Today Apple updated iBooks to version 2 which can now display much more interactive books than it did previously. While iBooks has been a terrific reading experience (I use it as my primary way to read books and PDFs) this new version can display textbooks created by Apple’s latest Mac app – iBooks Author.

iBooks Author, which is somehow completely free, is a Mac app that makes it simple to build interactive textbooks for iPad and iBooks 2. Not only does it work a lot like Pages for laying out a page of text, images and other elements, it also includes other interactive features like quizes, slideshows, videos, and more. It even makes it simple to add a glossary to a book. I imagine that iBooks Author has just become the worlds best book publishing application.

The iTunes U application gives teachers and students a way to interact together as well as with the iTunes U content available on the App Store. I don’t have much of an opinion about this application yet but it looks like a useful tool and it is also being offered for free.

These are amazing tools. Now lets see what the world chooses to do with them.

Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

First, move older email messages out of your Inbox and into an Archive folder. You should have no trouble doing this. It may take a little while for Mail.app to move all of the messages. If you’re the type of person that has several folders (or Mailboxes) for message categories like family, friends, work, etc. etc. then you may not benefit from this tip. But, if you’re like me, and you leave every single message in your Inbox then you definitely will.

What I’ve done is move every message in my Inbox dated prior to December 1, 2011 into an Archive folder that is locally here on my Mac. This way when I go into my Inbox it is only loading a few months of email. I may do this again in June or wait an entire year if I don’t see much of a slow down. But just doing this has sped up Mail.app a lot.

Second, you could strip the bloat from Mail.app’s Envelope Index. What does this mean? I don’t really know but the layman’s explanation might be this; Mail.app keeps a database and sometimes it gets a little out of control. You can run a few commands via Terminal and it will clean up that mess. Again, do this at your own risk.

Your mileage may vary but with these two tips Mail.app should get just a bit snappier. It has for me.

I’m going to change that.

This article by Kirk McElhearn at Macworld on How to use services in Mac OS X has pushed me over the edge. What are services? McElhearn explains them this way “Simply put, OS X services let you borrow features from other programs.”

/via John “I don’t know” Gruber.

I’m starting to believe that if and when Apple TV is updated the hardware price will be surprisingly low.

As you may very well know Eliza and I use our Apple TV a lot. We don’t use all of the features but we use it daily. For $99 (its current price) I think it a steal. I can’t imagine what would happen if, say, a new Apple TV was priced at $29 (my guess at what “surprisingly low” could be).

This, of course, is besides the notion that Apple will, at some point in the future, debut a brand-new television-related product. Perhaps a TV of their own. Or, perhaps, a really inexpensive Apple TV in addition to a TV of their own. Who knows?

But I can say this… I highly, highly recommend anyone with an iPhone, iPod, iPad or Macintosh to consider the Apple TV a must-have accessory. A must-have accessory. And if a new one is priced lower than today’s models than my recommendation would only be stronger.

Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET.

/via CNet.

“And lots of DF readers on Twitter are telling me they use Apple TV just for AirPlay and Netflix streaming.”

That is exactly what I use the Apple TV for. I do not buy or rent TV shows or movies from the iTunes store. Ever. Although the Apple TV integrates with the iTunes Store, Home sharing (for sharing files from a computer), the NBA and MLB (and others), Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, etc. etc. the two features I use on my Apple TV are Netflix with Airplay.

I use Airplay to put videos I find via my iPad on the TV. I do this a lot. (Thanks Devour) Even if the source of these videos is from YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and other outlets – the integration with any of those platforms goes unused by me since I simply use Airplay. I suppose if I didn’t own an iPad my use of Airplay wouldn’t be nearly as significant. It is just so easy. I’ll also, on occasion, use Airplay to play some music via my Apple TV (this replaced my Airport Express’ purpose) and very, very rarely put some vacation photos on-screen.

Another note about Airplay; if you, like me (and obviously Jason Kottke), sometimes acquire a few TV shows you couldn’t get otherwise by grabbing them via Bittorrent you may be interested in Erica Sadun’s Airflick. Airflick is an application that lets you stream video, audio, or photos from your Mac to your Apple TV. Very handy application.

But all-in-all my Apple TV might as well just be a Netflix box. I’ve used Netflix on the computer, on an Xbox 360, on iPad and iPhone and on Apple TV. By far the very best Netflix application exists on the Apple TV. It is easy to use, looks great, and works nearly every single time without hiccup. I don’t know if I’d even be subscribed to Netflix if I didn’t own an Apple TV.

“someone that loves to get the job done instead of working on their machine”

When I began my switch to the Macintosh nearly a decade ago my single biggest reason that I trumpeted to friends was that I could focus on my work rather than wasting countless hours maintaining my computer. I remember spending far too much time reinstalling my operating system, defragmenting my hard drive, installing virus and malware protection software, and other such tasks. Since switching to the Macintosh I have not had to spend a single minute on any of those things. The Mac lets me do work and get back to life. And I’m a huge fan of life.

/via Marco “Please don’t email me” Arment.

I think it is a good thing for the official applications to all feel and work very much the same. However, for obvious reasons long-time users of Twitter may feel the changes are a bit jarring. John Gruber rips into Twitter for iPhone by comparing it to Tweetie (which is what the application started out as). Mike Rundle rips into the app on its own merits.

Some TweetDeck users seem to like the update since prior to this latest version the application was a horrible Adobe AIR application that (at least in my experience) was slow, poorly designed, and bloated. This latest version seems better.

I don’t use Twitter for iPhone or TweetDeck and I only use the Twitter.com website on rare occasions. I’m very, very happy with Tweetbot.

Here is a good look at their application from Geoff Teehan. Or, you can stop by their site and grab a copy for yourself.

/tip Mike Rundle on Twitter for Teehan’s review.

This is excellent.

This isn’t worth jailbreaking for. There are plenty of affordable and good panoramic applications in the App Store and obviously Apple wasn’t happy enough with this feature to include it. So it probably isn’t nearly as good as the apps you can get for just a few bucks.

“His biography, written by Walter Isaacson, is topping many book charts and is even tipped to become the bestselling book on Amazon this year.

The company’s latest offering, the iPhone 4S, is faring less well, however, with many users complaining of rapid battery drain on their new smartphones.”

The most successful product launch in Apple’s history and it isn’t fairly well because of a simple software bug that is draining the battery a bit and will, no doubt, be fixed with the next release of iOS 5?

I don’t think it is possible for journalists to go an entire article without saying something negative. Or, maybe it is because Jones or the editors wanted to link to their own “smartphones” page to earn my ad revenue.

Dolts, all of them.

My theory; Shaun has a twin and we’ve been fooled for years.

There is a lot of talent inside of Microsoft. It is everything that happens above the talent that inhibits that talent’s ability to make really great things.

While the Arc Touch Mouse is very, very interesting and seemingly well done it is still based off an old “mouse” (read: move around your desk and move the pointer) paradigm. The multitouch touchpad from Apple is, in my opinion, much better and more forward-thinking because it is getting us closer and closer to having all touch-based interfaces for our computing devices. It is why I switched from using a mouse. I never want a mouse again.

I don’t want to take anything away from the people that worked on this mouse at Microsoft… but I’d like to know if Microsoft would have let them work as hard and long on creating a next generation touch device rather than only a slimmer mouse. And then actually be able to ship it.

I was never much a fan of Steve Jobs. I was always so much more a fan of the company he had built and the products they created.

His idea of thinking differently was to not follow the trends but to set them. The age of computers was, directly or indirectly, crafted by Steve Jobs and his team. Although he is, deservedly so, getting a lot of credit for the revolutionary products Apple has built over the years he wasn’t alone. Apple’s 21,000+ member team all worked in concert to design, manufacturer, market, sell, and support these incredible products. The part that Steve brought – at least from my perspective in the cheap-seats here, was the drive for perfection at the expense of features.

It wasn’t until this last two decades that his methods truly proved themselves to the world and paid off for him. Although Apple saw success in the early days those that would try to copy that which Apple built would be the true benefactors for years. That is, until Steve Jobs stopped being a one-man-team and filled his entire company with people that shared his principles and learned his methods.

Apple products notoriously do less than people want when they’re first shipped. But, no one can ever say that they aren’t beautiful, work exactly as they say, and are the best products they own. Of all the things I own I can say that it is only Apple products that I have a strong affinity for. No other company has captured me as a lifelong loyal consumer of their products. Yet.

I can say that Steve Jobs has had an affect on my life. His passion for perfection at the expense of features has taught me that you don’t have to be first, your product doesn’t have to be for everyone, and your products don’t have to have every feature in order to succeed. Taking your time and building something “insanely great” can pay off. His experiences have also taught me that no matter how great you are you’re only as strong as the team around you. No one man (or woman) can expect to accomplish anything great in our field without the help of people that are talented, driven, and willing to think different. For me those are his legacies; the pursuit of perfection at the expense of features and understanding it takes a team of people willing to think different.

Don’t just do what everyone else is doing, think different.

A little over a year ago I wrote about how it was getting very difficult to choose which camera to use in a given situation. The iPhone 4′s camera was good enough for almost every circumstance I had run into and so the convenience and speed of using the iPhone 4 over a DSLR made for a tough choice.

With the iPhone 4S that decision just got even harder. The iPhone 4S now has an 8MP f/2.4 camera that is also capable of shooting 1080p HD video (the iPhone 4 records in 720p). For any photographer that still pulled out their DSLR over the iPhone 4 they may find it a little easier to use the iPhone 4S. That is why I think the curve to popularity will be a very steep, up-and-to-the-right graph. More serious photographers will use the iPhone 4S then did the iPhone 4.

Time will tell if I’m right. I’d guess, 12 months.

To top it off Apple’s stock price dipped during the event and the tech press has since been rather harsh to Apple for “not releasing an iPhone 5″. The iPhone 4S is the iPhone 5 people. It is as big an update to a piece of hardware as anyone could want. Two-times faster CPU, 7x graphics, an amazing update to the camera, and an antenna that works around the world? What else, besides pure aesthetics, would have been updated on an iPhone 5? Only the name.

The insatiable tech press isn’t the best place to get a balanced view of how great these products, and products from Amazon, Google, Viddler, Twitter, BuzzCar etc. etc., really are. Many of these writers hear about the products too early and by the time they are actually given a launch date they are already bored with the news. Unfortunately the tech press is the only outlet educating both the got-to-have-it enthusiast and our mom’s. Not good.

I sometimes find myself guilty of this and I sometimes have to snap myself out of it. When I want to I either read this or watch this.

• The camera lens will be on the opposite side of the Apple logo. Wrong. According to any photos I’ve seen of the iPhone 4S the camera is in the exact same location as before. (Those of you with iPhone 4 cases that you like are probably very happy about this.)
• The antenna will no longer be built into the case. Wrong. Again, this isn’t the iPhone 5 so the antenna remains relatively unchanged. However, they have somehow managed to make the antenna work for the entire planet inside one phone as well as ad some dynamic switching between technologies. So, at least it is a better antenna?
• The phone will be lighter and have no glass back. Wrong. Wrong.
• The speaker phone will be better. Maybe? Although there was no mention of this in today’s presentation the iPhone 4S now allows for a user-configurable maximum volume limit.
• The build of the home button will be better. Assuming wrong. Apple could have made slight adjustments on the underpinnings of the iPhone 4S’ home button but it may take an iFixit type breakdown to know for sure.
• Every iPhone 5 will support most of the world’s carriers. Right!
• The camera will be better quality both in megapixels and focal length. Right! 8MP and f/2.4. The photos look amazing too.
• Again, the mic will be better, but I think it will be to handle voice commands. Sort of right? Apple is unleashing Siri on all of us – a personal assistant that does whatever you ask it to via voice commands. But whether or not the mic is actually better may take more time to figure out.

So, no iPhone 5 but I think it is very fair to say that the iPhone 4S is an incredible update to an already amazing “phone”.

• The camera lens will be on the opposite side of the Apple logo. I guess this because the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 will allow someone to use the volume buttons as the shutter-button. Using my iPhone 4 and pretending to take photos using the volume up button as the shutter-button I find having the lens on the bottom side of the iPhone to be very inconvenient.
• The antenna will no longer be built into the case. Although the iPhone 4′s issue of having the antenna be part of the casing (it is much of the outer metallic ring) ended up being a non-issue I don’t think they’ll want to deal with these issues again. They’ll more than likely come up with an even better solution.
• The phone will be lighter and have no glass back. When you hold an iPhone 4 you feel like you’re holding something that was incredibly well made. The glass front and back and the overall weight of the iPhone 4 make it feel that way. Plastic weighs less but feels like plastic. Metal was a good choice, I thought, for the iPhone 1. So I don’t know what the backing will be but I feel as though the iPhone 5 will be lighter and no longer have a glass back.
• The speaker phone will be better. Maybe this is the part where I begin to dream or something but the speaker phone feature has never been good on an iPhone. Many times it is not loud enough and more often than not the people on the other end can’t hear you either. So both the speaker and mic need to be better.
• The build of the home button will be better. I don’t know but I’m sure there are rumors that Apple will ditch the home button on the iPhone 5. If there are, I’d doubt them. Having a single home button is just about perfect for everything you need to do with an iPhone. I’d like to see more options with it (double-clicks, triple-clicks, etc.) but overall it works just fine. The problem with the iPhone 4 that I’d guess they’ll fix with iPhone 5 is that the home button hasn’t held up too well. After a year and a few months of usage it has taken a lot of wear in its feel. I often have issue with the double-click feature. I have to very deliberately push (read: almost mash) the button. Not good.
• Every iPhone 5 will support most of the world’s carriers. Making a different iPhone for each carrier’s network technology seems like something Apple should be very unhappy with doing. In order to ensure the iPhone’s growth over the last 4 years they’ve had to do this but the iPhone 5 is a great opportunity to unify all of the hardware and allow people to use these devices out-of-the-box all over the world.
• The camera will be better quality both in megapixels and focal length. The iPhone (and many other phones) have quickly replaced point-and-shoot cameras. In fact, I’d wager that the only people really using point-and-shoot cameras are people that do not have a decent phone camera. The iPhone 4′s camera is good enough for me to use rather than a point-and-shoot but it could be a lot better. There is a lot of room for improvement with the iPhone’s current camera and I think the iPhone 5 will bring a few of those updates.
• Again, the mic will be better, but I think it will be to handle voice commands. Apple hasn’t done much to update how the iPhone takes voice commands. I use this to make phone calls, sometimes, while driving. “Call Eliza Mobile” I’ll tell my iPhone and it works just great. Although I rarely use the iTunes voice commands they are there. But beyond that the iPhone is falling behind Android quickly. I know Apple bought a company that specializes in this sort of thing at least a year ago now so I can’t imagine that sometime in the near future the iPhone will be able to do things like speech-to-type and complex voice commands for things we do with our phones that we’d like to be hands free.

I don’t know how these align with the rumors but as an iPhone user since day one I can certainly see Apple addressing some of these issues with the iPhone 5.

Google Wallet is the first real step in the right direction. Square’s CardCase application is very nice but it is very, very limited and is contingent upon the store, cab, etc. knowing about Square and being compatible. Google Wallet is built on top of the already existing credit card, pay pass, infrastructure. Wherever MasterCard’s pay pass works Google Wallet will work. I’d imagine more card companies will follow suit soon and Google Wallet will improve.

This won’t make me jump the fence to Droid but I can only imagine it will be a matter of a year or two until Apple has a similar solution (perhaps even made possible via a Google Wallet iOS app) with the iPhone.

As I outlined in Recent software problems:

“Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.”

This problem continues. However, I ran across this solution via a few Google searches.

1. Unplug your Macbook Pro.
2. Put the Mac to sleep (Apple Menu -> Sleep or close the lid)
3. Once asleep, plug your MacBook Pro back in.

I’ve confirmed that this works. I’m still looking forward to a Lion update that addresses these and my other issues.

“I see normal people using iPads all the time, and I hardly ever see them using Safari, Calendar, Maps, or Music.”

Maybe I’m not what many would consider “normal” but I use the core iPad apps all the time. In fact, I spend most of my time using the core apps. In my post The iPad apps that I use most I failed to mention that the applications I listed were, in fact, in addition to the core apps. (I’ve since updated that post with an addendum.)

I can’t imagine someone using an iPad without using Safari. Though Marco lists Safari as an application he doesn’t see people using often he then says that one of the main apps they do use is a web browser. I’m not sure if that was by accident or he actually means a different browser than Safari.

In any case, I use these applications every time I use my iPad and I would think that for Amazon to jump into the tablet market and compete with the iPad (if that is indeed what they’re going to do) they’d definitely need to design some very good core applications. At least for this tablet user to consider giving one a try.

And I thought owning two iPads was a lot.

To swaps the events viewer and project stage simply click on Window > Swap Events and Projects. I never knew it was there. Hope this helps!

First, the problems I’m having on my Mac. Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.

Also Lion related, I believe, is Mail.app is a bit crash happy. I’ll be scrawling a note to someone and poof – instacrash with no warning. And although Lion touts itself as the resumable OS and I am usually able to pick up just about where I left off this is still frustrating.

To top it off my Mac is running fairly hot. I don’t believe my fans turned on more than once a day on Snow Leopard but on Lion they don’t seem to shut off and there aren’t any processes that seem to demand it. Again, I’m hoping that a update to Lion will cure some of these things.

Next up, my iPad. Twitter for Mac is one crash happy application. I think it has a lot to do with the way it tries to handle the various types of media that people are tweeting. I’ll do a search for baking (yes, I do searches for baking) on Twitter and within one or two tweets – crash. Unlike Lion on the Mac I can not resume where I was. I have to start over. I appreciate that the team at Twitter wants us to have a unified experience for how media is displayed but it is killing the reliability if the app.

One more gripe about Twitter for iPad. I separate the accounts that I follow into Lists. So, while I only follow about 60 accounts I’m actually keeping up with hundreds using Twitter’s Lists. It’s great. Except that on the iPad app I’m very limited in the number of tweets I can load. On Tweetbot for iPhone (which is arguably the best twitter client ever built) I can go back much further in the timeline. The problem I have is that some of my Lists are rather bloated – like my Software list. I follow many accounts that relate to software that I use this way I can keep up-to-date. But I have hundreds of accounts in that list. Which would be fine if the iPad didn’t limit the number of tweets I can pull up. Give me infinite scroll!!

The App Store on the iPad is dated and I hope that Apple works very hard on making this experience much better. Back in the days of the App Store having hundreds of applications it worked well. Now with hundreds of thousands of apps it doesn’t hold up. For instance, last night I was searching for travel planning applications. For our trip to Ireland I would like to store a list of possible locations to visit based on their location. So, if I’m going to be in Killarney and I want to pull up an already curated list of places we’d like to visit I’d think there would be a good application for that. Hint: there isn’t. Back to why the App Store doesn’t work – I kept having to start my search over at the beginning. Doing a text search turned up very little so I decided to go into the Travel Category. I ordered it by highest customer rating first and then paged through 174 pages of applications. The problem is that when you view an app and then click the back button your back to page 1 without your filters stored. It’s horrible and I ended giving up after only two or three tries.

So, yeah, Apple and Twitter have some work to do – for me. I feel better, thanks.

For those that are unaware, prior to Lion installing an application on the Mac went something like this; download a .DMG file which would mount to your Mac much like putting a CD in the disk drive and dragging the application icon into your Applications folder. That’s it. Drag, drop, installed. To uninstall an application you just delete the application from your Applications folder. Done.

The caveats to this process were the need to unmount the DMG after you’ve installed the application and then trashing the leftover DMG files in people’s Downloads folder.

However, with Lion came the promise of simplifying this process even more. Why? Because, although the above process seems simple it wasn’t nearly as simple as Apple had managed to make installing and uninstalling applications from iOS. On iOS you open the App Store, click Install, the application’s icon shows up on your device’s Home Screen. If you’d like to uninstall the application you tap and hold the icon, an “x” shows up, click it and confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Very simple.

Lion wanted to bring this very same workflow to the Mac. The workflow goes very much the same; Install applications directly from the Mac App Store, the application’s icon shows up on Launchpad, click and hold to uninstall the app from your Mac.

However, on Lion not all applications are created equal. Some applications were installed prior to, or without the use of, the Mac App Store. Perhaps you downloaded the application from the web or you simply have it installed from long before Lion. Either way, these applications still show up on Launchpad – they just can’t be uninstalled from Launchpad.

Which is why I think uninstalling applications on Lion is arguably more difficult for some people because the workflow for one application is different than the workflow for another application. If Apple could have allowed for applications that were not installed via the Mac App Store to be uninstalled using the same workflow they would have. There must be some very good reasons why they can not – however, I thought that they should have at least showed a dialog to instruct the user on how they can uninstall the application anyway.

For instance, if I’ve got Launchpad open I can drag the application’s icon to Trash on the Dock. Shouldn’t this uninstall it? If I was in my Applications folder and did the very same thing it would. So why not from Launchpad directly to Trash? Why even allow me to drag it over the Trash? Why not show a message when I do this: “Sorry, but you’ll have to open Finder, navigate to your Applications folder, and remove the application from there manually.”

I’m not sure why Apple didn’t find some way to either make this easier or to inform the user how to accomplish this simple task. But a few years from now, when 90% of all installed Mac applications have been installed directly from the Mac App Store, Apple will no longer need or care to worry about this issue. And perhaps that alone is reason enough for them not to care about it now.

But it sure did look cool.

I was bent on getting the Tik-tok and iPod Nano to use as a watch since the very first day I came across the Kickstarter project. I didn’t care if it would make sense as a watch – I thought it looked awesome.

So, I did it. I backed the Kickstarter project and picked up an iPod Nano via Quibids (actually, my wife Eliza handled this bit) and within a few months I had my very own iPod Nano watch.

And for a while it worked great. The complaints I had seen online about having to wait a moment to see the clock face, it being a little bulky, etc – never bothered me. I got at least one compliment per day on my watch and I really enjoyed using the clock, the radio, pedometer, and iPod features.

There is only one problem with the iPod Nano watch – it is fragile. iPod Nanos are built well but the entire face is glass. You’d have to expect, even as a guy with a desk-job such as myself, that somewhere along the line you’re going to hit the watch off of a few things. Over the few months that I had the watch I had a few scares where I had hit the watch against something and I thought for sure I’d shattered it. But it held up.

Until Tuesday.

Until Tuesday I hadn’t had a single scratch on the iPod Nano. Tuesday was a very busy day for me and after I got back home from work I was a little frazzled and doing things a little too quickly. I was making simple mistakes doing some of the most mundane tasks because my mind was shorting out a little. One thing I did was I had forgot my phone in the car and when I went to get it I hit my wrist on the railing of my front porch. The iPod Nano ejected from the Tik-tok and launched across the driveway. By the time I had picked it up it looked like this…

I’d like to think that I can continue to use it but I do not think that I will. And, since the price of getting another iPod Nano is about as much to find a decent, sturdy watch that is what I’ll more than likely do. My next watch will be one that I can take with me on vacation, underwater, in the rain, and – won’t have a face that can be ejected onto pavement and shatter.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to email them to me.

“Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub.”

Boom.

You see, with one application GitHub has just expanded its potential customer base many times larger than it already is. GitHub isn’t just for command line elitists anymore. Now just about anyone that can use a Mac application, and understand what it is to commit a new version of their work here and there, can use Git and GitHub to help control their source.

Before today GitHub’s potential customer base, or target-market if you will, has been those that fully grok Git, the command line, and source control. Or, people willing to put in the work to go through the tutorials to become one of these people. Their website was simply icing on the cake for people already using that workflow. In fact, their service was so compelling that many have switched from other source control platforms to Git just to take advantage of GitHub. However, now for all of the designers, copywriters, hobbyists and even solo development shoppes that didn’t seen the need to learn and fully understand source control – Git just got easy and GitHub made it happen. And that is many, many, many people.

Some, including myself, would argue that this could breed a bunch of people that understand GitHub for Mac more than they understand Git. And I think it is fairly obvious that understanding Git, for any professional, is more valuable than understanding GitHub for Mac. However, now that I’ve thought it over for these last few hours I’m beginning to see this application as an extension of GitHub’s many other offerings to make Git easier. You see, GitHub has always provided documentation, events, online training and tools to try to make Git easier for everyone. If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub. GitHub for Mac is simply an extension of these educational efforts that GitHub has always offered since the beginning. It is yet another lily pad for people to jump on as they cross from shore to shore. Brilliant.

GitHub for Mac isn’t the first application to give Git a UI on the Macintosh but it is the first that came from the guys behind GitHub and that alone will be enough to make many people make the jump. It also helps that the application is very good. If they work as feverishly to keep GitHub for Mac up-to-date as they do all of their other services I think everyone will look back at this app’s launch as a major point in the company’s already incredible story.

I just did something I’ve been waiting months to do. I purchased Reeder for Mac from the App Store.

It isn’t very often that I am so anxious to pay for something that I have been using for free. In fact, I can’t remember any other application that I’ve wanted to purchase more than Reeder for Mac. For months I’ve been using Reeder for Mac’s “beta” builds and they have progressed steadily and swiftly from a pretty good application to an indispensable one. Its workflows are so well refined that it allows me to accomplish a task that – at one point in my life – used to take hours and hours of my time each day. With Reeder for Mac I’m able to keep up-to-date with everything going on in my world in only minutes per day instead of hours. I’m able to use the same workflows no matter which device I happen to currently be on because I use Reeder on my Mac, my iPad and my iPhone. In fact, I simply can not imagine owning a Mac, iPad or iPhone without having Reeder installed.

I suppose I’ve wanted to pay for the application for so long because I’ve wanted to put my money where my mouth was and to finally pay tribute to those that have worked so hard on it. To provide them with the resources they need to keep the application in existence and, dare I say, improve it. I’m really looking forward to the future of these applications.

So, I guess it goes without saying that I recommend you pick up Reeder for Mac too. Oh, and for iPad. Oh, and for iPhone. You’ll thank me later.

Steve Jobs said that, starting yesterday, you could get iTunes in the Cloud (a way to easily download music to all of your iOS powered devices) as they were beta testing it. I couldn’t figure out how.

Here’s how: Download iTunes 10.3 manually from their site and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Updated: Screenshot of iTunes 10.3′s new “Purchased” area. (click image to zoom all the way in)

Typically when you insert a disc to upgrade Mac OS you need to reboot to the disc for the installation process to begin. This means that during the entire upgrade process (even though this process gets shorter and shorter with each update) you’d be effectively without a computer. The upgrade to Lion, it would seem, doesn’t require this step. The update happens just like any other installation process. However, you’ll still need to reboot when the upgrade process is complete.

Notable, but not as notable as not having to reboot at all.

For years I’ve been following the speculations thrown-out by industry pundits in order to formulate my own opinion of what’s to come at Apple’s next event. This year is no different as I’m tuned in with my ear-to-the-ground and my finger-in-the-air about what is to come at WWDC. I’m really very, very excited about Monday’s event. Moreso than I’ve been for a WWDC in a few years.

But I may choose to back away a little from all of this speculation because the phrasing of various bloggers is getting a bit out of control and it ends up in me being misinformed rather than informed.

Let me explain. When someone is riffing on what Apple’s upcoming, already announced, iCloud service will be it is OK to write posts like “What I think iCloud will be?” or “Based on the current information, iCloud could very well be”. But, that isn’t what is happening. The expectation for what iCloud will be has already been molded over months-and-months of rumors that “people in the know” (that is, people that have been following the rumors for months) already have a pretty hard and fast opinion about what iCloud is.

I’m included in this group. I’ve read enough speculation about iCloud and examined enough about iCloud’s competition to have already formed my opinion of exactly what iCloud could be. On Monday I’ll either be very happy or very disappointed as whatever iCloud ends up being may not align with my idea of what iCloud should be.

Take for example AOL/TechCrunch’s MG Seigler (whom I read regularly) who recently wrote a rather gloomy post about iCloud.

“One killer feature of iTunes in iCloud was supposed to be the ability to mirror songs. That is, for iTunes to scan your hard drive, identify your music, and give you access to those same songs in iCloud without any uploading necessary.”

Emphasis mine. Notice “was supposed to be”.

Was supposed to be? How does he know what iCloud was supposed to be? No, no. What we’ve all wanted from every product from Apple, including the upcoming iCloud, was for it to ease the biggest pain points in whatever area Apple happens to be touching on with its next product. In reality what we all wanted iCloud to be was a much, much better and more consumer-friendly offering than Google’s or Amazon’s music-in-the-cloud services. One of those pain points is obviously this whole uploading your music to the cloud business. But that doesn’t mean that it will be (though I’m willing to bet it will be better in many ways). But, supposed to be? No. Only in our minds.

I realize that we’re all supposed to read these speculative blog posts with our “hypothetical glasses” on but after a while it begins to grate on me that writers (and Seigler is not alone) tend to believe there own opinions as being fact before they’ve even seen the products they are speculating about. That somehow their own ideas about what a product should be become what the product “was supposed to be” even before they see what the product actually is. And I think that leads to people like me being misinformed.

So, perhaps I’ll slowly back away from all of the speculation that happens before an event like this and try only to follow the headlines. I want to make sure that I’m informed enough to know what is going on but not informed enough to be misinformed.

John Gruber quoted Guy English on the caveats to these gestures and while I agree they aren’t perfect – I sure hope Apple doesn’t give up before they’ve made them good enough to include by default. I know I know, Apple doesn’t do anything “good enough”.

Since turning these gestures on for my iPad 2 (have I told you that I named it Hurley?) I have been using them extensively. In fact, the only application that I’ve come across so far that has issue with them is Reeder.

I do not think Apple should or will ever get rid of the Home button. But I do believe that these gestures make using the iPad much quicker. The hardware, such as processor and RAM, isn’t the issue of performance it is the controls. The iPad is plenty fast but having to find and double tap the Home button isn’t nearly as quick a four-finger swipe up or side-to-side. Here’s to hoping they get them right.

All good questions. Here is how I write on iPad.

First, I use an application called iA Writer. This application gives me a distraction free writing environment that has just the right amount of features to make writing easy.

I do not use nor own an external keyboard for iPad. Never have. In fact, the on-screen keyboard in Writer has a custom keyboard with few shortcuts that I find very convenient.

I also edit within Writer. I read and re-read (unless I’m in a rush for some reason) the post until I’m happy with it. At this point there is no HTML, no links, no images, no videos in the post.

I then copy and paste the text from Writer into WordPress for iOS. I immediately save the post as a Draft (just in case). At this point I’ll either add the links, images, or video. If there is a lot of media to add to the post I may wait until I’m on my MacBook Pro to finish the rest. Sometimes adding a lot of HTML to a post using iPad can be cumbersome. I’m hoping that WordPress for iOS, at some point, adds a custom keyboard for written HTML quicker.

When the post is finished I’ll then schedule it to be published, usually sometime in the morning the next day since I typically write at night or very early in the morning. This gives the post time to stew a bit and gives me a chance to yank it if I end up not feeling good about the post. It also gives my blog a feeling of consistent publishing rather than a sporadic schedule.

And that is how this post was written.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

Already have a first-generation iPad and want to use Apple’s shiny new Smart Cover? Dan Provost, from The Glif fame, has figured out how to use the Smart Cover on the first-gen iPad.

Since posting about the iPhone apps that I use most I’ve had a few requests to do the same for the iPad. So, here are the iPad apps that I use most.

• Mail.app. I check, read, and write email on the iPad every single day. I actually prefer using the iPad to my computer for email. It forces me to be succinct and makes email fun again.
• Reeder. With Reeder on my iPhone, Mac and iPad I am able to keep up-to-date with my Google Reader account whenever I have time to read. In bed, on the go, and at my desk. Out of the three Reeder for iPad is the best.
• Instapaper. I tend not to use Instapaper on the iPhone all that often but I use it quite a bit on the iPad.
• Twitter for iPad. The Twitter application for iPad is better than any desktop or mobile application. It is just about every feature you could need or want.
• Dropbox. I share files between my iPad, iPhone and Mac using Dropbox more than any other way. And, having Notational Velocity + SimpleNote storing documents within my Dropbox share makes it easy for all of my devices to be wirelessly synced.
• SimpleNote. The only way I keep notes on my iPad/iPhone.
• Numbers and Pages. I use both of these applications fairly often. I bought them thinking that I would only open them occasionally but it turns out that having a real word processor and spreadsheet application is very handy.
• iThoughtsHD. I give a fair number of speeches and I like to use mind mapping for my speech outlines. On the go I use iThoughtsHD to put these maps together.
• VLC. Getting video into iTunes into the Videos app on the iPad is an exercise in frustration sometimes. VLC will playback just about any video and adding them to the iPad is a snap.
• Google Books. I read my books in Google Books so that I don’t have to buy books more than once (iBooks only works on iPad/iPhone).
• Angry Birds. The only game I keep on the iPad.

These are the applications that I use the most. I’m a fairly “light” applications user in that I spend a lot of time in a small amount of applications – rather than a little amount of time in a lot of applications. I see other people’s iPads and I wonder how they can possibly keep everything straight with so many applications.

There are, however, some applications that I use from time-to-time that deserve honorable mention. Flipboard, NPR, iSilo, iPod. Also, Devour.com is a great way to watch video on the iPad.

*Update 08/30/2011:* I failed to mention in this post that I use the core iPad applications (the apps that ship with the iPad by default) all the time. Safari, Mail, Maps, Music (iPod), Calendar – I use them all and often.

If you have any suggestions for applications that you think I would enjoy please feel free to send them along. My email address is on the front page of my site.

I’m not sure I dig this (as I think it removes the entire point of an iPad) but I will give 100 points for style to the iPad Keyboard Case that effectively turns the iPad into a laptop.

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.