Thoughts on iOS5/Lion/iCloud

On June 6th, Steve Jobs gave the WWDC 2011 keynote address and announced Lion, iOS5 and iCloud (the replacement for the stillborn MobileMe).

I am looking forward to iOS5 (due sometime in the Fall) more than Lion (due in July, upgrade from Snow Leopard for $30). iCloud is interesting, but I don't know if Apple can pull it off this time, given the past failures.

The biggest and most welcome surprise was the un-tethering of the iDevices from the PC. iDevices with iOS5 will "work" out-of-the-box without first being required to be connected to a PC. I can give a child an iDevice and it will work after a minimal setup.

The un-tethering also means freedom from being held hostage by that pig of an application called iTunes, which surprisingly was the original reason I joyfully switched to a Mac after using iTunes on Windows/XP, but which became a tiresome annoyance since it was co-opted (via the AppStore) to do more than its share of heavy lifting. Sub-textually, I look forward to iCloud as a replacement for iTunes.

The second surprise was iMessage (instant messaging including video and photos via Wifi or 3G between iOS5 devices securely (?) through Apple's servers) which aims to destroy the BlackBerry Messaging system, the last feature that RIM could claim as a distinguishing feature of its devices and kills the SMS cash-cow that mobile carriers have been milking. (I get the distinct impression that Apple (and Google) want to bypass the carriers entirely. I can see Google becoming/spinning-off a network carrier company.)

Unfortunately, iMessage also creates a walled garden of iOS devices. (Update: AppleInsider reports that iMessage is built on the open-standards XMPP. Update 2: iMessage can be used for group SMS) I am certain that Google will have a similar solution soon, but the lack of interoperability between everyone's messaging systems disappoints me.

Aside: Microsoft recently purchased Skype, to compete with Apple's Facetime and Google's WebRTC. If the past is any indication, Skype will be dead in 2 years (there were two major uncheduled outages (no doubt due to infrastructure re-configuration)  after the purchase. Even though Facetime is an open standard, Google has chosen an alternative solution.

I would like to predict that in the near future, there will be a start-up that will magically allow iOS devices to message Androids and Facetime users to chat with Android users.

April 2011 Apps

I have been remiss in keeping track of new Apps I have downloaded which were mostly games...

I found out about Terra, a tabbed browser, just yesterday. Do I trust that if I type in my passwords, they are not being sent off to third parties? No. It's nice for surfing though.

Having deleted Flipboard because of boring content, I have been using Zite instead and find it has a lot of interesting articles. Recommended.

The Google App's most impressive feature is voice-search. Recommended for demo purposes.

Shredder Lite (iPhone) is a chess program that uses the Shredder engine.

Pop-out Peter Rabbit ($3.99) is an interactive book which reads itself or by tapping on a specific word. There is a lite version you can try out. Recommended if you have kids or as a demo app.

G-Form iPad Case

The G-Form case is a reactive armour case for the iPad that stiffens whenever a sharp force is applied to the normal looking fabric.

In the video, an iPad encased in the G-Form case survives the impact of a bowling ball dropped from a height of 3 feet on to the glass face.

People spend more time with tablets (iPads, really)

According to a recent survey by Google, people spend more time with tablets (iPads, really) than other content delivery systems like TVs, and books.

"The Secret Garden" Illustrated EPub at Project Gutenberg

Frances Hodgson-Burnett's classic, The Secret Garden, (with illustrations and without) is available at Project Gutenberg as an EPub edition for iBooks.

I was going through the list of 50 books every child should read.

YKYBUTiTLW...

You Know You've Been Using the iPad Too Long When... you're reading the newspaper (the NY Sunday Times in this case) and you look up at the top of the newspaper page to check the time.

I expected to find a status-bar with the clock right next to the date.

A Review of the NY Times for the iPad App

The experience of reading the NY Times on the iPad is similar to eating at an a la carte restaurant. The news is segregated into separate compartments that begin and end abruptly with visits to the main menu. I would prefer a more continuous experience of reading the entire newspaper at a single sitting with the ability to bookmark the place if I am interrupted. The App also lacks the social aspects (as found on nytimes.com) of being able to publicly comment on an article.

The experience also lacks features that are possible with a real newspaper:
  - clipping and saving an article for reference later
  - hilighting (or copying and pasting) a small section of an article
  - "starring" a particularly well written article
  - after the newspaper is delivered to my house, it is "instantly on"; the App however, takes some time to get started and after it does, it starts with the articles from the last time I was reading. One would think that it would be downloading new content while I stare at a white screen with the NY Times logo.