Giles Turnbull - page 31

Folks, let me tell you a secret: I sing. I sing all the damn time. It’s a good job I work at home all by myself, because if I worked in an office I’d drive my colleagues crazy by singing at them all the time.

And since the birth of the App Store, I’ve been looking for a looper. A looper, for those who don’t know, is a musical effects pedal that grabs a short snippet of audio and, well, loops it. Over and over again. And lets you record another loop on top. Repeat, ad lib to fade.

It’s a quick and easy way to do clever things live on stage, and fun things when you’re trying to write new songs.

There’s been a load of apps that promised some kind of looping capability, and I’ve tried a bunch of them and never found anything that really nailed it. Looping needs to be ultra-simple, instantaneous and spontaneous. None of the apps I tried made that possible. None of them until Everyday Looper.

Axiotron, makers of the thing that was closest to being an iPad before the iPad was announced – the Modbook – are not going to give in without a fight. No sir.

They’ve sent out a press release today, announcing a new promotion for buyers of all new Modbooks. Something they hope will make customers think twice before buying an iPad.

Alfred is a new keyboard launcher in the spirit of Quicksilver, Butler and LaunchBar.

A (free) beta was released last weekend by the UK-based team who’ve developed it.

If you’ve ever used any of those other keyboard launchers, Alfred will be instantly familiar. You invoke it using a global shortcut, then type whatever you want to find. Type an app name to launch it, or type “google” then your search term to search Google.

It has built-in shortcuts for searching Google, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Bing, Twitter and plenty of others. It can also hunt down specific files or folders on your hard disk.

Here’s a cute little Twitter client called Pocket.

Pocket lives at the top of your display, permanently attached to your Menu Bar. Personally, that’s what I dislike about it most, but that’s because I’m a focus kind of person and I don’t want Twitter in my face the whole time. But Pocket wasn’t made for me.

No, Pocket was made for people who love having Twitter in their face the whole time, and for that purpose it totally rocks. I love the cute colors, I love the clever way that all the functionality you need is crammed into such a tiny weeny space. I love the one-tweet-at-a-time way that it displays things, giving you the chance to reply or retweet stuff as it arrives. Which is great if you can afford to spend your whole day watching Twitter.

I won’t be using Pocket myself, but if you love watching your tweets and want something colorful and cute to do it with, I’d recommend Pocket.

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Mobile for iPhone and the Naturally Speaking range of software products, has bought MacSpeech, makers of the jaw-droppingly amazing MacSpeech Dictate and its recent new sibling, MacSpeech Scribe.

Ever wondered what your mouse pointer actually does all day? Ever wanted to have a way of tracking where it goes while you work, and exporting that information as a map of your daily mousings?

If you have, you need IOGraph.

It’s simple, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s brilliant: it watches your mouse movements for as long as you want it to, tracking the times when the pointer is moving rapidly and the times it spends standing still in one place.

It plots all this on a view of your computer’s desktop, showing the movements as fine lines and the stationary periods as enlarged blobs.

You can choose to have your map on a plain white background, or superimposed over a screenshot of your desktop. If you search Flickr for “iograph”, you’ll find a few people who’ve made some great images with it. Co-creator Anatoly Zenkov has some cool images made with IOGraph in his photostream.

(Via Styledeficit.)

Thoughts is a desktop notebook app for Mac OS X, designed to look and behave like a real world paper notebook or journal.

When you open the app you see a shelf where all your notebooks are stored. Notebooks open in a separate window and come complete with a turning-page visual effect.

The basic layout of every note page is the same; there are title and date fields at the top. The main note editing space has a nice-looking toolbar at the bottom where you can access all the formatting controls you’re likely to need.

Mobile Safari is a lovely browser but lacks a few features, and one of those is Find-in-page. If you want to find a specific piece of text on a very long web page, you have to resort to third-party fixes.

There are a variety of bookmarklets, alternative browsers and add-ons around, but this latest one is a bit different. Although it’s basically just a bookmarklet, it’s being distributed as an app on the App Store, for a fee of 99 cents.

It’s called Find in Page, and just from the title you know what it does. Here’s a simple demo video:

What separates this from other bookmarklets is the extra interface controls that appear above Safari’s built-in navigation controls when you’re using it. They let you flick between instances of your search term, or start a new search, without having to start all over again.

The app itself simply adds the bookmarklet to Mobile Safari’s bookmarks folder; in theory, you need only run it once to do this, then you can delete it from your device. But you might want to keep it around in case your bookmarks get edited or lost and you need to add it again.

Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.

I read that and I knew it wasn’t the case. I knew I’d seen something that suggested to me that the iPad has on-board storage for documents. It was something I’d seen somewhere before, and for a moment I couldn’t think where. Then I remembered.

It was here:

This is at 1:04 in Apple’s official iPad announcement event.

Peter-Paul Koch is a man with opinions about the mobile web. And his latest opinion is a trifle controversial: Mobile Safari, he says, is this generation’s Internet Explorer 6. All the rage now, but destined to be hated by webdevs of the future.

So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?

Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.

But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.

Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.

Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.

(Via Merlin Mann.)

The clever people at Information Architects have released a free Omnigraffle template for iPad app design.

For those of you who’ve never used it, Omnigraffle is a wonderful visual design tool that can be turned to all sorts of tasks. It can create any manner of diagram, but works even better when enhanced with template themes that add specific visual widgets.

This particular set of widgets gives you almost everything you’d need to mockup an iPad app of your own. It includes drop-downs, alerts, the software keyboard, and loads more. Various bits of text are customizable, so your mockup looks as real as possible.

It will be even better when Omnigraffle itself is ported to the iPad – something that Omni Group boss Ken Case told us they would do as soon as possible (more about that here.)

The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.

And it’s also somewhat upset my plans for buying a new Mac.

Welcome to the “iPhone photography toy of the week” slot. Today’s toy is: InfiniteScope.

Forgive me for banging on about Notational Velocity – but it’s such an awesome app that it deserves a place on your Mac. And this week it just got a little awesomer.

The latest version of NV includes native support for syncing with Simplenote, the iPhone app and web notes service.

As I noted the other week in a post about rival (and NV-inspired) notes app Nottingham, the great thing about Simplenote is that you get access to what I call an “ecosystem”. Your notes are safe – there’s copies of them in the cloud and inside your NV database. But because Simplenote encourages third-party apps, you’ll always have plenty of choice about how you access those notes from your computer.

NV has also undergone a few visual tweaks to smarten up its appearance, not least of them smart and funny new icon by Colin Cody. There are some more technical details about the new update on this blog post if you’re interested.

Having all my Notational Velocity notes automatically and wirelessly synced with my phone is just wonderful. If you need a similarly simple synced notes service, I encourage you to download Notational Velocity and sign up for a Simplenote account. You won’t regret it.

Enough of my dumb opinions. I thought it would be interesting to find out what some Mac and iPhone developers make of the iPad. What are their first impressions? What do they intend to make for the iPad platform? Do they have any concerns?

I got in touch with a whole bunch of developer contacts and asked them if they’d like to share their thoughts with you, the Cult readers.

Here are the replies I got.

Ken Case of OmniGroup revealed that the company is working on iPad versions of apps like OmniFocus and OmniGraffle:

“We’re really excited about Apple’s iPad, and are looking forward to updating OmniFocus to take advantage of the larger screen size. We’re also looking at creating iPad adaptations of several of our other productivity apps, such as OmniGraffle.”

Manton Reece of Riverfold Software (maker of Clipstart and Wii Transfer):

“I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still have those frustrations, but the large screen opens up a whole new class of applications. It’s impossible to resist.”

Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems (maker of Tinderbox):

“The iPad announcement leaves many things unclear. Does iWork depend on private APIs, or will developers be able to write first-class applications? Will individual books be subject the the approval process — leaving 40 overworked Apple employees the additional task of approving or rejecting books an magazines?

“Since 1982, Eastgate’s been publishing original hypertext fiction and nonfiction. These works — many of which are now studied in universities throughout the world — can’t be printed and can’t be simulated in ePub. But, if we bring them to iPad, would that be vetoed as duplicating the built-in book functionality?

“In short, the app store is a source of grave concern for software developers. That said, the iPad is the most exciting personal computing development for a decade. It will transform our notion of computing and redefine the idea of the information appliance.”

“Hi, can I speak to Steve please?”

Steve speaking.

“Steve, hi. Listen, we’ve just found out that someone else already has a product called iPad.”

Uh-huh.

“Yeah. Fujitsu. Looks like they’ve had it for quite some time. Since about 2002.”

Really.

“Um, yeah. What do want us to do? Call Legal?”

When Steve Jobs first revealed the iPod on 23 October 2001, no-one had the slightest inkling of what it might become.

Nobody at the time predicted that the music player would morph into a phone, and then into a multi-purpose tablet device.

The iPad is itself a very similar starting point. What we’re looking at here is the very beginning of a new product line, one that we can expect to adapt, metamorphose, and grow just as the iPod did.

Earlier on we gave you a post crammed full of iPad hardware pics. But now, some software:

See that iTunes UI? A little bit different. What’s that slider at the top left? Thicker, chunkier controls. I might write a whole post about that.

Here’s the App Store. Looks very familiar.

Right now, only the people who were at the event have actually touched the iPad. So what are they saying about it?

Comedian and author Stephen Fry said on Twitter:

Ryan Block from GDGT told TWiT: “It’s heavy.” He picked it up and felt it was bulky in comparison to other tablet-like devices. He still liked it, though.

Elsewhere on TWiT, another contributor (sorry, I wasn’t fast enough to pick out who it was, it might have been Andy Ihnatko), said it was fast. It kept up with his finger movements without any fuss at all. The page-turning felt like actual page-turning. That’ll be the A4 chip doing its thing, then.

Seen any other comments by people who have Actually Touched the iPad? Shout in the comments.

OK folks, now for some picture pornography. This post is hardware; later on, we’ll do a gallery of software-related stuff. Keep the comments coming. Don’t be shy now: will you buy? Will you buy two? Does this compete with netbooks?

Phew. It’s all over. And a new era has begun.

Ladies and gentlemen: Say hello to iPad. It will cost you $499. Even the most expensive model is $829. The WiFi version ships in late March, the 3G in April

Here’s an overview of everything we know so far.

“It’s phenomenal,” says Steve. “It’s unbelievable.”

It’s official.

There’s so much expectation and hype about the things the Apple tablet will include, but there’s one thing I want it to exclude: wires.

1. Nick Merritt at TechRadar says the arrival of the tablet highlights the sad state of modern computing: “…This view sees the iSlate as the Omega to the Mac’s Alpha, the final delivery of the Holy Grail of computing, the fabled ‘information appliance’, completing the job the Macintosh started. How? By finally delivering on Jeff Raskin’s/Larry Ellison’s visions: something so flexible yet simple to operate a baby could use it.”

2. David Nuttycombe makes his views perfectly clear:

3. Photographer and self-confessed Apple fan Paul Inskip spells out his thoughts: “By my own admission I’m an Apple fan but this is another case where if Apple re-writes the rule book on tablets and creates something it helps to push everything forward. CES saw the same tired laptop-into-a-tablets computers thrown about hoping to ride the wave of the Apple device but they will end up looking like the chunky ‘smartphones’ of old before the iPhone came out.”

4. Finally, Jeff Harper at the Canadian Chronicle Herald has this to say about the tablet’s possible effect on the publishing industry: “Newspapers that were struggling to make money with their online product will now be able to harness the power of Apple’s iTunes store and sell monthly subscriptions there. It also allows papers to reach readers outside each business’s traditional boundaries of provinces and state lines. If your content is good, people will buy it.”