The key board – haven’t quite gotten used to it. It might be the same, technically, as the iPhone or iPod touch keyboard but it doesn’t feel the same when using it. On the iPhone, my fingers are so big that I have to use it and just believe that I’ll hit the correct key.and I do but it feels a bit like magic. On the iPad? I have to pay a bit more attention to the keyboard.

And I really want some arrow keys. I’m having real problems moving the insertion point in text boxes. Mostly because the text is so small. That being another gripe. The text being small on an iPhone makes sense because the device is small. But a lot of these iPhone apps modified for the iPad don’t allow me to change the font size. Instead, I’m stuck with iPhone sized fonts. I don’t remember seeing a default font size setting for the iPad. Hopefully that will be in iOS 4.0 (no, I haven’t looked. I haven’t had a chance to really dig into it yet.)

Font size in Mobile Safari is another issue. I want it to work like it does in regular Safari or even Firefox — increase just the font size, not the whole viewport. (In grown-up Safari it’s “View-Zoom Text Only”) Some websites provide that on their pages but not all. In some cases I can do the double-tap to zoom in on a chunk of text but that only works if the page uses markup elements that make sense.

Pages – a similar problem – I want the text to be zoomable but not permanently but I can’t find a way to do it.

Looks like all of my problems would be solved by text being zoomable. My insertion point issue would also work better with larger display fonts. Now I just to tell Apple.

(more to say on actual apps and usage later…)

Apple changed the Developers Agreement for OS 4.0 yesterday. There’s been a mild uproar from the usual suspects — folks whom it would never affect anyway since they never plan on doing Apple/iPhone development – for whatever reason.

The basic idea appears to be that – if you (developer/software co.) want to sell your iPhone app thru the iTunes AppStore, you have to use Apple approved software dev. tools. Of which there appears to be only 1. XCode 3.2.3+. And Apple approved API’s and libraries. Which means – C, C++, and Objective-C (which is C with a twist of Smalltalk syntax). And none of the cross-platform tools ->

Some pundits claim it’s a shot across the bows of Adobe, since it basically kills off their CS5/Flash to iPhone app generator (that they are supposed to announce/release next week. Ouch.). (Another skirmish in the Apple/Adobe Flash-wars?)

Another possible victim is Novell’s MonoTouch (It lets you use Mono (Novell’s .NET clone) and C# to develop iPhone Apps.)

And then there’s iSqueak – a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) for the iPhone. Not sure where it fits in – it might survive since it IS built with XCode. (Not that you can get it from the App Store since it breaks at least one App Store rule. But the the person who ported it to the iPhone has used it to generate several iPhone Apps that are in the store.)

I believe there are a could other similar cross-platform development tools that violate the new rules but I don’t remember them.

Me? I couldn’t afford the Adobe tools anyway. Monotouch was $1000/year the last time I checked. iSqueak? I’ve been tinkering with Squeak for years but never written anything “real” (I just like the environment). So none of those really affect me.

Apple only charges $99/year for their iPhone Dev. program (aka access to the App Store) but XCode is free (It just requires a Mac to run it on. And a test device would be good when using beta versions of the iPhone SDK.)

So the rule change doesn’t affect me personally. I couldn’t afford the possible commercial non-Apple cross-dev tools anyway. And I’m not one of those people who thinks Apple is evil so it doesn’t really upset me.

But I really need to find the time to do something .

Since everyone, by now, has seen one of those many “iPad unboxing” videos or photos, I thought I’d do something different and photograph unboxing my official Apple[tm] iPad case

Unfortunately, it isn’t too impressive.

1. I took the pictures with my iPhone.
2. The light here isn’t the best (And the iPhone has no flash – of any kind)
3. The case is some kind of ‘sueded’ rubberized material that doesn’t photograph well with an iPhone. It appears grey-ish.
4. The light reflected on the plastic wrapper so I couldn’t get a good picture of it in that.

Maybe I’ll recreate the event when I get home ? I have a MUCH better camera there I can use.

We’ll see how well the case works out but I suspect I’ll something a bit more durable once they start coming out (I have a 1st gen iPod touch and it was months before I found a case for it that I remotely liked.). This one seems a bit flimsy AND it collects dust like crazy. When I leaned it against something to take one of those pictures it ended up grey from the dust. Guess I won’t be reselling it in a couple years on eBay (Original iPad case, slightly used.).

Compared to the case that I bought for my Newton? It isn’t that impressive. Of course, that was almost 20 years ago and only Apple was making accessories for the Newton when it came out.

I have the Mac version of iWorks. Haven’t started using it a lot yet but I do like ‘Pages’ so far. I was a huge Wordperfect fan. It got me through college (running it on an Atari ST), it was a word processor in the truest sense. Pages isn’t quite the same but put it in full screen mode and it doesn’t get in the way like Word does.

Kindle

If I buy a book from Amazon for “my” Kindle, AFAIK, that book is licensed to run on THAT Kindle.  My book. My Kindle. My Amazon Kindle account. (There’s an iPhone Kindle app but it is still tied to MY iPhone, and MY Amazon-Kindle account. Amazon assumes that I’m the person using both and that I don’t use them at the same time — I believe it tracks usage somewhere in the Amazon ‘cloud’ so that the current page in a Kindle book is also the current page in the Kindle app.)

So… 1 person. 1 copy. If someone else in your house has a kindle, they have to pay for their books separately.

Apple

Now let’s look at how Apple does media on the iTunes store (iTS) (I’m making the wild assumption that they’ll follow the same model for their iBookstore.)

The center of your iPod “digital media lifestyle” is your desktop (PC or Mac). You authorize your computer to work with your AppleID and the iTS so you can purchase media from iTS with it. I believe you can tie up to 3 desktops to a single AppleID/iTunes store account. (It’s at least three.)

Now for the fun part…

If you have multiple iPod users in your household, they can EACH sync their iPods with the same computer (or another computer attached to the same AppleID). And they each have their own sync configs. And they could ALL listen to/watch the same media at the same time.

So… how would I set that up for a family? (The simple version)

1. Create an AppleID for the household (I would also get a credit card JUST for that purpose).

2. “Attach” it to a “family computer” (A Mac mini would do it. Just make sure it has a large hard drive and at least one external drive to back things up to.).

3. Everyone uses that machine to download/purchase music.

4. Everyone in the family syncs their iPods to that machine. Some will want to sync it manually. Some not. But they can share music/media this way.

So, with Apple and the iTS, you end up with 1 copy per household, not per person.

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Have to wonder what the media people (Publishers, music industry, movie industry, etc.) think about this media distribution model.