iPhone OS 4.0 Sneak Peek!

Apple have just announced that they'll be having a sneak peek event for the next version of iPhone OS and it's going to be on April the 8th! Only 3 days away!

Rumours have been flying around that we'll get multitasking with this update and I'd also expect some iPad-centric updates as well; possibly expose style task switching and some sort of widget system.

Guess we'll find out on Thursday!

The Future Of Magazines?

Below is a video from Wired magazine demonstrating their prototype of a tablet based version of the magazine. It's produced in Adobe InDesign the same as their printed edition but includes lots of interactive features and even some video.

This is a great sign of things to come for digital media and one of the things I fully expect to find on the iPad once the pain of distribution rights is sorted out for various countries!

An iPhone App In A Week

One Week App

Here's an interesting site that follows an iPhone developer who's trying to produce an app for the app store in one week.

He's blogging as he goes and giving insights into how he's solved certain problems and also asking questions of his readers as to how they think certain elements should be impemented.

As a beginner iPhone developer it's interesting stuff and I've learnt a few tricks already which I can hopefully put to good use!

He's blogging several times a day at the moment and responds to comments made and the end app looks quite interesting and may actually be something I'd use. Check out the blog or follow him on twitter on @oneweekapp

The Apple iPad... Do I want one?

I'll be honest, I love my iPhone so the prospect of a 'bigger iPhone' appealed to me pretty early on.

The idea of a netbook also appealed to me and I bought myself a Dell Mini 9 about 14 months ago. I was impressed at how well it ran Windows Vista at the time considering it's relatively low specs.

I struggle using the netbooks cramped screen for more than quick surfing though, scrolling around is simply a pain especially if I don't have a mouse surface available and have to use the touchpad. Outlook really doesn't get on so well with the small screen either.

So enter the iPad with it's slightly larger screen (just!) but it's friendlier touch interface.
I think the biggest gain at first for me will be mobile safari; I actually browse the web quite a bit on my iPhone and find the pinch&zoom or double tap to zoom into a column/section very fluid. A phone screen is hardly ideal though and I think the combination of touch controls and the larger screen could give me an excellent casual browsing experience. I want to be able to hold this thing in one hand lounging on the couch or sat in the car and be able to get where I'm going without swearing at the controls (something that happens frequently with the netbook)

Hopefully the iBooks store will make it to the UK in time for launch as I had been thinking about an eBook reader for a while; I read a lot of reference books and frankly they're quite heavy! Being able to gave a library of books available in my work 'toolkit' would also be very handy!

I'm sure that fairly soon after launch we'll see other useful apps start to be available. I'd certainly like to see a VNC app and a remote desktop app - combined with VPN abilities this could be very useful for me. A decent FTP client with text editing abilities would be very useful too for small website changes on the go.

Basically there are tonnes of apps on the iPhone that would be so much more useful in a larger form factor.

Rumour has it that the iPad (and hopefully future iPhone software) will have a proper document storage area that all apps will be able to get too, rather than the sandbox approach now where each app can only get to their own documents. That would make my Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com/) even more useful.

So what's NOT to like? I would have liked some sort of removable storage (SD Card being the obvious) and at least some basic multitasking would have been nice. I know why Apple have avoided it to keep performance at decent levels at all times but I'm sure there is some middle ground to be found somewhere and hopefully they'll find it.

The lack of Flash support in mobile safari has bothered quite a few people with the iPhone and even more with the realisation that it's not on the iPad either. From what I can gather it probably won't ever be either. I can't say that this is a major stumbling block for me.. I can't think of a single site I use on a regular (or even irregular!) basis that depends on Flash. Youtube is about the only site I can think of that normally uses it that I go to but they have got around the problem by having their own app and currently have an HTML5 version of their site in testing that alleviates the need for Flash altogether - hopefully other video sites will follow. Personally I think most uses of Flash can be avoided and it would actually make the web a nicer place and probably faster too.

So no screaming problems then! Of course that may change after release and we all get a better look at it!

So basically I want one and I'm constantly checking for UK pricing and to see who's going to be offering a decent 3g data package. There are rumours of the phone companies offering subsidised packages too which makes sense as they do the same for the netbooks with 3g integrated. Chances are in the long term buying one outright will be a better deal especially if the data packages have no contract as announced state side.

On a seperate note I wrote this blog entry on my iPhone sat in the car with the help of BlogPress... Hopefully I'll get to write some more in a few months from my new iPad.