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Hands on with Amazon Cloud Player for iPad→

Hands on with Amazon Cloud Player for iPad

For all intents and purposes, outside of the track scrubbing, the Amazon Cloud Player site on iPad simulates a basic music application reasonably well. The music quality sounds no different from when I stream my tunes on a desktop browser, and thanks to iOS multitasking, I can use other apps on my iPad while streaming music over the web. I have noticed that the service runs best if it retains the focus, however. When using another app, the music tends to stop after a song or two. A quick return to the web page nudges the stream to start up right away: something I hope is addressed in the future.

Amazon’s extended support for Cloud Player for the iPad is quite nice: if you’re an Amazon customer, all of the music that you’ve purchased or will purchase is now immediately available for playback via an online browser.

Amazon is making some nice strides with their Amazon Cloud Player, but the biggest hurdle to get users into the service is that you have to upload all of your music to their storage locker, and you still can’t play that music well on your iPhone or iPod touch (the device you’re most likely to have with you all of the time). The act of uploading isn’t something I want to do — and iPads have more than enough storage to carry enough of your music if you’re arguably normal and don’t need to carry your 150 GB library with you at all times. Too, services like Spotify can put a damper on Amazon’s service. Unless you listen to a lot of local music or uncommon artists, Spotify (especially now that it’s coming to the US) is going to have all of your music already online and ready to stream at $5 to $10 a month.

I have nothing against Amazon — I think having the option is spectacular and their addition of unlimited music streaming is big move — but it’s going to be hard to hook and sink iPad users who want to browse the Internet while listening to music, or who want the instant gratification of competing online services. What Amazon really needs is an app, although I’m not sure Apple would allow that to happen.

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The WSJ iPhone App and Negative App Store Reviews→

The WSJ iPhone App and App Store Reviews

Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com offers an interesting breakdown of the issues behind the design of the WSJ iPhone app’s initial login screen, which is causing customers to leave negative iTunes reviews as they think the newspaper is forcing existing subscribers to pay again to read content on the iPhone. That is not true (subscribers of wsj.com can access the app for free), but according to Nielsen a poorly designed login screen that puts the focus on new subscriptions and registrations, rather than login, is tricking users to believe that existing subscriptions don’t count against iPhone access.

Wildly persistent users might notice the much smaller Log In area at the bottom of the startup screen. However, they’re unlikely to press this button because their experience with the app so far has taught them that they must register (and pay extra) before being allowed to log in.

Those few users who do press Log In will finally see that they can use their existing www.wsj.com credentials to access the app. However, as the many negative App Store reviews attest, few users ever make it this far.

The full report with screenshots of the WSJ iPhone app and proposed mockups to address the issue is available here. Subscriptions and logins for existing subscribers have always presented usability problems for developers of mobile newspapers and magazine apps, struggling to find the best way to promote both new subscriptions and free access for existing, paying customers. Apple wants to improve the process with its native subscription system based on iTunes accounts, and indeed several publications are experimenting with the new APIs provided by Apple to offer web-based login screens that allow for new registrations and iTunes subscriptions, like The New York Times did in its latest app update.

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Give Me My Eject Key Back!→

Give Me My Eject Key Back!

A couple of months ago, I visited the OWC offices and took advantage of OWC Jamie’s workbench skills and had him perform some “OWC Love” on my 2011 MacBook Pro by removing the optical drive and replacing it with an OWC Data Doubler + 750GB HDD – to compliment the 480GB SSD I already have inside as my start-up disk.

With the optical drive removed, I started thinking about how the Eject key was now totally useless, and I thought that maybe there might be some way to re-purpose it to do something useful.  Turns out that I was by far not the first person to ever have this thought and that there are apps pretty much dedicated to remapping the Eject key.  These apps are especially popular with MacBook Air owners who are without an internal optical drive right out of the box.

One of the cool things you can do to a MacBook Pro is remove the optical drive in place of an OWC Data Doubler, which turns your optical drive bay into a usable bracket for a second internal hard drive. The benefit is that you can either achieve super fast speeds by setting a pair of SSDs in RAID 0, or you add additional space or a scratch disk to your machine without the added bulk of external storage. In doing this, however, the eject key on the MacBook Pro becomes needless. After all, how many times do you normally use that key anyway? Erik offers some great advice on how to map your eject button to something functional, while retaining the ability to eject a USB optical drive.

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How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life→

How The iPad Changed A 9-Year Old Girl’s Life

Evonne Barry at the Herald Sun tells the story of Holly Bligh, a 9-year old girl from Melbourne, Australia, whose life has been changed forever since she started using an iPad instead of regular paper and textbooks. As the publication reports, in fact, Holly has albinism, a condition that, alongside her skin, also affects her vision. Before the iPad, Holly’s parents and teachers were forced to print out papers with larger characters in order to let her read properly. The iPad, with its multitouch capabilities, changed that. Holly can now read her books with ease thanks to pinch and zoom, and her mother says the device is improving her ability to be independent from teachers as well.

But there’s more. Holly’s mother, Fiona, decided to send an email to Steve Jobs to personally thank him for producing a device that contributed so deeply to the betterment of her daughter’s life, and he replied.

Within hours of directly emailing multi-billionaire chief executive Steve Jobs, she was thrilled to receive a response.

“Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?” he wrote.

Mr Jobs signed off with “Thanks, Steve”, and asked for a high-resolution photo of Holly with her iPad.

This isn’t the first example of how the iPad as a revolutionary device changed the lives of children affected by different conditions and disabilities. Still, it’s always nice to hear a good story, rather than speculation on the next MacBook Air or Sandy Bridge CPU. Make sure to head over the Herald Sun for the full article.

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Designing GitHub for Mac→

Designing GitHub for Mac

It blows my mind that no one tried to do anything special. Git (and it’s DVCS cousins like Mercurial & Bazaar) provide an amazing platform to build next generation clients — and it’s like the entire OS X ecosystem left their imagination at home.

Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub. And since we all use Macs — we should start off with an OS X application.

Kyle Neath has posted an excellent overview of what designing the official GitHub Mac app was like, the challenges he and his team had to face when dealing with Apple’s recent interface changes coming in Lion, and the overall “new trend” of Mac apps inspired by their counterparts.

Check out the whole story and screenshot gallery here.

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How To Child-Proof Your iPhone→

How To Child-Proof Your iPhone

Dave Caolo at 52 Tiger shares a series of interesting tips to “child-proof” an iPhone (though most of these features are enabled on the iPad as well) to make sure kids using a device won’t get access to functionalities like deleting apps and pulling the trigger on in-app purchases. Something I never had the chance to play with is the restriction settings panel for location and email:

Next, exercise (limited) control over location services and email accounts. First, tap Location to see the locations options screen. You can disable/enable location services on an app-by-app basis or turn it off entirely. Once you’ve set this up how you’d like it to be, select Don’t Allow Changes. Likewise, tapping email accounts and then Don’t Allow Changes won’t let you modify existing email, contacts or calendar information or create new ones. Of course, Jr. can still read your mail (and reply to it), so this isn’t entirely useful.

You can read more at 52 Tiger by hitting the source link below, and enable restrictions under Settings->General on your iOS device. Apple has been criticized in the past for not offering the right tools to parents to prevent children from spending money in iTunes, though with iOS 4.3 they introduced a broader set of restrictions and brought the in-app purchase window (when a device asks for your Apple ID password) from 15 minutes down to 5 minutes.

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The New York Times’ Final Cut Pro X Q&A→

The New York Times’ Final Cut Pro X Q&A

Following the much discussed backlash over the launch of the “revolutionary” Final Cut Pro X for Mac, The New York Times’ tech columnist David Pogue has compiled an interesting Q&A on the available/missing features of the application, with direct input from Apple.

The “missing features” generally fall into three categories: features that are actually there and have just been moved around, features that Apple intends to restore and features that require a third-party (non-Apple) add-on or plug-in.

Among the covered topics, Pogue reports Apple says re-enabling support for the multi-cam functionality is a “top priority” for the company.

Complaint: There’s no multicamera editing. In the old FCP, you could import the footage from various cameras that covered an event (say, a concert) from different angles simultaneously, and then easily cut back and forth between them while editing. It was a star feature of Final Cut, and it’s gone from FCP X.

Answer: Apple intends to restore this feature in an update, calling it “a top priority.” Until it does, here’s a stopgap facsimile of multicam editing: If you drag two clips into parallel timeline tracks, you can choose Clip->Synchronize Clips. By comparing their audio tracks, the program aligns the clips exactly. Now, each time you select a piece of the upper video track and press the V key (“disable”), you are effectively cutting to what’s on the lower video track.

Another feature that generated much disappointment in several Final Cut Pro X reviews on the Mac App Store is the impossibility of opening old FCP projects. Pogue confirms this:

Complaint: Can’t import old FCP files.

Answer: As I noted in my column, this is true; your old projects are stranded forever in the older FCP program. You’ll have to keep both programs on your hard drive, and edit the old projects in the old program. When you install the new FCP, your old copy is safely preserved.

Read the full, technical Q&A here. In the weeks leading to the release of Final Cut Pro many professional video editors suggested it would be difficult for Apple to ship a completely rewritten version usable since day one by large studios and production houses. As Final Cut Pro X has been re-imagined from the ground up, clearly Apple needed to cut some features out of the first release, but they’ve already confirmed they’re aiming at making the update cycle for FCP faster with releases every 6 months or so.

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Apple granted patent on webpage scrolling behaviors→

Apple granted patent on webpage scrolling behaviors

So Apple got yet another patent granted today, and now there’s yet another media firestorm over whether it means Cupertino will be able to sue every other phone manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the business of making multitouch devices. And, as usual, most of the hysteria is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of what the patent claims actually say, and what behaviors they actually cover in iOS. I don’t know why we keep repeating this sad cycle, but I do know that it’s always, always better for us to read the claims and try to figure them out for ourselves — and in this case, they’re actually pretty narrow.

What the media made out to be a broad patent that would allow Apple to bully competitors is incredibly specific to frames within a webpage that displays other content. Nilay provides an example of a Google Maps embed, and explains that companies have to meet a lot of specific criteria to infringe on the patent.

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Apple amends complaint against Samsung, asserts more intellectual property rights against more products→

Apple amends complaint against Samsung, asserts more intellectual property rights against more products

Florian Mueller on amendments that Apple made to their complaint against Samsung yesterday,

Many of the changes are designed to portray Samsung’s alleged infringement as an incredibly outrageous act of copying. The original complaint already accused Samsung of “slavishly copying” Apple’s designs. The amended one stresses that Samsung “has been even bolder” than other competitors emulating Apple’s products and has created “products that blatantly imitate the appearance of Apple’s products to capitalize on Apple’s success.”

In their amendment Apple significantly expanded the complaint from 38 to 63 pages and are now asserting more patents and other intellectual property rights than before, and onto an extended list of Samsung products that Apple claims are infringing.

One of the amendments emphasized how similarly the Galaxy Tab 10.1 mimicked the iPad 2. Apple goes so far as to pull quotes from recent reviews of the tablet, citing Eric Franklin of CNET in one of their examples. “Taking another page from the iPad 2’s school of sexy tablet building, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has one of the cleanest designs we’ve seen in a tablet.” I don’t disagree with Apple that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was purposely built to copy the iPad in form.

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