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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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iPad Prognostications: What Apple Fans Want in a Web Tablet

A few weeks back, we asked Apple fans here at TheAppleBlog what you wanted in a web tablet. To round things out a bit, we also queried the mobile gadget enthusiasts what mattered to them over at jkOnTheRun.

Today we published the results of our technology enthusiast survey, and no doubt about it, most had strong opinions about what made a good web tablet. While there is no doubt for many of you that you’ll own an iPad someday, many see the price of a web tablet, the recurring cost of mobile broadband as well as other factors are important.

If you are interested in seeing some of the slides from the survey, head on over to GigaOM. If you’d like access to the full report, head over to GigaOM Pro and subscribe today to our all-you-can eat research service for one year at just $79.

Note: Those of you who took the survey should have been emailed the survey with the executive summary, as promised, in the original survey post. TheAppleBlog would also like to congratulate William Thomas and Sean Roycroft, winners of the $50 Amazon gift cards.

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The Smart Mac: iTunes, iPhoto & Aperture

The last stop in our series of better file management through ideas based on smart folders brings us to iTunes, iPhoto and Aperture. All of these apps provide support for organizing your files similar to Address Book and Mail. The beauty of "smart" file management, of course, is once you have defined the frameworks for the album, folder or playlist, new content will automatically fall in place if it meets your rules.

iTunes

The first time you noticed a smart "anything with a purple icon" was probably in iTunes. Besides OS X, iTunes is the only piece of software to ship with several built-in smart items. You've seen them before, specifically the 90's Music, Classical Music and Recently Played playlists, to name a few. If you've read our previous articles, you know how those work now (and can just right click them to edit their criteria).

But when it comes to iTunes, one thing that invariably also comes to mind is an iPod. If you have at least one iPod, chances are you probably have several iPods. As such, you can set each iPod to sync specific music, playlists or even smart playlists. But since oftentimes our music libraries are larger than the capacity of our iPods, Apple has built in a few unique twists in smart playlist support for iTunes to "shuffle things up." Here's a few ideas to get some unique use out of them. (Keep in mind, you can sync multiple playlists, allowing you to mix and match some of these unique smart playlists with your own favorite content.)

Random Tunes

If you have a small iPod, such as an iPod shuffle, you might try a smart playlist that just pulls a random sampling of your music.

Music I Never Listen To

As Apple (perhaps secretly?) wants iTunes to become the Google of your media collection, it has built in tracking of how often you listen to your content. You could create a playlist that showed you all items with a play count of less than 1 for a jam list of music you've never heard.

My Top 10

If you are one to tag your songs with star ratings, you could create a playlist of your all time 10 best tunes, based on rating and frequency of play.

iPhoto

The iPhoto equivalent is, as you might have guessed, called Smart Albums. Similar to iTunes, iPhoto provides support for specialized criteria for searching, including criteria based on camera settings and support for Faces and Places. Here's some ideas for unique iPhoto smart albums.

Group Shot

Keeping track of family photos is easy with faces. If you want to easily see all the photos from your own family, create a smart album that shows pictures based on the faces of any of your family members. (Make sure to set this one to "match any" instead of "match all.")

European Vacation

In addition to tagging your photos by location (or GPS, if your camera is equipped), you could create a smart album that automatically grouped any photos taken in the countries you visited.

Those Pesky Movies

Newer cameras support the ability to record film, and for lack of a better place to store them, iPhoto imports them right along with your photos. But they're all mixed up in albums and there's no simple way to pick them apart. Just create a smart album that looks for the usual video extensions in any text. This should find them by their filename and let you view them all in one place.

Holiday Photos

If you have lots of family and friends who all love to take and share photos, you could create a smart album based on the date photos were taken. For instance, all photos that are in the range of December 20 through December 28 are likely my holiday photos. As more people send you their photos from the event, provided their camera tagged them with the correct date, they will automatically populate the album.

Aperture

Apple's high-end photo management application also takes advantage of smart file management. Similar to iPhoto, you can use criteria based on EXIF metadata (aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc.). Despite the fact that Aperture doesn't support Faces and Places like iPhoto, there are a number of additional options that can make photo management even easier.

A word of caution with Aperture, however. When creating a smart album, Aperture will only search the root level of the location where you store the album. For instance, if I'm viewing my entire library and create one there, it'll search all photos. If I am in a particular project, however, the smart album will only search photos within that project. As usual, remember that deleting a photo in your library will also delete it from the smart album. You’re just “reorganizing” the same content with smart albums and not actually making a duplicate. (This applies to all smart items: folders, albums, playlists, etc.)

Missing Captions & Credit

Aperture provides extensive support for IPTC data (the metadata you add to your photos after the camera is done with them). You can use this to create albums that show which of your photos are missing captions or copyright information, should you wish to make sure all of your photos are properly tagged.

Need the Ratings

If you're a photographer who loves to use Apple's star system to rate your photos, consider a smart album that is based on showing you photos without a rating. It's a quick and easy way to find any of those photos that slip through the cracks.

Apple's own apps are certainly not the only to take advantage of "smart" organization. 1Password and NewsFire are just two examples of a growing breed of third-party applications that really harness the power of OS X's database infrastructure to deliver content organized on the fly by your rules. If you've found interesting uses of smart playlists in iTunes or Smart Albums in Aperture or iPhoto, share them with us below.

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Are Most Looking at the iPad With the Wrong Perspective?
In a blog post on Friday, The Omni Group, a major developer of productivity applications for the Mac, announced that it will be bringing five of its most popular applications to the iPad platform, namely: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus and OmniGraphSketcher. According to its announcement, The Omni Group is making a major shift in its development cycles because it sees the iPad as “the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for.”

This news certainly makes one think about the placement of the iPad in the computing world. In the few days since the announcement, many have panned the device, focusing on things like the lack of multi-tasking and a built-in keyboard when arguing that it could not replace a computer for most people. The refrain “It’s just a big iPhone or iPod touch,” has been heard over and over again when dismissing the iPad as a computing platform. After all, the iPod touch is certainly an impressive device, but no one expects it to replace even a netbook, no matter how big the screen is. Even Leo Laporte, usually known as an Apple evangelist, declared himself somewhat confused by Apple’s demonstration of iWork, indicating that perhaps it oversold the device’s capabilities.

The Omni Group’s excitement about bringing its applications to the platform, however, is just the latest indication that some disagree with this characterization. For example Joe Hewitt, the former developer of Facebook for the iPhone, wrote a long blog piece discussing how much more capable the iPhone OS is than people think, and that it only lacked a larger display to really come into its own. Apple has also made itself clear about the capabilities of the iPad with its demonstrations of iWork applications that are not stripped down versions but fully capable desktop-class programs in their own right.

One problem may be in how many pundits view iPad applications right now. Despite Apple showing us just what was capable with iWork, most pundits are still focused on the fact that the iPad can run iPhone applications. They are thus distracted by the idea of scaling phone applications up to a larger device. Developers like The Omni Group and Joe Hewitt, however, make it clear that they are thinking about things from the opposite direction, scaling desktop-class applications and websites down to the iPad. It's also clear that, like Apple, they see this transition not as a step down to a more limited platform, but as a lateral step to a platform that offers opportunities you can't get on a desktop or phone device.

It may be that our perspective of the iPhone OS is simply off. Many consider it to be nothing more than a cell phone operating system, so they look at the iPad and wonder how capable a larger device running a phone’s operating system can be. The reality, however, may be that Apple sees the iPhone or the iPod touch as a small iPad, and that what we know of as the “iPhone OS” was actually meant to provide the foundation for a much more capable computing device from the very beginning.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:
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Mobile Augmented Reality Apps: Changing the Way We See the World

GigaOM has a great set of infographics summarizing the mobile augmented reality apps that will have a major impact on how we look at our homes, cities, and the world at large.

See the full set of graphics at GigaOM →

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Rumor Has It: The iPad Camera
If you are already struggling with the decision of whether or not to go ahead and buy a first generation iPad model, then a new rumor that has sprung up regarding the device might help you make up your mind. The rumor has me leaning strongly towards a “Do Not Buy” state of mind, for the very same reason that I didn’t pick up the last revision of the iPod touch.

That reason being, it seems Apple may be holding back some important features to make the next iteration of the device seem more attractive. And now there’s some evidence to back up that assumption, so I’m not just acting out of early adopter paranoia.

iPad Camera

The lack of a camera was one of the biggest complaints many iPad naysayers had following the reveal of Apple’s exciting new creation. That’s what makes it so painful that Mission Repair, a licensed Apple repair partner, noted when it received a shipment of parts for the upcoming device that the iPad’s frames contain a space seemingly intended to house a camera. Putting a MacBook camera in that space, in fact, resulted in a perfect fit. Photos of the frame with and without the MacBook’s iSight camera inserted are available over at the Mission Repair blog right now, so you can see for yourself how perfectly they work together.

Add to that the fact that 9 to 5 Mac reported earlier in the week that the demo tablet Steve Jobs was using on stage during the announcement last week appeared to have camera holes according to pictures taken by some of those with higher quality cameras sitting closest to the stage. The photos definitely reveal something resembling a camera lens at the top of the iPad bezel.

Innovation vs. Staged Release

Either I’m becoming more savvy, Apple is becoming more transparent, or this business of withholding specific bits and pieces from products in order to increase the consumer appeal of subsequent iterations is the new standard for Cupertino. I suspect the last is true, and it’s spoiling my ordinarily ravenous appetite for conspicuous consumption of Apple products. I remember how right it seemed to buy the iPod touch when it first came out, and I felt at the time I didn’t need a smartphone (I didn’t, and I still probably don’t). It seemed like the natural evolution of the iPod, with nothing left out.

The iPad is more like a movie prequel. With prequels, the destination or endpoint of the film is generally accepted and known by the audience, but we go and see them to see how that thing came to be. The first-generation iPad is a good story about the device it will eventually become, but it doesn’t feel like something terribly worthwhile in and of itself.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:
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Market Share: OS X, Safari Flat; iPhone OS Slows in January

Looking at data from web metrics firm Net Applications, the first month of the new year was not big news for Apple. Both Mac OS X and Safari reached something of a plateau in market share, and the growth rate of iPhone OS slowed.

OS X peaked at 5.27 percent in October, which not coincidentally was the release month of Windows 7. Since then, OS X has more or less been stuck around 5 percent, and was 5.13 percent for January. It’s an open question whether this is stagnation or perseverance. Windows 7 upgrade churn is just one of two major factors working against OS X market share, the other being continued success of the netbook.

As for the breakdown between versions of OS X, Snow Leopard has been moving up about 4 percent a month for the last three months, and now stands at 35 percent of the OS X user base. That’s a faster upgrade rate than Leopard, and much faster than Windows 7, which just broke 10 percent.

Safari is also under continued pressure from Google’s Chrome. Last month, Chrome (4.63 percent) edged past Safari (4.46 percent). Safari has since risen to 4.51 percent, while Chrome jumped to 5.2 percent, actually taking share from both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Internally, Safari 4 now accounts for 80 percent of the user base, which is phenomenal considering Safari 4 was officially launched just eight months ago.

The iPhone OS continues to steadily gain market share, no doubt a byproduct of being so close to zero. The iPhone OS is currently at 0.58 percent of the overall OS market, which may seem small but represents some 75 million devices sold in two and a half years. The iPhone is now at .47 percent, while the iPod touch is .11 percent, with both edging upward. While the iPad won’t launch until March, looking at the growth rate according to Net Applications numbers, it’s a pretty safe bet that iPhone OS will pass Linux in market share this year.

Even with a flat month in market share, Apple platforms have never sold so well, and for the Apple consumer that means more software and better resale value of hardware.

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Atimi — Raising the Standard for iPhone Development

Atimi Software Inc. is a leading iPhone and cross-platform development company with a core strength in developing for the Mac platform and the new generation of smartphones. As a dedicated software services company, Atimi provides advisory and development services and has completed iPhone and software development projects for many of the leading brands in North America, including the New York Times and HBO. By the end of 2009, Atimi had completed more than 25 iPhone applications for its clients, 65% of which received some degree of Apple promotion including via iTunes, TV, print and in-store placement.

Atimi provides confidential, effective, and timely production of smartphone and desktop software. Atimi’s broad range of expertise, proven development processes, and its Orchard rapid development framework for mobile helps clients to reach their target launch dates reliably and efficiently, allowing them to focus on building strong, lasting relationships with their own customers.

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