Toby Curl

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.

As is usual now, I was reading Twitter on my iPhone first thing this morning when I read the sad news that Steve Jobs had passed away. He is the first public figure, someone that I have never met, who I am actually sad has died.

I started writing this on my iPhone on a train and have finished it on my iPad at home. When sat with the iPad next to me, every time I look over at it I think about how I am living in the future. He helped make the future now.

Thank you Steve.

Some great points here from Dan Frommer; especially the first point:

The iPhone 4S is a significantly different device under the hood, including a faster processor, better camera, faster mobile web access, better antenna design, worldphone features, and better battery life. In other words, a much better phone. (These aren’t just “specs,” either — these things matter.)

This new iPhone is nothing to complain about.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to peek at others’ workspaces (and this is the internet, so you probably are)

Avery Edison

These rumours about the new iPhone next week are all over the place now.

I can't remember any mention of this anywhere (but there probably is) but if we have the iPhone 4S in an inventory database and no iPhone 5 (yet), couldn't this rumoured tear drop iPhone 5 actually just be a new iPod Touch and these cases are just labelled based on these rumours?

3000 A.D. - Battlefield Earth - Let's hope Futurama happens.

Just seen (only a month late) WriteRoom has been updated on iOS and it looks like a good one.

I'm not sure how long there has been an iPad version/iPad version was added but I don't remember using it before. It looks great and now has Dropbox support. I have been using Elements for my writing needs on iOS for a while, mostly for it's Dropbox support, but WriteRoom seems to be doing a great job whilst I am writing this.

This version 3.0 of WriteRoom has also added an extra, customisable row of keys to the iPads keyboard. I have just started to use Markdown for my posts and this will help a lot on the iPad; it just makes getting to the square brackets fast, it also adds a tab key. The only thing that's missing for Markdown is a Markdown preview which Elements does well.

This is a really good idea.

(Via TUAW)

There have been accusations in the past that I look things up then deliberately make them slightly wrong to annoy people

John Allison