Quick thoughts on the iPad

as I’m writing this on my iPhone on a flight across the country for a business meeting I can’t stop thinking how nice it would be to have a ipad right now (of course I would want the 3g version). I see a lot of potential for the iPad as a third device, but have decided to no get one just yet (mostly since I’m looking to replace my MacBook Air with a new MacBook Pro).

Travel is one of the few situations where I really see great utility for the iPad. In my current case, the iPhone is just a bit too small to really consume the content I would like (read it later, instapaper, kindle, & manage personal email) as well as battery life issues., Since I’m traveling my large bulky work laptop hauling my MacBook Air as well is just too much. Sure, one could say just use your work machine. First, I think most people would like to keep their personal files off of their employers computer, and second the battery life on average laptops isn’t that great (mine is less than 2).

This is where the ipad would shine, great battery life and about the size of a tablet of paper. Additionally, I would love to get an ipad rather than spend a sizable chunk of change on a pretty well equipped 15″ MacBook pro. If only there were a slick photo management app for the iPad that would sync with Aperture on my desktop (don’t need the editing features, just want to be able to do the organization projects, flagging, rating, metadata) I wouldn’t have a need for a MacBook pro. Humm.. there’s an app idea for someone. only problem then is storage space, which is where a push to the could would be really helpful.

iTunes podcast sharing between computers

I listen/ watch a LOT of podcasts and mange them through iTunes on my primary mac. I find it pretty easy to keep current on the audio ones by listening to them on my iPhone while working throughout the day, but the video podcasts just seem to pile up because they require more attention and are harder to multi-task to. As a result, they rarely get watched on my iPhone, in fact I don’t even sync most of them.

So I have been looking for a workflow solution to keep current and get through the backlog of video podcasts. While I spend a good amount of time in the mornings and evenings at my primary mac I find myself using most of the screen real estate for photo processing or other tasks which doesn’t leave me with a lot of room to play the video podcasts on this machine. Moreover, unlike audio podcasts, I have found when playing a video in a separate window iTunes does not advance to the next video when the current one finishes playing. This requires a lot of back and forth between what I’m working on and iTunes.

Flickr iPhone app

I am really happy to see that Flickr.com released an iPhone app some time back. Since it’s release I’ve spent a little bit of time with it. The app is a great way to view other users pictures, and that is a plus. However, what continues to boggle my mind with this app, even in the latest release, is when you try to upload a photo from your own library the app replaces the time the photo was taken with the current date and time and will not upload the photos geolocation data (in the previous version it would always use the location you were uploading the photo from, now in the latest version you can turn that off, but it does not seem to use the embedded geolocation of the photo). So I am left wondering why on earth is Flickr’s app messing with the EXIF data of my photos? It makes absolutely no sense.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Flickr Officially Comes to the iPhone (mashable.com)
• Flickr iPhone App (marcforrest.com)

iPhone 3Gs

Finally decided to take the plunge over the weekend and upgrade my iPhone 3G to the 3Gs!!!

I had become so frustrated with the speed of the 3G. Hopefully, the 3Gs will be significantly faster. So thats my new toy to play with. I’m looking forward to a better camera. Ideally, it may be able to replace a point and shoot.

iPhone rant #2

Continuing my rants about the iPhone (which I still love, it’s a sort of love hate thing). In most all native apps the screen changes to landscape view at the slightest hand gesture sideways but it seems nearly impossible to get the screen back to portrait orientation. Come on Apple! either make it just as sensitive to switching back to portrait or let me disable landscape view. This happens to me at least half a dozen times a day.

Twitter overload?

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a big twitter user. Previously, I’ve tried to find the perfect twitter client for me (worked only so well). However, recently I’ve started to feel the brunt of twitter (coupled with Google Reader) overload. I follow a good number of people and do try to read everything that comes across, which I feel is part of the problem I’m now facing. I’ve being coming around to the idea that twitter is a lot about stepping into the stream and then back out, consuming what you want while in the stream and ignoring what happens when not.

As a result, earlier this week I started to pair back on some of the people (in many cases bots) that I followed. For most of these twitter feeds I simply moved them from my twitter timeline and into Google reader as RSS feeds. So far, it’s been an enjoyable experience. Most of the users I transitioned were feeds or users who posted a lot of links; being able to consuming these links during my RSS time seems more efficient.

Now I’m left with one more issue to tackle, within my twitter stream there people I follow that I would prefer to see all tweets from, or at least the majority of them, even for the periods that I am “out of the stream”. Sure, I could add these to SMS notifications but I really hate twitter over SMS. The iPhone handles SMS poorly and I already get too many notifications on my iPhone. So I’m looking for an alternative to SMS for a subset of the people I follow.

I’ve considered hiring a programmer to modify the email twitter client that I had made to only email me tweets from select users in my feed. I like this idea; it allows me to continue to manage just one list of friends and the ability to read all the tweets no matter how long I am out of the stream. The downsides: 1) cost, hiring a programmer=$, 2) since I spend a lot of time in my main stream there’s the risk too many emails will pile up and go unmanaged from the time I’m in the stream and I’ll end up ignoring these emails during the times I anticipated using the system.

At this point I am going to try and setup an additional twitter account to follow this subset of people and launch that timeline when need be. The downside is maintaining two accounts and the potential confusion other people may have with the situation (so if you get followed by my second account you knows what’s up). The advantage being it should take quite a while for 200 tweets (the upper limit for most twitter clients to pull) to cycle through this timeline.

So I’m looking for alternative and am open to any suggestions, please let me know if you have any thoughts.

Apple’s 9/9/09 event

There has been a lot of speculation the last few days over what Apple will release or talk about at tomorrows event. In general, I’ve taken much of the talk leading up to previous events with a large grain of salt, just as I am tomorrows. I don’t think we’ll see an apple tablet, although I can’t wait for one to come out (or the CruchPad if its out first). But stepping back from tomorrows event and thinking about the next 12 months for iTunes/iPods/iPhones I personally feel moving to the cloud would be the biggest “revolutionary” step for Apple to make right now. MG had a good post on this topic today, and it rang true for me. I run iTunes on my iMac, which in turn is the central place for all my music, iPod/ iPhone syncing, and as a result photo storage. Its the only computer with enough storage to handle it. But I would love to be able to sync my iPhone with my MacBook Air while traveling, or play music from my Library through iTunes on the Air, or at my work computer. Such functionaly is going to come, its already coming, the quesion is will Apple lead or will another player steal their thunder.

Besides an iTunes in the cloud, i think updated iPod touch’s that include GPS and a camera would be nice. Not necessary but nice. I would actually like a large capacity Touch to put all my media on that would have GPS (camera don’t care so much about) to travel with. As a result of the limited iPhone battery and my constant usage of the device I’m basically unable to play music on the iPhone and would shell out for a second device to travel with. Even more impressive would be functionality to keep two device “in sync” so that application data would be shared between two device. The goal being a seemless user experience transition between devices (including data stored in applications) *even more important for an Apple Tablet, assuming it runs an iPhone like OS*.

On a related topic, come on Apple why can I not sync my iPhone/iPod Touch with my Mac via Wi-Fi if I’m on the same network? That would simplify things greatly.

Google Calendar Quick add via email?

For a wile I have been looking for an easy way to add entries to my google calendar. I’m a pretty heavy user of google calendar and love the existing quick add option from the web site or via SMS. but sadly, SMS is just too slow and buggy on my iPhone these days to make it useful for me to quickly add items to my calendar. What I really want is the ability to add items via an email address.Frankly, I can’t believe Google hasn’t already added this feature. I can add doc’s via email why can’t I create an appointment via email?  Come on google calender.

Until google creates an official option, does anyone know of a work around?

Another great iPhone advert

LEAKED: New iPhone Commercial

iPhone rant #1

While I love the iPhone there are a few elements of the functionality that I really don’t like.

Bugging me the most lately is the fact that you can not end a call (unless you are using a headset) without first clearing through (selecting close or view) EVERY text message received while on the call.

This may not seem that annoying, but with how often I get SMS messages from twitter and other people cobmined with confrence calls it becomes really annoying. Even for the short calls.  I REALLY JUST WANT TO END MY CALL, I’LL DEAL WITH THE TEXT MESSAGES LATER.  What I don’t want to happen is for me to forget about the text messages just so I can end a call.

Please Apple fix this.

What little quarks about the iPhone aggravate you?