Custom messaging ringtones

Originally, iOS only allowed you to assign ringtones to people in your address book. Now you can assign custom ringtones to events such as text tones, email sending and receiving, tweets, and voice mail.

Double-tap the home button while locked for camera and iPod access

The one thing that annoyed me the most about the iPhone was the time it took to get to the Camera app. You had to unlock your phone, click the Camera app icon, and wait for the aperture to open. Now, all you have to do is double-tap the home button and you have instant access to the Camera app. You also have limited access to your music.

Notifications

One major annoyance about iOS in the past was the way the phone handled notifications. If you got more than one, there was no way to look at the history of the notification that were sent to you. Now, you’re shown all your notifications on your home screen that came in since the last time you checked. What’s better is you can now swipe down from the top of your screen and see a longer notification history. You also get a scrolling stock ticker at the bottom of the notifications list.

If you get a notification while using your phone, instead of a giant dialog box intruding on your work, the top 100 pixels or so will “rotate” down like the answers in Family Feud, and display your notification that way. You can then choose to tap the notification to read it, or simply ignore it.

iMessage

Instead of sending messages over SMS, Apple has created a new system called iMessage which allows you to send text, pics, and movies to anyone else that has iOS 5 with iMessage. Now you no longer have to send messages over the clunky SMS system, you can do it all over 3G and Wifi. You can even send messages to multiple people. If the person you’re sending the message to has iMessage as well, their name has a blue bubble. If not, they have a green bubble.

Reminders

Originally, all you could do in iOS to remind yourself about anything was to use the Notes app. Now, iOS 5 has a Reminders app that not only keeps your list of reminders, but also pushes everything to iCloud, so it wirelessly syncs across all your devices. You can set priorities, and tell Reminders how often to remind you about your…reminder.

Photo Stream

When you take a picture on your iPhone, or add one to your iPhoto library on your Mac, it’s automatically sent to all your devices.

Camera updates

One of the first things you’ll notice when you launch the Camera app is the grid lines it puts up by default. This is an excellent way to make sure your pictures are as straight as possible. Nobody wants their pictures to look crooked, as if they were taken in a villain’s lair from the old Batman TV show. HDR is also an option now so that you can take the high dynamic range pictures along with regular pictures.

Some people didn’t like that you had to touch the camera icon in the Camera app to take the picture because it was in an awkward position, so you can now use the volume up button on the iPhone 4 to snap the picture.

Software updates over the air

While beta testing iOS over the last few months,

I was able to update iOS over the air. I found that iOS will pull the update for you and let you know when it’s ready so that you don’t have to wait for it to download. You can, of course, do it manually. I was at a concert one evening when I got the notification that there was a new update available. I told my iPhone to proceed and was updated in less than 15 minutes. The downside is that if something does go wrong, you want to be close to your computer to restore from a recent backup. I would suggest not doing an over the air update unless you’re backed up and near a computer in case something goes wrong.

Sync and backup over Wifi

This is one feature that’s long overdue. I didn’t like that I had to attach my phone to my Mac every time I wanted to do a backup. Now, you can tell your iPhone to do its backup over Wifi. It has to be done over the local network where your computer resides, or at least have some kind of VPN access to it over the Wifi network you’re connected to.

While some people might not think that iOS 5 is a major upgrade, I saw a lot of little things that I absolutely love about it. iTunes Match won’t be ready for another few weeks, so watch here for our review of that service.

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Post tags: Apple, Camera+, iMessage, ios5, iPad, iPhone, iPod, photo stream, reminders

Communicators

Growing up, I thought these were the coolest things. I was already a fan of CB radios and had one of those cheap channel 14 walkie talkies, but the ability to talk to someone so far away seemed impossible at the time. Motorola’s Star-Tac phones were the start of the Communicator-type flip-top device, but the iPhone seems closer to what they’d use on the Enterprise, especially since the Star Trek Technical Manual states that the flip-top was an antenna. I wonder how much brain-frying radiation was coming out of those things. You couldn’t even watch YouTube on them.

Phasers

Phasers were amazing, but freakin’ dangerous. If you slipped on a rock and accidentally triggered the thing, it would vaporize you faster than you could say “red shirt”. Still, having a weapon like that which can do everything from heat rocks to send a Mugato into oblivion seemed like a great thing to have in grade school. While we don’t have exactly the same thing today, we do have the 1W lasers from Wicked Lasers, which are dangerous in their own way.

Universal Translator

It amazed me how any device could take the hissing of a Gorn and turn it into coherent sentences. I wonder what a stage production of “Romeo And Juliet” would be like translated into Gorn. In fact, going from English to Gorn would probably sound like the thing was broken. Still, Google’s new Google Translate is a pretty damn cool app on the iPhone. You speak what you want, it converts the speech to text, and then translates it into whatever language you want, including the ability for the translated text to be spoken.

Uhura’s Earpiece

While not the most impressive tech on Star Trek, the closest tech we have today is the Bluetooth earpiece. And just what are the hailing frequencies? Are they a reserved band in the universal spectrum?

Cloaking Device

This is something I thought I’d never see due to the optics involved, but in 2003 Japanese scientists created an invisibility jacket which pulls images from behind and projects them onto the jacket in the front. Pretty cool stuff, but it’s far from allowing you to sneak up behind your sister and scare her. Also, the technology of the cloaking device in Star Trek works on not being detected by sensors which is a whole different kind of invisibility. It’s too bad there aren’t any aliens out there whose towers we could buzz with it. Maverick’s got the ball.

Portable Storage

In the 1960′s, computers were massive and took reels of magnetic tape to store data on. Star Trek used these little rectangular cards for storage which amazingly didn’t need labels. Star Trek: TNG had something closer with isolinear chips, but here I think we beat Star Trek with USB thumb drives.

Replicators

In college I worked with a stereolithography device which used lasers to harden a liquid layer by layer, creating a three dimensional object. It was pretty impressive and slow, but that was 1993 and today these same types of systems have gotten very sophisticated. We still can’t replicate a cup of hot Earl Gray tea or turkey, the ability for these machines to create parts for themselves is pretty cool.

Artificial Intelligence

The M5 computer was supposed to be the grandest achievement in computers, according to Dr. Daystrom. For years I’ve kept progress of artificial intelligence in my peripheral view, keeping up with the likes of Big Blue. Last night I watched Watson play on Jeopardy. While he tied one of the human players, I wasn’t that impressed with how he played. Some obvious answers he got wrong, including a Harry Potter question which got gasps from the audience when it got the question wrong. Still, I wouldn’t piss off Watson or he’ll start tapping outlets to draw more power. How long until we all just “get in the way”?

PADD

While Kirk signed his name on some kind of futuristic clipboard, Picard and his crew used what was called a PADD, a Personal Access Data Device. Today, we have the iPad and other tablets which have come out since. These tablets pull data from the internet, just as the PADDs did with the computer system on the Enterprise-D. I wonder what Data would have done if he discovered Angry Birds.

Bridge Display

Giant screens in 1966 didn’t seem like they’d be practical or affordable. Today you can walk into any Best Buy and pick up a 1080p projector for a reasonable amount of money. Don’t tell me the bridge crew wasn’t watching Lord of the Rings while studying gaseous anomalies.

Shuttlecraft

Today’s shuttles aren’t as elegant as the ones in Star Trek, but they get the job done. These personal carriers simply need a little push to get airborne, they don’t need the solid rocket boosters that we need today. In recent years, Virgin Galactic started booking flights into space for the low, low price of $200,000.

Still to come

There’s still some tech that needs to be invented, but I’ll bet we get some of them in the next few centuries. We’re progressing technology faster than ever and understanding so much more about what makes the universe work.

Warp Drive

The “science” behind this is that you’re in a different kind of space, so hitting a hydrogen atom at warp 5 won’t vaporize the ship. I can’t see anything close to this technology happening anytime soon, but who knows what they’re cooking up at the CERN lab?

Transporters

I would bet that this technological breakthrough happens within the next 200 years. The ability to break down a piece of fruit like an orange at the molecular level and reassemble it somewhere else doesn’t seem like it’s beyond what we could accomplish soon. The only question is that when you break down a person and send them half way around the world, what happens to their soul?

Holodeck

Yes, we have the Kinect and 3DTVs now, but we have nothing like actual holodecks yet, where real items are created which you can feel, and the entire environment moves with you. I’d bet 400 quatloos we get this after warp drive.

Tricorder

I didn’t add this to the top, even though we have devices that can sniff gas or radiation now, but we don’t have real, portable devices that can do full body scans or detect Gorn at 300 yards.

Kidney-growing pills

That had to be one of the silliest things I had ever seen in Star Trek. McCoy once said they can’t yet cure the common cold but he happened to have a pill in his pocket that made a woman grow a new kidney immediately? Sometimes fiction can go just a little too far. I suppose there’s no need for Viagra in the 23rd century either, right?

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Post tags: bluetooth, cloaking device, communicator, holodeck, iPad, iPhone, padd, phasers, replicator, shuttlecraft, Star Trek, transporter, tricorder, universal translator, virgin galactic, warp drive

What it doesn’t yet do is share content with your friends, or allow you to watch what you recorded on your Comcast DVR (no word if it works on a Comcast-enabled TiVo Series 3). If it did that, you’d have a killer app right there which would compete directly with Hulu and Slingbox. I would hope that Comcast puts this functionality in their app soon because I’d love to be able to watch one thing downstairs while the kids are watching something upstairs.

The next step would be to work with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and integrate channel sharing into them so that one tweet or Facebook update could bring in thousands of potential viewers; at least for that time zone.

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Post tags: app, channel, comcast, delomni, iPad, remote, share, Social Media, xfinity

My biggest gripe with the lack of Flash is the inability to watch video, but that’s been changing recently. I’m missing Hulu support a lot on my iPad, but I can still watch Youtube and Netflix on it. We stream Geekistry’s vidcasts using Ustream which isn’t natively viewable on an Apple mobile device (we’re looking into alternatives).

There is one point about Flash that I have to agree with Steve with 100% and that’s the fact that Flash crashes my Mac all the time. I even did an experiment by installing Snow Leopard clean on my Mac Pro, and only installing the audio drivers for my Alesis Multimix 8 USB 2.0. Sure enough, Flash crashed when trying to use the audio drivers. Now, you could argue that the drivers were the problem, but the stack dump shows the crash is in Flash, and there isn’t a single application on the Mac that crashes with the Alesis drivers. Not one. Is this a scientific conclusion? No, but as a developer I know that when something crashes and other apps that use that driver doesn’t, the conclusion is that what’s crashing is the issue.

Admittedly, I won’t be using the Alesis drivers on my iPhone/iPad, but there are many other times I’ll get crashes from Flash that have nothing to do with audio drivers. When that happens, it takes down my browser. I don’t use Chrome because I don’t like it, so I have to stick with Safari or Firefox, which get taken down when Flash crashes.

As far as mobile devices go, I’d be happy with just Flash video support. I don’t care if a web site uses Flash and to be honest, I don’t like web sites that depend on it, except for cases like Homestar Runner which needs Flash right now since it’s an animation-based site. If a site uses Flash to render text, it’s badly designed in my opinion. I don’t need flashy graphics and sound effects just to read a blog post.

I’m hoping that within six months from now, all major video sites use HTML5 and/or H.264 for their sites so that they’re using an open standard, and that I can watch the content on my devices. It may sound presumptuous of Apple to force these companies to move to an open standard, but it’s actually working. Sites are putting notices up saying “we’re working hard to allow you to watch our content on your iPhone”. They know that Apple’s mobile products are in the hands of millions of people, and that they don’t want to give up their devices in favor of video they can watch at a later time.

On the flip side, I realize that developers don’t want to redo their sites in Flash. However, Flash is just popular, it’s not an open system. There really wasn’t an alternative at the time, though so I could understand why sites would be slow to adopt.

It would be nice to see a compromise on the video front, at least in the meantime, but I believe this will kick Flash off the internet sooner rather than later. Just like hardware, software should be retired, too. It’s time Flash goes the way of the floppy.

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Post tags: alesis, Apple, delomni, flash, homestar runner, iPad, iPhone, ipod touch, steve jobs

WordPress’s back-end site works great with the iPad. The only time I had a problem was typing in the Visual editor. When I tried to tap the text edit area, Safari would try and highlight a block of text which didn’t yet exist, and not allow me to edit there at all, not even place the cursor where it belonged. I tried the Opera browser and had similar results. If you click on the HTML tab, Safari works perfectly. Not having the visual editor made writing a bit of a hassle since using the links tool is the easiest way to add links. Typing them by hand is entirely possible, but I found that working with the < and > keys alone aren’t a problem, but when you’re constantly using <, >, =, and ” so much, typing on the virtual keyboard tends to be troublesome since you’re always looking for keys that don’t correspond to locations on a regular keyboard. Typing on the keyboard itself is a breeze, so long as you don’t have to mess with some of the non-alphabet characters.

After typing the blog post using the HTML editor, I switched back to the Visual tab, and tried to highlight text to see if I could add a URL to highlighted text. As before, trying to highlight text or set a cursor position didn’t work, Safari tried highlighting the entire paragraph. This made the whole Visual tab useless.

The only saving grace I had was using the free WordPress app for the iPad. It’s a decent editor, it grabs your posts from your WordPress blog, create new ones, edit ones that already exist, and send them to your blog. You can even insert images. However, it’s not a WYSIWYG editor which is surprising and disappointing since I would have expected a blog editor to have that feature. Alas, I’m stuck with HTML editing which is OK, but I might as well stay in the web application so long as I have an internet connection. In fact, I don’t know what would happen if I lost my internet connection while using this app. Thinking back, I probably should have tried that to see if WordPress would save the document locally. It has some photo capabilities which are rudimentary at best. This app needs a major upgrade, but it’s good if you need to edit something, don’t have Pages, and don’t want to use the Notes editor.

I’m sure some of you are wondering if I used an external Bluetooth keyboard for this. No, I did not. The point of this exercise was to try to edit a blog post on the go, when you don’t have a keyboard, or using one is cumbersome. I would like to see what the people that create MarsEdit do with the iPad, if anything. Someone needs to step up and create a powerful WordPress blog editor, and soon. The problems with Safari may not be updated in a timely manner, and although I can type HTML with my eyes closed, I’d rather not because it slows me down just a bit, especially when not using a standard keyboard.

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Post tags: blog, delomni, how-to, html, iPad, marsedit, Social Media, visual editor, WordPress, wysiwyg

Multitasking. This is something that critics of the iPhone have been rightfully complaining about since the iPhone was first released. Now, apps will be able to run certain tasks in the background. This means you can check your mail while listening to Pandora. No long will apps simply cease to work when they’re pushed down. App developers will have to modify their apps slightly, mulitasking comes at a small developer cost. Apple’s also adding background location services. What this means is that if you’re navigating somewhere and you want to start Pandora, pushing Maps in the background won’t stop your location service from running. An indicator will show that location services is running which is great for privacy. This won’t run on the 1st gen iPhone.

Folders. I’m so sick of having twelve pages of apps. I’ve always wanted to put them all in their own folder, even the obsolete ones. Now you can do that, and the folders are dockable. The folders icon is 3×3 for a total of 9 apps, and so far there’s no word on whether or not that can be expanded.

Unified mailbox. I haven’t been thrilled with mail on the iPhone, but I haven’t hated it either. I’ve just accepted that it’s mail and mail isn’t exciting, so that’s how it should be. A unified mailbox means messages from multiple sources go in one box. I’m not sure I’m a fan of that, although I could see myself getting used to it. Apple is also supporting multiple Exchange server support. That doesn’t help me much, but I’m sure there are some people that will be happy they don’t have to be tied to a single Exchange server anymore.

iBooks. There’s not much to say about this except “neat”.

Enterprise support. In-app encryption, mail encryption, mobile device management, wireless app distribution. Not exciting for me personally, but I can see how it would be great to support employees on the road.

Game center. This is huge. To date, Xbox Live and the Playstation network have been exclusive to their own wired networks. This is the first time you’ll be able to play with your friends anywhere. Literally. The system will have leaderboards, achievements, and be a social networking platform.

iAd. Apple bought Quattro for its location-based mobile ad system and have now incorporated it into iPhone OS 4. The ads are based on HTML5 (no Flash). This will allow developers of free apps to keep their apps free and still make a profit. Developers get 60% of the profit. I’m not sure how I feel about ads in free apps, but I think so long as they’re unobtrusive, it’ll be OK.

Other items: Bluetooth keyboards, home page wallpaper, map annotations, in-app SMS, Quick Look, Places in Photos, nested playlists, and other things.

The developer preview comes out today. I’ll be sure and get my hands on it as soon as I get home so I can see what it’s like and report back what I can.

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Post tags: Apple, delomni, iPad, iPhone, iphone os 4, iPod, ipod touch

Be sure to check back here for live stream links, and our take on what this new OS upgrade has to offer.

Image credit: engadget.com

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Post tags: Apple, delomni, iPad, iPhone, iphone os 4.0, iPod, ipod touch

Apple sold us all on the ability to read books on the iPad, and it’s a great eBook reader, and they also announced the ability to use their Pages app for word processing. I thought that maybe they had fixed the documents problem with a shared space and gave us the ability to read PDFs somehow, but unfortunately that hasn’t been fixed. Out of the box, the only way to read PDFs on the iPad is to mail it to yourself. That’s not a very practical solution since you sometimes delete mail off a central server if you’re using a main computer for it which means you’ll lose your PDF at some point. Also, some mail servers have a size limit. If you use IMAP, you’ll have to download the PDF every time you want to read it. You can’t save the PDF on your iPad which is especially troubling if you want to use different apps to access a single PDF for different reasons such as mailing it to someone, reading it, or simply extracting data from it. The only way you can access a single PDF from multiple apps is to use an app such as Dropbox to access it, but apps would need to incorporate Dropbox support to read those files. Dropbox does read PDFs but it has to read the file from its server every time you want to access it. What that means is, if you have a 31MB PDF file like I do, Dropbox goes out and grabs it which can be slow. Dropbox does not yet have a native iPad app so even if you did manage to load it using the Dropbox app, reading it on the iPad is almost impossible.

Even though Apple didn’t explicitly say it, I was under the impression that their Pages app would read PDFs. I was wrong, it only reads .doc files, and exports PDFs. When you export a PDF using Pages, it’s saved in a “File Sharing” area on the iPad for that app only, and when you sync your iPad, the file is then saved on your Mac or PC. I find this a crude way of doing things, I would think that if we had a central “Documents” space, we’d then have the ability to allow all apps to access document files, not just the apps that are working with the document directly.

The best solution I found was an app called GoodReader. It’s only $0.99 and has a fantastic system for dealing with documents. What it does is allow you to access files from multiple sources: FTP, WebDAV, MobileMe, DropBox, Google Docs, mail servers, box.net, filesanywhere, or MyDisk.se. You an also type in a direct URL for downloading. If you need a document badly enough, there isn’t some way that GoodReader can’t get it. I put a 31MB file on Dropbox, and GoodReader grabbed it fast, and put it in its document list. From there, I was able to see the PDF almost perfectly. It had some minor rendering errors, but they weren’t serious. After the file is read into GoodReader, you can compress it, or send it back out via email. I haven’t found an obvious way to put the file on a different server, such as copying from MobileMe and putting it on a DropBox file system.

Despite how much I love GoodReader, it’s still not the solution I’d like, but it’s inexpensive and works very well. I’m hoping that at some point in the near future, Apple gives us some kind of native file system with folders so that we can manage the files on our iPads a little better.

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Post tags: delomni, document, dropbox, featured, how-to, iPad, iPhone, ipod touch, MobileMe, reading pdf