Click here to watch this same video in HD.
This video, a compilation of pictures and videos from Jackson’s Christening on June 26th, 2010 was put together on iMovie on my iPhone 4. Unfortunately, I was not able to export the movie at all until yesterday due to a bug in iMovie that caused it to crash when exporting videos with lots of images in them. Yesterday, Apple finally released an update to iMovie that fixed this bug, but which still leaves the app with several problems.

Thanks to all our friends and family who came to celebrate the day with us, especially my brother Kevin, Jackson’s Godfather, and Kristin’s sister Maggie, Jackson’s Godmother. Jackson (and Kristin and I) is blessed to have such a large group of caring family and friends to help Kristin and I bathe him in love so that he grows up big and strong and happy.

Also, as I noted several times the day of the Christening, now that he’s been baptized warlocks will no longer be tempted to steal him away to be used in a flight spell. ;-)

iMovie for iPhone mini review:

Pros:

You can edit videos directly on your iPhone (let’s not overlook how incredibly cool this is. It is a huge pro.)

Cons:

• The Theme background music doesn’t loop and doesn’t play the entire length of the movie and there is no way to add more music to fill in the blanks, so about a minute into this 2 minute movie, the music stops. This totally sucks.
• For some odd reason, once the video is exported and off of the iPhone and uploaded to YouTube, the theme music sounds different. Some of the high notes are lost. This totally sucks.
• You cannot add titles over slideshow portions of the video. You can only add titles to video clips. This totally sucks.
• If you do add titles to a video clip the titles remain on the screen for the entire video clip. There is no way to make a short intro title besides trimming your clip to the length you desire and then re-adding it and trimming off the front part to match. This totally sucks.

Also, another problem that is really more of an iPhone 4 / iOS 4 issue than an iMovie issue: The only option for sending your video immediately online for viewing from the iPhone is by emailing (but if it is over a minute, you cannot email it) or by uploading to YouTube. Uploading to YouTube compresses the video to non-HD quality first. This is idiotic. This totally sucks. Apple needs to fix this. Now, other apps like PixelPipe will upload the full HD video, but only if it is under a certain size.

Overall, I’d say iMovie for iPhone is buggy and only useful in severely limited ways. I recommend against buying it yet.

Bonus video uploaded via PixelPipe directly from my iPhone 4:

View in HD here.

Related posts:

1. Liveblogging Jackson
2. Jackson with his Grandparents and a week of changes
3. iPhone 3G S has arrived; here’s a video

I really don’t think one can argue, in terms of usability as a phone, that the iPhone 4 is well-designed or in any way a masterpiece. It’s simply plagued by too many design flaws for this to be true.

Whoever thought “Hey, let’s make a phone that has a solid glass front and a solid glass back!” should be fired. It’s the single most stupid design choice in any mobile phone that I’ve seen and I’m somewhat flabbergasted that Apple is the one behind the choice. It’s a device which begs to be dropped and broken.

What’s more, although the iPhone 4 is lighter than the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 3G, and the original iPhone, that lighter weight is packed into a thinner, smaller package, making the iPhone 4 much more dense than its siblings. Many reviews have painted this as a positive, describing the iPhone 4′s feel as sturdy and solid and, in comparison, making its predecessors feel like flimsy toys.

There are two problems with this:

First, it makes one think, however subconsciously, that the iPhone 4 is actually sturdier than it is. All those flimsy toy feeling predecessors could be dropped multiple times without breaking (provided that the iPhone didn’t land flat on its face on an non-flat surface with no give). As we’ve all seen the multiple cracked screens and backs on the iPhone 4, it simply isn’t sturdier than its predecessors. It is more easily rendered totally useless by a simple 4 foot, dropped out of the pocket or knocked off the desk, type of common drop. And since it feels sturdier, you’re subconsciously going to treat it less gingerly than you probably should. Again: double glass surface = idiotic design flaw.

Secondly: the density of the design makes the iPhone 4 feel heavier than it actually is and the squared edges feel more uncomfortable if you’re holding the iPhone 4 in any single hand for any extended period of time. That being said, holding it two-handed in landscape mode for game playing actually provides an improved grip over its predecessors.

The other major design-flaw is one that will only affect left-handed users who happen to naturally hold their phones in a certain way. I, it just so happens, am both left-handed and predisposed to hold my iPhone in this way. Yes, previous model iPhones also suffered from dropped signal when held this way, however, the iPhone 4 is the only phone I have ever owned which consistently always drops the call entirely when I hold it the same way I have held phones my entire life. I don’t think Apple would be eating as much crow about the so-called “death grip” issue if they hadn’t made such a big deal at the iPhone 4′s unveiling of the amazing design of their antenna. However, they did and there’s a small percentage of users out there, like myself, who this issue actually affects, while there’s a lot of people who haven’t had any dropped calls but just hold the phone and go “Oy! Look the bars dropped!” Unfortunately, Apple looks to be addressing the concerns of the latter group, rather than helping the ones, like myself, who they have actually screwed with this horrible design choice.

Of course, there is a simple solution for both the highly breakable double-glass design and the dropped signal (which I refer to as the call kill switch): get a case (which I reluctantly did). Unfortunately, it seems the vast majority of people covering this issue online think that that means that these are not huge design flaws. Those people are simply wrong.

Getting a case kind of begs the question: why on earth did Apple decide to favor appearance over functionality in the design of the iPhone 4 when the only solution to the bad design is to cover the iPhone 4 with a case, which in effect renders the beauty of this useless-without-a-case device moot? I don’t have a good answer for that.

Now, there are definite positives to the iPhone 4. The double cameras with improved quality and the ability to record video in 720p HD is a *great* set of added functionality to the iPhone 4. Likewise, the new “retina display” is very nice. But, mark my words, when the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4G, or whatever it will be called when it arrives next summer, comes out, it will have these features and a new non-double glassed design and the amazing all metal band antenna will have gone the way of the dodo. I’m 99% certain in this prediction.

Also, two things to munch on: While the retina display is very pretty and nice, I think the main reason Apple spun this display improvement so much is so that they could get App developers making iPhone apps that look better on the iPad’s large screen when pixel-doubled. Also, a certain percentage of the “improved reading” that you get out of the retina display is owed to the new font being used and the way it’s being rendered on the screen by iOS 4 complete with more RAM than any other iOS device.

Also, total aside here: iOS 4 is buggy as hell. I can’t wait for the first update. Any emails sent from any app other than Mail.app end up stuck in my Outbox folder until I send them from there. I’ve done a full restore and this still happens. I’ve had multiple apps crash when I’m using the new app switching features of the OS. Also, I recorded fireworks in HD the other night using the video camera and it was actually showing up nicely. Unfortunately, the video is lost, because my iPhone 4 decided to warn me that it was running out of room too late and I could effectively do nothing with the video or my iPhone until I deleted the video. It went into a really crashy state. Also, iMovie for iPhone 4 fails to export movies that are predominantly slideshows of images. I made a movie of my son’s Christening and it is currently permanently stuck on the phone with no way to export it. Every time I try it crashes.

Related posts:

1. iPhone Casing Warping…
2. Dear DataViz & Quickoffice: Design a keyboard dock for my iPhone 3GS
3. Steve Jobs to Lefties: Hold the iPhone 4 differently or buy a case

I received my iPhone 4 today and just as it arrived, I started seeing reports of the new antenna configuration not being so friendly to left-handed users. Being left-handed myself, I was concerned about this issue, so as soon as the epic job of restoring my iPhone 4 from my last iPhone 3GS backup finished, I tested it. Sure enough, as soon as I held the iPhone in my left hand like I normally do when I’m talking on the phone, the iPhone lost all connection to AT&T. Like dead, no signal useless.

This is a huge problem in my opinion, so I did what I’ve been doing for the past several months whenever I hit a really odd roadblock with an Apple product. I sent Steve Jobs an email. Lots of people have been doing it for a while now. Steve has been responding. Both to them and to me. So far, I haven’t shared any of his replies to me publicly, other than to note on Twitter that he did respond. However, I think his response to my most recent email is both a rational level-headed response that gets to a real solution for avoiding this problem, and it’s clear at this point that Jobs somewhat expects his email replies to be broadcast, so I’m posting this one.

Also, I should note, that I don’t really think Jobs’ rational level-headed response is entirely defensible. I’m not happy that I have to adjust to my iPhone in such a natural thing as the way I hold things up to the side of my head when I talk into them (whether they are cellphones, regular phones, or bananas). If hold it differently or get a case is really the only answer here, then it’s clearly bad design.

Here’s my original email to Steve:

“Hi Steve,

I just received my iPhone 4 and it’s great except for the somewhat
major issue that I am left-handed and holding it left handed totally
drops the network. Any chance of a solution for this problem plaguing
your left-handed customers?

Thanks,

C.K. Sample III

Sent from my iPhone”

And here is Steve Jobs reply:

“Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.”

And here’s a screenshot:

Needless to say, based on Jobs’ reply, I’m skeptical of the theorizing that this is a software issue.

UPDATE: Steve Jobs just emailed me the same exact email again… 30 minutes after the first one. Form letter that he’s broadcasting to all lefties in reply to emails similar to mine? Also, Steve Jobs or Steve Jobs’ assistant?

Related posts:

1. Steve Jobs’ 17 page obituary
2. Overanalyzing Steve Jobs’ grammar gaffe: missing helper verb in iPad presentation
3. On hold with AT&T Wireless…

I‘ve just turned off all comments on this site. I’ve been loosely following the comment wars of 2010 (see here, here, here, and here) and while to a certain degree it’s all a very yawnable pissing match between Gruber* and the people who give a shit about whether or not they can comment on his blog, it does bring up some interesting points about comments.

As someone who has been the editorial lead for The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Netscape, Mahalo, and Obsessable, I’m pretty certain that 90% of comments are entirely and totally useless. 10% are pure gold (Weblogs, Inc often hired people who wrote the gold comments as bloggers), but only if you have a participant audience and an actual culture surrounding your site. Also, you can’t really define that culture without destroying whatever culture organically grows on the site.

On this site, there is no real strong culture of commenters. Most people who want to converse with me do so via Twitter. The vast majority of comments I get here day to day are from people ranting about similar things to what I’ve ranted about in the past. For example, my most commented on post which receives comments nearly daily is this one, titled UPS Sucks from 2006. It has 148 comments which are mostly of the caliber of “F*CK UPS” which I have now turned off. Why? Because I’m tired of moderating them. They are trollish ranting comments. They have absolutely nothing to do with me, my site, or what Sample The Web is about. They are people who haven’t yet made their own space online for talking about what bugs them, coming into my front yard, standing up on a little soapbox and shouting, hoping someone will hear them.

Get your own yard.

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter. #kthnxbai

*note: I agree that Gruber is way too biased and full of himself to tolerate at times. Although he’s right quite a lot, he’s also wrong quite a lot and you never hear that side of it from his blog. Why? It’s not because of comments or no comments. It’s because he’s an arrogant dick. Move along. Many people who have the guts to write their own words on their own sites are opinionated, arrogant assholes (I totally acknowledge that I am one of them). Deal with it.

Related posts:

1. Drama in the comments…
2. Comments and Trackback via Haloscan
3. Twitter vs Facebook: Differing audiences and convergence

Although I liked the Joker sticker that I had bought for my iPad, after two short weeks of having the sticker in place, the color was fading and there were scratches all over it. So I decided to replace it with something original of my own design (my characters Bosh, Conrad, and Bill from Bosh & Bill), and teach myself to make quality waterproof vinyl stickers in the process. You can see the results pictured above (and in this photoset on Flickr).

Step 1: Design

First, draw something that you want on your iPad. I actually drew all of the images in the above sticker on my iPad using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro and my finger (although I imported some sketches from my Moleskine as a draft layer that I worked off of in all the drawings). More details on that process over at Bosh & Bill.

I then transfered these images to my computer, complete with layers in tact, and dropped them into a Photoshop iPad template file that I put together. You can grab it here (4.24MB zipped Photoshop file). I positioned my characters on the dummy iPad and then made the iPad layer invisible before printing. Since these are rather basic comic characters, I only used 72dpi; if you’re trying to make a more detailed sticker I recommend you ramp up my template to at least 300dpi before adding your images.

Step 2: Printing

You’ll need an Inkjet printer and you’ll need to get some Papilio Inkjet removable waterproof vinyl paper and Papilio waterproof over-laminate. A ten pack of each plus shipping runs about $30, which is a bit steep, but not when compared to the $20 sticker price (get it?) of the individual iPad Joker sticker. I ordered directly from Papilio and received both very quickly. You can buy much larger sized paper and in larger quantities to reduce your per sheet cost, but since this was my first time trying this I went with the smallest sizes and quantities they had. The good thing about using Papilio papers and the over-laminate is that the resulting stickers are supposed to be capable of standing up to being placed on outside surfaces, like your car if you like.

Since these supplies are expensive, you’ll want to optimize the printing area and cram as many stickers in there as possible. To do this, take the finely positioned artwork from the iPad Photoshop file you were working in, collapse all the layers (with the exception of the iPad pic layer) into one layer, and then drag that layer into a new Photoshop document the same size as the paper you are printing on. Save this file as “whateverartwork_iPad_print.psd” or something like that for future reference. Now, duplicate that layer, flip the duplicate upside down, turn it sideways, position it diagonally, do whatever you have to do to get multiple copies of it on that same piece of paper. OR fill in all the white space with OTHER pieces of art that you’d like as stickers. Think of it as a game of Tetris. You have to fit as much as possible in the allotted space. Why would you do this if you only want one sticker? Backups in case something goes wrong in the next steps. Make sure you leave about .25″ to .5″ around the edge to make sure none of your design gets cut off.

After you have a nicely full print page ready to go, Print, set paper type as High Gloss Photo Film or the equivalent (this is so the ink actually sinks into the vinyl paper from Papilio), and check out the preview of the print job in Photoshop to make sure that none of your artwork is getting cut off. Finalize the print and let it dry for 15 minutes after it is complete.

Step 3: Apply the waterproof over-laminate

Papilio’s instructions for their inkjet paper says to run water over your print out after it dries to wash out any excess ink. This is good to do for the first time you test your printer and your printer inks with this paper and is to ensure there is no bleeding of the colors over time. However, since you’re going to be putting the over-laminate in place to make sure the sticker is entirely waterproof and rugged, you can skip this dousing (especially since it sometimes leads to a bit of fuzzy lines).

This is one of the most error prone steps. You need to pull just a slight sliver of exposed over-laminate from its backing and affix that, lined up correctly, with the top edge of your print out. I recommend doing this on the same surface that you intend to cut out your stickers, as the over-laminate is slightly bigger than the print out and can affix the print out to your cutting surface with a slight border when applied correctly. I used my trusty Alvin cutting mat, which has a convenient grid that helps with positioning.

Once you have that slight edge exposed and attached to the top of your print out, flip the over-laminate up so that it’s curve makes a roller of sort at the top of your artwork, and carefully remove the protective backing as you roll the over-laminate carefully over the print out. It may help to use a ruler or straight-edge on top as you roll to ensure that no bubbles or air is getting between the paper and the over-laminate. Go slowly and carefully, as once the over-laminate touches your paper, there is no pulling it back up and repositioning it. You can try rubbing bubbles out after the fact on a bad application, but it doesn’t always go well.

So far, this step equals great success with a perfectly smooth positioning, or it’s a ruined print job and you have to start over, so be careful.

Step 4: Cut out your stickers

Use an X-acto knife or other very sharp, precision utility knife. Cut slowly and carefully around your design, being careful not to leave any white border (unless you want to go for a consistent white border). This is the most time consuming step and also the one that, if done well, really makes the design pop.

If you leave an undesired sliver of white along an edge, before cutting it off, place your finger nail firmly down on the sticker along the edge of the line where you don’t want to cut and apply pressure, using your finger nail as a guide for your blade. This keeps the sticker from slipping from the backing as you cut this small bit of sticker. If the finished cut, check all the little white spots to see if they are actual sticker or just backing (which will be coming off anyway).

Also, target the harder parts of the cut before the easier parts. Cutting out the small inner connections on the robot in my sticker would have been a lot easier if I had left the white border along the outside in tact before hand, adding stability to the sticker.

Step 5: Clean your surface and apply your sticker

I used rubbing alcohol to wipe off the old sticker residue from the back of my iPad. I then carefully removed the backing from the sticker, positioned the bottom right corner of the sticker where I knew I wanted it, based on my Photoshop mock of the layout, and then gently rolled the sticker out from right to left, making sure there were no bubbles.

The sticker is a bit more forgiving here, in that as long as you haven’t pushed it down firmly on the device, it can be repositioned if you good up along the way. Just be careful and move slowly.

If all goes smoothly you’ll have your own sticker on your iPad.

I’m about 98% satisfied with mine. Next time I’d add a thicker black border around all my characters, so there would be a little more wiggle room to the cutting. If you look closely at the right side of Bill’s (the blue one) head over his eye, you’ll see that in my attempt to quickly remove some white, I cut a straight line that took away all the black line there. This is only really noticeable close up, so not horrible but not great either.

If you liked this tutorial, or you like these characters, make sure you check out my comic site, Bosh & Bill, and watch my Etsy store, where I’ll most likely be selling some stickers soon (once I’ve perfected the above methodology). Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Unless you need GPS, go for the iPad WiFi over the iPad 3G
2. Adobe’s iPad Opportunity
3. Self-caricatures (sort of)

After polling my Twitter and Facebook followers and receiving a whopping 5 replies from people who said they would be interested in seeing me write a book addressed to fathers (rather than to mothers, like all the other parenting books of note out there), I’ve decided to give it a go. I’ve launched a Kickstarter Project that outlines what I plan on doing and how I’d like to share what I’m doing with the community of backers who get involved in the project. Also, if you’re a dad and you’d like to contribute to the book, let me know. I’d love others’ input to keep this from being the C.K. and Jackson show.

More info is available on the Kickstarter project itself.

Related posts:

1. Back A Thousand Shots Photo Project for a chance at a Nikon D70
2. New Creative Commons photo project
3. A Thousand Shots Photo Project (Creative Commons)

I have a screen on my iPad dedicated to apps that I regret purchasing, that I recommend others avoid, and which are just sitting there on the off chance that they receive an update that actually makes them turn from being crap apps to being useful apps. (Aside: check out how cute that picture of Jackson is as wallpaper!)> Anyway, here’s a screenshot of that screen:

1. StoryPages iPad Edition looked to be an interesting storyboarding app where one can draw a rough sketch and annotate it below. Well, unfortunately it sucks. The lines are all jagged and yuck, so it’s pretty much useless.
2. SketchPad HD is one of those launch day apps that EVERYONE was recommending and saying was awesome. Well, it’s not awesome. It sucks. Again, the drawing lines are all jagged and it tends to crash all the time. Also the default color for drawing is RED and you cannot set new notes to default to any other color. Additionally, the free Adobe Ideas kind of renders this obsolete.
3. SplitBrowser does one thing really well: It gives you two side by side browser windows. I found this extremely useful until I found Atomic Web, which with its multi-tab goodness and persistent tabs renders SplitBrowser entirely unused. If more features arrive in a later update, I might revisit this app, but for now it’s in my deadpool.
4. Office² HD came highly recommended from a friend, so I bought it, even though I already had the iWork suite. I mean, it was only $7 all in and it is supposed to integrate with Google Docs. I was cautious about buying it because a few of the reviews said that it tended to mangle documents. My friend assured me that the latest update to the app fixed this problem, so I bought it. After about a day of use it mangled my first document. Also, the icon for this app sucks. It’s all jagged, colored sperm. And, with its last update, DataViz DocsToGo announced that the next update would make the app a universal app, adding iPad compatibility. I’ve loved DocsToGo on my iPhone for a while, so I’m sure it’ll be a great replacement for this and the entire iWork suite once it arrives.
5. Layers Pro is a drawing program that draws jagged lines. That’s entirely unacceptable. Don’t buy it. Brushes had the same problem and then got an update that made it great. Hopefully, Layers Pro will get the same treatment in the near future, so that it isn’t just $9.99 I wasted.

Any to add? Share them in the comments.

A note to my fellow app reviewers

Please STOP praising crap apps and feeling sorry for developers who didn’t have a real iPad to test on. Your praise of apps that aren’t up to snuff is doing a disservice to your readers, making them waste money on apps that they shouldn’t. I’ve seen a lot of glowing reviews that acknowledge a few problems but don’t really take a critical eye to the application at hand. This is a total abuse of the trust your readers place in you. Stop it now.

Editors: please make sure your reviewers know that sometimes they need to be cruel.

Related posts:

1. 10 iPad apps that I recommend you buy (and several to avoid)
2. What iPhone apps do you regret buying?
3. Unless you need GPS, go for the iPad WiFi over the iPad 3G

I remember having a conversation with Brian about the iPad the day it was announced. We were working on a Crowd Fusion project up at Alvey Manor, so we were actually working together in meatspace, as opposed to virtually online (which is more normal). Brian said he was going to get an iPad 3G and that the regular iPad would be a bad decision because his kids all have iPod touches, and the devices become somewhat useless when you’re outside of the range of a WiFi network (with the added caveat “except for games”). I disagreed, pointing out that the iPad is bigger than an iPhone / iPod touch, so it’s going to be away from WiFi networks less often. I also pointed out that the iPad 3G on a trip to the city would have the same spotty AT&T connectivity that the iPhone currently has, so that’s not a winning combo. $30 a month unlimited data off contract sounds great, but if it’s connectivity that fails you when you really need it, then what the hell is the point?

Also, I’ve seen the post about how you can hack down a regular T-Mobile SIM card to micro-SIM specifications so it will fit in the “it comes unlocked by default” iPad 3G, but the technology that runs the 3G connection on the iPad 3G is incompatible with T-Mobile’s 3G network, so you’re only going to get EDGE speeds using that method. Lame.

So, fast forward to yesterday, when my Zoom 4506 3G Wireless-N Travel Router arrived. Amazon sells the Zoom 4506 3G Wireless-N Travel Router for $79.22 plus $8.99 shipping and handling from one partner and they also sell the Zoom Telephonics Wireless-N Travel Router for 3G USB Modems for $89.99 plus free shipping from another partner. They’re the same device, and I have to say, I don’t know what the two one star ratings on the one item are about, as I’ve had mine running without problems for 24 hours now. As long as you jump into the admin settings and adjust it to keep the connection live and to reconnect, you’re solid. In any case, for under $90, I can use my off-contract Telava Mobile BroadBand Bullet, which I pay $60 per month for unlimited connectivity, as a WiFi access point for my 64GB iPad WiFi. Also, I can connect up to 4 other devices to the Zoom at the same time, so I can use both my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, and a colleague’s laptop on this connection at the same time if I had to (sure it would slow it down a bit, but hell, you can’t share your iPad 3G’s connection with anything other than the iPad) and I’d still have one open slot to share with a stranger, if I believed in letting strangers all up in my WiFi networks (I don’t).

Also, my iPad sees this as nothing different than the normal WiFi connection that it’s always connecting to. There is no extra battery drain on the iPad itself, as there is on the iPad 3G (which according to all reports I’ve seen gets about an hour to 2 hours less battery run time when doing everything 3G, depending upon the usage). Sure, the Zoom WiFi Router only gets 3 and a half hours of connectivity on a single full charge of the device, but how often am I really going to be away from a regular WiFi connection, and during those times, how often am I going to be away from an outlet (the Zoom comes with a power cable for charging that is about the size of your regular generic cellphone charger, so it’s really portable and ready to be plugged in at Starbucks while I’m sipping some coffee and iPadding it up). Also, it has a removable Li-Ion battery that is the same battery used by a whole slew of digicams and camcorders, and which can be found for less than $5 a pop on Amazon. I’m buying 3 of those and an external charger for them for a grand total of $25.95 with shipping and taxes. If I have them all charged and in my bag, I can keep the internet connection running for the same 12 hour stretch that my iPad’s battery under super heavy usage gets. And I can Skype from anywhere because the iPad always thinks it’s on WiFi.

So let’s add that up: 64GB iPad WiFi for $699 + $90 or so for the Zoom WiFi Router + $25.95 for extra batteries for the router = $815 vs $829 for a brand new iPad 3G.

And I’ll get better battery life and better connectivity and better speeds to my connectivity… like this:

Sure, I’ll have to carry under a pound of extra equipment around, but it’ll be in my bag, and if I ever decide to dump Telava and switch to another carrier, I can do so easily. And, yes, true, I won’t have that precious integrated GPS chip, but I already have a GPS chip in my iPhone 3GS and the WiFi location triangulation isn’t too shabby anyway.

Conclusion: iPad WiFi > iPad 3G.

Also, I almost named this post: “The iPad 3G is a suckers bet.”

Additionally, here’s me in rant mode on Facebook with my friend Trevor yesterday discussing what ended up becoming this post:

Related posts:

1. iPhone 3G or stick with the first gen?
2. Wifi-ing the Big Apple
3. 10 iPad apps that I recommend you buy (and several to avoid)

I‘m not going to waste your time going over any of the free iPad apps you should grab, as they’re free and you’ll probably be better served to just download them and give them a whirl; however, as I’ve been using my iPad for a solid month now and I’ve purchased multiple apps, some good, many duds, and a few shining examples of must-have iPad apps, I thought I’d share my experiences.

1. GoodReader $0.99

   
   GoodReader is a veritable swiss-army knife of file management that everyone who owns an iPad should buy. The name makes you think it’s just another ebook reader or that it is just an application for reading PDFs, but that is hardly the case. Yes, it is an excellent PDF reader, but you can also use it to view images, videos, text files, Word Documents, Excel files, and many more. Also, you can organize the files into folders, you can password-protect any sensitive information, you can email files to others from within the app, you can actually edit text files and create new text files from scratch (yes, it’s also a basic text editor), you can open files in GoodReader in other applications that support the iPhone OS’s document sharing features, you can share your files over your WiFi network from the iPad to your desktop computer or a colleague’s iPad, and last but not least, GoodReader has an integrated web browser, unzipping, and downloading functionality, so that if Safari refuses to download a zipped file, you can copy the address of the file, select Enter URL under Web Downloads, download the file into GoodReader, unzip the file in GoodReader and then either view the file directly in GoodReader or send it to another application on your iPad (or email it to a friend or share it over a local WiFi connection with a colleague). All that for a dollar. Go buy it now.

2. Atomic Web $0.99

   
   Atomic Web is the web browser that you wish your iPad had come with. No, it doesn’t play flash, but it does support multiple tabs, can be set to relaunch tabs from previous sessions, can be set to spoof a variety of different web browsers, has a nice fullscreen mode, has a private mode, has per site font settings capabilities, has integrated ad block, and can even upload bookmark files from your Mac or PC. Get it now. It’s universal iPad and iPhone.

3. IM+ $9.99

   
   IM+ is a chat client with push notifications that you can run on your iPad while using other apps to do other tasks. You get a push notification that someone pinged you in chat and you can jump over to IM+, reply, then jump back into whatever you were working on before. iPhone OS 4 isn’t here yet with its multitasking capabilities, but IM+ helps one simulate multitasking via this workflow. It also has a crazy speech to text add on bit of functionality that you can purchase for $0.99 per month that will let you dictate your chat conversations. I have not tried it yet. IM+ supports AIM, Yahoo, Google Chat, Facebook chat, Twitter, and a slew of other protocols (and it will run on both your iPad and your iPhone). If you ever use instant messaging, then you should buy this app.

4. NewsRack $4.99

   
   NewsRack is a powerful little feed reader that is able to sync with Google Reader, handle my over 600 feeds (which is no small feat, I assure you; NetNewsWire on my Mac always chokes and dies on that many feeds), and has integrated sharing features that will let you save any article to your Instapaper account for reading later, allow you to post any article to Facebook, or tweet from within the app. I absolutely LOVE this last feature, as it does not require you to share the link of the article you are currently reading when you tweet from within the application. This is great if you are reading something and think of something to tweet that is unrelated and don’t want to lose your place in your daily feed reading. Again, it’s another application that helps alleviate the lack of multitasking on the iPad. If you read RSS feeds, get it. NewsRack is another universal app that will run on both your iPhone and your iPad.

5. Instapaper Pro $4.99

   
   Instapaper is a great way to keep track of things you want to read, but don’t have time to read right away. Try out the free version, then after you see what I mean, buy the pro version, because every great developer who lets you store all these articles on his servers deserves some money. This also is a universal app that will run on both your iPad and iPhone.

6. LogMeIn Ignition $29.99

   
   LogMeIn is the most expensive app on this list and there are less expensive VNC alternatives for those of you who are willing to spend some time and technical energy setting them up on your iPad and your computer; however, if you want a great way to connect to multiple computers from your iPad (and/or iPhone; it is universal!) and access those computers from anywhere, this app is easy to set up, easy to use, and a great overall experience. I regularly use it to access my desktop computer when I’m in another room, and on a recent trip to LA, I used LogMeIn to jump into my iMac at home to get work done while I was in flight from LAX to JFK, then I used it when I was on location to jump into my laptop running in the other room as I ran around assisting a client out on the floor of their offices. You can navigate your full computer, launch your home computer’s browser, email yourself a file you left at home, or even log in to Eclipse or your IDE of choice and do some coding from your iPad. This app makes the iPad as fully functional as any laptop (albeit with a lot of pinch and zooming and mousing around the screen and with no audio playback from the remote computer).

7. Pinball HD $1.99

   
   Pinball HD combines three of my favorite iPhone pinball games, The Deep, Wild West Pinball, and Jungle Style Pinball into one amazing game that plays so much better on the iPad. You can play it in portrait and follow along with the ball, or play it in landscape and get a full on view of the pinball table, nicely angled as if you were actually standing at a machine. Also, if you go to the settings, you can enable a 3-D mode (!!!).

8. ArtStudio $0.99

   
   ArtStudio is the best drawing app with the most functionality available on the iPad (I know this because I’ve tried them all) and at a price that absolutely kills SketchBook Pro ($9.99) and Brushes ($9.99). Avoid Layers ($9.99) like the plague, as it draws very imprecisely.

9. Pages $9.99

   
   Pages is the best of the 3 iWork apps and the best word processor available for the iPad and it can export documents in either Pages format, PDF, or as a Word .doc file, and it does an adequate job of importing various other document formats. Unfortunately, it doesn’t manage to import older Pages documents, which is somewhat ridiculous considering I haven’t found a Word document that it couldn’t handle yet. If you do lots of presentations, then you might want to get Keynote ($9.99) as well, although for some reason neither it nor Numbers support exporting files into the file format of their Microsoft counterparts (Powerpoint and Excel, respectively) as Pages does, though both apps can import these file formats (and, like Pages, cannot import older Keynote and Numbers files). I wouldn’t bother buying Numbers. The inability to export into anything other than the newest version of Numbers or a PDF made this app immediately useless to me as I can add all kinds of data into it, but I can’t do anything with it on any other device I own.

10. Tweetings $2.99

    
    Tweetings is the best Twitter app that I’ve used on the iPad. Both Twitteriffic and TweetDeck tend to be slow and crash if left open for any amount of time. Tweetings runs fast, can handle multiple accounts, has integrated Push notifications (so you can see replies to your tweets while you are in other apps), and can dual-post to Facebook. It also has integrated Instapaper support for sending things in your tweet stream to be read later on Instapaper. It also has the pull down to refresh the tweets feature that I loved so much in Tweetie. I’m sure once Twitter for iPad is released it may very well replace Tweetings in my list, but for now, Tweetings is the closest thing to the Tweetie experience; It is great. Get it.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below.

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In all the coverage that has been given as of late to the hyperbolized battle between Apple and Adobe over the heart and soul of the Internet, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen any discussion of the rather large opportunity that Adobe has that the company doesn’t appear to be pursuing (which I will get to momentarily).

I am surprised by how surprised the vast majority of stories I’ve read are regarding the Adobe vs Apple battle over Flash. It is not like it is a new battle. It is one that has been ongoing very openly since the iPhone first launched, and even before then in terms of how much more poorly Flash performs on a Mac than it does on a PC. Also, the vast majority of the articles seem to forget that—and this is an important note—Flash is not Adobe’s core business, and online Flash, I would argue, isn’t even the core of the Flash wing of Adobe’s business. Flash was originally Macromedia Flash and was acquired by Adobe several years ago. Adobe’s core business is the very expensive suite of creative software that they sell to an entire industry of designers and artists: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, and In Design being the mainstays of their Creative Suite, with Flash being a sort of add on (that isn’t included in several of the core Creative Suite packages). As cute as the free Flash plugin is and as much as Adobe has put into Adobe AIR as a multi platform platform, I’m fairly sure that the revenue coming in from that branch of the company pales in comparison to the money they make from Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects (this is based on no research whatsoever, so I could be entirely wrong in this assertion, but I really *really* doubt it). Even the money they make off of the Flash software for building things in Flash is probably split heavily towards professional production studios working in animation in Flash that they can output to a variety of formats.

So to hyperbolically state that Steve Jobs is determined to destroy Adobe is a somewhat asinine claim, imho. There’s too many other money making resources at Adobe’s disposal, entrenched in other non-online industries with deep deep pockets for Jobs to ever really threaten Adobe as a whole by something as small as not allowing the Flash plugin on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, and by not allowing any 3rd party, non-Apple approved platforms to develop applications for those devices.

I’m surprised that Adobe has engaged this battle on Apple’s terms, playing into the bad PR surrounding the battle, rather than finding an alternate solution that would downplay the entire thing; I think Adobe is making a mistake with its current strategy (or really lack of strategy).

I think there is a huge opportunity on Apple’s iPlatform for Adobe that Adobe appears to be overlooking. The one thing that makes me think that Adobe might not be overlooking this opportunity and may actually be working on something secretly is the excellent and free Adobe Ideas app on the iPad. If you have an iPad and you haven’t downloaded it yet, give it a whirl. You draw / sketch little ideas in this app and Adobe does a nice smoothing of the lines you are drawing. It’s simple, but well-executed (unlike the rather no frills and useless Photoshop app for the iPhone that simply gives you a few filters while pissing all over the powerful brand that is Photoshop).

Now, take a look at Autodesk for a moment. They have, in Sketchbook Mobile for the iPhone and iPod touch and now in Sketchbook Pro for the iPad, created a professionally backed drawing program that is pretty damn powerful and has reinvigorated the Autodesk brand for lots of users out there who had forgotten that they existed.

What if Adobe did the same thing? What if Adobe actually used Apple’s development tools, as they did with Adobe Ideas, and built an actually useful version of their CS5 Suite of apps for the iPad? Adobe CS5 Touch with Photoshop Touch and Illustrator Touch. No plugins, but just the basic functionality of these applications made to work on the iPad and allowing export and integration with the desktop versions of the software. I would buy it in a second, and I think a lot of other people would too.

Also, Steve Jobs hates the idea of a Flash plugin for Mobile Safari on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, but what if Adobe actually built a Flash Browser app for the iPlatform that adhered to all of Apple’s memory restrictions? Would Apple approve it? I would love to see that app.

In any case, this is what I would pursue if I was Adobe. There is an opportunity to dominate graphics creation on the iPad. None of the current apps is the clear Photoshop gold standard of the platform yet, not even Sketchbook Pro. Adobe is being a foolish company indeed if it continues to fight down to this battle over the Flash plugin without building products they can sell on the platform, monetize, and instantly create a new fan base of Apple iProduct users.

By the way, this post started out as an Adobe Ideas document, screenshot below. I also wrote this entire post on my iPad, using the WordPress app, which I will eventually review one of these days.

Related posts:

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