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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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Instapaper Coming to the iPad
"Read Later – ⌘4". I live my life by it. I find an interesting article but have no time to read it – ⌘4. A crazy-long message in Gmail that's just perfect for, um, 'bathroom reading' – ⌘4. Pretty much anything that demands attention but can wait until I'm curled up in bed at the end of the day? ⌘4.

What's all this ⌘4 stuff about? Why, that's my browser shortcut to Instapaper by Marco Arment. Instapaper strips the text out of almost any browser page and stores it for later reading; for me, that's usually via the Instapaper Pro app on my iPhone.

And now Arment brings us Instapaper for the iPad. I've never been more excited! On the Instapaper blog yesterday, Arment wrote;

I'm probably supposed to keep this secret and build everyone's anticipation to hype this up. Oh well. Maybe I'll do that for the Instapaper edition for Apple's next revolutionary computing platform.

First: Instapaper is definitely coming to iPad.

Second: Instapaper is coming to iPad very soon. Possibly even on day one — yes, I'm going for it — but that's optimistic.

Third: Instapaper Pro will be a universal iPhone/iPad application. That means that you only have to buy Instapaper Pro once to have it on both devices, and the iPad edition will be available to all Pro purchasers at no additional charge when it's released.

You know that joy we all felt when Apple announced Snow Leopard would be super-duper-cheap? Remember the way you smiled when you heard the news, and felt a warm glow inside? That's how I feel about Instapaper Pro on the iPad. I think I even went "Squee!" when I read Arment's post. (I was alone, so no one knows I made a fool of myself. Oh, wait…)

Arment adds;

It looks like Instapaper Pro, but bigger, and with slight interface tweaks and redesigns where appropriate.

When everyone else was stalling their iPhone development for months in order to redesign entire applications for the iPad, I made the obligatory cardboard prototype and mocked up a bunch of radical interface departures.

Ultimately, none of them were very practical. Some worked well, but only with ideal content (which, in practice, is rarely the case except in the Editor's Picks folder). And I didn't want to commit to any huge risks because I don't have an iPad to test them on.

And that's the hurdle many iPad developers currently face. Any developer will agree it's important to be in the iPad app store as close to Day One as possible, but all app development and testing is horribly crippled by the 'little' fact that no one has an iPad yet. Emulators and simulations are all very well and good, but nothing beats having the real thing to hold in one's hands.

Supersize

What might seem like a great design decision or function implementation in a simulator may not work in 'real' life, on an actual hold-it-in-your-hands-and-swipe-with-your-fingers iPad. There's a big difference between how we interact with a computer monitor, and how we interact with a magazine – and the iPad is the mongrel offspring lovechild of the two. (You know what I mean.) Truth is, no amount of cardboard dummy iPads and on-screen simulations will provide the same tactile feedback and degree of first-hand quality control offered by an actual iPad.

Some developers are no doubt hoping that the iPad’s super-size function (by which apps designed for the iPhone are displayed at more than double their original size on the iPad) will keep customers happy until they can get a real iPad and spend time properly (re)developing their apps for it.

So why didn't Arment just let Instapaper Pro run in that supersize, double-pixel mode? After all, content in Instapaper is mostly text. No worries about pixelated graphics there, right?

Wrong. Arment fired up Instapaper in his iPad simulator. The result?

It sucked, and it was completely unusable by my standards…

While I could have taken the conservative option and waited until a month or two after the iPad's release before launching Instapaper for it, an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own.

Me neither. And, if early reports are accurate, neither will a lot of other people for whom the iPad is, for the most part, a reading device. According to a report today on TUAW, a comScore poll of prospective iPad customers revealed that 37 percent said it's likely they'll read books on the device; 34 percent were more certain, saying that they would use the iPad for reading magazines and newspapers.

For those of you, like me, who are using Instapaper heavily every day, the iPad is like a dream come true and I can say with certainty that catching up on all those ⌘4'd articles and web pages will be what my iPad is used for most often. And for the 34 percent of iPad customers-in-waiting, Instapaper (and the inevitable copycat apps that follow) will make the iPad just about the only screen from which we'll want to do any reading, ever again.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Evolution of the e-Book Market

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How-To: Image Snow Leopard to a Hard Drive for Quick Install

Whether your hard drive has failed or your OS has become corrupt, you may occasionally have to reinstall the Mac OS. Fortunately, Apple does a beautiful job of making installing or reinstalling your operating system relatively painless compared to our Windows brethren. Unfortunately, it’s still a painfully slow process running off a DVD. Not to mention, optical media can get scratched easily (one of the reasons for the long install times is Apple’s optical media verification).

To solve this problem, I recommend backing up your Mac OS installation DVD to a hard drive. Doing so protects it and allows you to install the OS quickly, as well as run Disk Utility on your main drive or reset a password. I keep a hard drive with Leopard and Snow Leopard installers so I can reinstall or repair multiple OS versions easily.

Getting Started

To start, you’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard (or whatever OS version you want to install). Open Disk Utility, which is typically found in /Applications/Utilities. On the left-hand side you see your disk appear as “Mac OS X Install DVD.” Go ahead and click the New Image icon to make a copy of the DVD. Save the file at your preferred location (I have a Archive folder on my hard drive for installer disks).

Prepare the Drive

Now that you have a digital copy of your installer, the next step is to prepare the hard drive you will use for the restoration. In this example, I connected an old 160GB hard drive from my MacBook into an external case. I’m dividing this particular one into three partitions: one for Leopard, one for Snow Leopard, and one for other installers such as iLife. I could put Tiger on it, but I get few requests for that OS. Since I want this to boot Intel-based Macs, I’m going to click options and make sure GUID Partition is selected. I’m making the partitions 10GB, but you can choose any size above 8.5GB to play it safe. You could also use a USB flash drive, but those can be slow. I suggest sticking with a hard drive-based solution for speed reasons.

Restore the Image

After preparing your drive, you’ll need to restore the image to your hard drive partition. Click the Restore tab in Disk Utility. For Source, click Image… and choose that image you created earlier. For Destination, drag the partition you want to restore the OS to, then click “Restore.”

You might get an error saying, “Restore Failure: Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to imagescanned before it can be restored.” If you get this message, go ahead and go to the Images menu and choose “Scan Image for Restore.” Choose the disk image you are using as source. Now click Restore; it shouldn’t ask again.

In my example, I’ll do the same for the second partition and put Leopard on it. Both partitions will be named Mac OS X Install DVD. That can be confusing on boot, so I suggest you copy the icon from each installer CD and paste it onto the respective hard disk volumes. You’ll easily be able to tell from the icon alone which OS you are installing. If you hold down Option during the startup of your Mac, you’ll be presented with those icons as well so you know which installer will boot, and you can go ahead and install the Mac OS the normal way.

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iPhone Gains Gaming Market Revenue Share
Software market research firm Flurry Analytics has posted some interesting information about where Apple’s iPhone stands in regards to the gaming market at large. The report also includes details about how the iPhone is stacking up in the mobile market against its two major rivals, the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP.

In 2008, Apple’s iPhone OS accounted for only one percent of the overall gaming market, compared to 20 percent for other portable games, and 79 percent for console. 2009 saw a definite swing towards portable gaming overall, with Apple alone reaping about half of the benefit of that shift.

Apple’s overall share of video game software sales climbed to five percent in 2009, which represents an impressive 500 percent growth rate for the year. The general portable market, which seems to include not only the Nintendo DS and PSP, but also other mobile gaming platforms like cellular devices, grew by five percentage points as well, taking 24 percent of the market in 2009. The home console market, by comparison, dropped to just 71 percent. The numbers seem to indicate a growing portable market, of which Apple is currently taking the lion’s share.

According to Flurry Analytics’ estimates, using information from the NPD group, which details gaming revenue, the market overall took in $11 billion in 2008, and had a lightly less lucrative 2009, taking in only $9.9 billion. That means Apple’s take grew from $115 million in 2008 to somewhere around $500 million in 2009. With the introduction of the iPad in 2010, that number stands grow at an even faster rate as a whole new market segment is opened up to App Store gaming.

Zooming in on how the iPhone is doing relative to its two strongest competitors in portable gaming, the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable, we see an even more dramatic picture of tremendous growth. Where the iPhone accounted for only five percent of the revenue share of the three platforms in 2008, in 2009 it took 19 percent. That means that it surpassed the PSP, which fell from 20 percent to 11 percent market share year over year. The DS stayed strong at 70 percent in 2009, but that still represents a fall of 5 percentage points from 2008.

The PSP is in big trouble, but it also looks like Nintendo may only be doing better because it had such a hefty head start to begin with. Recently, Apple announced that its next generation portable console, the Nintendo 3DS, is set for release in the not-too-distant future, so that could help its prospects. The PSP, on the other hand, had a very disappointing year with the release of the PSP Go, which wasn’t very well received, and no plans have been announced about the device’s next iteration as of yet.

Apple’s iPhone platform, on the other hand, is set to make some major leaps forward this year. There’s the very concrete and tangible benefit the iPad will have when it comes out early next month, compared to Nintendo’s vague plans regarding a new device somewhere on the horizon. Then there’s the near-certainty that Apple will be releasing a new iPhone in late Spring/early Summer, which should bring at the very least better processor power and graphics rendering for more impressive and ambitious games.

Therein lies Apple’s main advantage, besides its appeal to casual gamers: new hardware every 12 months, at least. The iPhone, iPod touch, and presumably the iPad, too, all get annual refreshes at the very least. And those refreshes often mean more muscle under the hood, which translates to more for game developers to work with. Significant performance updates to Sony’s and Nintendo’s platforms are few and far between.

The iPhone platform is still struggling to find purchase with core gamers, but I think the iPad, especially with its support for Bluetooth keyboards, might finally make significant inroads with that crowd. Watch for 2010 to be the year Apple dominates portable gaming.

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Why Apple's iPad Can't Succeed in Schools (Yet)
Apple has started making the iPad available on its online education store in packs of 10 with an appallingly–stingy discount of only $20 per iPad. If Apple wants to start a computing revolution with the iPad, it absolutely must get the device into schools. But in order to do that, it's going to have to try a lot harder, and generous discounts are the easiest problem to solve. There are much bigger hurdles standing in the way.

Let's start with costs alone. Assume a school wants to buy an iPad for each of its students. Assume the school is small with only 300 children enrolled. Assume also that the school wants to buy the cheapest iPad without AppleCare. At a little more than $450 per iPad, that's a cost of almost $144,000. I imagine the average state-funded school enjoys less than half that in its annual I.T. budget.

"Aha!" you might argue, "Many schools in underprivileged areas get subsidies from the state and provide laptops for their pupils."

And, of course, you'd be right. Many schools do provide their students with free or 'nearly-free' laptops. But not decent laptops. We're talking cheap, disposable netbooks that cost far less to insure against loss or damage. (Let's be realistic – the younger the student, the greater the chance of laptop-death!)

No Competition

I graduated from High School back in the early 90s, and even then my school was considered ahead of the curve when it came to the adoption of computer technology in class. Even so, there were no Macs in my school. They were just too expensive. Here in the UK, the fierce battle in the 1980's between Acorn, Sinclair, Atari, Amstrad and Commodore meant that there were many perfectly capable, cheap microcomputers available to schools. The Mac was superior to those machines in almost every way, but it couldn't compete on price.

It has been 16 years since I graduated from high school. And while I'm happy to report that my old school now has iMacs in most classrooms, sadly they only run Windows XP.

The reason for this comes down to two simple factors; Cost, and What's Best for the Kids. It seems more educational titles are available at lower prices on Windows than on Mac OS X. And, outside school, the kids encounter more Windows PCs than Macs.

So I look at the upcoming iPad and, even though I can see the potential it offers to schoolchildren (and the wider education market), I can't help but wonder if it has any real chance of making a dent at this time. HP's upcoming slate PC has more chance of being adopted by my old school simply because it works with all their existing software and runs Windows — the platform the school believes the pupils are better served knowing, rather than Mac OS X, which they have concluded is just too obscure and “specialist.”

And as though these fiduciary and policy-driven decisions aren't bad enough, there's another glaring challenge to getting the iPad widely accepted in schools; at the end of the day, it's just not a book.

Delicate Issues

You see, tablets-as-books is a great idea until the battery dies, and then the student has no textbook and no computer. She will have to plug-in to a power outlet if she wants either of those things back. But consider the delicate health and safety issues associated with cable-safety in a classroom environment. Not to mention the maintenance costs (that’s a lot of power outlets being used more than ever before) and don't forget the school will suddenly incur higher energy bills. Say what you will about a paper-textbook, at least it doesn't need plugging-in.

And then there's the issue of damage. What happens if an iPad screen is cracked? A damaged book cover doesn't render the book's contents inaccessible, nor is it likely to slice into fingers. Plus, the cost of a replacement book is trivial. Remind me how much the cheapest iPad is?

Oh, and let's not forgot that Apple isn't perfect. Remember when the iPhone OS was updated to 3.1 in September last year? I wrote about it here, and the comments quickly ran to over 100. iPhones everywhere were freezing, crashing, and generally just refusing to work, and all as a result of an official update from Apple itself!

What happens when Apple does the same thing with the iPad? Even the most diligent students who take the greatest of care with their always-charged-in-time-for-class iPads will suffer if an update from Apple proves flaky.

And, finally, there's the matter of crime. No one ever wanted to rob a kid from my school. The only thing we ever carried in our bags was biology books and the occasional Thundercats pencil case. But what if my school handed-out iPads to its pupils? Overnight, the school uniform would become an advertisement to any would-be criminal; "mug this kid – expensive computer on-board."

I'd dearly love to see all school kids and college students everywhere take-up iPads as their favorite learning tools. Sadly, I just don't see how that can happen as long as they remain significantly more expensive than textbooks, more sophisticated than simple e-book readers and less resilient than the existing, proven toolset — traditional, dead-tree textbooks.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015

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