They must be reinstalled from scratch. Unlike, say, Microsoft Office, Apple’s Final Cut Studio, or pretty much anything else.

Of course, the only indication of a problem is the fact that it wouldn’t accept my serial number. Providing a reason would be… reasonable.

Awesome.

Seems like something they could maybe mention on their FAQ pages for “having trouble with my serial number” or “how we abuse people who actually pay for their software”.

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Productivity Apps

• Things for iPad — first iPad app I bought
• Instapaper Pro + — indispensable
• Evernote + — indispensable
• OmniGraffle — very nice; again, takes some getting used to. Steep price, but worth it if you use it on the desktop, too.
• Bento
• Pages/Numbers/Keynote — export is annoying; takes some time to get used to UI conventions
• FlightControl HD — (this is the productivity section, right?)
• mondoSolitaire for iPad — see FlightControl…
• Brushes — iPad Edition — fun; has free Mac companion app
• Adobe Ideas + — Flash-free! (now there’s an Adobe Idea!)
• Stanza + — includes access to the O’Reilly bookstore
• iBooks — only Winnie the Pooh plus Project Gutenberg titles in Canada, so far; desperately needs to lose the fully-justified typesetting-sans-hyphenation. Sorry, Steve: it’s fugly.
• WebEx

News Apps

• BBC News + — best news app I’ve found yet.
• NPR for iPad — very nice
• Editors’ Choice (NY Times) — weird leading issue (extra space before last line of every paragraph) makes it irritating to use. Call me fussy; polish matters.
• WeatherBug Elite — nice; not sure I need the map; still looking for the perfect weather app that does metric.

Utilities

• 1Password Pro + — indispensable
• Dropbox + — indispensable
• iTeleport + — stupidly cool
• Server Admin +
• Awaken + (for getting through long Powerpoint presentations…)

Social Media

• Twitterific for iPad — not bad, but a little buggy; multiple accounts requires a not-unreasonable in-app purchase
• IM+ +
• FryPaper — Stephen Fry’s wit and wisdom
• Tweetdeck for iPad — I don’t use it
• Mashable! for iPad

Reference Apps

• Articles for iPad — Sophiestication’s Apple Design Award winning app; love it
• IMDb + — indispensable
• Flixster + — indispensable, and actually has local cinema listings, including the Vogue here in Sackville!
• Dictionary
• WolframAlpha + — still trying to figure it out!
• PCalc Lite +
• WebMD for iPad
• Epicurious +
• Jumsoft Money +
• Shazam for iPad
• Google Mobile App — mostly just links out to web sites

Downloaded, installed, deleted

• GoodReader — bizarre interface
• National Geographic World Atlas HD — what is this for??
• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Globe & Mail’s Globe2Go — indecipherable
• NYTimes Crosswords
• Tweeps
• Reuters News Pro
• Pulse News Reader

Anxiously Awaiting…

• Reeder — currently in Apple approval hell
• MarsEdit for iPad (unannounced, but fingers crossed)
• Analytics Pro
• Twitter (née Tweetie; for Mac and iPad) — currently in development hell
• Billings
• CBC Radio
• CBC News app (mobile sites only get you so far…)
• FlickIt Pro
• Skype
• Pastebot/Convertbot/Tweetbot
• TED

…and why did Apple leave out…

• a clock?
• a calculator?
• a notes app? (not that I like theirs…)
• Messages? (could’ve included it on the 3G model…)
• Compass?
• Weather?
• Stocks? (again, not that I’d use it, but…)

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Someone commented the other day that they found using a computer difficult because they were left-handed. That seemed odd to me, since I’m predominantly left handed and I’ve never found it to be a problem on a computer. It may have come down to the fact that they shared a computer with a user who had a right-handed input device like a curved mouse.

On the desktop, despite being left-handed with a pen (for writing or drawing), I’ve always been a right-handed mouser; can’t use a mouse with my left hand to save my life. But that also means I’ve always had room to the left of my keyboards for a Wacom tablet of some sort — the ideal switch-up if my right hand or arm gets tired.

After a couple of years using an iPod touch and a couple of iPhones, I’d never really noticed whether I use my left or right hand on them. I’d guess I use each about equally, especially since I’m a reasonably-proficient two-thumbed typist (in portrait mode, please) on those devices. I could be wrong, but that’d be my guess.

On the iPad, I seem to prefer using my left hand for a lot of input, even when it’s on the right side of the screen. It doesn’t feel awkward to do that, it feels natural. I think that’s interesting.

A device with a virtual keyboard feels natural. That somehow seems counter-intuitive to someone like me who’s used so-called traditional computers for more than 20 years. Like Steve Jobs said: on the iPad, it’s like touching a web page directly. The device gets out of the way. I naturally gravitate towards using my left hand, without even thinking about it.

I even find the keyboard pretty easy to get along with, especially as I become less conscious of it; it’s still not quite as fast as a physical keyboard, but that’s mainly a case of adjusting to the slightly different arrangement from the iPhone. I have no doubt this will improve with a bit more use (I’m writing this on my iPad).

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“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” —Abraham Lincoln

A recent article featuring similar logic (but without the sense of irony) can be found on DevGrow.com: Why Flash is here to stay.

Let’s be clear — I’m not saying Flash isn’t here to stay — Flash has a lot going for it.

DevGrow.com states: “Let’s face it, Flash is everywhere these days” and “…almost everyone has Flash player installed (99% of internet users, for those too lazy to check the link).”

Please: let’s stop pretending that Flash is ubiquitous, shall we? It’s misleading, as they say in parliament.

Those of us who weren’t too lazy to follow the link will note that Adobe is a bit more careful with their claims, qualifying this impressive-sounding statistic with the term Internet-enabled desktops.

It’s not a small difference.

While Adobe is careful in the small print to specify that it’s 99% of “internet-enabled PCs”, they’re happy to run the chart under the misleading subheading Flash content reaches 99% of Internet viewers.

The impression Adobe is trying to create here is:

People without Flash = nobody

I’m not sure why they don’t go one tiny step further and point out that 100% of people with Flash installed have installed Flash.

According to Steve Jobs, during the iPhone OS 4 keynote, iPhone has 64% of the mobile internet market. So much for Flash’s supposed ubiquity. Interestingly, Flash isn’t currently running on any of the remaining 36% of the mobile internet market, either. Certainly not in the author-once, publish-everywhere sense (Flash lite isn’t Flash).

While Flash will begin to ship for some non-Apple mobile devices after Adobe releases the full 10.1 player, at least for those users whose providers allow it, it isn’t even there now. So why act as though it is?

The fact remains that pretending Apple’s mobile devices don’t exist, and barging ahead anyway ignores the fact that 85 million Apple devices (plus more than a half-million iPads) that will likely never have Flash enabled, are in use today.

So should we use Flash or not?

If your website specifically targets Android or Blackberry users, great. Ignore iPhones, iPods touch and iPads. Otherwise, there are 85 million Apple devices — and untold millions of non-Apple mobile devices — in the wild that can’t see your Flash content.

The impression Apple is trying to create is:

85,000,000 ≠ nobody

I think a reasonable person must agree with Apple on this point.

As for Adobe’s claim… Back to you, Mr President: “You can fool all the people some of the time…”

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There are no flying cars, but we’re living in the future.

You can tell because people keep pointing to the iPad as proof.

But the future isn’t perfect.

There have been rumblings about the clumsiness of document synchronization between the Mac and iPad with iWork documents from Keynote, Pages and Numbers.

John Gruber has suggested, in his thorough iPad review, that you should be able to “specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document“, so that there’s no more user-management required and no more duplication of your documents every time they migrate between devices.

Agreed.

In fact it’s a bit surprising that it doesn’t work this way today, given how magical the iPad is according to many.

Why isn’t it this easy? I think the trouble is that iWorks documents can get huge.

Most of my presentations, by the time they’re 15 or 20 slides, have 200 MB of embedded graphics and video. Today’s high-res photos and HD videos — which Apple has encouraged us to store in iLife or Aperture, and easily adding them to iWork documents is a key selling point — leads to this. My Numbers files rarely contain graphics, but that won’t be true for others; same for Pages.

The end result is that on a typical high-speed connection, it could take an hour or more for a graphics-heavy document to upload. That will take a fair bit of the “magic” out of the iPad experience.

Which is why I think the USB-tethered syncing of iWork files to the iPad is tolerable. For now. Even with a DSL or cable connection, which is typically much faster into the home or office than out to the cloud, it would take a long time to move all that data around. It isn’t going to be like adding a new contact on your iPhone and seeing it on your Desktop a few minutes later: it could take an hour or more to upload even a moderately-large file at 30 or 50 kilobits per second.

Time to check that your ISP is delivering the bandwidth you’re paying for.

Yes, Apple can get smarter about storage (keep the file local and the linked/embedded media in the cloud; or only keep low-res proxies of the media on the iPad, especially where it can’t print).

These problems will diminish as network speeds improve, but they haven’t in 10 years, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

For now Apple needs to work on the iTunes-based file transfer and iPad-based file management — no mean trick on a device designed to shield users from its file system — and hope ISPs (or Google!) solve the network problem soon.

Or let us all move our iPhoto/Aperture/iMovie/iTunes libraries onto MobileMe or Dropbox where our digital assets will always be available all the time.

I’d pay for that.

Now… where did I leave the keys to the hovercar?

Update (9:50 pm) — John Gruber has just posted a piece quoting Tim O’Reilly on iPhone/iPad media syncing. Gruber’s take: turn MobileMe into a free cloud-sync service.

I’d still pay for it.

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The security implications of this for government, business, education and health care institutions — especially those who have policies about scrubbing data from discarded or recycled computers — are enormous.

Of course, all organizations should be looking after this, especially where there are privacy implications for third parties (e.g. patients, taxpayers, customers, students).

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I like to see a visual preview of my page while I’m editing, though, and that doesn’t fit so well with Coda’s 1-window approach. Or does it?

We select a file, it opens in Edit mode, and I can click the Preview button to switch to Preview mode. Also Command-2 and Command-3 on the keyboard. Easy. But it gets even better.

In the top right-hand corer, there’s a split pane button. If we click that, we get a top and bottom view, and we can switch one of them to Preview Mode.

But with a widescreen display, that’s not the best use of space, is it? So let’s close this.

Here’s the trick: if we hold the option key down while we click this button, it’ll split in the other direction. So now we have side-by-side views. Command-3 on the right-hand pane and we have editing on the left and live-updating Preview on the right; perfect.

Thanks to Les at Panic.com for pointing this out; it’s a real time-saver.

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Start with a video

Where has your video come from? The old adage, “garbage in, garbage out”, is especially true for video, and not all sources were created equal:

• Digital camcorders are an ideal source; their clean, noise-free video compresses really well and is easy to work with. Standard definition or high-definition will work fine.
• Screencasts are also an excellent source and, despite usually being compressed during the recording process, are well-suited to posting online.
• Video DVDs might be okay as a source, depending on how good they were to start with, but they’ve already been heavily compressed for the DVD, and re-compressing them for the web will degrade the final picture quality and/or increase filesize. If you can, get the original digital files that the DVD was made from instead of ripping them.
• VHS tapes won’t provide anything you’ll be proud of. The sad fact is that from a technical standpoint, VHS — even the higher-quality S-VHS — is quite poor. If you have to use VHS as a source, be prepared to use it at smaller sizes, and be prepared for it to look dodgy.

You’ve got an edited piece and you’re ready to unleash it on the world.

How do I get my video onto my site?

You have 2 main choices:

Host it on a third-party site (YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or Facebook, etc.)

• Advantages:
  • inexpensive — it’s free in most cases to set up a basic account
  • simple — it shields you from the technical complexities of video formats and compression options
  • easy — it’s easy to copy a link that you can use to place your video into your web site
  • flexible — some sites (YouTube, Vimeo) will convert your clip to multiple sizes and formats (suitable for desktop browsers, Apple TVs and mobile devices like iPhones, iPods and iPads)
  • encourages sharing — it’s easy for others to embed your videos on their own sites
  • robust — these content-distribution networks (CDNs) can handle a lot of traffic should your video become wildly popular
  • exposure — sites like YouTube get a lot of traffic, which can’t hurt
  • social — people can comment on your video.
• Disadvantages (many of these will be especially true of free accounts):
  • support — may not have high-priority support; may have to rely on FAQs or user-populated support forums
  • limitations — may limit the number of videos per month you can upload
  • limitations — may limit your videos’ length
  • limitations — may limit the amount of bandwidth you may consume per month
  • lack of control — you don’t own the web site your video is hosted on, so you have no control over content policies, your videos’ address, what other content might appear on their site, or how they handle disputes arising with other users of the site (if someone accuses you of stealing content or of defaming them, it may take a long time to settle; this would be a rare occurrence, however)
  • ambiguity — if the company is acquired by another company, then the terms & conditions under which you uploaded your video may change
  • “related” videos — you may not have any control on what content the hosting company chooses to show alongside your video as ‘related’. If keywords associated with your clips have unfortunate other meanings, or unfortunate associations, that could be uncomfortable. An example would be the word “Fundy”, as in “Bay of Fundy”. “Fundy” is also a short-hand term for a religious fundamentalist; the association may be innocent, but that doesn’t mean you want it or can prevent it. Keep in mind that these things also change over time, so it would be wise to monitor your related videos on a regular basis (e.g. the Wisconsin Tourism Federation wasn’t happy when “WTF” took on a new popular meaning, and went so far as to change their name over it).
  • unwanted advertising — your video may well have advertising superimposed on it; the content of the ads may be related to the content of your video, again exposing you to the vagaries of keyword-association. You may even find ads for your competitors in your own clips on your own web site.
  • legal implications — what country or countries are your files hosted from? What are the laws in those countries?
  • user comments — people can comment on your video — yes, this was also listed as an advantage. It’s best not to be squeamish about this, but really: have you seen some of the comments on YouTube? Either way, people can still comment on your video using Facebook or Twitter, so keep an eye on things, and engage in the conversation — don’t be a victim of it.

Host it on your own web site

• Advantages:
  • simple — your web developer will shield you from the technical complexities of video formats and compression options, and will embed your video in your web site for you.
  • targeted — your web developer/compressionist will make appropriate technical recommendations based on your content and your site’s audience.
  • controlled — since you own the web site (you do own your domain, right?), you are in complete control of the file, its address, your site’s policies, etc.
  • on-message — no third party will be able to insert advertising or associate your video with third-party content.
  • high-quality — your web developer/compressionist’s skills should ensure the end-result is high-quality video — including brightening, enhancing colour and contrast, sharpening and cropping.
• Disadvantages:
  • expense — there may be bandwidth costs associated with hosting video files if they’re large and/or popular. Ask your hosting company about this. You will also have to pay to have your video compressed, uploaded and added to your site.
  • discourages sharing — it will be more difficult for others to embed your video into their web sites; whether this is truly an advantage or a disadvantage is up to you.
  • not so social — If your site doesn’t already allow commenting or discussion in the way that video sharing sites typically do, then it makes it more difficult for your video to effectively draw people into a conversation with you or your business. With some effort on your part, though, you can still take advantage of Facebook and Twitter to engage your customers directly.

Next time: file formats, Apple vs. Adobe, HTML5, and some tips for great online video…

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This space will mostly be used to discuss getting the most out of your site, whether that means strategic issues like marketing, search engine placement or social media; content-related issues like writing, video and photography; or usability & design issues.

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