iPhone had the first two store UIs; the iTunes Store for content like music and movies, and the App Store for software. The iPad will add a third, the iBookstore, for buying eBooks. These stores all provide content for users to extend the utility of their device. But each has a pretty different user interaction model for accessing, purchasing, and consuming that content.
- The iTunes Store is a separate app that is completely distinct from the iPod app. When you find something to buy, prompting you for your iTunes account password. It then adds the purchase to the app's Downloads tab. Once you have purchased the content, you must then switch back to the iPod app to listen to or watch it.
- The App Store is a separate app. When you purchase something, it prompts you for your iTunes password, and then exits to the home screen, switching to the screen where the app will live. The state of the download is reflected in the app icon. When the download is complete, you tap the icon on the home screen to use it.
- The iBookstore (the one word is the official name as used by Apple) is not a separate app, but lives within the iBooks app on the iPad. Purchasing content prompts for the iTunes password and downloads in-app, which can be directly accessed after it has finished downloading.
Each type of content follows a different workflow when going from access to purchase to use. If a goal of the iPad's low price is to drive content sales through the three stores, as some speculate is the case, then the purchase model should be as streamlined for the different types of content. Forcing different workflows will only confuse users who can't remember which type of content comes from where.
We've all got our thoughts on what the Jesus Tablet will be, so here are my guesses. I fully expect to be completely wrong on all of this, as many of these answers are completely blind shots and that Apple will blow my expectations out of the water.
Hardware
- 8"-10" touch screen, running at 1280x720
- Very thin; less than 1/2" thick (the iPhone 3GS is 0.48" thick)
- About 1lb heavy, light enough to hold in one hand
- 8 hours of battery life
- 32 or 64 GB SSD
- WiFi
- 3G over GSM, and Apple's US 3G partner will continue to be AT&T
- There will be some way to pair your Tablet cell connection with your iPhone's cell connection; either with an official announcement of AT&T tethering, or by adding your Tablet to the 3G account
- Front-mounted camera
- Some kind of collapsible stand in the frame, so the device can sit on a table
Input/Output
- Multi-touch on the display, exactly like the iPhone
- Multi-touch on the back of the device, similar to the surface of the Magic Mouse
- Photos and video via front-mounted camera
- Audio via front-mounted microphone and speakers, wired headphones, or Bluetooth
- Dock connector
- Expanded voice recognition
- Software keyboard, no Bluetooth keyboards available
Software
- It will run the iPhone OS 4.0; or rather, the iPhone OS will become a "Mobile OS X", consisting of the heavyweight Tablet and the smaller iPhone.
- It will allow multiple apps to run at the same time, with some UI for viewing multiple apps alongside each other. This may not be possible on the iPhone.
- It meant to replace a full PC for most common day-to-day needs
- iPhone applications will not run "automatically", but will need to be resubmitted through the App Store approval process. Most applications will run without much modifications. Icons will need to be higher resolution.
- A system-wide Dock for documents, applications, and small widgets will be onscreen at all times
- The home screen will be significantly revamped, and renamed to the Dashboard. App icons, web clippings, and widgets will be freely arrangeable.
- Handwriting recognition will be available for text input, with an optional stylus, or with a gesture such as two closed fingers drawing as if you had a pen.
- Some gestures will be used on the back of the device, such as scrolling and zooming.
Apps
- Standard kind of iPod and Internet communications apps the iPhone OS comes with. iTunes video, iTunes LP content, Maps, and Safari web content will look phenomenal.
- Sketchbook, an unlimited workspace to sketch and write notes, with collaboration features.
- iWork, a full port of the iWork application suite, tied to the Internet (and expansion of the iWork.com web application), with collaboration features.
- iChat, a port of the Mac app, with a heavy emphasis on video conferencing
SDK
- The SDK will be available immediately, with a simulator.
- There will be an emphasis on application interoperability.
- Applications will be able to register plugins with view controllers and UTIs. When an application wants to expose an object (say, an image) to other apps, it will look for app plugins which respond to the "public.image" UTI, load one which matches the UTI, and present the view without leaving the application.
- Applications will be able to expose services, similar to how they work on Mac OS X. Services will be integrated into the voice control system.
Product
- 32 GB model will be available for $899
- 64 GB model will be available for $999
- Available in US in March, major countries by summer
- There will not be a WiFi-only model at launch.
Other Predictions
- Updated MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, with the mobile Core i5 "Arrandale" processors from Intel.
- There will be no mention of Verizon
- There will be no updates to the iPod or the Apple TV
- There will be no announcements of the iPhone 4G
This uses the new <video> tag in the HTML5 spec, but only supports browsers which implement the H264 codec.
Two interesting bits. First, this is great news for anyone on a platform where Flash is either unavailable (like iPhone) or where performance is terrible (like Mac and Linux). Second, there is a debate about the HTML5 spec's video codec, as it supports video in Ogg Theora or in H264. Safari and Chrome support the H264 codec, while Firefox and Opera support Ogg Theora. But this player only supports the H264 codec. I wonder if other sites will follow suit, and implement a de-facto standard based on H264.
Just a few years ago, Greenpeace would regularly call out Apple for their environmental impact. In that time, they've managed to climb a few ranks, mostly on the back of their efforts eliminating toxic chemicals like PVC. Kudos to them.
Not to minimize the efforts of other companies high on that list. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Phillips, LG, Sony, Motorola, and Samsung, you guys rock for not polluting all over the place.
Ars Technica:
ChangeWave queried 4,068 current and potential smartphone consumers last month and noted that a full 21 percent said that they would prefer Android on their next smartphones—a jump of 15 percentage points from the year before. Comparatively, 28 percent of respondents said they would prefer iPhone OS; this makes the iPhone the leader in this category, though this number dropped four percentage points year over year.
Many iPhone developers and Apple enthusiasts are quick to shrug off the Android platform, for a variety of reasons ranging from aesthetic and design, to functionality and developer tools. Many of these criticisms are certainly valid. But iPhone has its own share of problems, and certainly is deficient in many ways to the Android.
With Google's press conference tomorrow, and CES for the remainder of the week, there will be a lot of focus on the Android platform. It will become a much stronger platform in 2010. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds with iPhone OS 4.0 (which history suggests they'll probably talk about in March).
The templates that ship with Xcode are not the greatest. Some of them are inconsistent and don't enforce good coding standards (e.g. missing a dealloc method). Other templates which would be useful just flat out don't exist (e.g. an NSOperation subclass, or a protocol header file). This project aims to supplement or replace the built-in templates for Xcode to speed up coding and improve the quality of code.
Coding Standard
All files will be processed by Xcode. The generated source files must produce consistent, readable, commented code. The code must have these characteristics:
- Each file must have a comment block at the top describing the file.
- Each class must implement its superclass' designated initializer and dealloc.
- Stub methods must be organized by their purpose, class or protocol. -- Each group must be organized by their class hierarchy, with protocol stubs following. -- Each group must be prefaced by a pragma mark naming the class or protocol the methods were implementing. -- Clusters of methods (such as relating to KVO) should be organized along the lines above, with a pragma mark.
- All method implementations should contain a method call to their super implementation if needed.
- All method implementations should contain a commented out stub line that will signify where to insert their code.
- All comments must be in the form of two slashes //, and none using the /* */ form. This will allow developers to comment out large blocks of code as needed.
Wish List
- Different people want different things in their template. For instance, someone may want to include an implementation of observeValue:... for every class. Would be nice to have a template generator application (yeah yeah, very meta) which would make templates customized to the developer.
Inactive