the notification icon brings up a minimal popover. From there you can read the subject lines of your recent emails, and either slide them away to discard or tap on them to open your email and read that message. You can also control music playback via the notification popovers.

Notifications will also appear on the Lock screen. They look exactly like their minimal popover counterparts found under the status bar but they are not interactive (save the Music notification which lets you pause, rewind and fast forward).

You also get notifications about actions you’re currently performing, such as when an email has been sent or text has been copied. The same way a new email’s subject line will scroll across the status bar, webOS will tell you that you’ve successfully copied some text or that Paper Mache is syncing.

The Quick Settings Pane

There is a settings pane which you can access at any time, in any app, by tapping the top right corner of the screen. I am very fond of this little guy.

The settings pane tells you the day and date what percent of battery life you have left.

You can also:

• Adjust the screen brightness.
• Turn on/off Wi-Fi as well as pick a wireless network.
• Turn on/off VPN.
• Turn on/off Bluetooth.
• Toggle Airplane Mode.
• Lock the screen rotation.
• Mute the sound.

Though I welcome the ability to toggle Bluetooth and see the exact battery percentage, I think the average user would do just fine with a more simplified set of options. Perhaps Richard Kerris meant it when he said the target audience for the TouchPad is enterprise customers. (But if enterprise is their audience then why the horrible the Russell Brand commercials?)

Screenshots

You take screenshots the same way as on the iPad: hold the Lock Button and the Center Button down at the same time.

When you take a screenshot there is a large yellow orb that appears in the center of the screen. Presumably it is meant to imitate a camera flash or something, but it is very gradient-y and pixelated. It’s ugly.

It is very easy to accidentally lock up the device or freak it out if you happen to hit the volume rocker at the same time you are trying to hit the Lock Button and Center Button. This happened to me a few times, and once there was a several-minute stint where every time I hit the Center Button it would take a screenshot. One thing I like about the screenshots is that they get their own photo album, and all screen captures go into that photo album by default.

When the TouchPad is in USB mode, you can easily transfer screenshots over to your computer. They are in a top-level folder titled screencaptures. And when you see them, you find that they are named using the name of the app you were in, the date, and the time. For example, the aforementioned screen grab of shawnblanc.net that I took from the webOS browser is named browser_2011-01-07_114048.png.

This is clever, but in some ways it backfires. The screenshots are sorted alphabetically, and so if you take a screenshot and then want to attach it to an email (you can do that in webOS) it very well could be in the middle of the album rather than at the end.

Just Type…

Just Type makes for a nice one-stop-shop for quickly launching a Google search or getting a note or email started. It just works, and it works well.

Using Just Type as my go-to for starting an email, composing a tweet, or launching a Web page takes some getting used to. But, when I do remember to use it (rather than launching the app first), it is faster than launching the browser, tapping into the address field, and then typing out the URL.

Typing

I found typing on the TouchPad just as easy (or just as difficult) as typing on the iPad. There is the familiar click, click, click that accompanies the typing on the keyboard, and the keys are pretty much the same size. The layout is slightly different, though.

For one, the keyboard has a number row at the top. I regularly found this fifth row to be very useful.

Secodly, you can adjust the height of the keyboard between XS, S, M, and L. It would be nice if the height settings were orientation-specific. If you prefer the small keyboard height when in portrait orientation but medium when in landscape, you have to manually adjust it each time. I just leave it on medium at all times, and rarely do any typing when in portrait.

So, what did HP do with the extra keys they gained by adding the number row? They added some text-emoticons. How lovely:

As for typing with a Bluetooth keyboard, I didn’t buy HP’s Touchstone accessory and keyboard because I already own a Bluetooth keyboard of my own. Alas, I was not able to pair my Apple Bluetooth keyboard with the TouchPad. It literally took 5 minutes of refreshing the Bluetooth search on the TouchPad before it saw my keyboard, and that was followed by another 5 minutes of failed attempts to pair them. And so, no, I did not type this review on the TouchPad.

Cursor Insertion, Text Selection, and Cut/Copy/Paste

The way webOS does cursor insertion, text selection, and Cut/Copy/Paste are all nearly identical to the way iOS does them. There are a few differences:

• You don’t get the magnifying glass when trying place the cursor in an exact spot. It is hit and miss. If you miss you can try again or else use the backspace key to delete all the text to the left of where you actually wanted the cursor and then retype it. My advice: aim a little to the right.

• The text highlight color is yellow in webOS.

• Once I’d selected a word or a letter I found it nearly impossible to grab the little handles and adjust my selection. The touch targets must be too small or something, but it always takes great care and usually several tries before being able to get hold of a handle and select more text.

• To get your cursor to the very end of a document, it would appear that you literally have to tap in that exact spot. On iOS if you tap anywhere below the last line of text the cursor is automatically placed at the end of the document as if you hit page down. webOS does in fact work the same way, but the cursor doesn’t actually appear to be in place. You have to trust that it’s there at the end and simply begin typing.

In short, text selection is near the top of my list of things that bug me most about the TouchPad. Yes, the features themselves are there, but the functionality is only just passable. It can almost be less frustrating to settle the fact that you can’t do something rather than to have the hope of being able to do it yet never fully realizing that hope.

Fonts

The system font for webOS is Prelude.

If you visit this page which John Gruber set up 4 years ago to show the iOS system fonts, you’ll see that nearly none of the iOS system fonts are included with the TouchPad. The ones which do render are: Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, and Verdana.

In Paper Mache, the Instapaper app for webOS, the font options it offers you are Prelude, Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Times.

Dark Corners and Inconsistencies of the UI:

• In most of the various application settings the toggle buttons are blue and square:

  

  However, in some apps (such as in the Backup settings and the Text Assist settings) the toggle buttons are round:

  

• What we would call the Home Button is called the “Center Button” on webOS. If you enlarge a Flash video to full screen then the TouchPad tells you “Tap the Center Button to return.” However, in the settings for Screen & Lock, the TouchPad lets you know that “The center button blinks when new notifications arrive.” In once instance “Center Button” is capitalized, and in another instance it is not.

• There are times when certain screens or apps look just barely out of focus. Like a Photoshop document that is zoomed to 95-percent — it’s almost in focus but not quite. Part of me can’t help but wonder if the out-of-focus bits are simply scaled-up graphics from the phone-sized version of webOS.

• In the Music app there are four sub-categories under the main Library listing: Songs, Artists, Albums, Genres. If no songs are in these sub-categories then a message appears where the track would otherwise be listed. The message has a large monochrome icon above it. For Songs, Albums, and Genres the icon and the message are centered on the track listing are. For Artists, however, the icon and message got left up into the top left corner on accident.

• The App Catalog home page, when in portrait orientation, is quite off balance.

  

  You can see how the description bubble above Categories is a few pixels higher than the other three. The margin to the left of the 4 center boxes is less than the right margin, and there is a different left margin width for heading, the top-level paragraph, and the center boxes.

  However, it only looked like this for a few days. On Monday the Catalog home page was replaced with the cover of Pivot, the app discovery magazine put out by HP. I had been unable to find Pivot in the App Catalog until it arrived on its own, and so my guess is that Pivot and the App Catalog are one and the same. You will always see that month’s issue of Pivot every time you open the App Catalog, and since you cannot launch the App Catalog without an Internet connection neither can you read Pivot offline.

• For icons, there is not the same standard “form” for all icons like there is on iOS. As such, they feel very loose and non-unified. Not to mention that some icons are pixelated, some are not. That is not to say that every icon in iOS is beautiful — far from it. But the unity and consistency of iOS icon shapes at least add to the overall aesthetics of the Home screens.

Conclusion

Why would someone buy the TouchPad rather than an iPad? I can think of a few reasons:

• You have a Pre and you are desperate to use the advantages that come with the unified operating system.

• Being able to say that your tablet has Flash is more important than being able to use Flash.

• You are Apple-averse.

• You take great delight in webOS and have great faith in its future. So much so that you’re willing to tolerate the annoyances, frustrations, and dark corners of the TouchPad in hope that they will get ironed out.

As a tech writer it was great to be able to use and live with the TouchPad for a while. There are many things I appreciate about webOS, and I’m glad I was able to spend some time with a non-Apple device for once. But, alas, the TouchPad is far less likable than I expected it would be. As it is I would not recommend it to anyone I know — even my friends with webOS phones.

A few weeks ago there were some serious tornado warnings in my neighborhood for the first time since I moved here in 2001. The tornado alarms were going off, the AM radio stations were awry with the latest storm warnings, and Anna and I were hunkered down in the basement.

As we sat there listening to the radio and tweeting about the current weather outside, the thoughts that were going through my head were of those families just 2 hours south of us in Joplin, Missouri, who had lost their entire homes just a few days prior.

Thank God, our afternoon tornado scare never turned into anything more. But it left me thinking about the what if.

What if our home was destroyed and we lost all our belongings? Or what if someone were to break in and rob us? Apart from one another, the only irreplaceable things in our house are the priceless memories, work, and other information that we keep on our computers.

In short, if I woke up in the middle of the night and our home was on fire then I hope Anna and I would have enough time to put on some trousers, grab the external hard drive, and get outside.

But in moments like that the less stuff you have to think about the better, because what’s most important is staying alive and safe. And once we have kids that hard drive suddenly gets a serious demotion on the priority list.

If there ever were a situation where grabbing the external drive on the way out the door wasn’t an option, or if it were destroyed by a tornado, or if it were stolen, then we would lose years worth of photos and music as well as access to much of our livelihood, including the documents and passwords related to our business, finances, etc.

If what’s on your computer is important and irreplaceable, you should have an off-site backup.

When I was the Marketing Director for the International House of Prayer I kept an external drive at my work office. I would clone my laptop to that drive once or twice a week. However, when I quit my job as Marketing Director to write this site full time, my off-site backup came home with me.

My philosophy for backing up has always been this: keep it simple, keep it safe.

A backup system that requires very much personal attention will never make it in the long run. And a backup drive that isn’t safe is only slightly better than no backup at all.

I already have a system in place for keeping my current data backed up here at my house:

• Using SuperDuper! I back up my laptop to an external Lacie hard drive every night.
• I have a TimeCapsule that I run Time Machine to.1
• I keep all my daily “working files” in Dropbox.

The above backup setup is actually quite common amongst the nerdy. As it should be. It is extremely simple to maintain, it is redundant, and at any given moment if my laptop’s internal SSD were to suddenly suffer a fatal loss of all my data I would like only lose 60 seconds or less of my work.

But, what if something broke beyond just my laptop? What if my external drives were destroyed or stolen? The only data I would be able to recover would be the the handful of files which are in Dropbox. And that is precisely why an off-site backup is a good idea.

Off-Site Backup Options

There are many people who, like I did, keep a 2nd external hard drive at another location. ‘Such as:

• Rent a PO Box and store your 2nd external there
• Rent a safety deposit box and keep it there
• Keep the 2nd drive at a friend’s house
• Keep it at your office

I used to have my off-site backup at my office, but like I said, now that I work from home that 2nd drive is here with me.

The idea of keeping it in a Post Office Box or a safety deposit box is clever but seems like far too much work. It may be safe, but it most certainly is not simple. It means, that the longer between visits to the bank or the Post Office the less up-to-date that off-site backup is.

Moreover, PO Boxes and safety deposit boxes are not free. If you’re going to pay to store your data somewhere else then why not pay for a more simple and useful solution?

Why not back up to a cloud server? That’s what I decided to do.

The way I backup now looks like this:

• Nightly SuperDuper! clones of my laptop to an external drive.
• Time Machine running to a TimeCapsule.
• All “currently working files” stored in Dropbox.
• Automatic cloud backups of all my irreplaceable documents, photos, music, and application support folders.

If all the hard drives at my home were completely destroyed, Anna’s and my most important and irreplaceable data would be safe.

However, as I have found out, not all cloud-storage backup services are created equal. Over the past several weeks I have looked into and used a few different options and services. Here’s a look at each of the off-site backup services I have looked into.

Backblaze

This all started — as most things do these days — with a poll on Twitter. I asked for suggestions for a cloud backup solution, and the two most popular recommendations were CrashPlan and Backblaze.

They each have their own unique pros and cons, but at the core they are pretty much the same: they run in the background on your computer and they back up files to the cloud, and they both offer unlimited storage for a monthly fee.

I decided to go with Backblaze primarily because it was the more popular recommendation and Backblaze has a native Mac app that runs as a system utility. (As you’ll see later, CrashPlan is a Java app.)

When I first installed Backblaze and let it begin uploading, I was surprised to see that it was only going to upload 36 GBs of data from my laptop. I assumed it would do a backup, similar to how SuperDuper! does, and “clone” my laptop to the cloud. I also assumed that if I ever needed to recover my data from Backblaze and I asked them to send me the hard drive with my data on it, then I would simply be able to restore from that drive as I could with the external drive I have sitting on my desk right now.

Instead, I discovered that what Backblaze copies is just about everything but your Operating System and your applications.

Certainly the documents, media, and application support files which are in your home folder are the most important files to back up — they’re the ones which are most the irreplaceable. However, even if I wanted to backup my entire computer I couldn’t. Backblaze will not allow the backing up of any of the folders in your root directory, such as /Applications/, /Library/, /Developer/, /System/, or /Users/.

In many ways this makes sense. In an ideal scenario you’ll never need to use Backblaze to restore your data. So why spend extra bandwidth and CPU cycles to backup anything but the most crucial files? But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to have the option.

Backblaze will also back up external hard drives. I keep my iTunes library and Photo albums on an external media drive, and Backblaze uploads that to the cloud as well.

Data Recovery from Backblaze

Supposing my computer and hard drives were destroyed or stolen, how would I get back to the way things were?

Well, I’d start with buying a new computer, syncing my Dropbox files to it, and re-downloading and authorizing my applications.

Then I would have a few options from Backblaze for how to get my data: (a) download it; (b) have them send me an external HDD; or (c) have them send me a DVD with the data.

To download it is free; to have a physical drive or disc sent costs money. Since I have less than 100 GB of data and media, downloading it would not be all that horrible of an experience.

Backblaze Summary

The disadvantages with Backblaze are that I don’t get as much control over what files get backed up as I’d like, and that it doesn’t provide the greatest level of security encryption. If you’re nitpicky and paranoid, Backblaze might not be for you.

The advantages to Backblaze are that it’s affordable, fast, and native to your Mac. If you want a simple and affordable way to make sure your pictures, music, documents, and application support files are backed up then Backblaze is probably perfect for you.

CrashPlan

The second most popular suggestion was CrashPlan.

At first I thought CrashPlan was an identical service to Backblaze. They both do off-site backups of your computer and they both offer unlimited storage for $50/year. Since CrashPlan is a Java app, I picked Backblaze because it’s native.

However, as I did some digging around with CrashPlan I learned that it has some very cool features.

For one, CrashPlan lets you upload any folder on your computer. If you want to upload the folders in your root directory you can.

Secondly, CrashPlan has several options for where you can back up to:

• An external drive that’s connected via USB or FireWire.
• The CrashPlan cloud servers.
• A hard drive connected to a friend’s computer across town or across the world.

You only pay if you back up to CrashPlan’s cloud servers. This is obviously going to be faster and more reliable than backing up to someone else’s house, for some people they would much rather keep physical control of their data.

Backing your data up to drive connected to your friend’s computer is actually quite simple. They install CrashPlan onto their computer and then the app will give them their personal “backup code”. You enter that code into CrashPlan on your computer and then the two get linked. No fancy nerdery needed.

If your folks have a Mac or PC with a decent Internet connection, you could take a hard drive over next time you visit, plug it in, and convert their home into your off-site data center (something you never thought you’d say about your parents’ place).

Data Recovery from CrashPlan

If your data is at your folks house, you can just ask your dad to send you the drive. If you need to recover your data from CrashPlan’s data center they offer the same options as BackBlaze does: download, hard drive, DVD.

CrashPlan Summary

The advantages to CrashPlan are:

• You only pay for it if you back up to their cloud servers.
• You can back up any file or folder on your Mac, and you have complete control over picking those files.
• You have several options for other locations to back up, and you can chose more than one options, which means you can use just CrashPlan to manage your on-site and your off-site backups.

The disadvantage to CrashPlan is that it’s not a native app; it’s Java. Though, to be fair, you rarely interface with the app itself once you’ve set up the folders you want to back up and where you want to back them up to.

If you’re going to go with an off-site backup service and use their servers, CrashPlan would be a fine choice. But if you are wanting to keep your off-site backup in a location you control (like your office or your friend’s house) then that is where CrashPlan would truly be ideal.

Arq

There is, however, another backup option which is new to me: Arq. The more I learn about off-site cloud backups the more I like Arq.

Arq is not an App + Cloud service like Backblaze or CrashPlan, it is just an app. You buy it and connect it to your own Amazon S3 account. There are advantages and disadvantages to storing your data on Amazon S3.

At first glance it’s easy to think that putting your data on S3 would be significantly more expensive than the unlimited storage options that Backblaze provides. However, since Backblaze only uploads certain documents, and the general consensus for cloud backups is that you only back up the most irreplaceable files, the cost differences are may not be as extreme as you think.

Of course with Amazon S3 you not only pay for data storage, you also pay for data transfer. Which means my initial upload of 36 GBs would cost me $5 to upload and then $5/ month to store (or $3.35/month using the Reduced Redundancy Storage). If I upload all my music and photos (another 60 GB) to Amazon S3 as well then my monthly storage costs would be around $13 (or $9 if I used RRS).

(You could use Amazon Cloud Drive to store my music and photos since those are mostly static files and the Cloud Drive storage is cheaper than S3 at only $1/GB/year. But you definitely wouldn’t want to use Amazon Cloud Drive to keep your backups because you have to manually upload everything to it.)

So yes, Arq and Amazon S3 are a little more expensive than Backblaze or CrashPlan, but you get quite a few advantages. For one, you have complete control over the security and selection of your files that get uploaded to Amazon. Unlike Backblaze where your data gets decrypted on their servers, Arq keeps the decryption local.

Moreover, Amazon has several world-class data centers. If you keep your stuff on their Standard Storage they could suffer a simultaneous loss of two centers without losing any data. On the less-expensive Reduced Redundancy Storage they could lose one data center without losing your data. (Backblaze has one data center, CrashPlan has several.)

What I also like about Arq is that it gives you very granular control over what does and does not get backed up. By default, Arq recommends that you back up your home directory not including your ~/Library/ folder. But you can add or remove folders as you wish.

The way Arq does backups is similar to the way Time Machine does. Meaning it only backs up files that are new or have changed and it keeps past versions of old files as well. You can set a monthly storage budget so that your version storage does not grow your S3 costs out of control. When you hit that budget, Arq will delete the oldest versions of files in your S3 account, keeping only the latest copies.

I also like how Arq handles the network preferences for adjusting upload speeds. You can chose between maximum transfer rate, automatic, or fixed.

CrashPlan lets you set a transfer rate cap depending on if you’re at your computer or not. And though Backblaze lets you set a cap, those speeds are independent of what you are doing on your computer. For example, if I chose a lower transfer rate in Backblaze then it will use that lower speed even if I am not doing any network heaving work on my computer. And the opposite is true: if I chose a higher transfer rate then it will fight for that rate even if I am doing a lot of network heavy work.

Arq’s automatic transfer rate however adjusts to your Internet usage, as it should. So if I’m downloading a movie, Arq throttles back; if I’m casually web surfing, Arq speeds up.

Data Recovery from Arq

Restoring from Arq means downloading from your S3 account. You can chose to restore individual files, folders, or download all of it.

However, since Arq works similar to Time Machine, you can go back and see versions of your files and restore individual files or folders. So it’s not just for catastrophe recovery.

Arq Summary

The only disadvantage to Arq is the price. Of course, for some people the superiority of Arq’s encryption and Amazon’s reliability may make the price worth it. And for others, depending on the amount of data being backed up, the price may be inconsequential if not equal to other services.

The advantages to Arq are that it’s a well-built Mac app. It offers very granular control, versioned backups, and it stores your data in Amazon’s reliable data centers.

Using Arq I feel much more in control and confident about what is getting backed up and just how safe it is. It even just feels more safe than the other services.

The short of it

All this to say, it is a good idea to have an offsite backup, and I recommend using a cloud-based service because it’s easy to set up and easy to keep up to date.

Backblaze and CrashPlan both work well and are very affordable. If you have lots and lots of irreplaceable data (more than 100 GBs) then you may want to use these guys because the monthly costs will be lower and they’ll send you a drive with your stuff on it to recover.

However, if you care about having granular control, better data centers, higher encryption of your data, and/or you don’t have that much to back up, then Arq is a great solution.

I currently have a one-year subscription with Backblaze, and I’m glad I do. But if I had known what I know today one month ago then I probably would have bought and used Arq instead.

An Aside About Time Warner Cable

The biggest hurdle with off-site backups is the very first upload.

When I first installed Backblaze, it calculated 36 GBs of data to be backed up. I began backing up at 2:00 pm on Wednesday, May 25. Eight days later, on Wednesday, June 1, only 23 GB had been uploaded — an average of 2.875 GBs/day.

This all got me thinking that something was seriously slow about my internet. I had heard that a SURFBoard modem would help open up my upload throughput, and so I picked one up at Best Buy but it did not affect my upload or download speeds at all.

What I discovered was that upload throughput is no longer throttled at the modem level anymore, it is throttled by the ISP (it’s been that way for years). And so, after talking to Time Warner I found out that they had a new service called Road Runner Extreme and it uses DOCSIS 3.0. I of course ordered it, and they came out a few days later to set it up.

As of Friday, June 3, at 10:00 am, my Backblaze upload was up to 28 GBs and still had about 10 GBs to go. That’s what time the TWC guy showed up and hooked up my new broadband. Once the new DOCSIS 3.0 service was set up, it only took 13 hours to upload the final 10 GB.

My original Time Warner service (Road Runner Turbo) was rated at 7 Mbps down and 1.5 up. The new, DOCSIS 3.0 service (Road Runner Extreme) is rated at 50 Mbps down and 5 up.

With the new service, my Backblaze uploads went from an average of 2.8 GB/day to 1GB/hr — almost 10 times the upload speed. (Worth bragging about is that I now get average upload speeds of 500 Kbps into Dropbox and 350 Kbps into Amazon Web Server.)

Speed Comparison Chart

Here’s a look at the speedtest.net results of my before, middle, and after with the new service and different modems:

The way Dialvetica works is that you type in letters of a name — type them out of order if you like — and you’re presented with the most relevant search results. To call my mom, Bea Blanc, I tap on Dialvetica, tap the letters B, E, and then tap her name. That’s just 4 taps from Home screen to phone call.

Dialvetica’s custom interface is designed for this sole purpose, and so is the way it works under the hood. Searching for a contact within Dialvetica is far superior to searching within the Contacts pane of the iPhone’s Phone app.

In fact, Dialvetica has its very own keyboard; built to maximize your ability to search for and find a contact quickly.

It’s a custom keyboard designed to take up the least amount of space possible so you can see more contacts in the list. Also, the keyboard acts differently than the system keyboard: it highlights each letters you’ve typed, which acts as an aid to show you what letters you’ve typed already without having to take up space with a text field. It’s quite clever, really.

Dialvetica’s keyboard is 270 pixels tall. The default iOS keyboard is 431 pixels tall. And if you use the default keyboard, Dialvetica needs a text field (which takes up an additional 78 pixels) to be able to show you what you’ve typed.

(The names above have been blurred to protect the innocent.)

If you use Dialvetica, you’re silly not to use the custom keyboard that comes with it.

But it’s not just the keyboard that has been customized. The list of the names is a little bit “tighter” than the default contacts list view in iOS. You can see 7 contacts plus the keyboard in Dialvetica with its custom keyboard. You can see 4.5 contacts in Dialvetica with the system keyboard. Comparatively, you can see 8 contacts in the iPhone’s favorites pane which has no keyboard. And in the contacts search pane of the default Phone app you can see just about 5 names when the keyboard and searching field are all brought up.

To make it a customization trifecta, Dialvetica also has its own unique function for tapping on a contact. Instead of drilling down to a contact’s card, Dialvetica gives you 3 tap targets: one for making a call, one for text messaging, and one for email. Which means calling, texting, or emailing is just one tap away. If you do want to drill down to a contact’s card, swipe on that contact’s list item.

You can adjust the “default” behavior for your preferred tap targets within Dialvetica’s settings (which are found in the settings app). If your most common behavior is to search for someone in order to text message them, then you can set the default of tapping on their name to launch the SMS app. Or if your most common behavior is to search for someone to call them, then you can set that as the default. Likewise with emailing. My default is set to text message.

If the person you are calling or texting has multiple phone numbers then Dialvetica will ask you which number you’d like to call. You can pick a number and tell Dialvetica to always use that number, or you can be asked every time.

If you contrast Dialvetica with the iPhone’s Contacts pane in the native Phone app, you begin to see just how awkward the native app can be. Calling a contact through the Phone app’s Contact pane means that once you’ve launched the Phone app you have to tap on the Contacts tab, scroll to the top of the contacts list in order to reveal the search field, tap into the search field to select it and bring up the keyboard, then type the name of who it is you’re searching for, tap their name to open their contact card, then tap which way you want to contact them (call, text, email). Altogether you’re looking at upwards of 8 taps; 6 if you’re lucky. With Dialvetica it was 4.

Moreover, if you don’t type the name in exact spelling order then you get no results or wrong results. And the results you do get are listed alphabetically rather than by order of importance. The iPhone knows I call my mom several times a week, but it still puts that other person whom I haven’t called or texted since 2008 at the top of the list.

Dialvetica, however, does weigh your search results. Over time who you call and text with the most get pushed to top of the list. After you’ve experienced the way Dialvetica handles searching for contacts, when you try to find someone through the native contacts list pane it can be downright maddening.

But Dialvetica isn’t just good at search and find. It makes a pretty good replacement for the iPhone’s Favorites pane as well because Dialvetica also weighs the default list of displayed contacts. This means that whenever you launch the app you get an auto-sorted list of contacts, and those whom you are in touch with the most get pushed towards the top of the list.

And this is where my love/hate relationship with Dialvetica comes in.

When you launch the app is when it sorts your contacts list. Which means that every time I launch Dialvetica I’m greeted with the spinning loader wheel and my list of contacts shifts around just slightly. Yes, there is a great advantage to having an auto-sorted list of names. But there is also something about the timing and shifting of the auto-sorting which makes me anxious every time I launch Dialvetica.

In part, it’s that my “favorites” list is always a little bit different. The very top few names usually end up staying where they are, but the rest of the names have more flexibility. Granted, the more you use it then the more those names settle, but it is still not a hard and fast list and thought I love it, yet it irks me a bit.

Secondly, the sorting begins after you’ve launched the app. Which is a really bad time to tell the user to hold on a minute. I don’t know if this is possible but having the list sort in the background after you’ve made a call would be much better. Then it’s ready and waiting for you once you launch the app.

Since it seems to be re-calculating all the time it feels unpredictable, and I never know what my contact list is going to look like. And that, for whatever reason, throws me off and makes me a bit anxious.

Conclusion

Dialvetica has found a place on my iPhone’s Dock, where the native Phone app use to live. Though Dialvetica isn’t a replacement for the native phone app because it doesn’t show you recent and missed calls, and it doesn’t have access to your voicemail. Which means that there is still reason enough for me to keep my iPhone’s Phone app on my first Home screen.

Since Dialvetica replaces only 3 of the 5 functions of the native Phone app (Favorites, Contacts, and Keypad) it’s still an app that has to be used in conjunction with the native Phone app rather than in its place. And that is unfortunate because there are so many things Dialvetica does better than iOS, yet you can’t fully cut loose from the native Phone app.

Most of the applications I spend my time with throughout the day are the usual suspects: MarsEdit, NetNewsWire, Instapaper, et al. Below is a look at how these apps get used and why.

Safari

I usually have a dozen or more tabs open at any given time. I send a lot of stuff to Instapaper, and read a lot in the browser. Usually I’ll scan RSS or Twitter, open up lots of links at once, and then comb back through and read them. I also spend a significant amount of time reading on my iPad, but more on that below.

Instapaper

Instapaper has become as much of a business tool as it is a reading and entertainment app. I send at least a dozen articles to Instapaper every day because there is always something new flying across my browser, feed reader, or Twitter stream.

I do read quite a bit out of Instapaper but not as much as I put in. And I’m okay with that because, in part, Instapaper works as a placebo for me. Saving it to read later relieves me of any stress about having to deal with the article that minute, and I’ve also found that articles which seemed important at the time are no longer important when I get around to my Instapaper queue. So in that regard Instapaper saves me peace of mind as well as time.

Apple Mail

I have turned into a bit of a poor correspondent. I do read all my incoming email. I get a lot of great feedback from you guys, and many of you send in links to things you’ve built or written. I love that stuff, it’s just that I’m not always able to respond back.

I feel like as I am still finding my rhythm as a full-time writer and blogger so I’ve been more or less ignoring most other things until I get the pace of my day settled. Then, I’ll add things back in — such as better email correspondence.

Twitter

Something I did not expect is to find such a huge amount of value from Twitter.

Before I was began writing the site full-time, Twitter was a distraction when I should have been getting work done. Or it was a spot to spend some free time. Now, it is a tool.

I’m an extrovert and a verbal processor, and I love using Twitter to bounce ideas and questions around. It’s a great way to get feedback and input that I don’t otherwise get since I’m working alone in an office.

On my Mac and iPad I use the official Twitter clients. On my iPhone I use Tweetbot.

Notational Velocity and Simplenote

I do a lot of writing, random jotting, and note taking in Notational Velocity. I use Simplenote on my iPad and iPhone quite a bit, and so all three are synced.

Some people are super fancy with how they use Notational Velocity. I don’t really tag items or any fancy meta stuff like that. I like that the latest work is always at the top and it’s quite easy to search for things that may be buried.

A great many blog posts start in Simplenote or Notational Velocity when I have an idea for something but it’s not fully formed yet. It goes into this app because then that idea is available to me wherever I am. If inspiration strikes while I’m at the hardware store or in the yard it matters not.

Yojimbo

Yojimbo is the one application on my laptop that is always running. And, aside from the utility apps that live in the Menu Bar, Yojimbo is the only app that launches on startup.

There is no set rule for how I use Yojimbo — it is just the app which I use to toss anything and everything into that may not have a more logical place to be stored. I use it for passwords, bookmarks, quotes, tips, recipes, directions, and more. And I have Yojimbo’s search field set to activate globally whenever I hit Command+K — I search for items in Yojimbo nearly as often as I put them in there.

One question I often get is how I use Yojimbo differently than Notational Velocity / Simplenote. Rest assured that there is a marked difference between what goes in Yojimbo and what goes in Notational Velocity/Simplenote. Primarily it’s that the former is for anything I want to keep long-term; the latter is for anything that is short-term or in-process.

LaunchBar

My application launcher of choice is still LaunchBar. I use it primarily for switching to and activating apps of course, but also for running a few scripts, and looking up words in the Dictionary. And the clipboard history… my, how I love the clipboard history.

TextExpander

I use TextExpander primarily when writing and replying to email. Mostly it helps me with signatures and common replies to common types of emails I get. The big aha moment for me was when I realized that though I could use it to help automate my responses to certain common emails I get, that automation didn’t mean my replies were any less personal.

In the six months or so that I’ve been using TextExpander, I have expanded 568 snippets and saved 55,423 characters.

Droplr

My link shortener and file uploader of choice is Droplr. I share a lot of screenshots and files and text with people via DMs and iChat throughout the day and Droplr is what I use for that. I have the Droplr hotkey set to Control+Option+Command+D. Also, in case you’ve ever noticed and were curious, I use Droplr to create RSS-standards-compliant URLs if I am ever linking to a web page that has a question mark within the web address.

Fantastical

Now that I have a bit more open schedule I don’t need a full-fledged calendar application running all the time or taking up icon space in my Dock. I’ve been using Fantastical for a while now and love how easy it is to use, and how it can pretty much replace my day-to-day usage of iCal.

Keyboard Maestro

I am a newcomer to Keyboard Maestro, but it only took a few short hours before I was converted to a junkie. It is, by far, one of the most powerful, interesting, and helpful apps I have ever used. It is hard to explain in brevity, but as best I can describe it it’s an app for power users whom understand the power of AppleScripts, Automations, and hotkeys — yet who don’t know how — or don’t enjoy — to write AppleScripts.

OmniFocus

I use OmniFocus differently now that I am writing full time. I still add all my to-do items into OmniFocus, but it’s not always the primary to-do list that I work from during my day. There are often things which I want to do for the site that I don’t have time to do now and so I’ll set them as due in a week or two. But — as usually seems to be the case — I am just as busy a week or two later as I was when I was too busy to do that item the first time. Therefore, OmniFocus is primarily full of things that should get done but which are not vital to the survival of this site. I review the list every day (usually on the iPad) and will re-arrange what has shown up as due that day down to only what is necessary and what is reasonable.

However, I usually don’t review my OmniFocus task list until later in the day — often times preparing for what is needed to do tomorrow rather than today. The reason for this is that in the morning when I am first starting out, I usually write down onto paper what I want to get done that day: is there anything I especially want to link to, are there any emails I know need my attention, etc.

The Web is always moving on to the next thing. Something that is hot right now will be cold in a few hours. An article I’ve spent days or weeks working on is only exciting for a day or two, and may not bring any new traffic or readership to the site. There is a constant turning over of projects and goals — things move fast online.

Because of this rhythm I’ve noticed that it is easy to look back at a day spent writing and reading but feel as if I didn’t actually accomplish anything that day. Which is why it’s important for me to have a short list of the things I wanted to do and when I feel as if my day was unproductive I can look at the list and see that I actually accomplished all that I wanted to.

Put another way, writing a weblog full time is not unlike farming. Lots of chores and lots of busy work that take up time every single day, but the fruit of that labor is seasonal. My daily to-do list helps me stay on track, and OmniFocus helps me keep the long-term, seasonal goals from slipping through the cracks.

NetNewsWire and Reeder

I have been rocking back and forth between my usage of Twitter and RSS for finding news, stories, and information. Though I am prone to look for news and content via Twitter, I am finding that it is not the best place for link-worthy content. Sure, I find lots of things that are interesting and easy to spend my time on, but most of the time they are things which are not worth linking to from shawnblanc.net.

The vast majority of link-worthy content I find in my RSS feed. On the Mac I still use NetNewsWire. However, I am most successful at combing through my RSS feed when I’m on my iPad. And on the iPad I use Reeder. Unless I’m really focused on a project I try to take at least one or two breaks in my day to sit down and comb through RSS feeds.

For the curiously nerdy, I am currently subscribed to 152 RSS feeds.

WireTap Studio

I do all my recordings for Shawn Today with WireTap Studio. I have the metadata for file name and audio type and quality pre-set so that once I’m done recording I just add the album artwork and upload to the S3 server.

MarsEdit

By far, the most essential app to my life as a blogger is MarsEdit. This is where I write my site.

I write in Inconsolata, 13 pt, light text on a dark background. I have the custom keyboard shortcuts for markdown all set. And MarsEdit has a helpful bookmarklet which lets me take the current URL in Safari and then throw it into MarsEdit as a link post. And thanks to MarsEdit’s “live preview” ability, I can see exactly how the post will look when published on my website without having to write live to the site.

The iPad

A side-note for the curious: my iPad gets very little use as a writing tool. If and when I write using my iPad it is with Simplenote. However, the iPad is primarily used for reading: reading my Instapaper queue, reading RSS feeds, and reading eBooks. Also, as mentioned above, I use it to review and scrub my OmniFocus lists because OmniFocus on the iPad is killer.

The Missing App

There is one glaring hole of an app that would make my professional life much easier: MarsEdit for iOS. Or something like it. I am not so much in need of a full-fledged blogging app for my iPad and iPhone so much as I am in need of a way to post links to my site from my iPad or iPhone.

I find a lot of link-worthy content away from my laptop. Either when I’m reading on my iPad or surfing the Web on my iPhone. What I need is an app that takes the current Mobile Safari URL, title, and any highlighted text and then populates a post editing window with those items. From there, if I could adjust the title and the slug and hit publish, I’d be happy.

There have been hints of this in various forms, such as modified versions of the WordPress “Press This” bookmarklet and other plugins, but there is nothing ideal just yet. I’ve added it to my to-do list to spend a good amount of time fiddling with the Press This bookmarklet to see if I can turn it into something useful, but I haven’t gotten there yet. I have yet to find a best-of-breed blogging app for the iPhone or iPad that meets my narrow and specific needs.

The developers over at Flexibits have given me permission to share a little bit about Fantastical with you guys, and I’m honored to do so because I am really loving this app.

There is a fine line between not enough and just enough — between usability and unnecessary lack. That line is defined in part by the developer but also by the user.

We, the users, define what is too much, not enough, or just right for the software we use. Often times, the best of developers will be able to aptly build in the appropriate features for all sorts of users. So that those users with less needs do not feel overwhelmed and those with more needs do not feel any lack.

In many ways I think Fantastical has hit that sweet spot.

Fantastical started out with the intentions of being a counterpart to your current calendar app. It syncs with iCal, Entourage, BusyCal, Google Calendar et al., and it works quite well as a nimble access point for viewing and adding new events.

Other plugins and utilities have sought to do this in the past. However, in all my years of experimenting with those various “helper” apps for iCal, none have ever stuck with me. Fantastical is the first one that has.

After daily usage for the past several weeks I have found that Fantastical is near wholly a stand-alone calendar app. The only thing it doesn’t do (yet) is allow you to edit an event once it’s been created. If you’re not always editing events, then Fantastical very well could replace iCal for most of your day-to-day calendaring needs. It has for me.

What I like most about Fantastical is how quick and accessible it is. It lives in your Menu Bar and you invoke it via a global hotkey (I use command+option+c), or by clicking on the Menu Bar icon, and it appears instantaneously. It is both keyboard and mouse friendly. The power users in the room will be glad to know you can navigate and operate the app without leaving the keyboard — if it were not so then I certainly would not find the same amount of utility from the app.

And what blows me away every time I use it is the entry panel for an event — Fantastical uses a natural language parser in addition to the standard new-event, iCal interface. So far, in my usage, the natural language parsing has been superb; the best I’ve ever used.

The parsing is not only good at actually understanding what I’m entering it also makes me feel quite confident that it understands me. There are some clever visuals that come to life as you type in the title, time, and location of your event. The words move to their corresponding spot in the date and time list, letting you know that the event is being created.

Fantastical is set to launch later this month. You can sign up on the teaser site if you want to be notified via email once it launches.

There is this addictive cleverness and playful uniqueness to the way Mark and Paul build their apps. The sounds, the animations, and graphics don’t feel or act like a standard app, they feel more like a toy. A toy you get to use for work.

They say a man buys something for two reasons: a good reason and the real reason. And I have always thought that with Tapbots their apps cater to that. There is a good reason to buy an app from Tapbots, but there is also another (and perhaps, more real) reason. And the real reason is that you want to play with the app. Because, like I said, to use it feels like a privilege.

For the previous Tapbots apps the function of the apps has been very niche. Weightbot is for people who want to lose weight; Convertbot is for folks who want to know how many ounces are in a liter; and Pastebot, well, Pastebot is for nerds.

These are niche markets when it comes to iPhone apps. Weight-tracking applications, unit converters, and clipboard managers are not exactly in high demand on the app store when compared to games, news aggregators, or even Twitter clients.

Today, however, Tapbots has taken a plunge by making a Twitter client amongst a pre-existing sea of them. It’s called Tweetbot, and it is everything you would expect it to be.

There are too many Twitter apps to count; what is it that makes Tweetbot better than any other? Well, in some regards you could say that nothing makes it better. It doesn’t really do anything that [insert your favorite Twitter client of choice] doesn’t already do. I mean, it’s a Twitter client, right? It shows you tweets, lets you reply to them, save links to Instapaper, upload pictures, and generally get distracted.

However, you could also say that everything about Tweetbot makes it better. Tweetbot has more personality than any other Twitter client out there. Every single pixel has been hand crafted in order to build the most custom looking UI of any Twitter client I’ve seen. Moreover, the sounds, the animations, the actions — everything has been thought through with intent, care, and fun. It all adds up to create a Twitter Experience Extravaganza.

Using Tweetbot

When I launch Twitter from my Mac, iPad, or iPhone these seem to be the most common things I end up doing or finding:

• Discover links that get sent to Instapaper for reading later
• Discover news
• Eavesdrop on conversations
• Reply to someone
• Post a tweet of my own
• Direct message people

I have been using Tweetbot since its early stages of alpha development and all that time it has been my exclusive Twitter client when on my iPhone. Now, I don’t beta test that many apps and having one find its way to my home screen and wiggle its way into my daily life is not common behavior. More often than not, when I am helping to test out an app I use it enough to provide feedback to the developer, but it doesn’t become one of my most-used apps.

There are three reasons Tweetbot has wiggled its way into my life: (1) I use Twitter far too often; (2) it seemed a disservice to nerds everywhere to not use Tweetbot when I had the opportunity; and, most importantly, (3) many of the ways which I most use Twitter have been extremely well integrated into Tweetbot.

Below are a few of the reasons why I find Tweetbot so fantastic.

Tap and hold a tweet

When you tap and hold on an individual tweet, a list of options comes up and you can instantly send to Instapaper, email the tweet, etc…

This is great because far and away I populate my Instapaper queue in Twitter more than any other place (such as my RSS reader or browsing the web). But this is bad because it is so easy to add items to Instapaper in Tweetbot that I get ahead of myself and am sending more items to Instapaper than I have time to read. And so, alas, my Instapaper queue is longer than my arm.

Using lists as the main timeline

Tweetbot does something that, so far as I know, no other Twitter client lets you do. It lets you use a list as your main timeline. Any list that you have created or that you follow can become your main timeline. Simply tap the center of the top bar in (where it says “Timeline”) and you’ll be presented with a screen showing all the lists you have created or that you follow.

For example, I have a list of sites who’s RSS feeds are available via Twitter. I tap that list and it becomes my main timeline.

This is also a great feature as you find yourself following more and more people on Twitter. Simply create a list — funny folks; best friends; awesome writers; etc. — and set the list as your main timeline. In short, you’re curating your own mini-timeline within your larger, Master Timeline.

Every other Twitter client I have used has treated lists as second-class citizens. But, thanks to Tweetbot’s treatment of lists, I’ve begun using them and am wanting to use them even more than I already am.

Moreover, you can edit your lists from within Tweetbot via Tab Bar. The two right-most buttons are customizable and can be set for bringing up the lists editor as well as your favorites, saved searches, or retweets.

Swiping left to right for a conversation view

This probably happens to you as well. I will often “walk in” on the middle of a conversation that is happening in Twitter between people whom I follow and I want to read the rest of the conversation thread. In Tweetbot you simply swipe an individual tweet from left to right and it will load the conversation view. I do this enough that having such a simple and accessible gesture for it has proven to be extremely useful.

Similarly, swiping on a tweet from right to left will show you all the replies to a tweet.

A Few of My Favorite Things

It’s the little things that make a good app great. As you use Tweetbot those little details pop out and give Tweetbot its personality. The animations are beyond cool, and as I said earlier, every single pixel is custom. There is nothing that is not custom except the keyboard itself, and yet it all feels familiar.

Below are a few of the little things about Tweetbot that really stand out as being extraordinary.

• The falling dialog box: When you go to sign in to your Instapaper account, try using the wrong email address or password.

  (Click for full-size and more images.)

• Finding a user: When you type the “@” symbol while composing a tweet a small little user profile icon appears. Tap on that icon and you’ll be brought to a list of all the people you follow and you can quickly search for and find users.

  

  I absolutely adore this feature because I for one do not have all the usernames of the people I follow on Twitter memorized.

• Direct Messages: The Direct Message threads are top-posted like your Twitter timeline, rather than bottom posted like Instant Messenger or the official Twitter apps. (Though the Twitter website has top-posted DM threads rather than bottom-posted.)

  Technically, bottom posting the DM threads is the proper way to do it. However, I am jarred by it every time. I spend far more time in my main timeline and my @replies list than I do in the DM pane, and all the rest of Twitter has the newest tweets on top.

• Success!: When using Twitter there can be a lot going on in the background, such as your tweets being posted or your links being saved to Instapaper. Most Twitter and even RSS reader apps will have a small, somewhat opaque box that spins while the link is being saved and then gives a check box once the link is saved successfully.

  Tapbots already has their own version of this sort of feedback box that was designed and implemented in Pastebot. For example, when making edits to an image you get the little spinning lines while the iPhone processes the edits and then a checkmark and a ding once the edits are completed.

  In Pastebot a success notification looks like this…

  

  …and so I assumed that in Tweetbot the exact same element would be used for letting me know when my tweet had been posted or a link successfully saved.

  However, Tapbots rethought even this bit of their Twitter client and instead of a box getting in your way and sitting over the top of your Timeline, a notification slides down from the top letting you know that your tweet was successfully posted or that your link has been saved to your ever-growing Instapaper queue.

  

Extraordinary

For me, what makes a good app great is the little things — the small areas where attention to detail was given and where something that could have been normal was instead made extraordinary.

• You discover a podcast you like via one of many ways. Perhaps you are simply browsing the multitude of shows in the iTunes Podcast directory. Or perhaps you’ve come to a website promoting their podcast, or a friend told you about a certain one.

• Once deciding you want to subscribe to that podcast, you end up on that show’s page in iTunes and you subscribe for free.

• The show is added to your own podcast subscription list and the most recent show is downloaded onto your computer.

• You are now subscribed to a podcast.

Now, if you want to listen to that podcast on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you must plug your device into your computer and sync it. Making sure that your new podcast has been hand-selected to be one of the ones which sync to your iPhone.

Up until this point it all is fine. However, the frustrating part of subscribing to podcasts on your iPhone happens once you’ve synced the podcast and its episodes to your device. Because at that point the content on your iPhone becomes static — as if podcasts are treated like albums and episodes like songs.

Treating music or movies that you’ve synced to your your iPhone as static content is fine. I listen to the same album many, many times and only have my favorite albums and artists synced to my iPhone. But for a podcast, it’s like a radio or television show — I listen to it once and that’s it. With a podcast there is always something new to add and something old to get rid of.

We don’t listen to podcast episodes over and over. We listen to new ones as they get published. Out with the old and in with the new. However, when the podcast you are subscribed to publishes a new episode there is no easy way to get it.

The two ways to get a new podcast episode onto your iPhone are either: (a) tap “get more episodes”, be taken to the iTunes app and then pick a single episode to download to your iPhone, wait for it to download, return to the iPod app and play the episode; or else (b) sync your iPhone to your computer and transfer any new episodes which have downloaded to your computer onto your iPhone.

(If you are subscribed to more than one podcast, you have to repeat step “a” for each individual subscription, and manually download each new episode.)

When at my desk working I either listen to music or silence. There are only a few podcasts which I listen to on a regular basis, and when I do listen to them it is usually during some activity which has me away from my computer. Such as driving, mowing the lawn, or working in the garage.

Since I use MobileMe to keep my contacts and calendars in sync I rarely have need to sync my iPhone. Which means that up until a few weeks ago my Podcasts were virtually never up to date. If I was in the car and wanted to listen to the latest episode of The Pipeline I either had to plan ahead and sync or just listen to the most recent version I had on my iPhone. Which meant that in reality, I just rarely ever listened to podcasts.

Now, I realize that to have already written almost 600 words may seem like a lot to simply describe the awkwardness of trying to keep a podcast up to date. But: (a) I think we’ve all figured out by now that I have an affinity for writing about these types of things in detail; and (b) I’m trying to paint a picture for why I hardly ever listened to podcasts — up until a few weeks ago there was just no simple way to keep up with them.

A Better Way

What some people may not realize is that a podcast feed is just like an RSS feed. Which means that, when it comes to podcasts, iTunes is just a fancy (and bloated) feed reader.

This also means that apps other than iTunes can subscribe to podcast feeds. Instacast is one such app.

Instacast is not the first iPhone app dedicated to managing your podcasts, but it is the first I have ever truly liked. Its most notable feature is that it offers over-the-air updating of your podcasts.

You can update all your podcasts at once, or just one subscription, or even just one episode at a time. It will update the listing of all the new shows their descriptions, length, and more. From there you can stream the episode right away or download it for listening to when you’re not online. Instacast even remembers your spot for each episode you’re listening to and you can resume where you left off — even if you were streaming.

To fill Instacast with your favorite podcast subscriptions you may want start by rescuing your current podcasts directly from your iPhone’s iPod app.

Tapping the + button at the bottom-left corner of Instacast’s home screen (the screen which shows your complete list of subscriptions) will open up the area of Instacast where you find and add new broadcasts. Tap on the iPod icon and Instacast will look up all the podcast subscriptions you’ve been syncing over to your iPhone from your computer and will then pull the feeds for those and subscribe to Instacast for you.

Moreover, you can search for a specific podcast, browse the directory of Popular1 or Just Added podcasts, or thumb in the URL of a podcast feed which is not public. Instacast even supports authenticated feeds.

Thankfully Instacast not only acts the way a dedicated podcast app should, it looks like it was designed in Cupertino. And once you use it a bit, it really begins to make the native podcast section of the iPod app look as if it was even less thought through. Meaning, Instacast not only works better than the native podcast functionality of your iPhone, it looks better too.

Side-by-side comparison of the all-subscriptions list

Side-by-side comparison of an individual subscription

After using it for a while it’s clear that it was thought through with this sole functionality in mind. Instacast has a much more elegant design for podcasts than the iPod app does, and it’s made the native iPod app feel bulky to me.

Another great feature is the price: just 2 bucks in the App Store. Which should make it a staple for even the most casual of podcast listeners.

Conclusion

I am as nitpicky about user interface as I am about user experience. There are some apps which, even though they offer a great service, I just never use because I don’t like to look at them. And on the other side you have those apps which look cute but are not very useful.

Instacast, however, is of my favorite breed of apps: one with pitch-perfect design and that does one thing and does it very well.

Here is my list of the best software that shipped in 2010. These are apps I use regularly and which were brand new or received an X.0 update at some point in 2010.

OmniFocus for iPad

OmniFocus for iPad was released in July. It is, without a doubt, the best of the three-app suite of OmniFocus software.

It seems to be a common practice that for apps with a strong presence on the desktop, their iPhone and iPad counterparts are portals, or lighter versions, of their desktop apps. Not so with OmniFocus on the iPad; it is the current king of the OmniFocus hill. Moreover, it is one of the most robust, feature-rich, easy-to-use apps on my iPad.

The two most-addicting features of OmniFocus on the iPad are the review and the forecast views. This app is one of the few which have justified my iPad purchase.

Reeder

Reeder for iPhone 2.0 and Reeder for iPad are my two preferred apps for reading feeds. When Reeder 2.0 shipped in March it answered all of my quibbles about what I wanted from an iPhone Feed Reader.

Reeder for iPad, shipped in June, and it is superb. I enjoy the UI and the top-notch readability it presents. By far, my favorite feed reading app for the iPad.

Canned

Canned is an iPhone app that came out in August. I had the privilege of helping Sky Balloon beta test it, and it’s been on the front of my iPhone Home screen ever since.

Canned lets you pre-write the content of those text messages you send often, and even pre-assign those to the individuals and groups whom you often send that same text to.

I used to have a folder in Pastebot for these types of texts, but Canned is much better suited for the task. The app is simple and blazing fast. Buy it in the App Store for the price of a soda.

Instapaper Pro for iPad

If there ever was a piece of software that was like a good cup of coffee it would be Instapaper. Unlike other software and services where describing the ins and outs and use-cases gives others a very good understanding of the product, Instapaper is much too simple for that.

So in short, Instapaper is the best way to read the Internet. And the iPad app (which launched in April) is the best way to read your Instapaper articles.

And, if you want to get my starred articles in your Instapaper queue, my username is “shawnblanc”.

MarsEdit 3.0

MarsEdit is one of the most-used, most-important, and most-beloved applications I own. I can’t imagine writing shawnblanc.net without it. Version 3.0, which was released in May, added quite a few features to an already rock-solid application.

A highlight feature of the 3.0 release for many was the WYSIWYG editor. However, the most notable for me was the added support for WordPress custom fields, which — when combined with this Linked List plugin — makes posting links on my site a breeze.

Simplenote 3.0

Simplenote is an iPhone and iPad app that offers a minimalistic writing and note-taking interface and over-the-air syncing. Version 3 shipped in August, and is the sort of app adored by those who pride themselves in their use of beautiful and uncomplicated software.

Simplenote is also an app for people with ideas. It’s for those who need some way to jot an idea down, build on it, and refine it until they’re sick and tired of it, regardless of where they are or if they brought their laptop.

And as a writer, Simplenote could very well be your principal writing app. It has a straightforward design that makes it effortless to use. In Simplenote there is no text formatting, it’s just plain. There is no document titling — when you create a new note, the first line is the title. There is no saving a note — you just write and your note is backed up in real time, and even synced with any other other devices you use: iPad, iPhone, and Mac.

Dropbox 1.0

The most common misconception about Dropbox is that it’s solely for file syncing between multiple computers. Well, I only own one computer and I use Dropbox all day long.

Because Dropbox syncs your files to the Web, I use it to keep all folders for my current projects. This means things I am working on at the present moment are always backed up to the Web.

Also, by using Symlinks, I have the Application Support Folder for my most-used apps (MarsEdit, Yojimbo, 1Password, OmniFocus) sitting in Dropbox as well. Which means if I didn’t back up my laptop for a week or two, chances are good I would hardly lose anything important. And if I drop my laptop out the car window on the way home from work, I for sure wouldn’t lose anything from the day.

Dropbox finally hit version 1.0 in December, adding some stability issues and, most notably, options for selective syncing of folders.

Instagram

Instagram launched in October and by the end of 2010 had over 1,000,000 users. It’s part iPhone app, part social network, all fun.

It’s an iPhone-only app that works somewhat like Twitter but with photos. You take a quick snapshot, apply a filter, and share it with your followers. You can also send those photos to your Flickr, Tumblr, and/or Posterus accounts, as well as sharing them on Twitter and Facebook.

Instagram is low friction, and high-fun. And now that Twitter displays Instagram Media inline, it’s not unlike using TwitPic to post photos to your Twitter account. You can find me on Instagram as “shawnblanc”.

Because the tools — in and of themselves — are not what make me productive. And simply having a to-do list is not the same as doing things.

Unfortunately, low-fi task management is a luxury I cannot afford. In my role as Marketing Director at the International House of Prayer I am personally managing and working on upwards of a dozen projects at any given time. Some of these are personal projects (slowly advancing our approach towards communication and design) and some are group projects (like a website re-design).

One of the things I love about my job is taking complex and/or broken systems and simplifying them. I also enjoy taking nebulous ideas and turning them into clearly defined goals. In many ways, my work is like a giant puzzle I get to solve, and the end results are things like a well-run office, clear pieces of information, and non-complicated designs.

In the office, my team uses Basecamp. At any given time we have as many as 40 active projects — some are print, some web, some editing, and some are all of the above. However, I personally spend very little time in Basecamp. Often my time is spent thinking things through, having meetings and conversations, or doing research before the project is ready for the team to take it on in Basecamp.

Of the several projects I am personally managing at any given time, usually only two or three are truly exciting to me. When a project is the top idea in your mind you don’t need help thinking about it and staying on top of its priorities. But when you are responsible for additional projects which don’t excite you, you need help keeping on track.

Simplicity is not just about whitespace or having the least amount of features possible. It’s about having what you need. A “minimalist” would not do demolition work to their home using a small, lightweight hammer. For that sort of work you need a sledgehammer.

And this is why a powerful task-management tool such as Things or OmniFocus is so helpful to me. I lean towards the feature rich, powerful task managers because it is an area where I am in need of a sledgehammer.

When contemplating the minutia of a task management app it’s important to root out the false notion that a task list in and of itself will make you more productive. Task lists are not your boss; they are more like your assistant. OmniFocus is something I can talk to and tell what I need to get done, and then it assists me in doing that task.

But the tools and systems are just one side of living a focused life. Productivity as a vehicle for getting things done is more like a pair of running shoes: on your left foot is your system and tools, and on your right foot is time management. And you need both feet to run the marathon.

For me, the biggest hinderance to staying focused and productive has never been the tools I use. For the most part I have my “system” down. And so my greatest hindrance for living focused is staying away from the multitude of available distractions. It is amazing how easy it is, in a moment of feeling un-focused, to simply check Twitter or email real quick for anything new (this is why Inbox Zero is not about email).

And so, admittedly, reading in great detail about my sledgehammer of choice will not make you a better worker. But, if, like me, you feel as though you are trying to demolish a house every day, then perhaps you too are in want of a better hammer…

In Praise of Sledgehammers

Finding the right tool to keep track of your projects sometimes feels more like a journey than a destination. Many task-management apps have come and gone (some of us have tried them all). But in the past few years, as task-management software has increased its footprint on the Mac, the one app which has stayed in active development and which continues to grow and improve is OmniFocus.

Everyone in the GTD fraternity knows how easy it is to incessantly fiddle with our systems yet never actually work. And that is the trap door with an app such as OmniFocus. It is so powerful, so robust, and so tweakable that it’s easy to spend more time fiddling with our action items than it is to actually do them.

This is one of the obvious praises for simple and straightforward task managers: they seem to lend themselves to better productivity by the sole virtue that there’s nothing there to fiddle with.

However, my to-do list is sacred ground. I interact with many projects, tasks, notes, and clippings all day long — it doesn’t matter if I’m at work, at home, on the go, or at the amusement park. Which is why this nerd needs a to-do list manager with both brains and brawn. So yes, OmniFocus is a behemoth of an application. It is, in fact, one of the most feature-rich apps I own (second only to the beloved Creative Suite (how ironic!)).

Long-time readers know this is not how I usually roll — I much prefer light-weight, simple apps which do one thing and one thing well. OmniFocus can do so much it’s virtually overwhelming to get your mind wrapped around it. You’re sitting there, staring at all those options, knobs, levers, and buttons, and thinking: I just want to write out a to-do list. And that is a valid feeling. With OmniFocus it can be difficult to feel as if you actually have control over your action items — almost as if there’s a fear that once they’ve left the inbox will you ever seem them again?

This is why simple and straightforward apps like TaskPaper are so popular. Or why folks just keep their to-do list in a plain text file or even a Moleskine journal. I believe it is the same reason the average computer user keeps all sorts of stuff on their computer’s Desktop. They fear that if they can’t see it, they may never find it again.

But what I have found with OmniFocus is that once you’ve taken the time to learn it and get acclimated to its features, it just may be the best thing that ever happened to your task list.

An Aside About Things

It should be noted that I have used and adored Things for more than two years. It is a beautiful and powerful app which worked quite well for me, and so a dissertation in praise of OmniFocus is in no way an indictment against Things.

In my review of Things almost two years ago, I said:

Each of us has our own way of dealing with responsibility and our own expression of productivity. Tinkering and then switching is usually not the fault of the software. We’re not looking for the best app, but rather the best app for us.

Or — to continue with the hammer analogy — my reason for switching to OmniFocus from Things is not the same as buying a new hammer because my old hammer broke. Things still does exactly as promised on the tin. But for me, today, some of the features are no longer powerful enough. That does not imply Things is broken, simply that I now have a different sort of house in need of demolishing.

OmniFocus: A Brief History

The Omni Group has been around over over 20 years. Wil Shipley founded it in 1989 as a technology consulting firm, and at the very beginning brought on Ken Case (who is now the CEO) and Tim Wood. Omni used to build custom software for NextSTEP users until Apple bought NeXT in 1997. Now Omni builds their own software for OS X.

OmniFocus was sort of built by chance. It’s roots are in an add-on to OmniOutliner Pro called Kinkless (kGTD), which was built and developed by Ethan Schoonover. Though it was incredibly clever, Kinkless was really just a hack. It was a bunch of AppleScripts that sat on top of a single OmniOutliner document with some custom buttons and even some Quicksilver actions for quick entry.

In 2006 the Omni Group asked Ethan along with Merlin Mann to help take the ideas and functions of Kinkless and turn them into a bonafide Omni Task-Management Application.

After more than a year of private development with a group of about 500 alpha users, OmniFocus went into public beta in November 2007. At that time they also began pre-selling licenses and OmniFocus pre-sold over 2,500 seats in the first 5 days.

And finally, on January 8, 2008, version 1.0 was launched.

What Kinkless GTD looked like:

The first publicly displayed mockup of OmniFocus:

OmniFocus 1.0:

OmniFocus today (version 1.8):

As you can see, not much in the UI has changed from the original Kinkless implementation of 2005 to what OmniFocus is today in 2010. You could say that OmniFocus is Kinkless 2. And though the front end is still quite familiar, the back end has been significantly supercharged.

The User Interface

Though I confess I am not very familiar with the design and development team at Omni Group, but it seems to me, more or less, that OmniFocus was primarily built by thinkers and developers. Which is why it works so well, but still looks a little rough around the edges.

In a way, it reminds me of the early days with Instapaper. Marco confesses to being an engineer and not a designer, and for a while Instapaper was not exactly the most attractive app on your iPhone. But the functionality and ease-of-use blew any ill feelings towards the UI right out of the water. And over time the UI of Instapaper has been refined into the piece of art that it is today.

So it goes with OmniFocus on the Mac. In fact, I think the biggest hinderance to using it is the user interface. At times I find the interface for the actual list of tasks somewhat difficult to navigate. After a bit you become familiar with it, but I usually have this feeling that there is too much going on at once and I’m not quite sure that it’s all staying together.

In part, this is why perspectives are so important and useful. They allow you to drill down into the right lists at the right times and only see what makes sense to you.

The UI has certainly been refined from that initial mockup, and yes you can refine bits of the UI yourself by using custom icons in the menu bar and custom colors, fonts, and spacing for the lists. But overall the app’s interface could still use some refinement and some breathing room.

And as I’ll talk about later, interacting with the iPad version only reinforces that. The iPad app feels much more “held together”, if that makes any sense, and the design of the iPad app is part of what makes it the best version of OmniFocus out there.

But so long as we’re discussing the UI, one fun feature of OmniFocus on the Mac is the ability to customize the style for your lists. From the application’s Preferences window choose the Style tab. From there you can tweak the colors, line height, and fonts of all your projects and lists. No doubt, many procrastinators have wasted some time fiddling with these options. I know I have.

But in addition to fiddling, you can load and save themes. There are websites which have themes posted for download, or you can download my simplistic theme if you like.

Using OmniFocus

Many of the task-management apps available today are a just another designer’s unique approach towards the same fundamental functionality: the ability to add tasks, organize them by project, assign a due date, etcetera. Put another way: a lot of today’s to-do apps are, more or less, the same app but with different skin.

Of the five areas of Getting Things Done are capturing, processing, organizing, acting, and reviewing, you want the least amount of friction. OmniFocus doesn’t just let you capture, process, organize, and review — once you’ve captured and processed an idea, OmniFocus almost does the rest of the work for you.

This is why OmniFocus is different. It was built from the inside out, meaning it’s a database first and a UI second. It may not win the beauty contest, but in my experience, compared to other to-do apps, OmniFocus handles your projects better than any other tool I’ve used.

For capturing tasks and information, OmniFocus leaves little to be desired:

• There is a quick entry box you can bring up at any time on your Mac.
• If you email yourself items and use OmniFocus’ Mail Clip-O-Tron 3000 you can pull messages from your email into OmniFocus. OmniFocus will even write Mail rules for you.
• You can add files and clippings to your action items.
• There is a bookmarklet which works on your desktop, iPhone, and iPad to send whatever website you’re viewing to OmniFocus.
• It is scriptable.
• And more…

But once you’ve captured your tasks and ideas they need to be processed and organized so they can be done. And the area in OmniFocus with the most friction is processing.

OmniFocus forces you to process your actions. Items just sit mercilessly in your Inbox until you’ve at least assigned them a context or a project (but preferably both). It doesn’t stop there. You can assign a start date and due date, you can flag it, you can mark it as being on hold or delegated, and a then some.

At times, the need for processing your stuff can be frustrating. But the truth is it’s good for you. It’s like your mom reminding you to brush your teeth before you go to bed. Taking that time will mean much better results in the future.

A properly processed Inbox is what leads the way to the two most addicting and powerful features of OmniFocus: the review and perspectives.

The Review

I love how OmniFocus helps you review your projects. Again, like a good personal assistant, OmniFocus brings to your attention each project, one at a time, and lets you review the tasks in that project. This is your chance to refresh yourself on what you’ve committed yourself to and make sure it is all still relevant and accurate.

Moreover, OmniFocus keeps track of your reviews for you. It knows when you last reviewed a project and only brings it to your attention when it is time to review it again. And, like everything else, your reviews sync over the air. Which is fabulous news, because the best way to review your projects is with OmniFocus on the iPad (but more on that in a bit).

In Things, I had to review manually. I would sit down at my laptop and scrub the Today List. Then, if I had the time or energy I would manually go through each project to see what tasks were in there and if any were in need of being done soon, or were no longer necessary. Because everything in Things was centered around the “Today” list in a way, managing my to-do list felt like I was perpetually processing. And since reviews had to be done manually I rarely ever got to them.

Perspectives

Perspectives is a backbone feature in OmniFocus. It is one of many ways to sort and present your action items in a meaningful manner. But perspectives are so powerful, it is as if OmniFocus were thinking for you.

It’s through the perspectives that give OmniFocus a much more robust approach towards that final and all-important stage of getting things done: doing.

As I mentioned earlier, getting actions into OmniFocus is easy. But processing of those actions is where the most friction exists. But that is because the organization and output of your tasks is what makes OmniFocus so powerful. I’m not exaggerating when I say that OmniFocus pretty much organizes your lists for you. It will take your relevant tasks and intelligently order them for you so you only see what you need to see without worrying about other stuff. After years of keeping a to-do list, I just may now be finally understanding what people mean by a “trusted system”.

As Tyler Hall wrote:

It’s hard to describe how incredibly powerful Perspectives are until you actually spend a few days with them in your workflow. Other task managers have smart folders or dedicated “Today” lists, but they absolutely pale in comparison to the flexibility that Perspectives afford.

The perspective I live in the most is one I made myself. It’s called “Today” and only shows me available actions which are due and any flagged items. What I like about having flagged items appear in my Today perspective is that sometimes I know a new action item needs to be done today but don’t want to fiddle with assigning a context or project or due date (especially when entering it via my iPhone or iPad). Thus, flagging the item is the quickest way to get that task into Today’s list.

Defining custom perspectives is easy. You can start by manipulating your “View”. Then from the Perspectives menu chose to Show Perspectives. From there, clicking the gear icon allows you to save your current OmniFocus window as a new perspective or update a currently defined perspective.

While in the Perspectives Menu, you can also adjust unique Status settings only available from this pane, and you can set custom icons by dragging them into the icon box. This is how my “Today” perspective is built:

Once you’ve got your very own perspective you can add it to the toolbar and it will sync to your iPhone and iPad. From the iPad, if you star a perspective it will show up on your home toolbar (a feature I’d like to see come to the iPhone).

Over-the-Air Syncing

Despite all that OmniFocus as a task-management application can do, for me, one of the hallmark features is its ability to sync over the air.

One thing that’s important to understand about why over-the-air sync is so vital to my day is that I don’t spend my whole day working in one location. I spend part of my work day at home, part of it in my office, part of it in meetings, part of it on the go commuting between campuses, and part of it in our on-site coffee shop. Sometimes my location and the device I’m using will switch by the hour, and so I need my tasks and references to be available to me regardless of where I am or what I’ve got with me.

This is partly why I keep a folder of all my current projects and files — “Currently Working On” — in Dropbox. Not only does this keep those files in real-time backup, but it also gives me access to them from my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

As I said in an aforelinked post about 1Password, apps that don’t sync are becoming increasingly arduous to use and maintain. And it truly did reach the point where Things was nearly useless to me. I would throw tasks in there to get them out of my head and to save them for later, but between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac my lists were so out of sync just by lunchtime that I rarely went to Things when it was time to actually accomplish anything.

Instead I would keeping urgent tasks in my email inbox (horror of horrors!) and would do a daily mind sweep of anything I knew needed to be done that day and build my to-do list in Simplenote / Notational Velocity so I would have access to it throughout my day.

As I said an the outset of this article, in a simpler world I would be delighted to use Simplenote as my task list. But I wear too many hats and have too many plates spinning at the same time for such a low-fi system. And that is ultimately why I switched to OmniFocus from Things.

Clippings and Attachments

When on your Mac you can clip a file to your task. For example, suppose you get an email from your boss asking you to do something. If you’re a clever employee you will do what your boss asks right away. But, perhaps you would rather ignore your boss for the moment and continue reading about Inbox Zero.

You can take that email message from your boss and send it to OmniFocus. Simply hit the Clippings Shortcut key (which can be defined in the Clippings Preference pane) to bring up the quick entry pane with your email message attached as a note. Now you can define the action item your boss needs, and save the email as a reference for later when you get around to doing it.

A clipping is basically an alias to a file on your Mac. You can clip just about any file you want: photos, videos, documents, audio… anything. In fact, I don’t know of any file type that you cannot clip to OmniFocus.

Some clippings — such as email messages and website URLs — get synced to your iPhone and iPad as notes. Other clippings — such as images or files — are treated as aliases, and thus can only be accessed from your Mac.

By default, OmniFocus on the Mac does not embed files you attach to your items. It simply links to them. This offers a tremendous gain of speed for syncing your database between multiple devices. However, if you do have a file that you want to embed in your database from your Mac so it will sync to your iPhone and iPad, then you have to embed it manually.

To embed a file into an action item select the item and click Edit → Attach File…, then from the file picker choose the file you want and pick the option to embed the file in the document (rather than create a link to the file).

Now the embedded attachment exists within your database and will sync to all your devices.

In the iPhone and iPad apps, however, there is no such thing as clippings; there are only attachments. From the iPhone or iPad you can attach a photo (by taking a new one or pulling one from your device’s photo library) and you can attach audio.

There seems to be no limit as to how many photos and audio tracks you can attach to an item. And though the process and feature is overall very polished, I do have a few quibbles.

• Recording Audio: To record an audio attachment on your iPhone you tap “Record Audio”. But then, all you’re presented with is a blank white box. If you’re not familiar with how the UI changes you may be wondering (as I did) if the audio recording is actually taking place.

  In the iPhone’s native Voice Memos app you get a big red bar on top of your screen letting you know you are now recording. In OmniFocus you see nothing, until you begin talking. The you see a green line which is a volume-level indicator.

  

  Surely a pulsing red UI element signifying “now recording” would be more helpful? It wouldn’t even have to replace the volume-level indicator, it could sit right on top of the “Stop” button.

  After you’ve finished recording your voice note in OmniFocus it will sync to your database as a .caf — Core Audio Format — file, which is an audio container file used by Apple. The sound quality of a synced audio track is actually quite fantastic and clear.

• Attaching Photos: When adding a photo attachment from your device’s image library the iPad has the right approach. It says “Image added Today, 2:46 PM”. The iPhone however says “Picture taken Today, 12:14 PM” (or whatever time you added it). On the iPhone, for image attachments that are added from the iPhone’s photo library, it should say “Image added” not “Image Taken”. (And to get especially nit-picky, why is “Today” capitalized? I see no reason.)

  

  

The only downside to attachments is wireless syncing. Aside from being able to sync over-the-air the next most important thing is to be able to sync quickly, and big file attachments hinder that.

In day-to-day usage I rarely need to attach audio or photos to a task when adding it on my iPhone or iPad. It is much more common for me to add a clipping to an action item when on my Mac. But since these files are usually are only needed for a project I’m working on when I’m actually at my computer, I don’t attach the clippings I simply link to them. By keeping attachments to a minimum, it helps my database sync quickly when I’m launching OmniFocus on my iPhone or iPad.

Worth pointing out is that when syncing your OmniFocus database, only what is new and/or what has been changed gets synced. This means when your desktop app syncs to the cloud, it only pushes tasks that have been updated since the last sync. And when you launch the iPhone app, it only downloads the tasks which have been created or updated since the last sync. It does not download the entire database every time.

This is, of course, standard operating procedure — it’s the same way programs like SuperDuper, Time Machine, and Dropbox work.

The Omni Sync Server

On the iPad’s sync options you are given the opportunity to join the Omni Group’s beta Sync Server. It is, more or less, their own WebDAV server. The iPad is the only one of the three apps which recognize this as Omni’s own sync server. On the desktop and iPhone versions of the app you have to set up the service under the Advanced WebDAV settings.

Currently all the Omni Sync Server does is sync your data. Though my perception is that it does seem to respond much quicker than the MobileMe sync I used for the first month. Hopefully Omni Group has some exciting features in the pipeline for their sync server beyond just syncing (the ability to email directly to your cloud-based database would be one such feature).

A Few More Miscellaneous Observations About OmniFocus’ Over-the-Air Sync Options

• Changes to your database don’t get pushed to the desktop app, nor are they pushed to the server in real time. The desktop app syncs on a schedule every 60 minutes; however you can manually initiate a sync anytime you like and it always syncs when quitting.

• On the iPhone and iPad you cannot sync if OmniFocus is not running in the foreground. Unlike sending an email or a text message, where once you hit send you can lock your iPhone or iPad and the message will still be sent, OmniFocus must be open and running to complete its sync.

  Likewise, if your iPhone is locked it will still fetch new emails. OmniFocus however, just like other iPhone apps, can only sync when it is open. And alas, it does not have “sync completion” — this means if you initiate a sync and then exit out of the app the sync will lose its connection to the server.

  This lack of non-background syncing can be especially annoying when you’ve completed a task, checked it off on your laptop, but then later it beeps your phone reminding you the task is due. The only way around this is to turn off reminders for OmniFocus on your iPhone. This is done in the Settings pane from the OmniFocus home screen on your iPhone.

OmniFocus on iPhone

In the beginning, the best way have your OmniFocus task list while on the go was to print it out. The first version of OmniFocus for iPhone was an iPhone optimized Web interface.

On July 10, 2008 the native iPhone app launched. Unlike the printout or Web interface before it, the iPhone app was a full-featured, stand-alone task management app. Meaning you didn’t need OmniFocus on your desktop to use OmniFocus on the iPhone. But if you did have the desktop counterpart then you could sync your tasks with your Mac. And you could sync them wirelessly, over the air via MobileMe or your own generic WebDAV server. Syncing over the air is something that many applications have still yet to implement, yet Omni Group had it done right out of the gate.

And even before the iPhone app was available in the App Store it had already won an Apple Design award. The iPhone app has come a long way in the past two years, but it’s that initial hallmark feature of OTA syncing that caused me to switch to OmniFocus in the first place.

Perhaps the most clever and thought-through feature on the iPhone (and iPad) app is the ability to quickly enter a task even when the app itself is syncing and updating. The nature of over-the-air sync means the app has to check for changed data and then update itself every time you launch the app. During the updating process the iPhone app’s database is momentarily locked out. Yet you can still add an action item to the inbox via the Quick Entry button.

This is a dream feature for the many times you are launching OmniFocus for the sole purpose of jotting something down.

And so long as we’re discussing the Quick Entry button, it’s worth noting that there is a functional difference between the plus (+) button and the quick entry button. The quick entry is for something to simply go directly to the inbox (hence why the icon is an arrow pointing into an inbox). The plus button will add a task with your currently viewed project or context pre-populated (though you can change it).

As mentioned above, in the settings of the app this is where you can turn off notifications of due items. It’s also where you can set your badge count (I keep my badge count off; I’m already aware that I have things to do). I also have all the current “Experimental features” turned on. Such as Landscape Mode, Undo Support, and Perspectives. The latter is one of the backbones of OmniFocus, so being able to sync your perspectives between your iPad, Mac, and iPhone seems like a requirement not an experiment.

OmniFocus on iPad

The iPad app was released on July 30, 2010 and is, without a doubt, the best of all three versions. Moreover, it is one of the most robust, feature-rich, easy-to-use apps on my iPad. $40 is big ticket compared to many other iPad apps, but you are getting what you pay for.

It seems to be a common practice that for apps with a strong presence on the desktop, their iPhone and iPad counterparts are portals into the desktop app, or light versions. But OmniFocus on the iPad is the current king of the OmniFocus hill. Ask anyone.

Brent Simmons:

Every successful computing platform has to have a “VisiCalc moment” — the moment it goes from fun toy and technology demo to “holy crap this thing is useful.”

I don’t think there’s a single VisiCalc moment that everyone will have for the iPad — but, for me personally, it was OmniFocus. That’s when my iPad went from toy to indispensable tool.

Before OmniFocus, my iPad wandered around my desks without a real place. Now it has a place right next to my dev machine’s keyboard.

Chris Bowler:

OmniFocus [on the] iPad is the best of the three. It is indeed, but I’ll go one further: it’s the best task management tool that I’ve used. Period.

This is partly due because the platform itself is present — and usable — on the three main devices I use. But I must profess my love for the Forecast feature that was added to this client. It is not present on the Mac or the iPhone clients.

After a couple of days of using the Forecast ‘view’, I asked myself, “Why has no other Mac task application used this exact interface?” Indeed, even the Mac client for OmniFocus pales in my usage. The ability to quickly see a timeline of what’s coming down the pipe, no matter the project or context — has been a boon to my tool belt. To have all overdue items available in one quick glance is also beneficial.

In particular, the iPad version soars in two areas: (a) Reviewing your projects; and (b) the Forecast view.

Review

As mentioned earlier, one of the most splendid functions within OmniFocus is the way it helps you review your projects. You currently cannot review them in the iPhone app, but that’s okay because once you’ve done your weekly review with your iPad there’s no going back.

In perfect form the Review pane comes equipped with a coffee cup-bearing icon. Tap that and OmniFocus brings up all the projects you have not reviewed in the past week. (If, perhaps, you need to review more often than once a week you can set your time allotment of choice from within the settings.)

Once in the Review pane you see one project at a time. On the left sidebar is your list of all projects pending your review, and on the bottom are some attractive buttons to let you chose what sorts of projects you want to review (active projects, those you’ve put on hold, those you’ve completed, or those you’ve flat out dropped), and your stamp to mark the project as reviewed.

The review pane on the iPad app is a textbook example for why good design is important. The functionality on the iPad app is no different than the desktop version, yet the interface is so well designed it makes the review process faster and significantly more pleasant.

Forecast

The Forecast view is just that, a high-level look at upcoming tasks for the next 7 days; also included is everything past due and everything with a future due date. I second Chris’ statement above: why has no other task manager implemented this view? I use it more than my custom-defined “Today” perspective.

Since switching to OmniFocus I’ve had many people ask me if the iPad version is worth getting in addition to the desktop version. I would argue it’s the other way around: is the desktop version worth getting in addition to the iPad?

By nature of how I work, I use the desktop version of OmniFocus significantly more throughout the day than either of the mobile apps. But I prefer and enjoy the iPad and iPhone apps over the desktop. And I especially prefer the iPad version.

Hopefully OmniFocus for iPad will be leading the way for future versions of its iPhone and Mac counterparts and the Omni Group will take what it’s learned on the iPad back to the Mac.

Conclusion

I switched to OmniFocus because of its ability to sync. I’m staying because of its ability to do everything else.

What first turned me on to Gowalla was its design. The website and mobile apps are beautiful, and Gowalla’s use of cute icons and graphics throughout makes for a great experience.

But it’s not just the design that I like about Gowalla. It’s fun, and it’s meant for people who like to get out, whatever the reason. Errands, dates, local events, road trips, and the like — if you like to get out you might like to Gowalla.

And this focus on travelers (adventurers?) is what makes Gowalla so interesting and fun for me. I don’t have to have a metric ton of “friends” on to make it worth using. And though I suppose it would be more fun to use if more of my friends Gowallad, chances are good that even the 30 friends I do have aren’t paying much attention to where I check in. And that’s okay. Because what is most enjoyable about Gowalla is the cataloging of your own journey.

I just returned from a two-week vacation in Colorado. On the first day of our trip I put the Gowalla iPhone app right on my home screen and decided that while I was traveling around the Colorado Front Range and the Rocky Mountains I would check in at every spot I could.1

Also, in preparation for my Colorado vacation I created a Gowalla trip called “Classic Castle Rock“, which features some of the premier spots around my home town. I built most of the trip on the Gowalla website before I even left Kansas City. There were a couple spots I wanted to be a part of the trip that weren’t created already, so once I got in to town last week I spent one of my mornings driving around and creating the final few spots.

It’s unfortunate that creating new locations and checking in at spots is limited by my connection to the internet. If I’m not connected I can’t check in. And this is particularly unfortunate because some of the most fabulous, visit-worthy locations are in areas with no cell service and no wireless internet.

For instance, my family and I spent a few days in Pine Grove staying at my grandparent’s cabin. It’s an old, red cabin that sits right by Elk Creek. And a half-mile upstream is the Bucksnort Saloon, home of the Buck Burger. We also spent one morning in Bailey to have breakfast at the Cutthroat Cafe and visit Coney Island’s new location. Sadly, my AT&T-connected iPhone couldn’t get a lick of signal at any of these fabulous spots.

It just so happened that on The Big Web Show last week, Jeffery and Dan interviewed Josh Williams, the founder of Gowalla. And they discussed this very issue of mobile connectivity versus spot check-in and creation. Josh is hoping that the Gowalla team will find a way to store GPS location data on your phone even when you don’t have cellular service. Then, once you’re connected to the internet again, you could use that stored GPS location data to check in and/or create the spots you were at.

This would be a great solution considering the situation, but ultimately we just need better cellular coverage. You see, it’s one thing for me to be able to create the Bucksnort Saloon 48 hours after being there, but that won’t necessarily help someone in the area use Gowalla to find the Bucksnort when they’re out in the middle of No Network Land looking for great burger joints.

It has taken me a while to decide how I use Gowalla (though I’m still not sure exactly what that is). At first I had to check in as soon as I arrived at a spot — as if I was punching in on a time clock. If I didn’t check in right away, I wouldn’t check in at all.

Now I check in when I have a few spare minutes. But there are some people who check in to spots they don’t even walk into but that they just walk by and notice. Is that breaking the rules? What are the rules, even?

For me, I prefer to only check in at places I’ve actually walked into and spent at least a little bit of time. But even then there are times I am on the go and don’t have a few spare minutes to check in with Gowalla.

And this is perhaps the most frustrating part of using Gowalla. It usually takes at least a minute or two to fully complete the check-in process on my iPhone. And that’s assuming the spot I’m checking in to has already been created, and I have good 3G coverage. It takes an extra couple of minutes if I also need to create the spot I’m at.

I would love to see a part of Gowalla’s future solution for checking in at places where you don’t have service to also include a way to check in quickly, or even in the background. If my wife and I are out on a fancy date you bet I want to check in at J. Gilbert’s. But giving my wife the attention she deserves is significantly more important. Which is why I want Gowalla to let me check in for my hot date at the best steakhouse in town while also letting me ignore my iPhone and have a great evening out.

Coming back to my question, I don’t think there are any rules. Much of what makes Gowalla so cool is that it’s still being defined and discovered by its developers and users. Every day I seem to discover a new use for Gowalla, and as it grows the more useful and fun it will be.

The unified inbox is great. But I still find myself tapping the “Mailboxes” header on the Inboxes view in attempts to go back one more screen, despite the fact there is no button there.

Folders are great. But I now have to re-learn where my apps are. I used to know where on the screen they were located, now I have to remember which folder I put them in.

Multitasking is great. But double tapping the Home button doesn’t get me to Phone favorites anymore — a function I have used dozens of times a day for the past three years (I’m one of the few who uses my iPhone to make phone calls). In earlier iOS betas you could at least double tap and hold the home button to launch favorites. But alas, that function didn’t make it into the Gold Master.

But eventually I will acclimate and the above quibbles will be non-issues.

Apple’s new mobile OS is the most feature-rich and robust one to date. Just as the iPhone 4 is the biggest leap forward for the hardware since the original iPhone, iOS 4 is the biggest leap forward for the software.

iOS 4 is packed to the brim with features and functions we only dreamt about in 2007. Yet in spite of all the new, nearly everything about this OS is expected. Not because we’ve seen pre-release demos, but because the features are implemented so naturally. There are no new features that require much, if any, explanation. And, save but one, no new features do anything mind blowing.

That is exactly how Apple rolls. The implementation of a feature is just as much a feature as the functionality which it provides. Apple didn’t just add the ability to now create folders, they built the best possible user experience around that functionality that they could.

Current iPhone and iPod Touch users who are able to upgrade to iOS 4 will have no trouble using all the new toys found in iOS 4 without missing a beat. Even the most “hidden” of the new, highlighted features, fast-app switching via the Tray, is easily discoverable to the average user since activating the Tray is now tied to one of the most common functions of double tapping the Home Button.

The New Look

Every major update to the iPhone’s operating system has mostly only provided feature enhancements. iOS 4 is the first to sport a significant change in the look. And it’s beautiful.

Earlier this year I jailbroke my iPhone to install a different GUI and add a Home screen wallpaper and custom icons. But many of the graphical changes in iOS 4 negate my reasons for wanting to jailbreak. From what I’ve noticed, all of the new graphical elements are fantastic. Well, all but one: the default water drops wallpaper is bizarrely ugly. I’m currently using the fun but unobtrusive Pictotype Purple wallpaper from Veer.

I was never, ever, keen on the 3D Dock introduced in Leopard, but on the iPad and iPhone it’s great. For one, it’s much more open than the ‘grid’ Dock in previous iPhone OSes. This makes for a cleaner looking, more simple Home screen. Secondly, the square icons don’t look at all awkward while sitting on the 3D dock, which is not always the case in OS X.

Additionally, I’m a big fan of the scratched fabric texture which shows up in the background when drilling into a folder or when fast-app switching via the Tray. It’s a darker version of what you see behind the Google map if you click on the bottom-right page curl. And it’s the same background Reeder uses for its iPad app.

Folders

Folders are swell, but I suck at naming them.

Choosing a proper and usable name for a folder is proving to be more difficult than I thought. Also difficult is remembering which folder has which apps.

Thanks to folders, my first Home screen now has the apps which used to occupy my first two home screens. These are the apps I use daily or weekly. And the OCD in me decided it would be best to name each folder with names that were five characters long. So: Tools, Photo, Stats, and Sweet.

On my second Home screen, I have seven folders: Rare, Reference, Utilities, A Games, B Games, Misc, and Tools. But off the top of my head I couldn’t even tell you what apps are in each of those folders.

The Rare folder holds all the apps which previously lived on the very last Home screen wasteland. A Games and B Games are just that — except I hardly ever play games on my iPhone so I don’t really know which games are the more or less favorites. And the difference between Reference, Misc, Tools, and Utilities is (embarrassingly) a bit lost on me. I chose those names because I was trying to avoid having four folders with the same name, Utilities. But unfortunately my current solution is just as confusing as the alternative.

Once I’ve nailed down some proper names, my only gripe with folders will be the spacial arrangement of the individual apps. As Lukas Mathis points out, the placement of an app’s icon is in one location in the folder’s icon view, but it’s in another location when you open that folder. (Similar to the same spacial issues the iPad has when you rotate the device from landscape to portrait.)

The Tray and Multitasking

But Apple doesn’t really intend for users to navigate through folders for the apps they use regularly. Instead, they’ve given us the Tray and multitasking.

It used to be that when you were done using an app and you pressed the Home Button you were quitting that app. Some app developers were smart enough to build state persistence into their app. Which meant when you came back to that app, it would load itself at the same spot you left it, but it still had to load.

Now you are no longer quitting the app when you press the Home Button. Instead the app is put into the background and its icon gets slotted into the Tray. You access the Tray by double tapping the Home Button and from there you can swipe through all the apps you’ve recently used. But the computer-savvy geek in me wants to quit out all the apps that I’m not using. It pains me to see an app in that tray which I know I only use once or twice a month. That app is taking up precious memory.

Neven Mrgan wisely advises:

This is not the multitasking you’re used to. The sooner you accept this, the better.

And so I’m learning not to play the Tray because iOS 4 is clever and responsible enough to quit apps on my behalf. The least-recently-used app gets the boot once the system actually begins to run low on memory. And with iPhone 4 rocking twice the memory my 3GS has, there will be even less reason to manually monitor which apps are running in the background.

John Gruber explains the new multitasking quite well:

The new model [of multitasking], [...] is that apps are not quit manually by the user. You, the user, just open them, and the system takes care of managing them after that. You don’t even have to understand the concept of quitting an application — in fact, you’re better off not worrying about it.

The Tray and its fast app switching are just one element of multitasking in iOS. There are also a handful of background APIs which 3rd-party apps can now take advantage of. The most heralded have been the APIs for background music, location, and VoIP. Respectively: Pandora can play music while in the background; GPS apps can give directions while in the background; and Skype can host a phone call while in the background. I don’t use Pandora, GPS apps, or Skype, so these new features, while great, do not really change my life for the better at the present moment.

The API which I am most thankful for, in that it affects my day-to-day usage the most, is task completion. Now I don’t have to wait while Twitter uploads my latest tweet or Simplenote syncs my latest note. But unfortunately, the other side of the coin to task completion, background updating, is not baked in to iOS 4. When you open apps like Simplenote, Twitter, or Instapaper, even if they’ve been running in the background, they will not have been able to update. They still have to wait until they are the frontmost app before they can download any new data.

7:00 am: Ben, Terry, and I are driving down to the Leawood Apple store to stand in line for an iPad. Well, technically it’s me who’ll be standing in line to buy an iPad — the guys are coming along because I convinced them it’d be fun.

7:30 am: We are here. Coffee in hand. And only 75 people in line ahead of us. I talked to the first few folks who apparently arrived the night before around 8:00 pm (a group of them, too, yet only one guy who’s actually buying the iPad). I guess the next group showed up around 2:00 am, and all the rest of us have been trickling in since 6:00.

7:32 am: A young guy and his mom get in line behind us. The guy is wearing a “WWSJD” t-shirt. I like to think that I’m less nerdy than he is, but the fact is I am ahead of him in line.

7:39 am: We are awkwardly interviewed by a young college student, and then a lady comes by handing out menus for breakfast pizza from California Pizza Kitchen. CPK will deliver to us while we wait in line. It’s a clever idea, but nobody orders (I know I’d rather spend that $10 on a few apps).

7:46 am: The WWSJD dude sends his mom to get Starbucks.

8:11 am: The couple in front of us share some of their donuts. (This would have been better 30 minutes ago when my coffee was still hot.)

8:55 am: The store is about open. There have been random bursts of cheering and clapping coming from inside for the past half hour.

Our line (which has grown to about 200 people by now) is directed to split into two groups: those who pre-ordered their iPads, and those who did not. Those of us who didn’t pre-order outnumbered those who did at least five to one. Yet those in the pre-order line were served by the Apple sales team about four to one versus those of us in the non-pre-order line. Considering I’m stuck in the non-guaranteed-to-get-one, slow-moving iPad line, this is seriously annoying.

And now that the line is moving rumors are running amuck that the store is already approaching sold-out status. All of us who came so early to share donuts and buy iPads may have to come back at 3:00 pm to share sandwiches and fight for the leftover iPads (if there even are any).

10:19 am: It’s been nearly three hours in line. The store is not sold out of iPads, and I am finally next to go in. I am equally excited to get out of the cold and into the warm store as I am to actually drop 500 bucks on the iPad. Linda, a nice older lady, greets me and lets me in. She helps me gather my order, charges my Visa, and then sends me on my way. I buy the 16GB iPad, Apple’s black fitted iPad case, and a bluetooth keyboard.

11:00 am: I am back home and ready to unbox. Terry and Ben went home — they had their fun playing with the iPad at the Apple store while I was spending money. Now it’s my turn. Just me and my iPad.

My wife loves me, so she humors me and joins me for the unboxing.

I love her too, so I humor her and let her be the first to click the home button. Hmmm… oddly the thing is already powered on. As Anna clicks the home button the iPad brings up the “plug me into iTunes” display. Well, okay then.

It takes me over an hour to sync it for the first time and fine tune the placement of the icons. But the wait is worth it. In the meantime I surf iTunes and spend next month’s coffee budget on Apps.

12:49 pm: Oh my goodness… my iPhone is so crowded and small and slow and tiny.

1:12 pm: My sister calls me asking what Anna’s and my plans are for Easter dinner and if she can join us.

“Of course you can,” I tell her.

She asks me what I’m up to today, and I tell her I’m playing with my new iPad. “What’s an iPad?” She asks.

2:04 am: My bout against the iPad’s battery has failed. I can barely keep my eyes open and this thing is still running bright.

Sunday, April 4

7:20am : Holy battery. Last night I plugged this thing in to my MacBook Pro with 11% battery life and five hours later it’s only at 62%. Clearly I need a dedicated wall charger.

8:25 am: I am so taking the iPad to church. What a great use-case scenario… I mean who needs a Bible, a note pad, and a pen in your pocket when you’ve got an iPad? It’s the future!

9:17 am: So I’m embarrassed to actually use the iPad for anything. I’m leaving it under my seat because I don’t want to attract any attention. This reminds me a lot of when I bought my iPhone. When the iPhone first came out they were so rare and exotic for the six months or so that every time I’d pull it out people would be like, “Woah! Is that an iPhone?!” And so using my iPhone in public felt like bragging.

11:29 am: I wish Amazon would gift me a free Kindle version of all the new, hard-cover books I’ve ordered lately. Instead of carrying Linchpin, REWORK, and Your Marketing Sucks in my backpack all at the same time it would be ergonomically glorious to have them on my iPad instead. I may never buy a physical book again.

Monday, April 5

7:00 am: The week begins, and I am spending my daily coffee and reading routine downstairs and on the couch this morning.

This is also when I scrub my to-do list and plan my day. And though Things for the iPad is beautiful, it is not nearly as robust as its Mac counterpart. There are so many features on the Mac desktop version that I use regularly. Such as linking emails inside of to-do items and re-shuffling tasks to another due date which I know I won’t get today. But Things on the iPad is more akin to the iPhone version and so a lot of this I can’t do.

But perhaps I don’t necessarily mind the division between work and play. It’s actually a bit nice to do my reading with coffee from the living room and then scrub my email and to-do list from the office.

And speaking of reading: the Wall Street Journal app sucks. It’s slow and will not relent in up-selling me to a subscription. I would consider a subscription if this non-subscriber’s experience were not so horrendous.

9:52 am: So I was going to bring only my iPad to work today, but I wimped out. I will try to do all I can to see if I can get by with just the iPad today, but I’ve got my MacBook Pro with me just in case…

10:19 am: Just met with Jono in a side room to show off our website’s glorious lack of video compatibility on an iPad. For some reason, seeing our website in 1024×768 instead of 480×320, the need to get a non-flash video solution becomes much more real.

12:00 pm: Combing through my email at work for pass number two today. Email on the iPad is easy and delightful, but my workflow and systems are kinda broke now. All the weekly reports that get sent to me on Monday mornings couldn’t be saved to their folders on my Laptop (which means I have to just delete those emails, or process them again later).  

12:14 pm: An email from Isaac with the PDF mockup of this month’s Partners Journal. The Journal looks fantastic on this display. But the 12-page, 6MB file is not easily flicked around in quick view.

12:59 pm: I bring the iPad to our first meeting together. Other than passing it around the table for my directs to check out, it gets no use at all. I write my notes down on the meeting handout as I usually do, and when I do need some info that is digital it is resting with my MacBook Pro and not my iPad.

3:10 pm: Sitting down at my desk and thanks to the florescent lights in my office the iPad is virtually unusable in here. I plug in my laptop to my 23-inch cinema display and work as I have every other day — with a mouse and a keyboard.

7:00 pm: I am done for the day at the office and am heading home. The battery is still at 60% — looks like the iPad got more use today than I’ve let on.

Tuesday, April 6

11:55 am: On my way to a noon meeting. I stop at the coffee shop for a lunch-time Americano. Eddie is walking by sees the iPad under my arm as I head in. He jumps in line with me and I give him a guided tour of some apps: Pages, Sketchbook Pro, and others. The presence of the iPad commanded the attention of everyone in line, even the cashier and barista (I should have asked for a discount).

Noon: Just like yesterday, the iPad’s only use in this meeting was to it show the fellow attendees.

One of the iPad’s best apps is Safari — especially when showing the big touch-screen display to people. It’s a great demo app because it gives them a chance to see something they’re familiar with (a web site) but experience it in a whole new way. Even for iPhone owners it is great to watch people take some time and hold the Web in their hands. Unfortunately the wi-fi in this back office is lousy. So I show them Mail and iBooks instead.

2:51 pm: Back at my office I walk across the hall to show Phil the iPad. He says he’s not getting one for a while because he doesn’t like to buy first-generation gadgets (as he pulls out his first-generation iPhone).

Phil’s wife, Alison, comes in to pick him up while we’re chatting over the iPad. He slides it over to her so she can check it out. She opens up Notes and begins typing away with no trouble at all. “Alison is awesome”, she taps.

It is a tense event to let someone play with your iPad. There is nothing which i want to hide, but it is quite personal to freely let people look at your email inbox, read your notes, and see what web page you were last viewing.

3:21 pm: Just downloaded WeatherStation Pro. It’s a good thing apps are a tax write off I keep telling myself.

4:29 pm: I’ve got a meeting in one minute with Jarrod. I walk out to grab a print out and leave the iPad on my desk. As I walk back in Jarrod’s in my office waiting and perusing the apps on my iPad. Later I open the Notes app to discover a new note: “Jarrod is awesome, too.”

10:15 pm: Up until now it’s always been at my desk where I spend so much of my time. It is where I work and where I create. I write, design, pay bills, share pictures, and more. Something the iPad has really helped me do is disconnect work from play from entertainment from incessant nagging that all exists on my computer.

Unlike my laptop, the iPad is not a do-all, be-all device. Its limited scope helps me stay connected to news and others things which I enjoy but without the distraction of all those things I could be doing at that time.

Wednesday, April 7

6:00 am: My morning routine hits the iPad again. The iPad is great for reading and replying to email, but it’s not great at processing email. At least not the way I process it. I can’t send an actionable email into Things as a to-do item when I’m using the iPad. I can’t save a file from the email into a project’s folder in Dropbox. All this means that checking and processing email on my iPad is about as productive as checking email on my iPhone (though it certainly is a better experience).

Checking email on my iPad is, more often than not, an interim checking. I reply to conversations or other threads but can’t really do much else. And so I have to come back to many of some of those messages a second time when I am at my laptop so I can fully process them into my workflow.

7:00 am: The iPad should have shipped with fingernail clippers and a screen cleaning cloth made of denim.

8:19 am: It’s interesting how some apps, like Pages, require use of the devices orientation for certain functionality.

1:15 pm: Reading in Instapaper. Again. This app has become one of the most-used on my iPad (I use it much more than I use it on my iPhone). It’s a gift to guys like me who have a very hard time doing only one thing at at time. And I love it so much I’ve even started sending articles to Instapaper which I want to read right at that moment, but would rather read in Instapaper on my iPad than in Safari on my MacBook Pro.

1:32 pm I wish iPhone OS shipped with Menlo. But more than that, I wish there was an iPad-version of MarsEdit. Currently I’m unable to post links on shawnblanc.net with the iPad due to some lame limitations in the WordPress Web interface, and because the WP app does not support custom fields. And speaking of writing: All this typing and I have not yet used that bluetooth keyboard. Primarily I guess because it’s not with me most of the time (right now it’s sitting on a shelf above my home office desk).

9:01 pm: Ay caramba. I wish “spp” would auto-correct to “app” instead of “spa”.

Thursday, April 8

7:40 am: Today begins the first real-life, 4-day test of my iPad. I am fairly certain that my iPad can’t replace my laptop. But it could replace my iPhone as the new Command Central for times like today.

This afternoon begins a four-day conference which we are hosting. And so this weekend my normal work schedule and tasks all get put on hold while we host 2,000 conference goers. There will be a lot of communicating via emails (though not as much as through phone calls and texts), and a good deal of short pow-wows.

For the past three years I’ve used my iPhone as Command Central when running marketing at our conferences. This weekend it will be interesting to see if and how the iPad holds up as a replacement for my laptop and an addition to my iPhone.

8:38 am: Test failed: the Monoprice Power Station portable iPhone battery backup dongle does not charge my iPad.

12:15 pm: Sitting in the back room with the rest of the Web team. They’re updating the website, and I’m checking my email. Nick comes in to say hello. He’s my only other friend who owns an iPad and I haven’t seen him since last Friday. So I make him sit down and we geek out over our favorite apps.

I show him some of my embarrassing finger paintings from SketchBook Pro, and he asks me to help him figure out one of the puzzles in Labrynth 2. We’ve officially established ourselves as the nerdiest two in the room.

4:40 pm: I bump into Mark in the main auditorium. He heard I got an iPad and wants to check it out. I hand it to him and he wimpishly peruses it. And so I’ve realized that when showing the iPad to someone, it helps to walk them through how to use it. Or at least show them which apps to tap on, and what do do from there. A lot of people like to see it and hold it, but would rather that I demo it for them.

5:30 pm: So I’ve been thinking a lot today if this iPad could actually replace my MacBook Pro or not. There are certainly some great advantages to it. Like how small and lightweight it is, and the incredible battery life. Some other things I don’t mind:

• The screen size: Perhaps it’s because i’m used to software like this running on a 3.5-inch screen instead of a 10-inch one, or perhaps it’s the single-app view versus my MacBook Pro’s multi-window view, but the smaller screen (compared to my 15-inch laptop and my 23-inch Cinema Display) really doesn’t bother me.

• The software keyboard: It certainly takes some getting used to, but for casual use it is perfectly fine. In no way does the software keyboard make me want to chuck this iPad like a frisbee. Sure, I can’t type long-form papers or articles on it, but that’s okay. That’s what the bluetooth keyboard is for.

Friday, April 9

7:40 am: With my iPhone (or just about any other gadget for that matter) it’s not uncommon for the battery life to affect the workflow and interaction I have with the device. But it’s always a negative issue: crappy battery life interrupts and hinders my use of the device.

But with do to the iPad, this is the first time ever that incredible battery life has affected my workflow and usage of a device. Since the iPad’s battery lasts so long I rarely need to plug it in to charge it. Moreover, since it won’t charge through my USB hub, when I do plug it in I rarely connect it to my computer. Thus, I have to make a concerted effort to remember to connect my iPad to my computer and sync it. Why I can’t sync via Wi-Fi (like Cultured Code does with Things) is beyond me.

8:03 am: Every Friday morning Josh and I go get coffee at Einstein Bagels. He just got a new Audi so normally he drives, but today I do so he can play with the iPad. He teases me about the email in the Notes app that I sent to John Gruber pointing out some typos. It’s a little embarrassing, but not really. But clearly I am going to have to start using 1Password for notes that i don’t want other folks to see. People will fiddle around on your iPad and find stuff much more easily than they would if they were fiddling around on your laptop.

10:40 am: I comb through this morning’s fury of new emails related to the conference and yet I’m still thinking if the iPad could actually replace my laptop or not. The blaring hurdles for that to happen are:

• To-do management: maybe I’m complicated, but it bugs me that I have no way to send tasks into Things. And I have no way to sync over the air so that my iPhone and iPad are in sync without needing my Mac as the mediator.

• Blogging: Yeah, I still don’t have a way to post links to my website…

• No Dropbox: all of the files and projects I am currently working on are kept in Dropbox. This keeps them backed up and secure in real time, but also makes them available for viewing and emailing if I’m away from my computer. No doubt the Dropbox team is working on an iPad app, which will be lovely (since this other app called GoodReader sucks), but even still it will only be a useful app for viewing files which are already in my Dropbox and not for syncing or transferring files to and from my iPad.

• No file storage or management (I have to leave emails in my inbox if they contain files I want to save)

• No document syncing: Well, no good document syncing, that is. I want the document I’m writing to exist on my Mac and on my iPad (and why not my iPhone, too?). Krikey… I am dying for Simplenote to make its way to my iPad (but even then, it would just be for plain text files). I spent $10 on Pages… really wish I could have some of those documents synced without the nightmare of USB and manual version control.

The size, weight, and battery life of the iPad make me want to leave my laptop at home forever. But the above unordered list necessitates that I don’t. My next laptop could be a MacBook Air.

2:08 pm: Watching a video in a sun-lit room… Oh yeah, this is why I hate glossy displays.

Sunday, April 11

8:39 am: I take the iPad to church again; my confidence to use it in public has grown. Also, Anna and I sit in a row occupied by nobody else.

I try to tap out notes from this morning’s sermon, but I can’t keep up — my tap typing is too slow. The iPad’s auto-correct turns my would-be notes into fragmented sentences less understandable than my own chicken-scratch hand writing. At least I can email them to myself for decoding later.