haniblog

Barely a day after the iPad introduction and everyone and their next-door neighbour’s cousin’s friend’s dog has an opinion on the new device. I think the ratio of the number of people who have actually used one over the people opining are probably 1:20,000,000 or so.

“It’s just a big iPhone!”

“No camera and no flash!”

As everyone who knows me knows I’m an unabashed Apple fanboy and my opinion? I’m very impressed and I think I see the potential, but I am also ambivalent. I’ll wait until I hold one and try it myself. Everyone who was actually at the keynote and tried the iPad is completely won over, from John Gruber to Stephen Fry to Michael Pusateri. Money quote from the latter:

I am a technology professional. For almost 20 years I’ve tested, used, broke, fixed, and played with all kinds of technology from broadcasting to air conditioning to software. I am not easily swayed in these things. But even with all my skepticism, I think the iPad is something different. A new way of computing that will become commonplace.

This feels just like how it was before the iPhone was revealed, doesn’t it? The Tablet will be announced 6.00pm London time and I have to admit that I’m a teensy bit excited. Today’s tablet rumour video looks slick now but how will it appear after the event?

Seriously though, I love how Apple work so incredibly hard to make me a birthday present.

With Apple’s special event happening this Wednesday I thought it would be fun to feature the best Tablet mockups over the next few days. Today’s video rumour is a Tablet running an Ikea app (in Pounds Sterling, no less!). Enjoy!

There’s been a huge volume of speculation on the rumoured Tablet and now it’s all but confirmed. Apple sent out invites to the press for a special event next week and the rumour mill has now changed into the cast of CSI: Apple Invite. Among the names for the new device, the two that seem to have stuck are iSlate and Apple Tablet but a recent comment on Twitter by Cabel Sasser just lit a big lightbulb over my head. My Apple predictions have been ropey, to say the least, but that comment along with the invite design above, seems to fit.

So, Apple Canvas?

I’ve been playing around with two apps that perform simple grading adjustments: PS Mobile, which Adobe finally released worldwide; and Mill Colour, an app written by London/New York/LA post house The Mill. Before I start, there’s a really good article on Phil Green’s site which helps with the grading terminology.

PS Mobile has a nice simple interface with a menu bar in icon form at the top of the screen and undo/redo controls at the bottom, whether the iPhone is in Portrait or Landscape mode. The icons at the top perform image functions, exposure and saturation operations, filters and finally effects. The colour controls are quite intuitive, though not the most responsive. There’s a lag when you drag sideways to affect the saturation or exposure for example.

Here’s what the interface looks like.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s a nice simple interface and it’s simplified further when grading the photo. Here’s the saturation control which is increased or decreased by swiping across the screen.

And this is the colour tint interface.

Aside from the frequent performance lag I would’ve wished for more fine-grained controls as well as separate RGB curves. PS Mobile is a free download from the App Store.

A disclaimer first before I start on this app. I used to work at The Mill years ago. I often think of the place as my alma mater!

I wanted fine-grain controls and here they are! With Mill Colour photos can be graded by adjusting Lift, Gamma and Gain and each with individual RGB sliders. Actually, can I have slightly coarser-grain controls now? The sliders start at 1.0 and then increment up or down by .02 values. It would be a lot more useful to be able to adjust those increments.

In performance Mill Colour is everything that PS Mobile isn’t: the interface keeps up with you, doesn’t have any lag issues and looks clean and uncluttered.

As with PS Mobile, Mill Colour has a set of looks and in this app they feel more professional. To demonstrate the subtlety of some of the looks here are the Print and 70’s look.

There is one thing in the interface which is really distracting and not in the iPhone aesthetic: the horrible button feedback glow-flare.

Aside from the controls adjustments and the button feedback issue, the app is a joy to use. Mill Colour is a free app as well.

With Christmas shopping in everyone’s mind, may I offer up a novel idea for the iPhone geeks in your lives? Yes, iPhone application icon coasters. A set of 6 coasters for £12.99 and they come in three different icon packs as well.

Gillian, hint hint nudge nudge!

Click for a larger view.

I think it’s about time I spec out my ideal Mac. I need a Quad-Core all in one system with a 27″ LED screen, ideally 2560 x 1440 res with up to 16GB RAM and 2TB internal drive. It would absolutely need a multitouch wireless mouse and have a DisplayPort input to turn it into an ultra HD viewing device. Oh, and it would need to be wall-mountable.

But who am I kidding? When is a dream system like that ever see the light of day?

Wait, What?!

Finally, the iPhone has more than one network in the UK. Two days ago Orange announced that they’ve broken O2’s stranglehold on the iPhone and will be selling all models by Christmas. Yesterday Vodafone declared they will be selling the iPhone as well from early 2010.

What will this mean to the iPhone? Considering that Apple recently reported that there are over 85,000 apps in the App Store and over 2 Billion downloads in its first year, those numbers will now skyrocket. There has never been a better time to start writing apps for the iPhone and the Mac platforms.

I’ve been dabbling with Xcode for a little while and found some really good resources to help me get started. The best guide so far has been BecomeAnXcoder and I highly recommend Aaron Hillegass’s book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. When you have a handle on Xcode and want to get started on iPhone development, there’s Stanford University’s excellent iPhone Application Programming podcasts.

Do it now if you can. The iPhone application market is about to expand massively.

Since the update to Snow Leopard I find myself using a feature that was introduced in Leopard which I never used very much: Stacks. Finally, I can navigate the hierarchy of a folder or drive in the Dock quickly and easily. In Leopard I usually switched to the View as List option and avoided Stacks altogether. Thanks to this hint on MacOSXhints.com I now have a hybrid view which I really like: a navigable list which looks slick.

Just type this in the Terminal and you’ll see what I mean:

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES; killall Dock

Click on the image above for a full-sized view. Of course if you’d like to switch back to the default view just replace the YES to NO in the command above.