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.

Half the apps on my iPhone’s Home screen alone involve reading as a predominant, if not exclusive, feature. Mail, Messages, Safari, Tweetie, Instapaper Pro, Simplenote, and Reeder: these are my most-used apps, and each one is used for reading in some way or another. And yet the app which serves no other purpose than to read, seems to be the most frustrating to use for said purpose.

• In Mail I read and reply.
• In Messages I read and text.
• In Safari I read and surf.
• In Tweetie I read and tweet.
• In Instapaper I read and drink coffee.
• In Simplenote I read and write and edit.
• In Reeder (or any other feed reader app, such as Byline, Fever, Google Reader, NetNewsWire, NewsRack, MobileRSS, etc.) I read.

The predicament with feed reading apps is most certainly not in the quantity of the selections; rather, the quality. This is not to say that most of the legitimate feed reading apps on the iPhone have not been developed with care — but as agents of delivery for my favorite authors, and as contrivances meant for enjoying lengthy bits of text, I prefer a simple app that does less and does it better.

In total fairness asking for the “best feed reader app” is like asking for the “best shirt”. Just as John Gruber so aptly laid out last April when writing on the the UI playground of Twitter clients. John said:

[D]ifferent people seek very different things from a Twitter client. TweetDeck, for example, is clearly about showing more at once. Tweetie is about showing less. That I prefer apps like Tweetie and Twitterrific doesn’t mean I think they’re better. There is so much variety because various clients are trying to do very different things. Asking for the “best Twitter client” is like asking for the “best shirt”.

It is my safe assumption that readers of this website also prefer apps which do less, but do it well. And so read on for a high-level look at some of the more popular iPhone feed readers, what I find good and not-so-good about them, and my suggestions for amelioration.

Reedie

As of this writing the iPhone App Store has nearly 4,000 apps in the News category. This is where all the RSS reading apps are listed. If you search for just “RSS” you’ll get over 700 results, or roughly 18% of the 4,000 news apps. Searching for “RSS Reader” nets you 203 results, and if you get even more specific and search for “Google Reader”, you get 50 apps.

But now compare this to the Social Networking category. It has 2,600 apps, and searching for “Twitter client” returns only about 65 results. There are over three times as many RSS reader apps than there are Twitter Clients in the App Store (based on search results).

Of the 4,000 news apps, the most downloaded are the dedicated apps provided by popular news sources such as the New York Times, USA TODAY, the Associated Press, NPR News, Wall Street Journal, and etc. The first RSS feed reading app you listed amongst the most popular News apps is “Free RSS Reader“; with NetNewsWire Free right on its heals. Surely “Free RSS Reader” is the most downloaded RSS reader by virtue of name alone.

In the most popular social networking apps, the first Twitter client listed is the free version of Twitteriffic. Over its life in the App Store it has received 139,000 reviews, mostly positive. Now compare that to Free RSS Reader which has about 17,000 reviews (mostly negative).

And thus we find a conundrum: the amount of RSS readers for the iPhone that of Twitter client apps, and yet the tables are turned when it comes to quality.

According to a small poll I conducted via Twitter, the app people spend the most amount of time reading from while on their iPhone is Instapaper, followed closely by Tweetie and then Mail.

Tweetie and Instapaper are two classy apps. They are easy to read from, easy to get around in, and a ton of fun. But tweeting and reading things later should not be the only place where all the action is. I would love to see a top-notch, Tweetie-level, RSS reader for the iPhone…

Reedie.

Why? Because when Tweetie 2 blew every other Twitter client out of the water it also sunk a few apps that were in a different part of the pool, and it’s time for a comeback.

There are tons of nerds who were using Twitter way before Ashton was and who have been riding the RSS train for years and years. And since nerds are the pickiest of all when it comes to usability and interface design, they are the ones most in need of a great feed reader app for their iPhone.

Secondly, what Twitter has done for Twitter clients, so has Google Reader done for feed reader apps. As Loren Brichter said during his interview with Macworld:

One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go. It’s possible for anyone to write a Twitter client nowadays and have the opportunity to completely blow everyone else out of the water.

Granted, the initial set up of a new Twitter account is really simple compared to the same for Google Reader. Twitter asks for your name, desired username, and password, and then you’re free to follow friends and strangers at will. A process significantly more straightforward than creating a Google account, activating Reader, and then finding and populating it with RSS and Atom feeds.

But the type of people that would use a feed reader (nerds!) are also the types of people who already have Google accounts (we’ve been beta testing Gmail since 2004), and who are even more likely to have an OPML file sitting around ready to be imported.

Up until today, all of my software reviews have been about programs which I find fantastic. But today I’m trying to get out there that I see a chance for improvement in the iPhone App market. But the only way I know how to pinpoint the opportunity is to highlight those who are trying to meet it, and (in my opinion) not quite hitting the mark. It’s not that I have only negative things to say about the following apps, it’s just not all moonbeams and rainbows. Also note that I hold Brent, Sean, Milo, and the other developers all in the highest regard. They are busting their butts to make great software; thank you, guys. Please keep it up.

Google Reader (Mobile Web App)

The online RSS feed reader that took over the world. It was a big day when they began offering public APIs for developers to sync to and from G-Reader, and it was a smart move for NewsGator to abandon their home-brewed syncing platform to allow NetNewsWire (on desktop and iPhone) and FeedDemon to sync via Google Reader.

The mobile version of Google Reader is not too shabby. More than one well respected nerd uses it instead of any number of native iPhone apps which sync to it. And I actually prefer the mobile version over the full web version. However, the mobile version doesn’t support many of the favorite features found in a native iPhone app such as emailing articles and links, saving to Instapaper, and a few others. But it is a classy, speedy mobile web app. And it’s free. Hello.

Byline

Version 1.0 came out in July 2008. It cost a whopping $10 and sported a much more Mail-like UI. Three months later Milo release Byline 2. Then version 2.5 came out in July 2009, and now 3.0 is due for release soon (and will be free for existing users).

Version 3 will finally support Instapaper and Twitter, as well as a few other cool new features and UI refinements. But for the most part it will still look and feel just like the most current version. If you’re not already sold on Byline, version 3.0 will surely not be Just What You Always Wanted. But for the many, many fans of Byline that already exist this next release is sure to be a home run worth waiting for.

There’s quite a bit to like about Byline. For starters, it’s been around for nearly two years — it was one of the original iPhone feed reading apps and has continued to see forward movement. What makes Byline stand out is its caching of your feeds. If you do a lot of offline reading (or if you live in New York or San Francisco) a huge motivation to use Byline may be its ability to store the text and images of your feeds, as well as linked-to Web pages, right on your iPhone. It will also remember stars and unread/read state, and it all syncs back to Google Reader when you’re next online. (The 3.0 version will even have the ability to cache your feed content while the screen is locked.)

However, my biggest quibble with Byline is the GUI. I know that Milo has to develop graphics that look good on many different generations of iPhones and iPod touches, and that he is proud of the look and feel of his app. But in my opinion the heavy gradients used throughout the app are too much, and give an overall impression of immaturity to the app. If it’s not a delight to look at and read from, it’s less of a delight to use.

Since most people voted that if they were reading, chances are they were in Instapaper or Tweetie, I thought it would be interesting to contrast the heavy gradients used in Byline to the subtle gradients used in Tweetie to to the complete lack of gradients used in the iPhone’s Mail app:

(FYI: Even though Instapaper won the “most read from app” question, since it uses the same no-gradient design as Apple’s own Mail, I chose Mail for the comparison so as to have a native Apple app in the mix.)

NetNewsWire

Though NNW is arguably the best desktop RSS reader on the planet the iPhone version is not quite as mind blowing as its older brother.

NetNewsWire for iPhone is quick, reliable, and just the right balance of feature-richness versus simplicity. One of its most clever feature by far is the option to choose which feeds are downloaded and synced by your iPhone. Especially handy for those crazy folks that like to sit right in front of the RSS fire hydrant. However NNW feels more like a utility program built for accessing feeds, rather than a contrivance for enjoying them.

Mobile RSS Pro for Google RSS

Here is a clever app. Clearly the developers have put a ton of time and thought into this. And though a few of the features are simply re-works from some of Loren’s popular Tweetie 2 user interactions (such as swipe to reveal options below a listed item, and pulling down a list to refresh), they’ve got some additional great things going for them:

• MobileRSS Pro saves state perfectly (better than any of the feed readers listed here).
• It’s fast.
• It’s got a good-looking, ‘dark’ theme (it’s called “Black” but it’s actually blue).
• The way they implemented the unread badge count for each feed as a little tag that hangs over the edge of the feed list columns is very cute.

But despite all this, the app just doesn’t feel right due to a handful of little things which make it feel unbalanced:

• Such as the way my gmail account in shown large type at the top.
• The large vector icons for “All items”, etc…, contrasted against the small favicons for the each feed.
• I only have one folder, and at the bottom of the root screen it says, “52 Feeds, 1 Folders” (oops).
• On the item view list of any given feed it has my gmail account name crammed into the ‘back’ arrow, with the title of the feed somewhat off center, and then a little ‘info circle’ icon pushed to the right-hand side.
• It uses the familiar “share” / “export” icon at two different places in the app, yet for for two completely different things: (1) when viewing an individual article, tapping the icon brings up options to email the article’s link, save it to Instapaper, or etc…; (2) when viewing an entire feed with its list of articles the same icon is there, and tapping it in this context gives you the options to sort by oldest/newest or to mark all as read.

With a little bit more polish and attention to detail, MobileRSS Pro could be a much more classy app.

Fever

Shaun Inman’s Fever is the best dressed web-based feed reader out there. (I wrote about it at length when it first came out last June.) And the mobile-optimized version of Fever is just as great. It is a delight to use, easy to read from, and is always in sync with itself (duh!).

The downside to Fever’s mobile version is the same as any other mobile web app: no state saving, no caching for offline reading, and little to no sharing/saving features.

I stopped using Fever about four or five months ago when I took a break from RSS feeds all together. Through the holiday season I hardly ever checked my feeds. Similar to the olden days I would visit individual sites on occasion by typing the URL in by hand; and I was happy.

So happy in fact I decided to slash my OPML and only subscribe to that small handful of sites which have a history of enriching my day.

I wanted to keep Fever fully loaded so as to make use of the Hot list on occasion, but I didn’t want the bloat of loading all those feeds in a browser every time I wanted to check RSS. So about six weeks ago I came back to NetNewsWire on my desktop and populated it with only 25 time-worthy feeds.

Now, my current RSS setup is Reeder on my iPhone and NetNewsWire on my Mac — all synced via Google Reader.

Reeder

Reeder’s approach to their app design is brilliant. They’ve sought to bring back some of the nostalgia of reading while on a digital device by virtualizing the look and feel of an old, trusted book. And they did this without sacrificing the ‘touchability’ of a well-designed iPhone app.

The custom GUI goes beyond just the torn-paper markers and off-white background. The pop-up menu for sharing an item unique, being more akin to what you may see on Android OS instead of using the standard buttons on iPhone OS. And there are a few custom, intuitive swipe gestures which can be used to mark individual articles as read, unread, or starred.

In his review of Reeder on Download Squad, Nik Fletcher aptly wrote: “Reeder balances the familiar with custom elements, and as a result the interface looks great when browsing (and reading) content.”

So yes, Reeder is more unique than any of the aforementioned feed reading apps while still feeling familiar and friendly. It is by far the best feed reader app available in the App Store right now. Yet some of its cleverness feels too clever, and since Reeder is so close to being beyond great, its shortcomings seem so much shorter.

For instance, the status bar takeover is neat, but is it necessary? I find myself distracted by it every time open the app. It always makes me think of the stoplight countdown before a Super Mario Kart race begins: Beep. Beep. BEEEEEEEP!1

Secondly, the GUI is not contrasty enough. I love the texture and the vintage, off-white coloring, but it can be difficult to quickly see the difference between a read and an unread item, as well as the lighter colored text which makes it not quite as easy to read on. But this is a subtle quibble…

My primary gripe is the lack of saving state. Regardless of where you are in the app when you quit out of it you will always start back at the beginning when you re-launch it. Compare this against the convenience of state saving found in Instapaper. Instapaper actually saves two types of states: (1) those of individual articles: if you are reading an article and then return to the item list view, and then come back to that article later, it will open in the same place you left it; and (2) overall state: upon a re-launch of Instapaper you will always find it just as you left it.

Reedie

A good feed reader is quick, reliable, and readable. But a great feed reader has to be all of those and more. It has to be clever, very polished, and, of course, fun.

My ideal feed reader app would look like some sort of marriage between Tweetie 2, Instapaper, and Reeder. It would have the sounds and UI elegance of Tweetie 2, the typographic and state saving bliss of Instapaper,2 and the uniqueness of Reeder. (For bonus points it would swipe the swipe-top-navigation-bar-to-go-home feature from Tweetie 2.)

I don’t want another iPhone feed reader, I want a better one. Because apps like Tweetie, Twitteriffic, Birdhouse, and Birdfeed are all outstanding Twitter clients — each one is clever, polished, and fun. And who says feed reading can’t be as enjoyable as tweeting?

Pastebot is more powerful and versatile than its siblings, and it comes with all sorts of tricks and surprises floating around. To get the most out of it requires a minimal understanding of how the app works. When you first launch Pastebot you are guided through a cute and succinct tour. Later, when you find yourself in various screens within the app, little help tips will pop up to point out functionality.

Using and mastering Pastebot borders on entertainment.

Daily Usage

Other than the clipboard history in LaunchBar, I have never used a true clipboard manager. My ‘clipboard manager’ is Yojimbo. That’s where I throw random bits of info, web clippings, text, images, PDFs, and more — some to be stored indefinitely, some to be deleted when I don’t need them anymore, and some which will no doubt be forgotten.

Using a clipboard manager on your iPhone for boilerplate management is an obvious solution. At times it can be easier and quicker to copy and paste a canned response to a text or email than to thumb one out. And this is what most clipboard managers in the app store boast about: their ability to store text snippets for quick access. But very few brag about their ability to capture bits of info from your iPhone…

An app that auto-populates itself with the contents of your clipboard is surely the simplest way to throw bits of info into an app on the iPhone. Which is why a clipboard manager is, in my opinion, a foundational functionality for an attractive, capable Anything Bucket app for the iPhone. And Pastebot is the closest I’ve seen for this type of app.

On my Mac, the key to a good anything bucket is its ubiquity — that at any time, in any application, you can throw something into it. On the iPhone however, you can’t run 3rd-party apps in the background. Which is why the most important feature of Pastebot is launch time. In my usage with a mostly-full clippings folder littered with text, images, and other paraphernalia, Pastebot loads (and pairs with my Mac) in less than a few seconds.

Once running, whatever you last copied on your iPhone appears at the top of the Clipboard list. And if you’ve got the Pastebot Sync utility installed, anything you copy on your Mac pops right into the Pastebot app while its open.

From there it’s a copy and paste playground. You can sort, edit, add, delete, use, transfer, and more.

Miscellaneous Observations From Copying and Pasting Various File Types Between my Mac and my iPhone Using the Pastebot Sync Utility

• Text: Even thousands of words copy over quickly, and text is the only data type that you can copy from one mac and past to another using Pastebot as the middle-man.

• Images: Copying a photo from within iPhoto will send the actual picture. Though the title of the image from iPhoto does not transfer.

  Copying a whole slew of images from iPhoto gives Pastebot a datatype that it doesn’t recognize:

  

  However, it still maintains the data. For example, I copied 9 images from iPhoto, they showed up in Pastebot as unknown Mac data, but from there I was still able to paste them onto my Desktop.

  Also, copying an image from Preview will get the full image onto your iPhone and allow you to use it on your iPhone. But copying the image file from the Finder only sends the file-type icon.

• Audio and Video: Copying an audio or video file from iTunes sends the metadata to Pastebot. But it’s metadata based on where in iTunes the file was copied from. For example, trying to copy Star Trek to Pastebot from my Recently Added playlist sends this info:

  Star Trek 2:06:47 J.J. Abrams 11/18/09 7:48 PM

  (The same info that is shown in the playlist’s columns: Name, Time, Artist, and Date Added.)

  But trying to copy Star Trek from the Movies playlist sends this:

  Star Trek 2:06:47 Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2009
  The greatest adventure of all time begins with Star Trek, the incredible story of a young crew’s maiden voyage onboard the most advanced starship ever created: the U.S.S. Enterprise. On a journey filled with action, comedy and cosmic peril, the new recrui
  Star Trek – iTunes Extras Sci-Fi & Fantasy

  On the other hand, if you copy an audio or video file from within the Finder it sends that file’s relevant icon to Pastebot. And if you then paste that icon back to the Finder, it will paste the audio or video file; pasting it when in a plain text document will paste the filename; pasting it in a rich text document or an email will attach the file; and trying to paste into iTunes does nothing.

• Folders & Zip Files: You can copy an entire folder or zip file. It shows up in Pastebot as a folder or zip icon, but pasting it back to the Finder the whole folder, with all its contents, shows up unscathed.

  You can email a file that Pastebot itself doesn’t recognize but it gets sent as an icon file. Sending a ZIP file you copied into Pastebot will only send the 512×512 icon titled as filename.zip. Similarly, sending a folder sends the icon of a folder named after the folder you had copied.

  

• PDFs: Copying a page of a PDF document from within Preview will send that actual page. You can then paste it into the finder and you’ll get the page as if it were dragged out from Preview.

Transferring Data from one Mac to another using Pastebot and the Pastebot Sync utility

Using Pastebot Sync you can pair Pastebot on your iPhone with as many Macs as you like. But as far as I can tell, the only data you can transfer between multiple Macs using Pastebot as the mediator, is text clippings. If any file or image originates on Mac #1 when it gets copied into Pastebot, it won’t paste to Mac #2.

Although anything that was added to Pastebot from within your iPhone can be pasted to any synced Mac.

They say a man buys something for a good reason, and the real reason. You buy an app from Tapbots because it does something useful, but in truth, you just wanted to play with it.

But, in my estimation, only the best writers have the skill to skip 2 and 4 while still bringing us to 5 — their prose alludes to the missing pockets of plot just right so that we figure it out on our own. And this they do without us realizing, because though we were actually led by the writer, we feel like smarter readers.

It is in this regard that software developers are not unlike writers. But instead of a plot they have a feature set, and instead of prose, a UI. The developer can lay out the whole of their feature set before the user with menus, sub-menus, and more. Or they can hide pieces of it hoping that each feature will be discovered, but knowing that perhaps they won’t.

But ignorance can still be bliss, because in my book a simple, well-written application that delights is far better than a feature-rich one which overwhelms. And this is why Tweetie 2 is not just my favorite Twitter application on any platform, period, it may also just be my favorite iPhone app.

You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket.

This is not the same as your tried and true System for saving and finding things. The System is for everything. Your Anything Bucket, however, is for everything else. And you need both.

There are lots of options out there. Off and on for years I tried to use Yojimbo, but it frustrated me because I treated it as a replacement for the Finder. On more than one occasion I endeavored to replace my tried and true System of filing things with this single piece of software — attempting to save nearly everything in Yojimbo. That is a horrible way to live, and it’s why I always abandoned the app.

Yojimbo is not an Everything Bucket. A more fitting description, I think, is Anything Bucket.

Because apps like Yojimbo are not where you should keep everything, but rather, where you can throw anything. They are not replacements for the Finder – nor the opposite – you should use them both.

John Gruber lays this out ever so clearly in his article, “Untitled Document Syndrome“. The gist of John’s article is that apps such as Yojimbo are successful because they’re simple. He says: “When you don’t have to do much before (or after) doing what you want to do, you do surprisingly more.”

Summing up Mark Hurst’s advice about simple computing, Andrew White says: “Use the simplest, sanest application that will get the job done. Avoid extraneous clutter in menus, on desktops, in applications. Pick the utilities that will give you the most — ahem — utility, and use and learn the crap out of them.”1

Anything Buckets should be more about ease of use than about depth of features. The very best ones lend themselves to perpetual use. And if you use them, depth will come from breadth.

The info we throw at them can be permanent, temporary, important, or trivial. It doesn’t matter. Regardless of who, what, when, where, or why, the best Anything Bucket is ready to receive any bit of information that threatens to elude you.

My Favorite Anything Bucket

Yojimbo. Hitting shelves in January 2006 it has sat on four different Mac operating systems and has gone virtually unchanged since its initial release. It is a simple and charming piece of software that packs a lot of punch.

The previous version of Yojimbo, 1.5.1, was released on February 2, 2008. The 2.0 release shipped on September 1, 2009, nearly 19 months later (longer than most of the previous major OS X release cycles). The 2.0 update to Yojimbo came with a new icon, a database upgrade, a few new features, and a lot of refinements.

Yojimbo 1.5 is to OS X Leopard what Yojimbo 2.0 is to Snow Leopard. Which is to say version 2 is an attestation to the charm and punch Yojimbo 1.0 came out of the gate with. Even though version 1.5 sat there for over 19 months, it was still whispered about at the water cooler as people fiddled with their Evernote iPhone app. And that, my friends, says something profound about the quality of this simple piece of software.

Looking at version 2 and what Bare Bones Software decided to add, and what they decided to leave out, says a lot about Yojimbo. I couldn’t help but imagine the 2.0 release as being similar to the scene in 300 between King Leonidas and Xerxes’ messenger.

In the scene, a messenger from King Xerxes arrives at the steps of King Leonidas’ home. As they walk through the streets, the messenger calmly demands that Sparta submit itself to the will of King Xerxes and begin giving offerings or else face war against the King’s vast army. The scene climaxes in one of the most memorable and quotable moments of the movie as Leonidas kicks the messenger into the city’s well, defying the demand to submit, shouting, “This! Is! Sparta!”

Sure, it’s a little over the top to compare a software release to an epic war movie, but the plot line in this scene is analogous to the current Anything Bucket market and the path that Yojimbo has taken. Not to say other apps have taken the wrong path and Yojimbo the right one, but in the midst of many options — and many requests for features that other apps have — Yojimbo’s feature scope has remained unwavering.

The latest Yojimbo, as I see it, is not fighting the same way their competitors are. After 19 months without an update, many were looking at the Bare Bone team: Choose your next features wisely. And but so, when 2.0 finally shipped Bare Bones Software chose not to lay new tracks, but instead, grease the current ones. “This! Is! Yojimbo!”

Yojimbo’s most powerful feature won’t be found in the release notes. In this regard it is very similar to Quicksilver. At first glance, when you look at Quicksilver and see it’s an application launcher, you think, Cool. But so what? I have Spotlight and the Dock. Why should I learn a new app?

Even if you read the support documentation and learn about the plugins and the extensibility that Quicksilver offers, it’s not until you use it that Quicksilver becomes a part of you in a way you can’t explain. Nor could anyone have done it justice in explaining it to you.

Input: A Juggernaut for the Onslaught

It is likely that many people confuse a tried and true system and a system they use as being the same thing. In my experience, it is one thing to have a clear and organized structure for where you put quotes, notes, passwords, and the like. But it is another thing altogether to actually fill that system’s folders with content.

Like I said earlier, this confusion was the reason I tried and abandoned Yojimbo so many times — I completely misunderstood the purpose and advantage of an Anything Bucket. Yojimbo is great not because it replaces your organized filing system, but because it encourages perpetual capture of all sorts of information.

Put plainly, Yojimbo is the simplest way possible to save any bit of spontaneous information. No matter how indispensable or arbitrary that information is.

As Patrick Woolsey of Bare Bones Software said, “The intent of [...] all of Yojimbo’s input mechanisms is to make entering info as easy as possible, so that you’re more likely to do so.”

And Yojimbo’s input mechanisms aren’t just easy, they abound. You can get info into Yojimbo just about any way you can imagine: quick input windows, drags and drops, bookmarklets, javascripts, AppleScripts, and more. Choose your own adventure.

With input options around every corner, my rule of thumb for getting the most out of Yojimbo is to dump as much in as possible. Here are some of those ways, listed in order of what the author uses most:

• Scripts: Getting my other most-used apps to help me toss stuff into Yojimbo via AppleScripts is surprisingly easy. There are ample scripts available to help you create new Yojimbo items from Safari, Mail, NetNewsWire, Mailsmith, and more.

  My Safari and Mail scrips (invoked by FastScrips) are by far my most used methods for sending info to Yojimbo.

• The Quick Input Panel: A close tie with the scripts is my use of the Quick Input Panel.

  There is a whole lot of cool when it comes to this thing. It can be brought up at any time, in any application, via a keyboard shortcut (so long as Yojimbo is running). And it is the perfect place to drop notes, ideas, passwords, images, and more, without having to bring Yojimbo to the frontmost window.

  If you have text copied to the clipboard when you invoke the Input Panel, Yojimbo will automatically populate the new item with that content. It’s even smart enough to know if it’s an image, an URL for a bookmark, or text for a note. Moreover, if you close the Input Panel before creating your item, Yojimbo keeps that info in there.

  When you invoke it again, yet happen to have new content saved to the clipboard, Yojimbo gives you the option to keep what you used to have or fill the panel what you’ve currently got in your clipboard.

  

  Similar to the Quick Entry HUD in Things, Yojimbo’s input panel is an easy and ubiquitous way to capture info on the fly. Unlike the HUD in Things, however, is the Quick Input Panel’s frustrating behavior with click-through. I am a big fan of how the Quick Input HUD from Things handles click through: when HUD is frontmost you can navigate, click, select, drag, and drop all around your Mac without the HUD closing. The Yojimbo input panel operates the opposite: when creating a new item, clicking outside of the input panel will instantly cause it to disappear. The info isn’t lost, you just have to re-invoke the panel to get to it again.

  My only other gripe is need to press the Enter – not Return – to create a note item after entering some text. Though the reason for this makes perfect sense because the Quick Input Panel supports rich text editing (hit cmd+r while inputting text and you’ll see what I mean), it is still a keyboard shortcut I haven’t gotten used to.

• Saving PDFs: One of the features updated in version 2 is the “Save PDF to Yojimbo” option that shows up under the PDF button in the print dialog box. You can now change the items’ title and add tags, labels, comments, and/or flag it.

  

• Dropping Stuff Onto the Dock Icon: Typical to most apps in the Dock, you can drag any Yojimbo-supported file and drop it over the Yojimbo Dock icon to import it as a new item.

  Similar to the way Mail will launch and create a new message with the file you dropped as the attachment, Yojimbo will open and display a new item with whatever it was you just dragged and dropped. (You can even take iTunes URLs right out of iTunes for albums, apps, and movies that you want to revisit some other time.2)

• Drop Dock: I have gone back and forth with using Drop Dock, but its new feature set in 2.0 has made it worth another look.

  For one, when dropping an item into a Tag Collection that is in the drop dock, the respective tags for that Collection will be automatically assigned to the new item. Secondly, you can now choose what collections show up in the Drop Dock. Honestly, I can’t think of two more useful feature additions to the Drop Dock.

Storage and Organization

Yojimbo is the only app I use tags with. I don’t use them in Things, Mail, or even on my own website.

And I don’t just use them, I use them religiously in Yojimbo. So much so that I added tag-input dialogs to the Mail and Safari scripts I use so often. Though ironically, I don’t know that I’ve ever found a file in Yojimbo exclusively thanks to its tag. What I do use tags for is smart Collections (especially when working on a project).

The reason I don’t tag my to-do items in Things is because bothering with them on the front doesn’t ever prove useful on the back end. But in Yojimbo tagging an item is a big contributor for how information gets organized (assuming you even want it so), and for how it gets found later.

You can have folders (called Collections) and smart folders (called Tag Collections). Standard Collections only get populated by manually dropping a Yojimbo item into them. Whereas Tag Collections auto populate with every item in your Library that contains one or more of the tags you’ve assigned to that Collection. If you drop an item into a Tag Collection all the tags assigned to that Collection are added to the item, and, obviously, that item gets pulled into the Tag Collection.

It used to be that a Tag Collection would only hold items that matched an exact list of tags. But now I am very grateful that you can populate with items that match either all or any in a list of tags.

And if you’re not a huge fan of the default icons used for collections you can change them. Just find a folder who’s icon you do like, and copy/paste it from that folder’s info panel into Yojimbo’s info panel for your (now attractive) Collection. This can be especially helpful for regular / smart Collections you keep around indefinitely.

Output

Bill Bryson once said: “The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.”

And this is the very reason Yojimbo is so remarkably helpful — getting information back out is nearly as easy as getting it in.

Since the fastest way to find something in Yojimbo is to search for it, I’ve set a global hotkey to bring Yojimbo frontmost and put the cursor in the search box. And searching for something in Yojimbo is outlandishly quick. Results never hang, and I’ve never been unable to find what I was looking for.

Moreover, all of the Library items are indexed by Spotlight. If something you’re looking for in Spotlight exists in Yojimbo, you’ll see it there. Or you can do an app-specific search by prefixing your Spotlight query with “kind:yojimbo”.

In addition to finding what you know you are looking for, the new Tag Explorer helps you find what you don’t know you’re looking for. It is a great way to delve into the random things you’ve thrown into Yojimbo that you may have forgotten about. In a way, it is a similar concept to Shaun Inman’s Fever feed reader, in that, the Tag Explorer can help you aggregate the contents of your Yojimbo library. You never know when you’ll find some long, lost gem you had forgotten about. It may just be the funnest addition to version 2.

Sans-iPhone

Back to the beginning: the greatest feature of an Anything Bucket is simplicity that leads to regular use. For me, I don’t see what good is it to have my files synced across my laptop, my phone, and my friend’s Web browser if I am rarely putting any files in. I’m not concerned about using an app that will cover my butt for that one day when I might need to access that one bit of info when I’m not at my laptop.

Rather, I want an app that will actually get used… a lot.

It’s not to say, though, that simple cannot be married with mobile. It just means if Bare Bones does launch an iPhone app there is a lot for them to consider. Primarily: syncing and accessing the database, and iPhone app development.3

Syncing and Accessing the Database

If I were to sync my entire Yojimbo library to my iPhone, it would be a little less than 1,000 items with a database of 86 MBs right now. Even for someone like John Gruber, who has been using Yojimbo since the beta days, it wouldn’t be a massive chore to get his Yojimbo data onto his iPhone. John’s total library is 5,500 items and 375 MBs. Not that big of a file for just about any given iPhone. A single movie easily takes up three or four times that amount of space.

(An interesting tid-bit of info: Patrick Rhone, who recently migrated his data from Evernote back to Yojimbo, went from 1,220 items and a 1.3GB library in Evernote, to 1,432 items and a 403MB library in Yojimbo. His database weighed in at one-third the size after the migration. Obviously none of his audio or video attachments were able to be transferred into Yojimbo, but that’s not the only reason the database was shored up. Evernote treats text files as HTML and uses WebKit to render notes. Patrick and I agree that, because of the way Evernote handles even basic text notes, extra size gets added due to the code which is wrapped around even the simplest of notes.)

If Yojimbo offered multiple syncing options, such as over-the-air, same-wireless-network (like Things), and USB, it could allow for a user’s first sync to be over USB. Thus getting the initial heavy lifting of the data over to the iPhone that way, and then allowing wi-fi and/or over-the-air sync as the default.

Ultimately, without over-the-air syncing Yojimbo would not be the world’s best info-management mobile app. The biggest need for me wouldn’t be having my notes with me all the time, but having them with me at an unanticipated moment.

This is exactly why Apple’s iDisk app for the iPhone isn’t that exciting for me. It meets a perceived need, but not a real-life need. If I know ahead of time what documents, songs, and images I will want on my iPhone then hooray for me that I can drop them onto my iDisk and find them later. But it’s virtually impossible to plan ahead for all the items I may want access to when away from my computer. Let alone, just the files that I would only want to view, listen to, or share (since iDisk files are read only on the iPhone).

App Development

Functionality isn’t all that Bare Bones has to consider. Designing an iPhone version of a desktop app requires much to be reconciled. As I wrote about in my review of Things, when creating an iPhone version of a desktop app you can’t just drag and drop the code and click the “iPhoneitize This” button. You have to completely start from scratch.

There are two dynamics to successfully building two versions of the same app onto two unique platforms (one for iPhone and one for the Mac).

1. Both apps need to feel native on their respective platform. The iPhone app needs to feel like it belongs on the iPhone, and the desktop app needs to feel like it belongs there. This doesn’t just mean the GUI should be different. It also means the layout and display of core functionality, along with the flow of navigation and the user interaction within the application all have to pull together to form a well developed iPhone app that still has striking familiarity to its desktop counterpart.

2. Both apps need to feel like they are one in the same. Meaning, the Bare Bones team will have to reconcile the two-fold need for their iPhone version of Yojimbo to feel like a native iPhone app while also feeling like the very same application they’ve made for the desktop.

   Not only would the Yojimbo iPhone app need to stand on its own for those who only use it on the iPhone, it must also feel like a natural extension of the desktop version for those who will use both.

Reconciling these goals is the same issue Apple had to tackle with apps such as iCal and Mail. iPhone’s Calendar app feels great all by itself, but if you also use iCal on your Mac you don’t necessarily feel like you’re working with two different programs. They are simultaneously the same and different.

Moreover, the problem of Plain Text versus Rich Text notes would have to be solved. iPhone OS doesn’t have native rich-text-editing features. Yojimbo’s iPhone app would have a handful of possibilities for how they would let users make edits to a rich text note:

• Strip all formatting, turn the note into plain text, and let the user edit;

• Keep formatting, but any text that is added/edited would be unformatted;

• Not allow edits of notes, only appending of new text (this is how Evernote handles it);

• Build an in-app rich text editor (see: Documents to Go [iTunes link]).

Based on how I most use Yojimbo, I would be happy to have a “convert to plain text-only” option that would allow me full read/write access in sacrifice of rich text notes.

In the mean time, however, I get along just fine without an iPhone Yojimbo app. When I think of an idea or something that I know I’ll want in Yojimbo I usually just email it to myself. Otherwise I throw it into Simplenote.

Though I did have this crazy idea of using Evernote and Yojimbo. Not sure if it’s feasible, or worth the trouble, but I had this thought about scripting Evernote to export all its notes as RTF and then have Yojimbo import them. It could be set to run once or twice a day automatically, and that way I could use the Evernote iPhone app for capture and the note would automatically end up in Yojimbo. It simultaneously seems cool and over the top; it may be easier to just set up a Mail rule and a script instead.

Final Miscellany

• Reliability: I can’t think of one time Yojimbo has even beach balled on me, let alone crashed. It is a solid, fast, and well-made app. It is one thing to complain that a feature is missing, and quite another to complain that an implemented feature is busted. Anyone can do the former, but in Yojimbo the latter is hard to come by.

• Security: Perhaps Most important of all, your data is safe. Not only does Yojimbo use industrial strength encryption, it also doesn’t jack with your data. The data and files you import stay untouched, making it just as easy to pull your images, PDFs, and what have you, out as it was to put them in.

• The New Icon: Not a fan of the new gear box.

• Web Archives: If I archive a Web page, Yojimbo provides no easy way to go back to the original permalink of that archived page.

  Moreover, I don’t often use Yojimbo to archive for the sake of reading later, but for the sake of usefulness later — archiving articles which I may need as references one day. Having an easy (or at least obvious) way to return to the permalink of archived Web pages would be most appreciated.

  Update: I just discovered that the URL for a Web archived item exists in the Comments section of the item and there is are contextual menu items to copy and visit the original URL in your default browser. (Thanks Steve!)

  

• Jon Hicks 3-Panel Widescreen Hack: Changes the default layout of the Yojimbo window and turns it into a three-panel widescreen layout, not unlike the one found in NetNewsWire. (Currently only works in 1.5.1)

• Better Keyboard Navigation: By far and away, the keyboard navigation is the most frustrating user interaction in Yojimbo for me.

  There is no easy way to move around in the Yojimbo UI using the arrow keys. This is what I adore most about NetNewsWire — how easy it is to move left, right, up, and down between groups, feeds, and items using nothing but the arrow keys. Having this capability within Yojimbo would be a dream. Especially the ability to quickly get from the search box to the list of returned search items without having to use the mouse.

• A Preference Option for New Notes to Be Created as Plain Text by Default: Nine times out of ten when I’m dropping in copy/pasted text as a new note I don’t want the former stylizing that came with it. This is how I do email, and I’d be delighted to see the same in Yojimbo.

Listed in order of noteworthiness to the author:

• Quicksilver: Version B56a7 was posted Friday, and though it’s labeled as Snow Leopard compatible, I couldn’t even get it to launch at first. I was only updating the Quicksilver app in my Applications folder, but that wasn’t enough. I also had to delete Quicksilver’s application support folder (~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver) before replacing the app itself.

  The horror of having to delete the app support folder was the loss of all Quicksilver’s “learned behaviors” — years of Quicksilver learning and memorizing my workflow just thrown in the trash. So I decided it was time to mix things up and give LaunchBar a shot.

  LaunchBar runs faultlessly on Snow Leopard. What I like most about it is how well it blends in with the OS — it very much feels like a native app (though I wish it didn’t appear up top by the Menu Bar), and in only a few days of use LaunchBar has mostly acclimated itself to my most-used apps and files.

  After using LaunchBar, I realize that what I liked most about Quicksilver wasn’t so much its power, but rather its mystery. As if every time I used it I wasn’t just launching an app, I was doing a magic trick. To truly dive deep into a relationship with Quicksilver isn’t to become a power user, but rather, a magician.

  Which is to say, what I like least about LaunchBar isn’t its smaller feature set compared to Quicksilver, but rather its lack of mystique and awe.

  Truly, the difference in feature scope is not a big deal. Because what LaunchBar lacks in its support of custom keyboard shortcuts for triggering AppleScripts, applications, and more, can easily be amended with Daniel Jalkut’s notorious FastScripts.1

  The shortcut triggers I used in Quicksilver were to launch apps, AppleScripts, and Javascript bookmarklets that I frequently use. For instance: instead of hitting cmd+space, followed by the letter ‘m’ and then return, I could just hit cmd+shift+m to launch (or switch to) Mail.

  But now, a simple three-line AppleScript takes care of the exact same workflow. I just tell FastScripts to run this script whenever I press cmd+shift+m and I’m as good as gold.

  Tell application "Mail"  
      Activate
  End Tell  
  

  And although it’s hard to tell for sure – it may be due to Snow Leopard or something else – but I think FastScripts has a better trigger-to-launch response time than Quicksilver did.

• Automation and Services: Compared to how big of a breakthrough this is for OS X, I really haven’t toyed with it enough. Services and automation are such fantastic and powerful features of OS X, but up till now they’ve mostly been ignored or treated as annoying second-class citizens. Just the fact that this got so much T.L.C. from Apple makes a lot of us very happy. And there are so many ways to use these new features, and they are so easy to use and implement, Snow Leopard is sure to make partial nerds such as myself feel like full-fledged, bona fide nerds.

• EPS Files and Quick Look: The actual EPS image is now visible in Quick Look instead of the pixelated EPS icon we’ve been spacebaring into for the past two years. Designers, et al. rejoice.

• Seriously Snappy: In Snow Leopard launching apps, moving files, compressing folders, booting up, shutting down, waking from sleep, and more, are all noticeably faster.

• Exposé: The subtle layout and GUI tweaks, along with better integration with the Dock, have made it feel much more sturdy and easy to use. I very much appreciate how Snow Leopard differentiates a minimized window with one that is not, by displaying them smaller and at the bottom. It used to be that minimized windows didn’t show up in Exposé at all.

• The Dock: Speaking of minimized windows, they can now shrink into their application’s icon in the Dock, rather than becoming a new addition by the trash. This is an option that can be selected under Dock in the System Preferences.

  And two of my favorite new GUI designs (not that there are many to choose from anyway) are the new contextual menu you get when you click and hold an icon in the Dock, and how the whole screen gets dim except for the clicked-on icon.

  

  Though it’s not all roses. As Pat Dryburgh pointed out, clicking and holding on the Trash icon in a left- or right-aligned Dock that’s pinned to the bottom will display its contextual menu about two icons above the Trash.

• The Installation Process: I always prefer to install a major new OS release onto the blank canvas of an erased hard drive. It’s an ideal time to shake my feet from the dust of unused apps and preferences.

  In previous releases it has been easy to choose to erase and install. This time, not so much. There was no clear option to “Erase and Install”. Once I had inserted the install disc I had read a PDF that listed the info on how to erase down towards the bottom — as if an afterthought. Basically, there is no standard option to Erase and install anymore. You have to to do it the old-fashioned way by re-starting your computer, launching Disc Utility, choosing to erase your hard drive, and then begin the installation process. No doubt too many people were innocently wiping their hard drives clean. Apple wants to make sure you are really aware of what you’re doing. So much so, that it even made me second guess the whole process.

  In the past, once I have my fresh OS installed, I have only ever imported my user preferences during the initial startup process. Then, I setup .Mac (now MobileMe) and sync from the cloud to my computer. Next I would re-download and install any applications – from memory so as to only install the ones I knew I used – and import their app support and library files from my backup.

  But this time was different. Before the install as I was sifting through my applications folder, I only found ten apps I don’t regularly use. So instead of re-installing everything from scratch this time, I simply deleted the ten and after installing Snow Leopard imported everything from my old user account. (This is more or less the exact same thing as doing an archive and install, except that it takes twice as long.)

• Dictionary: This oft-used app now remembers – and keeps open – any previously looked-up words until you actually close their window. Meaning, if I look up synonyms of creative in the thesaurus, quit, and then later highlight ignominious from Safari and choose “Look Up in Dictionary” from the contextual menu, there will be two windows open when Dictionary launches: the previous one with the synonyms of creative, and the new one, with the definition of ignominious. Currently I find this is simultaneously helpful and annoying.

  Also new to the Dictionary app is a Chose the Right Word tailpiece. It’s a semi-brief snippet of text meant to “show fine distinctions in meaning between closely related synonyms to help you find the best word.” It isn’t there for every word, just some. Like creative:

  Choose The Right Word

  creative, inventive, original, resourceful, imaginative, ingenious

  Everyone likes to think that he or she is creative, which is used to describe the active, exploratory minds possessed by artists, writers, and inventors (a creative approach to problem-solving). Today, however, creative has become an advertising buzzword (creative cooking, creative hair-styling) that simply means new or different.
  Original is more specific and limited in scope. Someone who is original comes up with things that no one else has thought of (an original approach to constructing a doghouse), or thinks in an independent and creative way (a highly original filmmaker).
  Imaginative implies having an active and creative imagination, which often means that the person visualizes things quite differently than the way they appear in the real world (imaginative illustrations for a children’s book).
  The practical side of imaginative is inventive; the inventive person figures out how to make things work (an inventive solution to the problem of getting a wheelchair into a van).
  But where an inventive mind tends to come up with solutions to problems it has posed for itself, a resourceful mind deals successfully with externally imposed problems or limitations (A resourceful child can amuse herself with simple wooden blocks).
  Someone who is ingenious is both inventive and resourceful, with a dose of cleverness thrown in (the ingenious idea of using recycled plastic to create a warm, fleecelike fabric).

• The Addition of Four-Finger Gestures for All Multi-Touch Trackpads: I’m on a previous model MacBook Pro and keep forgetting I can use these now.

• Menlo: The cool new monospace font that ships with Snow Leopard. I would compare it to Panic Sans in that it seems great for writing code, but not to Inconsolata in that Menlo stinks for writing lengthy amounts of text (in MarsEdit). Moreover, since Menlo comes with four weights it’s great for writing and editing AppleScript.

• TimeMachine: The first backup after installing took over 24 hours (6:00pm Friday until 7:00pm Saturday). First it calculated changes, then erased my entire TimeMachine backup, did an entirely new backup, and once done told me my backup disk was almost full.

• Gamma 2.2: This is now the default instead of 1.8. This is the same default as Windows, and means the graphics have more contrast. It’s most noticeable with dark images / backgrounds.

Currently, there are nearly 30,000 words worth of software and hardware reviews hidden on this site. And until today there wasn’t a one-stop-spot for all the reviews I’ve written. Which is why I felt it was high-time these articles became first-class citizens by receiving a dedicated table of contents page.

I had the honor of helping beta test Fever over the past year, and six months ago I actually switched away from NetNewsWire and now use Fever exclusively.

It really is that hot.

The reason I switched is because the selling point of Fever (subscribe to as many feeds as humanly possible, and never feel stressed about not being able to keep up with all of them) actually translated to my experience. Fever is much more than a good idea with a pretty face — Fever really works.

Up until now feed readers have pretty much had only one function, and that is to collect all your unread items. Which is why the only solution to feed-reader overload is to slash and hack your subscription list.

Naturally, Fever works splendidly as a standard feed reader. You can group and browse your feeds just like you always have. But it doesn’t stop there, and neither should you.

Suppose you want to simply check in quickly and see if anything new or exciting is going on. In any other reader you would have to scan through all your feeds, and mentally assess what’s going on. That’s a lot of thinking, and it certainly doesn’t happen quickly. Which is why people are constantly feeling the need to cut back on feeds.

Yet this is the main point of Fever.

As Shaun put it, “Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.” Which means the more feeds you’re subscribed to, the better Fever works. Go nuts! Subscribe to as many feeds as you can.

All these extra feeds are called “Sparks”. Once you subscribe to them, you never have to look at them, sort through them, or worry about them again. But you DO get to use them to help keep your Hot tab alive and active.

It’s Hotter in a Site-Specific Browser

The way I check feeds in Fever is the same way I used to check feeds in NetNewsWire: using the arrow keys exclusively to find new articles, but reading the articles on their respective websites. This is why I prefer to run Fever in Fluid.

In Fluid’s preferences, under Behavior, I checked the box for links sent to default browser to open in the background. Since I like to read articles in their perspective author’s site, when I right-arrow out to an article or a link it then opens up in Safari, and in the background. Once I’ve opened up the small handful of things I want to read, I close Fever and begin reading.

If Fluid is opening an additional tab or window every time you arrow out to an article then go to Fever’s preferences (not Fluid’s), and de-select “open links in new window/tab”.

Hot Tips

• Make sure you put the Feedlet into your browser’s bookmark bar. You can’t set Fever as your default RSS reader in Safari’s preferences, so clicking on the RSS icon in the Address Bar won’t subscribe you to the feed in Fever.
• The main keyboard shortcuts I use are “a” (for marking an entire feed as read), and “s” (for saving an article). Fever has a slew of keyboard shortcuts; you can find them in Fever’s main menu.
• Selecting “Show Unread” from the menu, or pressing “u”, will show you only the feeds that actually have unread items in them. Removing the clutter of lots of feeds that have old articles you already read last month.
• Though the iPhone interface of Fever is extremely slick, it can get a bit borked when you visit a webpage. A quick tilt of the phone to change the orientation will fix it.
• Fever installs automatically, and its updates are pushed automatically (not unlike WordPress’ in-app update feature).
• In Fluid’s General Preferences I’ve checked to show the dock badge. This way you can see your unread count in the dock (assuming you want to).

If you need some help getting Fever populated, here is my current OPML file, which includes about 200 feeds altogether.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.