Last year, when OS X Lion was first demoed to the public, I commented on the influence of iOS and the iPad on the new version of the Mac’s operating system.  Now that Lion has been released, and most people have had a chance to at least look at it, there can be no denying this influence. Now we should consider why Apple has let so much of iOS seep into OS X.  Does any one think that it was just due to a sense that these related systems should have similar behaviors?  If you do, I have some nice real estate on Mars that I can sell you at a bargain price. For many consecutive quarters Apple...

While there has been much commented on the introduction of Apple’s iCloud service, little has touched on its deeper implications.  Sure, iCloud is a replacement for MobileMe, and allows people to sync files between different devices, but what else does it do?  How is it different from MobileMe or other such services which are available from other companies? The most significant difference in iCloud is that it is being introduced not as a “drive” where you can save your files, but as a service accessible through a specific API, which will be present in every Mac, iPad and iPhone that...

Apple has finally introduced the in-app subscription service that has been long rumored. Subscriptions created through this service will incur the same 30% fee that Apple charges for other in-app purchases or sales of apps in the App Store. While the 30% fee makes a lot of sense for the app sales made through the App Store as Apple is effectively acting as both distributor and reseller, such a charge just for handling the order processing for content providers seems a bit too steep.  When Apple makes a sale through the App Store, it handles the hosting and bandwidth for the downloads in addition to...

I just discovered that the excellent iA Writer app for the iPad is on sale for just $0.99.  I’m not sure of just how long this sale will last, so if you are interested in writing on your iPad, you should check it out on the AppStore.  This application is a great option for taking notes or working on any text while on the go. iA Writer has a focus mode which dims out all text outside of a one line radius around the cursor position.  This is intended to allow the writer to focus on what he/she is currently writing without the temptation to review other parts of the text.  This is one of the...

After an update, released last night, the app for “The Daily” is working much better.  It is in fact “working” on my iPad, which is a nice change.  Before the update, attempting to open the app resulted in a long wait on a black screen, followed by a long wait on a screen which indicated that a new issue was being downloaded, followed by a crash. After deleting the old app (as recommended on the App Store) and downloading the update I was able to open the app and download current issue, without any trouble.  The start up of the application was much faster also, without the...

If  you use your iPad for doing serious work you might be interested in the Dropbox application.  You can use this App with the a service from Dropbox that allows you to store up to 2 GB on the cloud with no cost or considerably more data at a monthly cost. The Dropbox App syncs with the online service allowing you to cache some content locally and allowing you to control the contents of your cloud storage from your iPad. The free client application allows you to visualize PDFs, text files and images without the need of any additional Apps. While you don’t really need any additional Apps to...

In a busy day of application releases both Apple and its subsidiary Filemaker released new versions of their main productivity applications for the iPad.   The updates to the iWork applications seem to be focusing on the main complaints from early adopters such as the inability of having objects grouped and the inability to export the documents in a Microsoft Office compatible format. Both Keynote and Numbers were updated with the ability to export documents in formats compatible with Microsoft’s Powerpoint and Excel applications.  These updates should help make the iPad even more useful as a...

Since the iPad was originally introduced people have been buying it for an amazing assortment of tasks.  While no one has been talking much about its penetration in the Enterprise it is getting to a point where it can’t be dismissed or ignored. Just recently I’ve been to a significant number of meetings where one, two or more of the participants were using an iPad to take notes or look up information.   A quick chat with some of the other participants revealed that several of them are heave iPad users at home but haven’t yet decided to bring it into the office as they prefer to...

Since the iPad was first introduced people have been fascinated by the possibility of using them for taking notes.  The size and weight of the iPad makes it a great option for carrying around the office and into meetings.  Personally, I’ve always been interested in this aspect of the iPad and when I ran across a note taking application called Chapters I was immediately interested  in testing. Chapters seems specially well suited for taking notes for which a chronology is important.  The application gives special attention to the date in which a note is created and they are listed in...

An application called iMockups came recently to my attention as I was going over the drawing and diagramming tools available for the iPad.  This is an interesting application that is designed to let you quickly create sketches of interfaces for Web, iPhone and iPad applications. While I hadn’t really considered it before, the iPad does seem like a good option for conducting a one on one session for doing an early application sketch along with an application user.  In fact Endloop Systems, the creators of iMockups position it exactly as a tool for quickly creating the first rough sketches of...

Recently I published a post commenting on the fact that Flipboard was an interesting App to check out, if you were able to.  As the application was released there was such an influx of people downloading it and wanting to use it that their servers were overwhelmed.  At that point I had watched their demo video, but had not yet been able to try out the App. Now, they seem to have gotten things under control, even though you need to go through a registration process that lets them have better control on the number of people putting demand on their  back-end services. A couple of days ago I finally...

About two days ago people started talking about Flipboard. Really talking a lot.  So much so that many people, including me, have found it very hard to try it out.   Just last night I noticed a tweet from the other side of the planet in which the editor of readwriteweb.com commented that he too couldn’t try it because Flipboard was over capacity. This problem should give you an indication of just how interesting a concept Flipboard really is.  In short, Flipboard collects information from your Twitter and Facebook (other Social Networks may be supported) feeds and uses it to bring all the...

Over the past week I’ve been trying out Osfoora HD, a Twitter client of which I had never heard of until I pretty much stumbled on it in the App Store. If you are in a similar situation read on as it turned out that this app is really interesting. In the past I have used several different Twitter clients and I tried a couple of them out in the iPad but none gave me as good an experience as Osfoora HD.  At first look it seems a bit like a cross between Twitterrific and TweetDeck, but it feels like an improved version of what this cross would look like. Let’s start from the beginning, with...

Apple has made available on the App Store its new retail store application.  The application is designed for the iPhone but runs on the iPad. In fact I grabbed some screen shots using the iPad.  The application allows you to place orders for all the products you expect to find in the Apple store and has a nice feel to it, being very similar in functionality to the App Store itself, as you would expect. I experimented with placing an order for an iPad and it offers you the option of adding services such as MobileMe or AppleCare to the purchase, while making it very easy to skip over the offering with...

The App Store is now showing more than 10,000 apps specifically for the iPad.  That is an impressive mark after just two and a half months since the device was first released.  This is all the more impressive because iPad apps tend to be more complex and extensive in functionalities than their iPhone and iPod siblings. It is just natural that having much more screen area users would expect more of the applications and that developers would find ways to explore it.  Many iPad applications are much closer  to desktop applications to what you would expect and be used to on the iPhone or iPod, as they...