Jean-Jacques Halans ‹› Afterhours

It’s been over a week of spending time with the iPad, so here’s the obligatory one-week review.

Carrying it around killed my manbag/murse, I think. I didn’t notice it before. I do sometimes carry my SLR and lenses in it too so that might have contributed too. But it does fit really nicely, without any bulk, into any reasonable sized bag, though it’s weight at about 700g is considerable. But it is a joy to use, like the iPhone is. It is not however, just a big iPod Touch, it feels totally different, more capable. Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Saying the iPad is just a bigger iPod Touch, is like saying a swimming pool is just a big bathtub.”

I get through at least two days of usage, with 30+% battery charge left. So I charge every other day, though I have to wipe it clean every day… Not that I am dirty, fingerprints are just more noticeable on the big screen compared to the iPhone.

I love iBooks as an ePub book reader (mainly O’Reilly ePub books), as a bookstore, I can’t find anything I want. For me iBooks works. I don’t get eye strain or anything. It’s a lot more comfortable than reading on a regular desktop screen. And the size of the screen makes a lot more sense than my Kindle 2. GoodReader for PDFs is pretty good, though not very intuitive. It contains a lot of functionality which isn’t apparent at first.

Though would it be enough to get an iPad just to read ebooks, in stead of a Kindle DX? You do get more functionality with the iPad for about the same price, for sure. Mail is great (though it is at times slow to sync). Safari is great, just to be able to surf a bit from the couch, reading at arms length, while glancing at whatever’s on the TV. Maps is great, though buggy, as it kind of locked up on me twice, where I couldn’t zoom in anymore.

There isn’t any great Twitter app yet. I’ve tried Twittelator, TweetDeck and Twitterriffic and they all lack something. One of them I can’t even seem to click any links in tweets (or did I miss something – Edit: yeah missed that you have to turn Tweetdeck into portrait to get to click links). So I hope my favorite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (now owned by Twitter themselves), gets ported to the iPad soon.

The newspaper apps are not yet there I think, with much room for improvement. Magazines are experimenting and all the different interactions don’t make it any easier to read e-magazines (double swipe up here, tab there, double tab right side,…). I am interested in getting a subscription on a newspaper and some magazines (Wired, where are you?), if the price is right, not too much adverts and it offers something more than the dead tree version does. Time magazine for example, requires you to download a separate app every week, in stead of downloading a new edition inside the existing app, which is just plain silly. With this model, you can’t get subscriptions either. It is priced at US$5 which I believe is the same as the printed US version, but you do get extra video and additional pictures, but then again you can find those online at their site too. (Edit: To be fair, I just noticed on their app description that in-app purchases and subscriptions will be made available in coming months)

Lots of apps are just gimmicky. The Elements app is pretty cool (and heavy at 1.7GB), but I don’t really need a periodic table. The iWork apps are cool, but each have there own limitations (Keynote not supporting notes for example). Sketchbook Pro is a pretty cool art app, especially for the price. Scrabble (using additional iPhones/Touches) is pretty cool. And so on… But I haven’t found THE killer app yet, the one app that would make you buy an iPad just to be able to use that app. But then again it is early days. And I can’t really say there is a killer app for the iPhone either. It’s just the combination of different apps, and the ease of use.

The iPod app is a bit limited, or at least it feels that way, missing Coverflow, no iTunes LP/Extra support, and some other things I thought were different or missing.

File management is the biggest drawback. You can’t just mount it as an external disk, drop files onto it, and use those in any app. The iPad doesn’t have a system explorer app to browse its disk. So file management all happens through iTunes, and only for apps that support it. You can however use apps like AirSharing and GoodReader to wirelessly (over WiFi) transfer files, and then open these files (PDFs, Word docs, Excel docs,…) into the iWork apps (for example), in which case they get copied to those apps folder and imported into the app, where you end up with a duplicate file. Having said that, it hasn’t impacted me that much just yet, so it’s biggest drawback isn’t a biggy at all (for me).

On a side note, the optional VGA cable only works for Keynote and video (or any app that supports video out). You can’t just demo everything on the iPad through the VGA cable as you would on a laptop (Steve must have had a special build of the iPad OS), which is a bit disappointing.

It’s a lot easier to criticize the things that are wrong, as they often jump out, than it is to emphasize what is right. Because when things just work, you don’t notice that, as it should. And I believe that is the case with the iPad too. Despite these niggles, I still love it, and I’m sure it will grow on me further (though we’re still in our honeymoon period, and my wife is already a little bit jealous :).

PS: In case you’re wondering, I still wrote this post on my desktop pc, though WordPress has a decent iPad app.

When you read the blogosphere, with the introduction of iPhone OS 4 and it’s new T&C (which blocks cross compiled iPhone apps), it looks like we’re in for a next stage in the war between Apple and Adobe’s Flash. No doubt the particular clause in question is against Adobe. But why?

I went to the Adobe Refresh Roadshow event in February, where they showed off Flash CS5 and its capability to create iPhone apps. It was all very rudimentary. You couldn’t actually create an app that feels like a real iPhone app as there were no UI elements available, no common iPhone interaction,… unless you created those yourself.And as they said, it was all very early days.

What struck me immediately was the fact they did not mention XCode at all. The demo was given on OSX, so XCode could have been installed, and it could have used it to compile the iPhone app. But Adobe Creative Suite sells both on Mac and Windows, and I’m pretty sure they want to sell it on both platforms. It would be the nr 1 reason to upgrade.

So after the event, I asked one of the presenters over Twitter if there was a need for XCode and if it would also work on Windows:

I leave it to you to draw your conclusions on what Adobe is doing (or how it is doing it). I think this could be easily solved if Adobe takes out the iPhone compilation out of it’s main product, and sell it as an extension for the Mac version, which then would require XCode and would compile a Flash created XCode project, like Titanium creates and compiles an XCode project.

Shouldn’t Apple and Adobe get together and talk this out over a coffee (too)?

How wrong was I. In The Rebirth of the LP I wrote that I was expecting great things for the iTunes LP on the iPad. Well, I’ve got my iPad, and it doesn’t take the iTunes LP files. You can buy them in the iTunes store on the iPad, but they are downloaded once you go back to your desktop pc in iTunes there. Bummer.

Still, I expect this to be fixed in an update of the OS, or maybe in iPhone OS 4 for iPad later in the year…

Remember the LP? I’m not really talking about the actual vinyl, but the cardboard cover it was encased by. Some artist aspired it to be a work of art, something that extended the music, in an analogue world. I remember my dad having a Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers LP with a real zipper attached to it. Some LPs would fold open. You could hold them, reading or singing along to the lyrics while listening. I used to have the New Order Blue Monday floppy disk LP, some fancy Cure LPs, Primus,…

Then the CD replaced the LP, at less than a quarter of the size. Which means the booklets shrank too. Publishers started adding extra content onto the cd itself, hybrid cds with video. Now we have mp3 downloads, with hardly any cover art. Sometimes we’d get an extra pdf booklet, which I think is pretty sad mostly. Or the web itself on the official artist’s website (if you can find it) offers additional content, videos, lyrics,…

Then Apple quietly introduced iTunes LP and iTunes Extra last year with the new iTunes 9, but only with a limited number of titles, mostly older releases, repackaged with some video, lyrics. I haven’t seen that list grow either for the last 4 months. No new releases with LP content. Then end of November ’09 Apple quietly published the TuneKit API, for publishers to developer iTunes LPs. If you look at the technology, it’s as open as it gets: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, packaged in a webarchive with .itlp extension (just rename to zip and open up). It works both on Mac and Windows iTunes, and on the Apple TV. But currently not on the iPhone or iPod touch. It is supposed to be similar to the CMX (Connected Media Experience) format supported by 4 major music companies, but they still need to deliver any actual media content (which is supposed to be the second quarter of 2010).

Up until now the submission (by music and movie publishers only) has been manual and limited. When you look at the iTunes LP page now, it says:

“Automatic, electronic submission of your iTunes LP or Extra is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.”

Cue, the Apple iPad! Although missing from Steve’s presentation, it seems obvious that music publishers will be offering lots more iTunes LPs by the time the iPad is released (at least that’s what Apple is preparing for based on the above comment). It provides music publishers with extra revenue for music and video. And it provides Apple with another media segment to be sold to eager consumers (like me) using their hardware. Apple has control of the whole ecosystem: selling hardware, developing the format, selling the media. A hard act to follow by media companies, although at one point in time Sony was probably one of the few global companies to be able to offer a similar ecosystem of hardware, movies, music and games. But by now it may be a little too late. All they can do is try to catch up.

This also offers another great opportunity for web developers. You can actually publish your “iTunes LP” anywhere, have people download it on their iPad, which opens iTunes and shows your media/app (pure speculation at this time of course)! In time, the TuneKit API might be should be updated with a JavaScript touch API (like PastryKit?). If they don’t, you can always add it yourself! As for now I haven’t played around that much just yet. I’m not sure if it can load external content into an iTunes LP to get updated content.

Flux 2, a web development IDE for the Mac, comes with an iTunes LP and iTunes Extra template to get you started!

Of course you can do all this with a website. But the iTunes LP offers something to distribute, use offline. It might be just one more trick up your sleeve.

So finally, after almost a year since I registered as an iPhone developer over at Apple, I build myself a couple of iPhone apps. Here’s how.

I have a couple of Objective C books laying around, which I opened once in a while, but closing them again pretty quickly… so I never got around developing anything. For now, I couldn’t justify any time spend on learning yet again another language. It is after all just a hobby project (the iPhone development that is). As a webdeveloper I could develop cool iPhone web apps (with jQTouch), but still that wouldn’t give me the same satisfaction as a native app. Then there are a couple of frameworks like PhoneGap and NimbleKit which allow you to develop iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But you’re still confronted with XCode, working in a new environment.

Then I found Appcelerator and their Titanium Mobile. Their Titanium product allows for cross platform development for desktop apps, and their Titanium Mobile allows for, well, cross platform mobile applications, using JavaScript and HTML. And Titanium Mobile is itself written in Titanium. Still in beta, I thought I’d give it a try. Was I in for a surprise! Titanium Mobile creates native iPhone and Android apps, which means you get to use native UI elements, the GPS, the accelerator,… to get some apps up and running pretty quickly. For example, I took the http://nextsydneyferry.com code and converted into a simple iPhone app (in the simulator) in less than 30 minutes! Before I was able to get it onto my iPhone though, I had to set up “provisioning”, generating certificates and all. Something you need to do for XCode development too. Once that was set up, you click a button and it gets transferred through iTunes to your iPhone, and you got yourself a native app. Without opening XCode, in my preferred webdevelopment environment!

Some gotchas:

• If you want to develop iPhone apps, you still need the iPhone SDK which is Mac only. No way around that. But you already have a Mac, right?
• You’re building native apps, and there’s different support between iPhone and Android. For one some features are missing in the other. So you’ll need to cater for that, and fork code between iPhone and Android.
• You still need to follow Apple’s design guidelines (although I’ve seen some horrible apps out there that don’t follow any design guideline). You’re not building an iPhone app for Android, or an Android app on iPhone.
• Don’t expect to go building 30fps 3D apps or something, you’re better of doing that in Objective C

Having said that, for simple text-based, web-connected applications, Titanium Mobile is perfect:

• There’s the basic API documentation of the JavaScript framework.
• They have a Kitchen Sink app and source that shows you all there is available in the framework, so it’s just a matter of copy/pasting.
• There’s a great forum for support and discussions.
• There are a couple of screencasts to get you started.
• Both iPhone and Android apps (and soon Blackberry) with a little bit of effort. I hope they would also add Palm’s WebOS.
• It’s Open Source (on GitHub).

Oh right, something about the iPhone apps I developed… A NextSydneyFerry app, which is just a port of the web application into Titanium Mobile. I might add some more features like saving the data locally, so you don’t need a web connection (only for updates). And a Twitter visualization tool called TweetFrame, which cycles through tweets based on a search query you define, like “a digital picture frame, but for tweets”. The funny thing is that, through Facebook I got a request to have something like TweetFrame, but as a website widget (don’t know why, but there were already widgets like that). Well, since it’s just some JavaScript, I did the reverse and created a widget based off of the iPhone app… You can see it in action on the homepage, below the Flickr feed.

For now I mainly focused on iPhone. I don’t care that much for Android at the moment, though with a little extra effort I could get them to work on Android too. One of the other platforms Appcelerator is looking at is Blackberry (though could )

It’s golden times for web developers, a Renaissance, where HTML(5) and JavaScript open great possibilities. I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much happening now, it’s an exciting time.

So, if you’ve been keeping off developing for iPhone, try out Titanium Mobile!

Just watched this cool bullet-time-like movie (you know, the Matrix) on the Philips site as a demo for their 21:9 cinemascope tv set due out this month. Great if you’re a movie buff watching lots of DVD or Blueray, and I love the ambient light feature. But one other feature their new sets offer is so called “Net TV”.

Net TV looks to be a proprietary service through Philips (you need them to get onto their Net TV platform), which is based on CE-HTML (Consumer Electronics), a subset of XHTML, CSS TV Profile 1.0, ecmascript, DOM,… intended to improve the experience to browse the internet on a tv. But why do we need another standard? Why are manufacturers trying to set up new walled gardens? Did they not learn? My mobile smart phone is perfectly capable of displaying full featured webpages, why wouldn’t a tv set? It might have been true five years ago, when we were all still on low resolution CRT tv sets, but with the lcd/plasma revolution we had last couple of years, resolution has improved greatly and tv set sizes have grown.

Browsing the web on tv has been around for ages, but never took off, with for example now defunkt Microsoft WebTV. I myself worked on a TV banking platform back in ’99-2000 for a Dutch bank and cabeltv company accessing internet banking over a settop box (“t-commerce”), which if I remember correctly was also using a version of CE-HTML, but there was certainly no JavaScript involved. And if you have a Nintendo Wii, you can browse the full internet on your tv using a version of Opera (a 5$US upgrade). But unfortunatly Wii isn’t an HD device, and isn’t an optimal browsing experience even on new full HD tv sets (native resolution seems to be 608×456, with pages being zoomed in and out). Playstation 3 (and I guess XBox 360) has a full featured browser too, and again people complain about text being too small.

But why would Philips not get on board with Opera (or Mozilla, or use WebKit), in stead of using CE-HTML? And it’s not a single manufacturer getting on board the internet-on-tv train, it’s also Samsung, Sony,… getting on board though with different solutions. And yesterday Adobe introduced its Flash Platform for the Digital Home
with Intel at NAB, but the tv makers seem to be reluctant to join them. While browsing on tv might never take off, one thing I am looking forward to are tv widgets, using web standard XHTML and Javascript, where Samsung and Yahoo! are leading the way (sets already available at Bing Lee).With these widgets you could keep track of Twitter while watching tv (without having a laptop on your lap, or an iPod/iPhone in your hand), and we might see new ways of interaction with tv programs through backchannels displayed at the bottom of the tv, as already happening on Twitter (#newinventors instigated every week by @mpesce). What I am looking for is actually some kind of Chumby for tv, something that injects widgets onto the screen (without me buying a new set), though better integrated (form, transparency, bottom or sidebar positioned) like the Yahoo! widgets.

In stead of a new browser war on television, we’ll get a widget war, between Flash, Yahoo!, Google (imagine the advertising potential) and all the other widget makers out there, trying to get their hands on whatever little time you still spend watching tv. Hmmm, come to think of it, Google Calendar as an EPG on your tv…

Yes, it’s international CSS Naked Day today! That’s why everything looks a bit black and white (and blue).

You wonder why? CSS Naked Day is about raising awareness about Web Standards and accessibility, the proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a decent hierarchy structure. It’s time to show off my gorgeous <body>!

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Cross-post from my Mapanui blog, because I can, right?

Me pimpin’ microformats and Mapanui in a published readers’ letter in the current April edition of UK’s .net magazine (aka Practical Web Design). Let’s see if they do a microformats article soon (and include Mapanui…).

On a side note, this edition also includes an interview with Christian Heilmann (of Yahoo), who’ll do a workshop on Pragmatic, accessible JavaScript in a web services world at the WebDirections Roadshow in Melbourne and Sydney. Get your current copy for (a whopping) $25 at any good magazine store.

SocialActions.com throws a challenge at web developers:

“Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge is about building innovative tools to help people find and share opportunities to take action on the websites, blogs, and social networks that we all visit everyday.”

There are a lot of organisations out there that need a conduit to get their message across. This challenge is about developing ways to put a spotlight on their issues, to remix the web for social change: new WordPress plugins, interactive buttons, widgets, bookmarklets, scripts,… There will be 20 finalists and 3 winners, April 28th, so you better start cracking!

Why not Digg it?!

RedCrates.com blogged about on the Big Word Project blog.
I bought the word “crate” ($5) a couple of weeks ago, which then gets linked to your website, in effect defining the word.
And apparently they go through all the sites that register, and they liked the Red Crates site (well page actually), and “crate” is now an “interesting word”.
Thanks guys!