Marco’s Posterous

Techcrunch's MC Siegler has an article up that states that Apple may be developing a larger iPad variant, about 15 inch in size and possibly announced on the (developer!) conference WWDC 2010.

John Gruber thinks this is total bullshit.

I do agree with John that at first this is way too early to even consider a larger variant, but if the iPad will be a success, the idea isn't too bad at all.

As a photographer I love the idea of taking the iPad with me to clients to check out and select the photos, present my work and even write an invoice on the spot. I'm already sold to the 9.7" version.

However, for serious editing work, I would love to see a larger version. And with larger, I mean LARGER, like 20-24 inch. Yes it wouldn't be portable, but look at it as a Wacom Cintiq with the added multitouch function and full computer possibility (the Cintiq is just a "screen"). Ideal for studio work. I can totally see myself working in Bibble 5 using a large iPad like that. And for on the road work, a version that is mentioned in the Techcrunch article of about 15.4" would be pretty nice as well. So the iPad becomes it's own product range, with an iPad (10"), iPad Pro (15") and iPad Studio (20") version. But since the iPad is running the iPhone OS, what would the larger variants run, it can't be iPhone OS with its limitations?

I guess "standard" OS X to make full use of their size and functionality. And thus this idea is almost immediately killed. Why would Apple support different OS-es in one product range? It would make support and development much harder.

It's much more plausible that the iPad will be extended with functionality, remaining similar sized (maybe grow a bit larger to max 12"). Still, I like the idea of editing photos/movies on a large iPad :-)

I just tried opening my mobileme webmail, and noticed that the Calendar icon has a "beta" label on top of it! (see image) The site doesn't load properly, so I bet Apple is doing *something*

update False alarm? after 10 minutes I checked again and no beta label anymore and the site loads fine.. hmm.. glitch?

Yesterday the iMovie 8.0.5 update introduced the new "iFrame" (knowledgebase) format which is 960x540 pixels (quarter of a full-HD resolution).

However, iMovie has been exporting to this resolution since the introduction its new architecture in iMovie 08. It is actually the maximum size which you can use to export for sharing, unfortunately (see screenshot from mobileMe gallery).

However, it will probably mean that:

• the iPod nano will be updated to record in iFrame mode (firmware!)
• the same will apply to the iPhone 3GS (firmware!)
• the to be introduced (I guess) iPod Touch will record in iFrame natively

Still, I'd prefer a real 720p resolution option instead of this halfbaked approach. But Apple probably has something up it's sleeve we don't know about :-)

Here is my downloaded iPhone apps list. Current for Monday, October 5th 2009 :-)

about 304 apps downloaded.. Usually about 70 installed on the iPhone.

Click here to download:

apps.pdf (98 KB)

What's your list?

edit: okay Numbers pdf export screwed up big time. Too many pages. The pages with 3 columns are the right ones. The single column pages are duplicates. Sigh, I thought Excel was sucky.

According to theAppleBlog, sales of SL are double that of Leopard.

Most will agree that the price is pushing sales high, but I also think Leopard was just not good enough. At least in my case, and talking to other Apple users, a lot of them aren't (weren't) really happy with Leopard.

Leopard was suffering from "Windows syndrome". Being bloated and slow. Some of it due to carrying legacy PowerPC support, some of it by feature creep and unoptimized code. In SL there are still some loops open, but that is mostly in the application area. (iTunes is still carbon for
instance). That will change in due time (I predict an "iMovie08" makeover for iTunes next year)

The OS is finally mature :-)

I created the same mobileme account on my own and my wife's iPhone, and voila, in the MobileMe "Find my iPhone" there are now two iPhones which can be tracked.
Useful in come ways, I guess (I have a family acct, so each has his/her own MobileMe)

(FWIW: big FAIL for Apple that you cannot have two MobileMe accounts actively syncing on the iPhone)

The 3rd party Push notifications have been announced two years ago, and are finally available for general use in iPhone OS 3. Apple has put up push notifications as an alternative to multitasking, mainly because multi-tasking apps running in the background would drain your battery quicker and multi-tasking would use more memory. 

Well, it is a fact that the more apps you are running simultanious, the more memory is used. And yes, especially if an application is polling the network for new messages, that can consume battery life quite quickly.
 
So, push notifications is the solution and holy grail for iPhone users.
 
Now, back into real life. I installed Worldvoice, a "radio" application that uses push for notifications of new "broadcasts" and such. So I switched on the push notifications and played around with the application a bit. I then switched the app off and pretty soon, a push message was shown. Cool. I got bored with it, and switched off the individual notification settings for Worldvoice. The general Push setting remained "on" (because I forgot about it) - see screenshot.

After half a day, I noticed that my iphone battery indicator dropped significantly more than I am used to.
 
Did some more tests during a few days and yes, even though you're not actually receiving any push notifications, just having the push notification enabled makes that your battery drains quite a bit quicker than usual. Because the connection to the push server and phone is open constantly.
 
I am now wondering if this push is actually such a good idea. It drains battery, even without using it. This is with only one app, with very few updates. If you have three or four apps, with a lot of updates (say a twitter client with notifications for DMs and Mentions, and an MSN client with notifications for messages, etc), I think your battery will be gone after a few hours. That sucks, and I think is not much different than just run the apps in the background, really.

Do more people have the above experience (or not?) and willing to share their opinion?