If you hadn't heard, it's pretty great. Here are a few points I wanted to talk about.

iCloud

iCloud seems to be holding up pretty well so far. I haven't heard of any major issues and I haven't had any, which does bode well. The only minor problem I had was when setting it up on my Mac. Everything seemed to enable except the "Mail & Notes" option in the settings. I would check the box, it would say starting, but then upon leaving the screen and going back in the box was unchecked and mail not set up. Leaving this alone for an hour or so, then trying it again worked fine, so I can only assume that it was just a slight connection issue. However there was no message saying such, it just didn't do anything.

Notification Centre

Notification Centre seems to be liked by some but not by others. I do like it. The problem some people seem to be having looks like more to do with habit than anything else; not checking Notification Centre. I see it as something that people would actually get used to doing over time. A scenario for this problem is given by Ben Brooks in his article The Annoyment Center:

So here’s a common scenario for me:

  • While driving home from work I get notifications from OmniFocus, Twitter, Text Messages.
  • At some point during the drive I need to make a phone call, so I unlock the phone and make the call, using voice dial or Dialvetica.
  • I get home and use my phone to check Twitter and Email, but now all the notifications that were on the lock screen are gone because I unlocked my phone and made that call.

Therefore: I never see those notifications. I thought this entire system was designed so that I don’t miss notifications any more?

I would argue that the last bullet point should read "I get home and use my phone to check Notification Centre, Twitter and Email..."; so you still see relevant, up to date, notifications that you may have missed but are now gone from the lock screen.

User-Defined Keyboard Shortcuts

I am just coming round to seeing the usefulness of TextExpander on my Mac and these are a good way to get a bit of that functionality built into every text fields in iOS. These can be set in Settings > General > Keyboard.

iPad Gestures

I got round to having a long play on my iPad last night with iOS 5 installed and these new gestures are just awesome. With 4 or 5 fingers they let you swipe left and right to switch apps, swipe up to get the app switched and pinch to go to the home screen. Much less double clicking the home button is great.