Anyway…

One feature I’ve always wished would be added to the iPad is the ability to select a default browser rather than always being forced to Safari every time that I click on a link. Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding that functionality. Normally the “walled garden” approach that Apple has adopted doesn’t bother me. I like that for most things the device just works. Still some of the things Apple seems anxious to lock down make little sense to me, especially from a usability standpoint. Maintaining control isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however singsong a strangle hold is, and that’s what it feels like Apple is intent on doing sometimes. With all that in mind I finally decided it was time to jailbreak my iPad.

Greenpois0n was recently updated allowing an untethered jailbreak of iOS 4.2.1. I read up on it and skimmed a couple forums to see if people had been experiencing very bad things when using it to jailbreak their iPads. Other than a couple incidents which read like idiot user syndrome rather than an issue with the software, I didn’t find many negative reports. So after backing up my iPad I decided to take the plunge.

I followed the instructions I found on padgadget.com which seemed simple enough, but the update kept failing. Each time my ipad booted back in to its normal non-jailbroken self so I wasn’t worried about bricking it(I did a complete back up of it before I started). After looking around a bit I found some advice on a couple of forums that worked like a charm. Basically I had to use the terminal to open up greenpois0n directly from the .app package rather than double clicking the pretty icon. For whatever reason opening it via the terminal worked and the loader for Cydia showed up on my iPad. It was only about ten minutes from start to the point where Atomic was set as my default iPad browser.

Not bad for a days work – which could have been only a few minutes of work if I hadn’t ran in to problems initially. So far everything seems to be working well and I haven’t had any stability issues.

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The iPod touch has been a real champ for me over the past couple of years, but the size had it’s limitations. It was good for light browsing and some quick e-mails, but it got a little tiring for protracted use for me. Not to mention the battery wasn’t suited to all day use. It’s a great little media device, but after a couple years I couldn’t help but want more.

Once it was announced that iOS 4 wouldn’t run on the 1st generation iPod touch I knew it was about time to start looking in to a replacement. To be honest at that point I still hadn’t really considered the iPod and was eagerly awaiting the 4th generation iPod touch as that’s what I was pretty sure I was going to upgrade to. When it was announced I was fairly impressed by it, though like many others I felt that using an underwhelming camera just to make the device thinner was a rather annoying move – likely one meant to minimize cannibalization of iPhone sales. Still I gave it a good look and was still fairly certain I was going to go with that. Then I played with the iPad demo at Best Buy. I was hooked.

I’m now a little over 24 hours in to owning one and it’s been a good experience so far. Most of the iPad specific apps I’ve played with are well thought out and imaginatively take advantage of the extra space the iPad screen offers. The web use is fantastic and I can’t say the lack of flash has been an issue. Sure, I don’t have much against Flash and wouldn’t mind seeing it on the iPad. I was most impressed by the ESPN website which normally uses quite a bit of Flash, but detects that you’re on the iPad and adjusts accordingly, taking out the flash and replacing with what I’d suspect is HTML 5.

I’ve yet to play with the 3G options on it, but the built in GPS is more than adequate. It might not zero in on my exact position, but it comes close enough for my needs on a device like this. I’ll have more to say about the 3G and traveling with the iPad after my upcoming trip to California.

After a day of use (and going gaga after the great battery life) I love the iPad.

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I’ve played with it for a little bit now, and it does feel snappy.  I’m not sure it actually feels faster than Chrome (which I had been using), but then again I haven’t run any tests on it.  Still, my initial feeling is that it certainly is a speed improvement over the previous version of Safari.

Apple also boasts vast improvements with HTML5, but seeing as how HTML5 isn’t an official standard yet it’s really hard to say if there’s any real improvement in that area.  It would require some actual development work to see how it plays with the HTML5 standards (even though those standards haven’t been set in stone yet).  I’m sure it’ll all be worthwhile, but so far there’s not much to say in that area.  I guess it’s good that Apple is focusing on it now before it becomes a widely adopted standard, but at the moment it’s not much of a selling point to the vast majority of users.

Something that has the potential to be quite interesting is Apple adding developer extensions to the browser.  This is going to allow developers to create their own extensions (much like with Firefox or Chrome) that will work with Safari.  While it seems Apple is still going to exercise some control be using digitally signed certificates, it certainly is a much more open move than they have been with the browser in the past.  All of these extensions will be sandboxed so that extensions won’t be able to access other resources or data on the users hard drive.  It’s a good step towards extension security.  Right now it’s such a new feature there isn’t anything out there yet, but it’s something to watch.  Hopefully developers will be quick to start releasing useful extensions for the browser.

Finally, a new feature that I am the most interested in so far, is their “Reader”.  In the address bar, while you’re reading an article on a website, the Reader icon will appear.  Clicking on this brings up a PDF like view of the web page, bringing up the text and related pictures, but not any of the other cruft that populates a webpage, in theory making it easier to get at the meat of what you’re trying to read by eliminating all the other distractions.  It also has controls for zooming, printing, or e-mailing of the information on the webpage.  It seems like it’ll be rather useful, especially on some sites that make reading articles fairly difficult by littering them with advertising that goes throughout the text.

Safari 5 seems to be a lot more under-the-hood style of improvements opposed to Safari 4 which was much more of a cosmetic release.  Safari 5 holds a lot of promise and it’ll be interesting to see what people do with the new improvements.

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I’ve watched the videos, read the reports and Steve Jobs spiel and still I am amazing overwhelmed.  Sure, it may have just been the massive amount of hype that has been surrounding this thing, but I don’t think so.  I can pin point a few of, what I consider to be, pretty glaring short comings.

1. The very first thing I noticed about it was that it’s not a widescreen device.  For something that’s only 9.7″ when I’m watching video I don’t want to have to deal with black bars when watching wide screen content.  For a media oriented device this just seems silly to me.  No, not a deal breaker, but something that rubbed me the wrong way from the get go.
2. While the iPad seems to have a more polished version of the iPhone OS, it seems like too stripped down, and too locked down to be a “great” product.  Sure, it’s still useful, and the iPhone OS is entirely serviceable.  But in a time when other companies have touch screen machines running full OS versions this just seems a bit silly.  Especially after how much he cuts on netbooks and then releases a product that is more stripped down than “a cheap laptop”.
3. Again it seems as if Apple wants nothing at all to do with Flash, as, like the iPhone/iPod Touch, the web browser lacks a Flash plugin.  A device like the iPad would be great for Hulu video, or any number of streaming content sites.  However without Flash these sites are a no go.  While some people see Flash as becoming irrelevant in the not so distant future as HTML 5 brings its own embedded streaming standards, it is however relevant now.  They are releasing this device now, not in the future, and to ignore a current dominant standard seems absolutely silly.
4. Finally, what I see as the biggest deal breaker of them all, is the lack of multitasking.  Only being able to have one app going at once is short-sighted, and something I’d expect from a device from several years ago.  On my 1st Gen iPod Touch I can understand there are hardware limitations.  On Apple’s much touted “blazing fast” A4 chip I’d expect it to handle the running of multiple applications like a champ.  Why is this feature lacking?  I wish I knew, but it sets the iPad behind devices that are less technologically impressive.  Big fail on this one Apple.

It’s true that three of these four complaints could be addressed by software updates.  I certainly hope that they are.  Currently, however, this device seems aimed at a very small niche market.  It looks to me more like a proto-type than an actual prime time ready release.  I can see the iPad, however, sparking competing devices that will force innovation in this newly emerging market.  The iPad might be a precursor, but in its current incarnation its nothing more than an overgrown iPod desperately seeking a market.

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It certainly seems like there is a good chance of this happening.  While AT&T has moved a lot of iPhone’s, it has also burdened their service like no phone before it.  They’ve been getting a lot of negative press, so losing exclusivity could help relieve some of the burden and allow them to push more of other variety of phones that they see better financial returns from.  It would also be a boon to consumers who lust after the iPhone as it would give them choice, and competition, in theory, helps to lower price and give new incentives to the consumers.  Verizon’s recent price cut on unlimited plans was followed by a nearly identical price drop by AT&T.

The iPhone’s on another network rumor sound more plausible to me than a tablet announcement after so many disappointments in the past.  Still, no one said the event on the 27th has to be limited to one device.  Apple is the master of “Just one more thing…”.  Perhaps a networked tablet from Apple riding on Verizon’s airwaves?  We’ll just have to wait until the 27th to see.

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I’ll be honest, I won’t really believe it until I see it.  Too many times in the past there were indicators that Apple was about to release one, and they ended up releasing something else.  So yes, I’m skeptical.

The tablet market has also been a rather niche one, more so than many other technologies.  Things like the Kindle, or the recently released Nook, have come along that are a bit of a compromise between a touch computing platform, and media enabled device.  Both are geared towards being a digital replacement to the shrinking dead tree industry.  Multi-functionality is something that we don’t see much of in these early renditions.  While this may change in the future, right now there is a window for a combination of a media device (music, movies, and books) and a device to deal with our online lives (social media, e-mail, web browsing, etc.).  If anyone can take a fledgling market and make it a must have experience it will be Apple.  The question is, is it the right time?  Is Apple even releasing this beast?  Or will the 27th leave all the Apple Tablet fan club kiddies sad little pandas?

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The most notable was the surprise everyone experienced when they announced the iPod Nano was receiving a video camera whilst the iPod Touch is not.  There was much speculation that the Touch would be getting the camera, as well as the possibility of it getting GPS capabilities.  It was expected that the Touch would realize its place as the iPhone minus the phone.  Apparently Apple has another direction in mind.  After hearing several tech blogs state that the iPod Touch was a capable portable gaming platform it seems that Apple adopted that mentality.  The touted all the games available for the iPod Touch, and talked about all the developers making their latest and greatest for the iPod Touch.  I also don’t think its unfair to say Apple is worried that the Touch could cannibalize iPhone sales.  There are a lot of people looking for a lot of the features of the iPhone, but not be forced to pay the AT&T tax.  I’ll admit I really like my iPod Touch, and it would be nice to pick up one with more capacity (and in theory a bit better battery life).

There’s a new iTunes in town, and this is perhaps the more interesting of the announcements today.  In particular, to me, the best part is the Home Sharing feature.  This feature allows you to share the music and videos on up to five machines over your home network.  Home Sharing is something that people had been hoping to see in iTunes ever since it debuted.  It removes the hassle of having to have multiple copies of things housed on each computer.  It allows you to not only stream from one machine to another, but also to copy the music and videos between the machines.  I like this feature because it allows me to keep all my media on a desktop machine, but if I wanted to have some movies with me when I traveled I could easily copy them over from the desktops library and then delete them at a later date.  Sure there have always been ways to do this, and most of them aren’t all that complicated.  But they are a bit of a hassle, and what Apple has done is make it as simple as opening up iTunes and dropping and dragging the media you want in to your local library.  So far I’ve only played with the streaming features of both music and TV shows that I had purchased from the iTunes Store.  The streaming worked great – there were no hiccups at all.

Finally, to all those people hoping to see the Beatles come to the iTunes store (yawn), it seems you’ll just have to continue to hope, wonder, and dream along with all those Apple Tablet people who swear its going to be announced at the next big event.

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Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update.  It appeared that everything went smoothly.  It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning.  When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”.  Hmmm.  This wasn’t happy behavior.  I fiddled with the settings a bit.  Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing.  I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine.  I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network).  After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”.  Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image.  This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute.  Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first.  After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in.  The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update.   Okay, I could buy this.  So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.

Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing.  There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing.  Next I invoked  mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index.  Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar.  20 minutes later the drive was reindexed.  Awesome I thought.  Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…”  I let that go for hours before finally giving up.

Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure.  In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.

Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”

I’ve also gotten:  ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “

Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall).  While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors.  I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.

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After playing with the AppleTV for a little bit it was time to get down to the business of hacking it so that it could play a multitude of video formats as well as allow the attachment of an external storage device.  There are lots of instructions online for rolling your own hacks on to a USB key, but out of laziness, and the fact I’m willing to let better qualified people do the work for me, I went with the guys at aTV Flash.  They frequently update the software which is especially helpful as some of Apple’s updates to the units firmware can tend to break the things you so meticulously went about hacking.

The 160GB internal storage of the AppleTV wasn’t going to cut it once I started making digital copies of my DVD’s to transfer to the device.  We ended up hooking up a 1TB external USB drive to it, which was a snap.  I formatted it as HFS+ Journaled, plugged it in to the AppleTV, and it was immediately recognized.  I was able to FTP in to the unit and copy files over to the external HD.  After the finished copying the were accessible through the AppleTV’s menu – specifically in the “DVD” section of the expanded menu that appears after initially hacking the unit.  For ripping the video I find that Handbrake’s default settings work quite well – a great compromise between file size and quality of both picture and sound.

One of the other benefits that came from hacking the device is access to Hulu (along with other services)through Boxee.  I’ve watched some old episodes of ALF for nostalgic purposes as well as a few other gems (Airwolf and Knight Rider in particular).  It’s hit or miss with newer episodes of some shows through Hulu, but I use it more when I don’t know what I want to watch as opposed to stay current with series I follow.  More recent series I’ve slowly been acquiring from the Apple Store.  Following the series that I do as well as purchasing a couple I haven’t seen in awhile works out to the same, if not a little cheaper than the cable bill had been.  Boxee has also enabled me to have access to every episode of South Park that has been made thus far – something I take frequent advantage of.

The AppleTV has been working great as a replacement for live TV.  Yes, I do miss popping on the occasional football or hockey game, but I can always go to a friends house or one of the sports bars in town to see those.  I certainly haven’t felt any less transitioning to this digital centered, cable tv free lifestyles.

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