Excellent blog post on Cocoia by Sebastiaan de With.

“Fortunately, there’s not that much stuff in the iPad UI that I’d call ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’. Apple has shown once more that they’re at the top of their game, and the interface is sublime. If iPad had preceded iPhone, we’d all be lyrical and hopeful for a smaller device that did even a few percent of its awesome feature set. Instead, this natural evolution of the iPhone OS is being heckled by people that fail to see how extending the underlying ideas of iPhone’s UI helps interaction with ‘serious’ applications like iWork.”

A must read.

The reaction to the official iPad announcement has been hilarious. Pretty much like every official announcement, it seems like you have to either completely love or hate something in order to give your opinion about it. But while this way of thinking doesn’t work in real life, so it doesn’t in technology. You can’t judge a new device in 2 hours, just as you can’t in a week or in one month. And please notice that the iPad it’s only been announced: it will be out in 2 months.

That said, I think people are missing the whole point about Apple’s newest creation when comparing it to a big sized iPhone. Sure, it looks like a fat iPhone if you ask me. Point is, it doesn’t feel like an iPhone at all and the fact that it looks like the iPhone is actually the explanation of what I’m talking about. Plain and simple. Don’t get me wrong: the user interface is very similar to iPhone OS, it takes some elements from it (toolbars, buttons, icons) and pushes them into another dimension. I don’t know how this OS will be named, but iPad OS doesn’t sound bad at all. The big difference between the looks like and the feels like problems lie in the screen size itself. Many people can’t look beyond the form factor thing and they just go out and say “it’s a larger iPhone”. I can’t blame them if they don’t have a vision. By creating a product with more screen real estate, Apple will provide a device with more information on it. All those menus that you used to have in a dedicated tab in your iPhone can now be accessed with a single tap on a button without losing the information you’re looking at. It’s in the user flow where the iPad will be different from the iPhone: you can do things faster, in one place, without losing or breaking the experience.

Take a look at the Mail app, my favorite so far: you don’t have to go back and forth between the inbox and the single message view, you just hit a button and boom, here’s the “contextual menu” for that, with the inbox listing your incoming messages. I can go on with this for hours, but I’m pretty sure Tweetie for the iPad won’t have a single compose window anymore.

Second of all, the iPad we saw yesterday isn’t about tech specs. Neither it will be in 6 months or later this year. Sure it’s got a pretty aluminium case, a gorgeous shiny screen and 802.11n wifi, but I believe Steve wanted to put the focus on the reason you need it rather than plain numbers.

“We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts - we want to make the best tech, but have them be intuitive. It’s the combination of these two things that have let us make the iPad”

A great piece of tech, which has to be so great and yet intuitive to establish itself in a third category of products. This leads me to the question “Do I need an iPad?”. Yes I do. Speaking for myself, I need a device I could carry around the house, in the garden or in bed that lets me access and work with my stuff. That lets me check and manage my stuff. Couldn’t I use an iPhone for that? I could, and I’m currently using it. But this doesn’t mean it could be a lot better and most of all, the iPhone doesn’t let me manage data. I check things (stats, docs) but I don’t manage them. The iPhone is a device meant for “checking and accessing the most important things of your life” on the go. Nobody ever said it could be your mobile office, and Office clones apps in the App Store don’t justify that. I don’t write posts on my iPhone. With an iPad running iWork, I probably will.

I’m not saying the iPad it’s perfect, because it’s not. The OS is still incomplete, it’s a first iteration and we all know how much the iPhone got better in 3 years. I’m just saying that the iPad has a reason to exist, that there’s room for a 3rd category of products and Apple can fill that empty space. And as Josh Helfferich said yesterday “this is how past computing dies — with thunderous applause”.

Right after Steve unveiled the iPad yesterday, I started wondering what was the developers’ reaction to the product. I had the chance to chat with Michael Flarup, a graphic designer who’s currently working at Robocat. We reviewed Robocat’s first application, Outside, and we loved it.

Enough for the presentations, let’s see what Michael thinks about the iPad.

Read more

Full Interview

“As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It’s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.”

But your children aren’t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.”

Have you ever wished to type faster on your keyboard? I bet you have. Well, Snow Leopard comes with a very powerful built-in tool a not so many people know, and it’s called Text Substitutions. Pretty much what TextExpander offers at $30 comes built-in for free into Mac OS X. Maybe Snow Leopard’s text substitutions aren’t as customizable as TextExpander ones, but sure they get the job done. Setting them up it’s easy and fast, but the menu is hidden into System Preferences app. Also, you have to be sure that the application you’d like to use text replacements with supports that feature (just take a look at the contextual menu of the app).

Enjoy!

Federico Viticci on Vimeo.

Another VideoStories post, another awesome review by Cody. In his quest for the perfect windows management app, today Cody takes a look at SizeUp, a cool app by Irradiated Software which lets you move and resize windows with just your keyboard.

Some weeks ago I reviewed Cinch, another app from the Irradiated guys, which brings the Windows 7’s Aero Snap feature to Mac OS X. SizeUp seems to be more geeky and a little bit more difficult to set up, but I’m sure many of you are gonna love this.

And remember: for every Mac, there’s a story.

VideoStories: SizeUp, Reviewed By Cody Fink from Federico Viticci on Vimeo.

I knew there was something going on around Mail.app and a secret project an “all-star team” was discussing, but Ars Technica has just made the thing real. Seems that people like Brent Simmons, Gus Meuller, Cabel Sasser and John Gruber are indeed working on Letters, the app that probably will replace Mail.app as our default email client.

The story is very long actually, so I suggest you to read the whole post over at Ars, and this could be a real revolution. A team of Mac OS X third party developers and bloggers that team up to create the perfect Mail application?

You just made stop thinking about the Tablet. And that’s definitely something.

John Casasanta from Tap Tap Tap and Macheist has posted an article regarding the sales figures for Convert since its August ‘09 launch. He then analyzes the current situation of Mac development, and how in his opinion the App Store is affecting it by providing higher revenues for developers and a more focused, yet powerful way of distributing applications.

From the post:

“The App Store has proven to be a super-efficient distribution system. In a nutshell, you can earn a lot of money even with 99¢ apps because you can reach so many people. Conversely, the Mac shareware market has always comparatively been very inefficient. Developers depend on services like VersionTracker, MacUpdate, i use this, and even Apple’s own Mac OS X Downloads site, etc for small publicity/sales spikes. But all of these sites (including Apple’s) get far less attention than the App Store.

[…]

Because of the much smaller reach and resulting far lower number of Mac software sales compared to iPhone, developers have had to compensate by keeping prices at a much higher point. But this is also what’s kept the market down and now on a decline, unfortunately.”

Is the Mac market really..dead? Or is it just going through an evolution that might revitalize it with the release of 10.7? No doubt things are going to change, or everyone will start developing iPhone apps. But what will happen when the iPhone market will be saturated?

Oh yeah, there’s the Tablet one.

Great piece over at GoSquared’s Liquidicity blog, surely worth a read.

From the post:

“Apple’s responsible for kickstarting the touch screen revolution with the iPhone, so why would they do anything other than push themselves as far as possible along the trajectory they’ve already begun? When you consider the possibility of Apple building a device that not only sits alongside your iPhone, but replaces your MacBook, the game changes. Whatever Apple’s tablet finally shows up as, I’m pretty sure it’ll be more “this is the end of keyboard and mouse computing as we know it” than “oh it’s a big iPhone”