ExtraBITS for 12 April 2010
There’s no point in denying it – nearly everything we’re reading and talking about is still about the iPad and iPhone OS 4. But it’s all good stuff, and if you’re not yet sick of the iPad, do tune into some of our podcasts and check out the articles we link to.
TidBITS Staff Discusses the iPad on MacJury Podcast — In what was perhaps the largest podcast we’ve ever participated in, nearly the entire TidBITS staff joined MacJury host Chuck Joiner to talk about the iPad. Topics ranged widely, including how it will be shared, the need for a guest mode, how we’ll interact with it as an object, and where it will fit into our digital lives. But the real reason to listen is to hear Tonya compare using the iPad to “eating pudding with your fingers,” an image that left many of us briefly speechless.
Google Developer Explains iPhone OS 4 Multitasking — A Google developer, formerly on the Android team, provides a detailed, fair, and clear explanation of how iPhone OS 4 multitasking will work. Robert Love explains the difference between true background application multitasking and Apple’s limited set of APIs that let certain processes continue to operate in the background. He also differentiates serialization (quitting an app while preserving its state precisely) and true background operations.
Jason Snell Examines Apple’s Strategic Position — Our friend Jason Snell of Macworld has a must-read piece on how Apple used the iPhone OS 4 announcement to take aim at a variety of competitors: Google’s Android operating system, App Store critics, Adobe, and (again) Google. Jason is, as usual, spot on, and his conclusion should be required reading for anyone complaining about Apple’s behavior.
Adam Discusses the iPad and iPhone OS 4 on Tech Night Owl Live — It’s been an iPad- and iPhone-intensive week, and Adam took some time out in the middle to talk with Tech Night Owl host Gene Steinberg about the first few days of iPad hands-on, along with a run-down of the most interesting bits of Apple’s iPhone OS 4 announcement.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball Reviews the iPad — Few writers put the kind of thought into user interface that John Gruber of Daring Fireball does, and that shows in his lengthy review of the iPad. It’s very much worth reading for his detailed impressions in support of why the iPad is Apple’s reconception of personal computing.
A Toddler’s First iPad Encounter — Hoping to capture her initial reactions, Todd Lapin had his camera ready when he first showed his iPad to his 2.5-year-old daughter. Aside from being cute, the footage is interesting for what it shows us about which aspects of the iPad interface are intuitive and which are less so. The clip also hammers home just how standard and ubiquitous this technology will become for the next generation.
Jeff Carlson Joins Photographers to Talk about G10/G11 Book — On a recent MacVoices podcast, Jeff Carlson joined Chuck Joiner to talk about the making of Jeff’s (almost ridiculously long-titled) book “Canon PowerShot G10/G11: From Snapshots to Great Shots.” What’s great about this episode is that they were joined by photographers Jeff Lynch and Justin Van Leeuwen, who contributed photos for the book through an experimental crowd-sourcing process using Flickr.
Tips on Traveling with Gadgets from the TSA Blog — If you’ve done any air traveling in the last several years, you know part of the process is handing over your laptop, phone, and any other gadgets for security screening. The Transportation Security Administration, responsible for air travel security measures in the U.S., offers tips in a new blog post on traveling with small gadgets such as e-readers, netbooks, and, yes, the iPad.
WeatherBug Elite for iPad Free for Limited Time — Adam’s favorite weather app for the iPhone, WeatherBug Elite, has been expanded for the iPad, and for a limited time, it’s available for free. We haven’t spent much time with it yet, but it appears to use the iPad’s larger screen to good effect, devoting most of the display to the map, and providing four zoomable panels for conditions, cameras, forecast and hourly forecast. The main missing feature appears to be pin dropping and display, but WeatherBug’s developers tell me they just couldn’t get it in for the iPad launch, and plan to add it to an update, due in the next month
or so.
First Day Impressions of the iPad on MacJury, Part Two — The madness continues as Matt Neuburg and other sleep-deprived zombies rattle on with Chuck Joiner about the first-day iPad experience.