The Bad
Newsstand really is just a wrapper for the magazine apps out there. I thought it would be a new unifying app framework (like iBooks). I also dislike how it looks different from the rest of the phone. It opens like a folder from an icon, but can hold more than twelve items, it has a built in "Store" button in this weird folder view. Why isn't it like iBooks? In fact, in iBooks we have "Books" and "PDFs", why not "Magazines" and then use the same store? The reason is, of course, that it's "just" a wrapper. It's just an alternate way to look at the same magazine apps.

Reminders will probably be better with Siri, but I like the entire geofence ideas. But apart from that, Reminders is a fairly limited todo list app. I use OmniFocus which is a true GTD app which syncs with my iPad and my Mac. How do I get to my Reminders on my Mac?

Twitter is on the bad list because it's only Twitter. Why not an open framework? Why couldn't app developers provide app credential plugins for the iPhone? So I download a Facebook plugin, a Tumblr plugin and whereever I can share something, all these services pop up. Windows Metro seems to do this correctly, and only Twitter is half-baked, even if it is the number one largest sharing service aside of Facebook.

The good
Airplay mirroring is fantastic. Mirror the entire iPad 2 screen to your TV via the ATV and you instantly have a Wii-class console with ten times as many games. I played Real Racing HD 2 which supports TV out - which led to 1080p of gaming goodness on my tv with the iPad as the controller in my hand.

The new notification center is awesome, and has great control over the details and settings for how each app can notify you, which is great. To decide what gets shown on the lock screen is golden! I know that Android has had this for a while, and it has been an area where it has been ahead. Not any more.

I haven't been able to test iMessage out much, but I bet it will replace WhatsApp on my phone. I just hope that iMessage is being brought to Lion soon enough, which would mean that regardless of what devide I'm on, I could communicate with all of my friends.

The camera app is a lot better for two reasons - lock screen access and volume button shutter. Easy, quick. Photo editing in iOS is severly limited, but being able to rotate and quickly fix small stuff is a nice addition.

The entire PC free, wireless sync and wireless update is amazingly good of course. Another catching up-feature, but still. The Safari additions like Reader and Reading List are small but welcome. It's odd that it took this long for Reader to come to iOS. The multi-touch gestures for iPad is also really nice to have at hand for us that have grown used to the gestures in Liion.

I think the recent lawsuit from Apple towards Samsung is just plain dumb. If you read the the claims, they are outlined where Apple claims that the Galaxy Tab is infringing on the Ipad for these reasons:

1. A square shape with rounded corners
2. A flat shiny surface
3. A metal frame is visible from the front
4. A screen is centered in the shiny surface
5. When turned on, colored icons are shown.

Wtf? You can't protect that! That's just plain dumb. Not only does it exactly describe this:

But there is more. I wonder if there was any company prior to the iPad... or the iPhone, that made a product that not only fits the above criteria - but also looks a lot like an iPad? Well, yes there is - and that company is called Samsung!

March 2006. Square with rounded corners, shiny surface, metal frame. Check check check. I'm sure it has colored icons somewhere when turned on (a claim that is dubious to say the least, since the Samsung galaxy tab runs honeycomb, which doesn't necessarily show colored icons when turned on - i.e. home screen)

Apple, you're being dumb. Stop it.

I've just installed OSX Lion and here are some of my first impressions

Dog Slow
Upon finishing installation, it does some thorough indexing which slows down the computer a lot. I certainly hope that when the indexing is done, it will be snappier.

Too Grey
The Finder has lost its color. No color icons in the sidebar, and it's all a grey mess, which I don't like at all. Same goes with all apps - icons in the toolbar are all grey stylized symbols lent from iOS. It's just boring.

Mission Control
It's pretty nice, and I like how they have incorporated all window management tasks into one view.

LaunchPad
This is a worthless piece of junk. You can't search like you can in iOS, and they have done away with all general UI for the Mac and totally replaced it with iOS style interaction, which sucks. So to re-arrange, you press and hold, and enter jiggle mode. You can't select more then one icon at a time, you can't drag-select or shift-select any icons. You can't create folders by cmd-shift-N, only by dragging one app over another. You can't even command-click an icon to reveal it in the finder. As I said, this is a worthless piece of shit.

Mail
I really don't like the new Mail. Again with the grey boring looks of it, but what I dislike the most is the three-pane view (when you display the folders). I don't want that. So I drag the divider to the far right, but then I have no columns, only a fairly stupid list view, which works fine in iOS, but not here.

Also, they've removed the Mail todos functionality. I can no longer make a selection in the text of a mail and make a todo out of it. That sucks.

iCal
It's made to look like a leather calendar. This is STUPID AS FUCK. Stop doing this, Apple! I don't want my software calendar to look like a real calendar. If I did, I'd fucking use a real calendar. iCal is also iOS-crippled with the calendar list being a pop-out from a button in the upper left corner. And it's fixed size! It doesn't actually show all my calendars even though screen space would permit it! This sucks! I want to see all my calendars all the time!

Scrolling
I changed back to normal scrolling immediately. That was a stupid idea.

Full screen
All Windows-joking aside, the full screen modes is nothing like full screen in windows. For better and worse. Accessing the dock seems flimsy, it seems I have to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, and when it can't travel further down, pause, and then move it downwards again, the cursor stays in the same place, but this registers as a "double down" or something, which shows the dock. Unintutive and clumsy. Also, if I have 5 spaces, and have mail set to space 2. I always press cmd-alt-2 to go to my mail. Right, but when I set mail to full screen, it actually creates a new space in between 2 and 3, which as *NO KEYBOARD SHORTCUT* WTF? All I can do is cmd-TAB to it, or use the dock (double down!!)

Open dialogs
You can't drag a file to a open dialog to quickly select it anymore! What the hell?? This was one of the most useful function of OSX ever!

Safari
Seems like a nice update, quick as ever, broke some CSS for me on my CMS, will look into that. Reader List seems useful, probably more so with iOS 5.

In conclusion I think I can say that borrowing too much from iOS isn't necessarily a good thing. There are things about the Mac UI that we like, and there are things about the iOS UI that we like, they're not always interchangeable though.

I wonder which car manufacturer who will be the first to incorporate an iPad into the dashboard of a car. We know that car makers are keen to include iPod connectivity in their cars, and iPad seems like the next logical step. Sure, everything I'm about to write applies to any given iPhone or even iPod touch, but with the iPad, you get that nice big screen which is why I think this would be desirable.

Think about it and it's a pretty neat thing. The best thing for the car maker would be to make it an optional thing. You'd order your BMW or whatever brand it is and in the dash you have a 10 inch plate, ready for an iPad. Only, if you order it without it, you get an ordinary car stereo plate inserted into the space. It's exchangeable, so if you change your mind, it actually disconnects and you can then insert one of two iPad-optimized inserts. One for a more permanent fixture. I.e. it blends in that awesome 10 inch screen into the dash and it stays there. The other option is to have it easily removable. You can click in your own iPad into place, and take it with you if you please. With iOS 5 and data syncing via iCloud, I'd think this wouldn't be a necessary thing. All your music, photos and such sync to your "car iPad". And the more permanent solution would still allow for disconnect if you want to sync large movies to it for some reason.

As for how it would be used, that's where the sweet stuff comes into play. Using the 30-pin connector, you can have a button on the dash that launches the "BMW Dashboard app" which is a free download from the App store. Using that app, you can control most of everything in the car. Sure, some basic functionality would still be available via hard buttons and knobs on the dash, but the app would provide a much more intuitive way to set up the radio, stereo equalizer, suspension dampening, automatic distance to cars when in cruise control and god knows what. When you put the car in reverse, the app would launch and display the video from the rear video camera.

When not using the car app, you'd download your preferred GPS and have a 10 inch GPS screen on your dashboard, instead of using the manufacturers crappy GPS solutions, or an on-dash solution. The car would obviously tap right into the audio and you could listen to iPod, podcasts, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify and whatnot on the road.

Using airplay, movies on your iPad would play on the two headrest screens for your kids, while your GPS runs on the iPad. You can even initiate Facetime calls from your car if you'd like.

Where do I order this car? :)

Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.

Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a patent settlement with HTC over intellectual property infringement.

Microsoft is suing other Android phone makers, and it’s looking for $7.50 to $12.50 per device, says Pritchard.

HTC Pays Microsoft $5 Per Android Phone, Says Citi.

Clever! If you can't make money on your own technology, use patents to make money from competitors technology!

www.asymco.com...

So, Neil McAllister have been trying out Flash for the Xoom tablet, and here are some impressions:

Streaming video is the most popular application for Flash today, so I tried that first. Ironically, I had a hard time finding demo cases. The Xoom ships with a video player that automatically launches when you view content from YouTube or Dailymotion, so you don't need Flash for those sites. On the other hand, Hulu wouldn't work even with Flash installed; all it would say was, "Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Wait, what? YouTube launches in a separate app? What's up with that? Wasn't the entire idea of Flash that you didn't need separate apps for these services?

On sites where I could view Flash video -- such as Comedy Central and MTV -- results were mixed. Playback quality was mostly good but a little choppy at times, and audio occasionally seemed slightly out of sync. Videos that looked sharp in full-screen mode seemed to degrade in picture quality when shrunk to smaller sizes. Worse, some of the Flash video players' controls were almost impossible to activate, given the tablet's touchscreen interface.

Well, all of this is highly unexpected.

As I continued my tests, it became clear that these initial problems weren't limited to streaming video. In general, the Flash Player for Android 3.0 does not do a good job of scaling bitmap images. This becomes especially clear when scaling bitmapped text, which becomes blocky and hard to read at small sizes.

The difficulties of navigating Flash UIs on a touchscreen device are increasingly troublesome, and unfortunately they're endemic to the Flash platform. Flash developers are even more likely than traditional Web developers to populate their UIs with rollovers, fancy animations, and aesthetically appealing yet nonstandard controls, none of which work well on a device with a small screen and no mouse

I'm quite certain that someone have raised these issues before, but I can't think of who that might be.

Scrolling the screen is a particularly egregious example. Android tablets don't use the traditional scroll bars of a mouse-based UI; instead, users swipe with their fingers to scroll. Flash apps don't seem to understand this concept. Once a Flash movie loads into part of the browser window, that part of the window no longer responds to swipes. If you need to scroll the window -- say, to make sure the Flash content is centered on the screen -- you have to carefully touch your finger on a portion of the page that corresponds to HTML, so the browser will know you're trying to scroll.

This won't be a problem of course, since the ones writing the browser will just adapt the code for the Flash plugin to correctly interprete... ooops. This is what happens when you allow for a third party to control the user experience on your device.

The worst part is the player's inconsistent behavior. This gets really frustrating when there's lots of HTML and Flash content mixed on a Web page. The UI turns into a tug-of-war between the browser and the Flash Player, where each touch produces varying effects, seemingly at random. Depending on where your finger happens to land -- and maybe on your timing -- one touch might be interpreted as a command for the browser and the next might activate controls in a Flash movie, while the next might do nothing. Adobe simply has not done enough to accommodate touch-based interfaces.

And remember, they haven't done enough to accomodate for touch interfaces *within the flash object* on top of not playing well with the touch interface where the object is embedded. It's like two layers of stupid for the price of one.

Needless to say, these deficiencies are compounded when you try to use Flash Player for real work. For my next assessment I wanted to see how the Xoom would handle complex Flash-based applications. I had the perfect torture test in mind: Adobe's own Acrobat.com [8], which features a Google Docs-like suite of office applications implemented in Flash. Unfortunately, on the Xoom I was greeted with the message, "Sorry, but Adobe Acrobat.com is not compatible with your browser at this time. Please upgrade to a supported browser." That should have been my first hint.

Great job, Adobe!

When I did track down some demo Adobe Flex applications that would load in the Android browser, my reaction was utter disappointment. Visually they were appealing enough, but they didn't do much to accommodate the tablet-sized screen, which meant I had to scroll around a lot (where possible). The UI controls were all nonstandard, and many assumed I had a mouse.

Much like most AppStore apps... Oh wait.

Worst of all was form input, a mainstay of any business application. When presented with a Flash-based form, I literally had to stab my finger at the Xoom's screen six or seven times before my touch would register as a click. Finally some random form field would be highlighted, irrespective of where my finger landed, and the onscreen keyboard would pop up. Woe betide me if the wrong field was highlighted, though, because Tab and Shift-Tab would both advance me forward through the form fields. There didn't seem to be any way to go back, and I dared not try to select another field by touch. In a nutshell, Flash-based forms are a total nonstarter on Android tablets. Forget about them.

Forms, something introduced to the web around 1994, are a non-starter for flash on the Xoom. Wow.

What about games? Even there, I didn't have much luck. One simple balloon-popping game rendered in my browser window, then inexplicably leaped up and to the left, leaving a white square where the Flash content was supposed to be

Again, much like how games from the AppStore behaves...

As far as I could tell, there was one thing and one thing only that the Flash Player for Android 3.0 accomplished successfully. On the stock Android browser, Flash content is invisible, so you don't notice Flash-based advertising. With the Flash Player installed, however, all those ads suddenly appear where once there were none

Score!!!

www.infoworld.com...

Since the apps of interest are from the same company, they should have the same user interface standard, even if the iPhone versions and the Android versions are developed by different people. But why do they look so different? Is it because iPhone developers are better at user interface design? Is it because the iPhone development environment is better than the Android’s? Is it because iPhone users care more about user interface? Or is it because Android itself implants the ignorance of beauty, usability and focus on details into the community at the first place?

Funny comparison of some screens from companies that have considerably nicer looking apps on iPhone than their Android counterparts.

android-gripes.tumblr.com...

Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones.

Yeah, open source software is great!

www.businessweek.com...

Being a citizen of Sweden, I don't have access to the Movie and TV show content of the iTunes store, until I created a USA account when I imported my iPad. The US iTunes store was the only place where you could get most of the iPad apps from day one.

I recently started using this account to purchase TV shows and I love it! Nothing new for US customers of course, but just how easy it is is amazingly accessible. I use my Apple TV to browse and buy TV show seasons or even TV show episodes.

But my AppleTV fills up really quickly, and my iMac which it syncs with does as well. Why am I downloading this? I can totally understand downloading it for using it on my mobile devices, but why am I doing it on my Apple TV? Why not just buy a "Season Pass" to Top Gear and then have all the episodes streaming to me on demand? Come on, you're already downloading it once to every customer, and it's highly unlikely they would be watching the same content over and over to saturate your bandwidth that quickly, right?

We have Spotify here in Sweden, which is much like iTunes, only you stream all the music and you get rid of the adds by subscribing to the service (plus, you get the iPhone app, handy).

Apple has already conceded that people doesn't want to own their movies, thus they offer rentals. Not on all movies, but many. And that's just perfect for me. My reason for buying physical media is that you usually get a nice case that fits nicely on your shelf, but once you move into digital content, I don't have to own it for $20 to take up place on my hard drive, I rather rent it for $3 every time I want to watch it.

Same goes for TV shows - only you are less likely to watch these more than one time. Give me a season pass and stream the TV show to me when I want to see it. Put it in "My TV Shows" on my Apple TV menu but not on my Apple TV hard drive.

Mac mini computers make sweet servers for most applications. However, integrating them into a rack poses some challenges. How do you securely mount the minis? How do you keep them cool? How do you turn them on without pulling them out of the rack? How do you plug in a thumb drive for a quick update? Sonnet's RackMac mini solves all these challenges and more!

It's a fun idea, and maybe some Xserve users would migrate down to Mac minis using this technology? I'm not one of them, though.

www.sonnettech.com...

800 dollars for a 32GB tablet, and for some strange reasoon, the fine print on this ad says that you need to activate a 3G subscription (for at least $20/month) to enable Wi-Fi on this device. What? Seriously?

www.engadget.com...

TechChrunch had some hands-on with HoneyComb on Motorolas Xoom and they like it a lot. Click the link to watch a video of the UI in action.

techcrunch.com...

The UI looks alright I suppose, While I'm not endorsing the 20-icon grid of the iPad, I think the entire widget thing is a bit too much. I don't want a widget of my books on the home screen, and who would? The one thing I can agree with is with your calendar, where you can quickly see todays schedule. Here are some of the highlights:

The Action Bar

One of the most drastic changes is the move from dedicated hardware buttons to access Menu options to the ‘Action Bar’ a UI element at the top of the screen with options that change depending on whatever application you’re using.

I think it's a pretty nice idea, and it makes for a consistent place where some contextual tasks can be placed. Hopefully this is utilized well by developers.

Browser

Kicks the pants off of the iPad’s browser. Tabs are great, and the fact that the tablet browser syncs with your desktop version of Google Chrome is very nice. Scrolling felt smooth. And there’s Incognito Mode.

Since iPads browser syncs with your desktop and supports tabs, I fail to see how it is being kicked based on those arguments. While I can see that using visible tabs on top of the screen might be handy, I do think it's wasting some precious screen space as well. It's by no means any "kicking the pants" of iPads browser, and since they're both based on webkit, I'm going to go ahead and assume that they support the web almost identically. Chrome in Honeycomb is supposedly faster with javascript, though.

Gmail

We’ve seen it showcased a few times now, but Gmail for Honeycomb is awesome - it’s like the iPad-optimized web version of Gmail, but without the slight lag you still find on browser apps. I want it badly.

I wonder if it's something like, you know, the native support of Gmail in the built in Mail client on the iPad?

Android Market

The UI of Android Market has been revamped for the tablet. I think it’s pretty ugly: the ‘Android Green’ striped lines feel almost like placeholder graphics and it doesn’t look nearly as attractive as iOS’s App Store. But it gets the job done.

It's basically like a bad ripoff of the App Store. But I'm not going to hold that against Android. Some times, something gets so entrenched that anyone wanting to make an alternative almost always end up making a copy. This is one of the main complaints I've had for Linux over the years - they spend too much time trying to look and feel like Windows - as to make for an easy transition from Windows.

Movie Studio

It hasn’t gotten much press, but there’s a new application included as part of the Honeycomb suite of Google applications: Movie Studio. I didn’t spend too much time in this, but it includes the features you’d expect: transitions between clips, text overlays, and so on. The UI isn’t what you’d call pretty and it may leave some people scratching their heads, but it’s a nice app to have.

Yeah, while the UI seems awkward, this is a perfect application for the the tablet form factor. Imagine iMovie on your iPad, editing video that has been shot with your iPhone (connected wirelessly to your iPad etc) or even using video clips from iMovie on your desktop.

Performance

In general Honeycomb felt snappy - you can see in the video that there’s never really any lag. I did notice some slight jittering when dragging widgets, but was later shown a more recent build of the OS that seemed to fix this. And the fact that the Xoom has 1GB of RAM means that you aren’t going to find your browser tabs emptying the way they do on the current iPad.

Yeah, RAM is important, and while the refreshing of your tabs in iOS is a slight inconvenience, the Xoom didn't seem to be any snappier than the iPad as far as I could tell.

Honeycomb also features a new notification system that reminds me of Growl on Mac OS X. New updates slide into view in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and you don’t have to squint to see them the way you do on Android phones. Again, very nice.

The Android notification system is something sorely lacking from iOS.

Today, as part of the interoperability bridges work we do on this team, we are making available the Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome, which is an extension for Google Chrome to enable Windows 7 customers who use Chrome to continue to play H.264 video.

Ironic, to say the least. Microsoft is suddenly the benefactor of current standards and going out of their way to provide what Google is trying to remove.

We've gone from a Apple vs. Microsoft power struggle to a threeway where I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft is struggling that much with each other any more.

blogs.msdn.com...

I am ecstatic to announce that Pixelmator grossed a gigantic $1 million on the Mac App Store. And that happened in only 20 short days.

Amazing

www.pixelmator.com...