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TheAppleBlog
News, reviews, walkthroughs, and real-life application of Apple products
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New MobileMe Mail Web Beta Introduces Gmail-like Features
I use MobileMe. Have for two years now, ever since it was first introduced. Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the service, especially now that you can synchronize your contacts, email and calendars for free and get push email using Gmail. But one thing I’ve never felt very comfortable using is the web-based Mail application.

In fact, I much prefer the interface on my iPhone, and that of the iPad Mail application is better still. Which is why it’s great to see Apple release a new beta version of MobileMe’s web mail app that borrows heavily from its cousin on the iPad.

To get started using the beta, all you have to do is be an existing MobileMe subscriber (or sign up for a new account, I suppose, if you’re that interested, although buzz is building that it might become free soon), log in to your account and click on the “Request an invitation” link that appears in the bottom lefthand corner of the current interface. Apple will then send you an email invitation when you’re added to the beta pool.

Here’s what you’ll get for your trouble:
- New widescreen and compact views allow you to alternate between an iPad-like display mode that shows you more of your message, while also giving you access to your folders. Compact view gets rid of the folder navigation pane, and you can still switch back to classic view if you preferred the way things were.
- A new formatting toolbar means your messages won’t have to look so drab going out, and you can format long URLs to keep outgoing mail nice and tidy, and less likely to trip junk mail sensors.
- Set rules from the web view to filter out unimportant emails and cut down on inbox clutter. Whereas before you had to set these up in desktop mail, you can now create them on the web and have them automatically apply on both your desktop client and on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Not to mention the PC, if you happen to be using MobileMe with Outlook.
- Increased performance like faster loading and continuous scroll combine with increased security to give you a better overall web-based emailing experience. Plus, clicking the “Archive” button provides a handy, one-step way to file messages away without losing them for good.
An interesting side note would be MobileMe beta users: Apple recommends Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 8 as the browsers of choice for use with the beta. Wonder why they left Google Chrome out of the party? Pretending your competition doesn’t exist won’t make them go away, Cupertino.

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Will ePubs Replace Your Library?
While it remains to be seen if Apple's iBooks app and the iBookstore will be able to transform the print industry, they both have ignited a spark that makes reading more fun. The idea of reading on mobile devices is not new. Devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader have been around for a while, but with the buzz surrounding iBooks sparking more interest, are digital books worth it?

The Beginning of the Digital Revolution

When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, Steve Jobs made the case for why digital downloads would be the future. At the time, it was fairly easy to illegally download music through services like Napster or Kazaa. However, Jobs felt that people would pay a price, very reasonably set at 99 cents, to download music that was great quality and featured intact metadata and gorgeous album artwork. But does the same argument extend to digital books? The current offerings on the iBookstore seem to disagree.

Limitations of the ePub Format

There's a few considerations to keep in mind, such as selection and format. When the iTunes Store first launched, its catalog only contained 200,000 titles. Seven years later, the catalog features over 11 million titles. While Apple hasn't released a specific number, its website says the iBookstore features tens of thousands of titles with more arriving daily. Still for most, the selection feels a bit limited. It's unlikely you'll be able to replace your entire library with e-books soon.

Another consideration is formatting. A lot of digital content like books and documents are in PDF format. This is great as this format can maintain the exact structure, graphics, typeface and colors from the original source material. However, there are some trade offs. For example, zooming on a PDF document, especially on an iPad, will require you to scroll up and down, or even worse left and right, just to view everything on one page. This doesn't make for a natural reading experience.

Content on the iBookstore is delivered in ePub format, which is essentially an XML-based web page. By using a standards-compliant format (and we all know how Apple loves open standards), the ePub format supports benefits like being able to resize text or switch typefaces. This works because the iBooks app can simply modify the stylesheet applied to the document. When you make these changes, it's easy for the iPad to reflow the content onto additional pages if needed. But sometimes this can get a bit wonky (yes, that's a technical term).

First, custom typefaces are not supported in iBooks. While Safari on the iPad itself will support font embedding, iBooks misses out on this feature.

Another issue is images which are displayed in-line with the text content. What this means is in an original book, you might have a few photos out to the side of a paragraph but on the iPad, they'll just be displayed one right after the other, mixed in with the narrative. For some types of content, this may be a non-issue, but for others where the page structure is essential to the reading experience, this can be problematic.
More on iBooks
Both of these are the top reasons why you don't see periodicals available through the iBookstore. Imagine the implications this causes for technical books or textbooks. Isn't the education market supposed to be a big market for this device?

Some Potential Solutions

There are some potential solutions to this. Publishers could simply display some pages as single images, as this would maintain formatting, but accessibility features and the ability to bookmark and change text sizes would be lost.

Another solution would be that authors could release specific apps for these titles. Some have followed this route, but managing more than a handful of these apps really begins to clutter up the device and suddenly, the simplicity of the iBooks app for managing your content is gone.

Since ePub is an open e-book standard, there is hope that future versions will be able to address these issues. Likewise, the iBooks app itself can also be updated to add additional functionality, however, once you've bought a book, you own it. Unlike how Apple offered users to upgrade to iTunes Plus to get higher bit-rate versions of their songs, its unlikely that Apple will go back and update older titles or offer "plus" versions of some of these books.

Instead, Apple is being more selective about which titles are showing up on the iBookstore. Obviously, there are no periodicals. You could argue that the iBookstore is intended for books only, but I really think that's just the beginning, similar to how the iTunes Store began with music videos before adding TV shows and then movies. But could Apple release a different app to manage periodicals and newspapers? Perhaps and so there is yet another solution.

Regardless, the feasibility of converting your entire book collection to e-books is unlikely in the short-term, either because of a lack of content or simply because e-books are not worthy replacements of the books on your shelves. The ePub format itself still has a number of issues to address before printed books become a proverbial page from the past.

Have you used the iBooks app or the iBookstore? What are your thoughts on the ePub format? Is it sufficient enough to replace your library? Share your thoughts in the comments and tell us what you think.

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TechUniversity: Smart Playlists
Ever wanted to listen to all your Rock music? Or wanted to hear only your recent music purchases? The Smart Playlist feature in iTunes lets us do just that!

In this TechUniversity Smart Playlists screencast (subscription required), we’ll walk you through creating a Smart Playlist and how to set up different “rules” to control what songs automatically show up in your playlist.

View full Smart Playlists screencast on TechUniversity (subscription required)

Screencast Sample

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C4 Cancelled: A Loss for the Community
Everything changes as it grows, some things for the better, but others for the worse. Anyone who’s been a part of the Apple community for the past 10 years can testify how Apple has changed, and changed radically, over that time. Most of the change has been for the better, bringing us faster machines, amazing portable devices, and beautiful software. The changes that Apple has made for the better have caused it to become hugely popular, and gigantically profitable. Unfortunately, change at such a rapid pace always brings growing pains.

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch has, apparently, cancelled his incredible C4 conference. In a recent blog post, Rentzsh states…

C4 was my attempt to push on the Apple community from the bottom-up. With that background in place, I hope you can understand how Section 3.3.1 has broken my sprit.

Section 3.3.1 that he is referring to is a change made to the iPhone Developers License Agreement, declaring that any app that runs on the iPhone needs to have been originally developed using the iPhone SDK and the Objective-C, C, or C++ programming languages. What that means for developers is that they are not allowed to use Adobe’s Flash CS5 or any other language or development environment to create their apps. What that means for Apple is that it keeps complete control over its platform. What that means for consumers is less choice, and fewer apps. Then again, considering the wealth of applications available on Windows, and the general level of quality of those applications, maybe it’s not all that bad after all.

The change to Section 3.3.1 happened several weeks ago, but Rentzsch has just posted his goodbye to C4. He didn’t take this decision lightly. Rentzsch is a leader in the developer community, to see his conference go is a huge loss. If he is right or wrong is up to him to decide, but I honestly hope that other developers do not follow his lead. Apple has built a brand on solid hardware and amazing applications, on the iPhone OS and Mac OS X. To see some of the best minds abandoning or taking away from the platform, if that is indeed what Rentzsch is doing, is worrying to say the least.

I hope that if any good can come out of the loss of C4, it will be for Apple to hear their wake up call, and realize that perhaps this time they’ve taken the change a little too far.

Image courtesy of Flickr user somegeekintn

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