I’ve been beating that drum for a while now! Anyway, worth a read I think….

The New Precious

When the iPad 2 was announced, I dragged my feet before upgrading. A new version of iOS had given my lowly iPad new spring in its step, and I tried to convince myself that the incremental speed, cameras, lighter weight and thinner profile weren’t all that important to me. Then I (finally) got to use one for a bit and I realized the error in my thinking. Though only incrementally improved in pretty much all aspects, in sum the iPad 2 was a marked improvement in daily usage over the original iPad. Especially in my use case, which is “all day every day.”

This time around, I drank my own cool aid straight away, neurotically refreshing multiple browser windows waiting for Apple’s online store to go live so that I could order – and thus receive – a New iPad as quickly as possible. I chose the full boat option as usual, a 64GB Black AT&T model. I would’ve gone to 128GB had it been available, alas. The cloud is a lovely place, but there’s no substitute for local storage.

FedEx pulled up on the 17th around mid day, giving me plenty of time to set things up ahead of the weekend. I easily transferred my grandfathered unlimited plan to the New iPad at the AT&T ipadlanding site, restored from an icloud backup, sync’d my local media and I was off to the races.

I’ve been using the New iPad as I usually use iPads which is to say pretty much non stop (yes, I have a problem). Most of the usual suspects have chimed in with full reviews, so as usual I will focus on my primary takeaways, pro and con.

Pros

- I’d been experiencing an increasing amount of lagginess on my iPad 2 under iOS, most noticeably in safari when selecting the address bar and trying to type a new URL. Safari also quit with annoying frequency. I can say without hesitation that the New iPad thus far shows no hesitation. The overall UE has returned to that sense of “instantaneous” which always seems to fade over time.

Apple’s actually created a bit of a conundrum for itself in this regard. In general, iOS devices are extremely snappy, and set an extremely high bar for expectations of responsiveness. Whether any lag actually present truly increases over time, or we simply perceive it to do so, I find myself constantly craving a reset of sorts, wherein the device returns to that sense of instantaneous responsiveness.

However, even cursory comparisons reveal some strange effect at work here. A freshly wiped original iPad, quick as the day it was born, feels – and is – incredibly laggy next to a New iPad. And I have no doubt that the IPad of 2014 will feel markedly quicker than the New iPad. I loves my original iPad and thought it the most responsive device I’d ever used. Now it feels like a Windows 95 era PC.

Said another way, these things are so wonderful, and work so well, that they constantly increase our expectations over time. Today’s snappy is tomorrow’s slug. The New iPad is snappy. For now! Whatever the benchmarks are saying, I can tell you without hesitation that in heavy use, the difference in speed between the New iPad and the iPad 2 is noticeable, appreciated, and worth the upgrade for me.

- The screen. Hailed by Apple as resolutionary, the New iPad’s screen is indeed a marvel. I end my days with less eyestrain in general and find reading on it in particular more enjoyable than I had previously. My eyesight is slowly deteriorating with age, but I can easily see the difference here. This screen is insanely gorgeous.

Cons (wait, only two pros?)

- Heat. Yup, this is a real issue. I noticed it in lite use even before loading it down with all my stuff. The lower left corner (which for me is lower right in my landscape positioning) feels obviously warm, if short of uncomfortably hot. Not a big problem per se, but make no mistake: Apple will address this in the Next iPad. I guarantee you they’re already working on better shielding for the next iteration of the device. Whether they can fix the New iPad via a software update remains to be seen. I would welcome a fix.

- Weight. Yup, the New iPad is heavier, and I notice it. I’ve built up a fair bit of muscle memory using the iPad as I do. I know precisely how it feels in different positions, in my hands, on my lap, etc. In my hands, I can ideentify the New iPad vs. the iPad 2 with my eyes closed. Yes, I tried.

It’s not “too heavy” and of course overall is comparable to the original iPad in weight. And I didn’t have a problem with the weight of the original iPad. In fact I hailed it as somewhat of a miracle! Still. It’s somewhat un-Apple for a new model to be heavier (and thicker…which I don’t notice as much) than a prior model.

- The front camera, which I am much more likely to use, hasn’t been upgraded. I’d take a 2MP front camera over the 5MP rear camera – which I pretty much never use – any time.

- No 128GB option.

- Dictation. Maybe it just takes practice, but I have to say that I’m not a fan of the dictation functionality. Don’t get me wrong, I love that Apple baked it into the keyboard at the system level, making it accessible from within any keyboard app. I just don’t love the way it works. You had to say period to end sentences (which makes writing the word ‘period’ something of a funny exercise). And forget parentheses, commas, quotation marks, etc. Try as I have, I can’t get the output to match my intended input in these kinds of cases. I find it sufficiently annoying that I am typing, rather than dictating this post. That should say it all. It gets words right on the whole, but not structure and grammar which are equally important obviously.

Conclusions

Should you upgrade? If you have an original iPad and like it, absolutely positively get the New iPad. It will rock your world. If you have an iPad 2 . . . the case is less clear cut for many users. IMHO, the incremental speed improvement will go unnoticed by most users. The screen however should be very noticeable to literally everyone. So check it out. If it makes you go wow then the answer is clear. If it makes you say meh then stick with the iPad 2.

I read this morning on Engadget that Avid has entered the video editing fray on the iPad. For $5, the same price as Apple’s own iMovie app, we now have another offering from the 900 pound gorilla of the space. 

For those of you not familiar with Avid, they were pretty much the king of the NLE space until Apple started giving them fits with Final Cut Pro. Before FCP, Avid was a super expensive software package that ran only on super high end rigs and pretty much required crazy expensive custom hardware. They still offer that stuff and it is used extensively in the industry, but FCP forced Avid to continuously lower the price and hardware bars to where they are today; you can purchase a software-only solution that runs decently on an iMac or MBP and doesn’t cost all that much more than FCP (FCX again changed the dynamic). 

All a long way of saying that the release of Avid Studio for the iPad is the next step in a trend that has been going on for a while, with Avid continuously chasing Apple down the price/hardware requirement scale. So…no big deal right?

To the contrary. This app is a very big deal.  Not because it’s all that and a bag of chips; early reviews reflect lots of crashes, and obviously the feature set is relatively limited compared to the full boat packages offered for macs and pcs.  But there are several reasons why Avid Studio for the iPad is a very big deal indeed:

1) It will continue to foster creative solutions for using a touch UI for video editing. Apple invented some conventions and borrowed others for iMovie for iPad. There are other apps in the space as well doing the same. But I believe that a company with Avid’s scope and focus will bring new energy to the discovery of best practices for a touch UI and video editing. 

2) It will also likely foster the development of cool hardware attachments for the iPad so that when docked you’d have the ability to access potentially deeper functionality.  Think of a keyboard and jog wheel type dock. Maybe some external screens as well.  Obviously this requires continued evolution of the iPad hardware itself, not to mention iOS, but that’s inevitable (thanks Moore’s law!)

3) Because projects are easily exportable and compatible with “full” Avid solutions (something I don’t beleive is currently the case with iMovie and FCP) you’ll see more iPads used on set to quickly rough some sequences together.  Editors already do that with MBPs but cheaper/smaller/lighter hardware usually translates into broader/deeper use.  On our last feature I used my iPad to watch dailies as they came off the MBP that we used to log footage. Occasionally that footage was roughed together before I transferred it to my iPad. With this I could rough it together myself, or make tweaks to my heart’s content.  All said another way, it enables the iPad to occupy more mindshare on set and in workflows (our cast was already reading sides from their iPads…)

4) It portends the continued evolution of the iPad as a serious productivity tool. No, I don’t believe this app can replace a full editing rig as things stand today. But I am certain that it (and iMovie…) will continue to broaden the feature set, slowly removing yet another slice of functionality that stood in the way of the iPad being capable of “everything.” I used to say that professional video editing was one of the few things you still really need a Mac/pc for. By the time we see the iPad 4, the 3rd or 4th rev of this app, iOS 7, and custom hardware accessories, I can imagine that no longer being the case.

5) It adds further legitimacy to the platform overall. When Microsoft does the inevitable and releases Office for the iPad, it will do the same (but 1000 fold given Office’s ubiquity). This is good. Apps from serious companies which do serious things will help open the eyes of naysayers who still foolishly see the iPad as nothing more than a glorified media consumption device. 

Ah good times

What can we gleen about the iPad from the results? Revenues from iOS devices make up the lion’s share of the company’s total, something on the order of 72%. Incredible. Apple shipped over 15 million iPads in the quarter (not to mention 37 million iPhones!), three times the number of Macs shipped, though the Mac total also represented a new quarterly record and ever growing market share for Apple.

How does Apple feel about all this? Just great apparently. According to Tim Cook, they’re quite pleased that iPad sales are cannibalizing the Windows market. Further Tim Cook believes that “there will come a day when tablet market by unit is larger than the PC market.“

I say…welcome to my world!

(And no, I don’t believe that this is a new opinion from Mr. Cook; I believe he saw the writing on the wall long ago.)

For those of you who followed me early on, you know that I’ve firmly believed – basically from the moment the iPad was announced – that tablets (useable ones, not windows XP/7-based tablets or hybrid laptops) would come to dominate the market in terms of unit sales. They are the future of computing. Or at least the next wave. As Nikki Finke would say…Toldja!

The trend is inevitable, and inexorable. Despite analysts and pundits consistently underestimating the market’s appetite for the iPad (which, for the moment is, for all intents and purpose, the tablet market), the thing has continually exceeded even the rosiest estimates.

You may not like the trend. But just remember: the iPad can already do what 9x% of the people use a computer for 9x% of the time (and do it extremey well…) For the rest of the people the rest of the time, “full” computers will continue to exist. On the other hand, iOS and future iPad hardware will obviously continue to improve and grow in capabilities, pushing the percentages above closer and closer to 100%. Add in the Kindle Fire, Android 4 tablets, and, yes, Windows 8 tablets, and betting against this trend is foolhardy.

It’d be interesting to poll the pundits to see when they believe the tablet market will outpace the PC market in unit sales. Whatever the consensus, I’d bet sooner

EDIT: I came across this lovely tidbit which puts iPad sales into sharper perspective:

The iPad by itself, in one quarter, brought in more revenue than 230 out of the Fortune 500 companies earn in an entire year.

Just…wow.

As a full time user of the iPad, I’m always looking for ways to improve the overall experience. Hearing the recent news that the geniuses (no sarcasm or irony) in the dev community had released an untethered jailbreak for iPad 2′s and iPhone 4S’s running iOS 5.0.1 helped me decide to give it a try. What was my experience?

Well, the short version is that it was quick. And I’m now back to “stock” 5.0.1. So what went wrong?

I’d long coveted some of the customization I’d seen on some JB’d iPads and iPhones.  In particular, a more useful, informative lock screen, a dock with more apps permanently moored in it, and a 5 row keyboard were enhancements I was after. Most important of all was quick settings access for radios and other toggles.

My first mistake was trying the jailbreak as soon as I read the news. The greenpois0n servers were getting hit so hard that a process which should take minutes instead took about two hours to slog through.  I won’t bore you with the details (the threads over at macrumors lay it all out pretty clearly), but suffice to say that by the time I was jail broken, I was already a little frustrated.

But once done I had renewed energy and set out to get the features I wanted. I clicked the Cydia icon and started by getting SBSettings, which gives quick and easy access to a pretty wide selection of toggles for the radios and other things like volume, screen brightness, etc.  I was also happily shocked by the wide selection of add-on toggles which could be added.  I picked a skin for it that I liked, set up my activation methods, and I was off. A quick respring later and I had my first feature down.

I then added infinidock, which allowed me to put 8 icons in my dock (hallelujah!), intelliscreenX, which allowed for some pretty great customization of the lock screen and notification center, retinapad, which does a nice job of scaling iPhone apps to the iPad’s screen, and an extension (the name of which I forget…) which allowed the music controls for Apple’s remote app – which I use heavily – to appear at the top of the screen whenever I swiped up to make the multi-tasking dock appear.  

I paid handsomely for some of these apps, but was mostly happy to do so for the functionality they offered.  I was also happily surprised that I was able to use Amazon check out to make the purchases, and that doing so would allow me to install the same apps on my iPhone without paying again (for universal apps) much the same way you can in the “legit” app store. I was also pleasantly surprised that some of the apps were accessed via the Settings app, again just like “real” apps. In general, the improvement and experience were sufficient that I decided to jailbreak my iPhone 4 once I had my iPad dialed in.  That’s when the trouble began…

I then moved on to the 5 row keyboard. I feel like I am constantly hitting the “.?123″ key on my iPad so this one was important to me!  It sounded like the app was pretty customizable too so I was really looking forward to it. When I drilled down to the app’s page in Cydia, I was surprised to find that I was unable to purchase it because it hadn’t yet been confirmed to work with the most recent 5.0.1 JB’d version of iOS. I took this as a very good sign, figuring that the dev community had made a commitment to quality control and doing whatever they could to ensure a sound overall experience.  

That may be the case.  Or, it may also be that some of these apps are sufficiently flaky in design or practice that it’s better to be safe than sorry.  I don’t know what went wrong when things went wrong. But some setting in some app or tweak, or some unintended interaction between apps and tweaks, caused some pretty unfortunate consequences.  Here’s what happened.

I was using the iPad continuously all day and the battery finally gave out. I wanted to continue playing around with things and so I plugged in and sat at my desk.  When the iPad came back to life something was strange. My lock screen picture was distorted, stuck in portrait (even though I lock in landscape) and the pass lock keypad was in the lower left of the screen rather than the center.  Hmm. And when I activated the notification center on the lock screen it too came down in the lower left corner. Hmm.

I typed in my pass code and the fun continued. My desktop now had an iPhone style 4×4 app grid. It wasn’t clear where the other apps had gone. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to how things had gotten shuffled around to other pages. The dock still held the correct 8 apps. But everything else was happening iPhone style. Notification center came up in the lower left corner here too. And I was still stuck in portrait. 

My first thought was google, or the forums, to ask for help. As I speculated above, some setting in some tweak, or some interaction between apps, was causing some unintended consequences. Basically, it seemed like my iPad thought it was an iPhone and was behaving that way.  I did a respring, a power cycle, then a hard reset, but the situation persisted. 

And instead of asking for help, I pulled the plug.  Right to iTunes for a restore to stock and then from a recent backup. I’m sure some of you will say that I gave up too soon.  That if only I’d flicked some toggle in some tweak, or deleted some app or changed some setting, that everything would’ve been fine. 

But you know what? This flies in the face of the experience I want to have when I use my iPad. I want everything to “just work.” For the most part, in stock iOS, things do just work. And I almost never need to ask someone to help troubleshoot an issue because there are hardly any issues. I used to have to do that all the time in windows (and even osx on occasion).  I realized quite clearly that I don’t miss that paradigm at all. At all.

Perhaps it’d be different if my iPad were a fun/side device, rather than my primary computer. Or if I had more patience and time to work through these kinds of kinks. And I *really* miss having 8 apps in my dock, and quick access to settings and Remote controls.  But I also missed having everything “just work.” I also feel like Apple will continue to slowly but surely coopt the best stuff allowed by jail breaking into future versions of stock iOS. Until then, my iDevices remain in jail! I appreciate the incredible efforts of the JB community and dev team. It’s just not for me as an all-the-time iPad user. 

*OnLive intends to offer paid versions as well. Paid users will receive server/bandwidth prioritization, and perhaps other added benefits down the road (Quicken anyone?)

Here’s a look at the desktop. As a commenter pointed out, it really feels like a Windows machine inside your iPad. For my part, it’s a bit like a possession, and a somewhat unsettling one!

I really wanted to like OnLive, so I went in with an open mind. The good news is that unlike CloudOn, I noticed somewhere between ‘no lag’ and ‘not enough lag to bother me’ in real usage. I guess their long experience streaming games has taught them a thing or two.

The bad news is that as with CloudOn, OnLive has two issues I simply cannot get past, and a few other niggling issues which make the overall experience one I cannot really recommend except in a pinch. CloudOn’s issues are the lag, and UI. OnLive’s biggest problems break down in two main areas:

1) The app uses its own custom keyboard rather than the system keyboard. There’s a neat trick you can use to swipe it on and off screen (I left it up full time because in Excel in particular it’s difficult to consistently tap to get the little ‘show me the keyboard’ button to pop up) but as a keyboard it’s frankly terrible. And I mean terrible. As spacious and useable as the iPad system keyboard is, the OnLive keyboard is cramped, filled with tiny buttons, and leaves you only the option of hunt and peck style typing. See here:

I applaud the effort to get a full fledged desktop keyboard onto the iPad’s screen. But in use, it’s just too cramped and reminds me of the Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh keyboard. Ick. All the touch typing proficiency I’ve built up was simply gone. And to be honest I don’t think you could get there with OnLive even with a lot of practice. Even though certain functions would be ‘buried’ somewhat using the system keyboard, I highly recommend to OnLive that they at least make it a user option. Without it, I could never use OnLive long term.

2) The UI, while more familiar and ‘standard’ Office feeling than CloudOn’s, is still needlessly complex and flies in the face of the wonderful, elegant UI standards that have been set by native apps like those in the iWork suite. The bar is high, and OnLive reveals the pitfalls of porting – even when done with some care – as opposed to designing anew from the ground up.Add in the lack of integration with Dropbox or other cloud based file lockers and an inability to print directly from within the app, and I’m left with a sort of perplexed sense of things here. 

Conclusions

OnLive seems to have the virtual machine hosting/streaming thing down pat. There’s no lag that I perceived as problematic. And they’ve obviously put thought and effort into this Office effort. On the other hand, they shipped something difficult enough to use with any regularity that I have to wonder whether the folks at OnLive actually spent time using it themselves.

Replace the keyboard with the iOS system keyboard, and integrate with dropbox, and OnLive might have a winner, moreso if they streamline the UI as well. Until then, those looking for MS Office on the iPad will have to wait until Microsoft does the inevitable, or, use Apple’s pretty great iWork apps.

However, upon real world usage I found the general lagginess and overall complexity of the interface to be a bit much for me.

I’m pretty excited to try the competing OnLive app which was announced recently. I just installed the app. Unfortunately, using it requires you to set up an account at their website, rather than within the app. Bad form! Also, you have to enter a fair bit of info including your birthday in order to get an account. Again, bad form. Finally, your account doesn’t immediately go live. I assume I’m waiting for an email activation.

Sigh. I guess OnLive takes its cues from Microsoft – let’s make it as cumbersome as possible for people to even try to use our software!

Anyway, once they decide to let me actually use the app I’ll be testing it and reporting back here. Stay tuned.

By the way, this is my first post using Blogsy, recommended by commenter Jen. Pretty interesting so far…

I have an HP all in one. It’s networked, and I print to it all the time from my iPad. While following news out of CES I saw that Xerox announced a $249 portable/wireless scanner that could scan directly to an iOS device. I was intrigued. It got me wondering – where has scanning to an iOS device evolved to of late?

A quick search led me to a Wired story about an app called VueScan.

It promised exactly what I’ve been looking for, as well as broad device compatibility. In fact, though the full featured app costs $5 (technically $4.99) they offer a free, stripped down version which you can use to test and ensure that your specific device works with the app. This was important to me because while their device compatibility list included the HP 7700, it didn’t explicitly include the 7780 that I own. I was optimistic – and it does work fine – but having the free app to confirm made me much more comfortable plunking down the $5.

Bottom line: I love this app. It works and works well. I can scan from the document feeder, rotate and/or crop if needed right on my ipad, and attach the scan to an email or save it to outside apps like Dropbox (which is my de facto file system).

Frankly I’m shocked that no one tackled this sooner. Maybe we really do live in an increasingly paperless world. Still, for the few times I need to scan, VueScan does the trick and does it wonderfully. One step closer to retiring my iMac for good. Now if only iTunes match would drop the 25000 song limit, photostream held as many albums and photos as you wanted, and you could also save videos to the Apple cloud…

Original post:

If you’ve not checked out CloudOn iTunes Link, you’re a big DropBox user (or thinking of becoming one) and like to be productive on the iPad, then CloudOn is an app you must explore.

Put simply, it’s Office for the iPad. And it actually works pretty well. Surprisingly so in fact. I’m still exploring it myself, and getting used to the mouseless convention of using office apps on the iPad, but…wow.

Apparently what they’re doing is hosting Microsoft Office in the cloud and allowing custom access via the app. They’ve baked DropBox into the app for the file system, and you need an Internet connection to use it all.

If you’ve followed my exploits and efforts to use the iPad Alone, then you know that as much as I’ve explored Quick Office and the like, I’ve stuck with my iWork/Dropbox/dropDAV solution for some time now. It works pretty well, and there’s only one step in the process (saving files from iWork back into Dropbox) that feels like a workaround.

With CloudOn, I finally have an alternative that I may actually prefer. Time will tell, but so far so good.

The only wrinkle are the rumors, reignited of late, that Microsoft itself is working on Office for the iPad. To be honest I’m shocked that it hasn’t appeared already. And if Microsoft does it right (and I’ll discuss that some other time) then it’ll be a no brainer. That said, CloudOn raises the bar. If Microsoft was planning on some stripped down experience, they can pretty much forget it. CloudOn feels more like Office on my iPad since, well, Office on my Mac.

Check it out!