Upgrading from iPad1 to iPad2

It’s a bit thinner and a bit lighter, the screen is a bit brighter but nothing very spectacular.
The most striking difference is with the app start-up time. All apps that take a little while to load initially, such as BBC iPlayer, Google Earth, Friendly, Evernote, the New York Times, MobileRSS, BBC News all take less time to start-up on the iPad2.

And it's a bit more slippery as well when handled bare.

Facetime on a tablet is fun (although the image quality for the other party is better when using the iPhone 4, because the iPad2 camera is so poor). 

The New Safari Books Online app for iPad!

 

At last!!! The reason why I bought an iPad in the first place! Being able to browse the wonderful Safari Books Online library from the iPad and download entire books for offline reading in the tube.

Last year O’Reilly released a first version of Safari To Go that was one of the worse apps on the planet at the time. They removed it from the app store less than a month after release.

So far the least worse way to browse the books from an iPad was to use the full web front-end, which wasn’t too bad with a browser supporting full-screen. But reading a book on the web was sluggish: you had to wait every time you clicked the next page, offline reading was not possible so no way to read in the London tube.

Version 2.0.1 of Safari To Go is a proper native iPad app that uses the whole screen and allows you to touch swipe between pages (compare that to the wasted space and sluggish web feel of version 1.0).

When flipping pages you have access to a very handy pop-up Table of Contents (I wish iBooks had that).

You can cache the entire book you’re currently reading. This is a very useful functionality that even the web front-end did not allow: all you could do with Safari Books Online was download individual chapters as PDF. Because there was a limit on how many chapters you could download each year you always had to think twice before downloading an entire book. That made offline reading very tedious.

Saving a book for offline use looks like this:

Safari Books Online on the Ipad

The best way I know to read Safari Books Online on the Ipad is the full web interface (not the mobile web version).

• Install an alternative to Safari called Perfect Browser that allows full-screen browsing.
• Browse to a Safari book.
• Enable HTML View and Full Screen. Without HTML View, the text doesn’t scale properly when you zoom.
• In Perfect Browser, hide the address bar and the tab bar.
• Display the table of contents on the left.

You are now browsing your Safari books full screen with a table of contents in sync. Double tap on a paragraph to zoom in and hide the TOC. Double-tap again and the TOC comes back.

Obviously flicking pages is not as smooth as with a PDF and you can’t read the books offline. We’ll have to wait for the next version of Safari To Go for that…

By the way Perfect Browser is not perfect: if it was it would be able to post to Twitter and Read It Later.

Self-Defense Techniques

It took me some time before I got to a stable and convenient backup system. I think I got there now. It’s hassle-free, complete and entirely automatic. This is the setup I use now for backup and synchronisation between all my portable gizmos.

1st level

Dropbox to synchronise my essential documents between

• home PC,
• 2 VAIO laptops,
• IPhone
• IPad.

I have less than 2 GB of essential documents so the free version of Dropbox is fine. I find the synchronisation very fast and more reliable than using the Windows offline files feature or Live Sync. This acts as a first form of backup since all files are saved on the Dropbox server by default. Dropbox files are always available offline under Windows. On the IPad/IPhone versions of Dropbox you must manually tick the files to make them available offline. By essential files I mean

• technical Books
• travel documents, flight tickets, travel insurance policy, conference tickets….
• Visual Studio projects
• OneNote files

2nd level

Daily incremental backup on an external hard drive of all documents on my D drive using the backup tool that comes with Windows 7. The drive is a 1TB Western Digital. This protects absolutely everything in case my main drives fail, which is a very likely occurrence.

3rd level

Off-site backup with Mozy, just in case my flat burns or I get burgled. This is an industrial-scale backup: documents, video, raw sound files, VM files, everything gets saved. I currently have 130GB saved on Mozy. At the time I bought the subscription, the backup size was unlimited. No matter how big a video is it will save it, it’s just a matter of time. It took me about one week to finish the initial backup. After that it does very quick daily automatic incremental backups.

I’m happy about this system so far, it’s entirely automatic and very exhaustive.

The Mystery of Safari To Go: why is it so bad?

A lot of applications make the IPad shine: they’re fast, responsive, elegant and take full advantage of the touch screen: Flipboard, Ocado, Twitter and most magazines (Wired, Economist, New York Times, …). Swiping is smooth, the whole screen is used.

And then you have things like BBC IPlayer, Amazon Touch Shopping or Safari To Go that in terms of user interface are plain rubbish.

Take Safari To Go: I was expecting to be able to easily flick through my collection of Safari books stored offline, it was the reason why I bought the IPad in the first place. Well it turns out you can’t even swipe the pages!!! You have to press left/right arrow buttons to navigate. It’s full of strange rounded dialogs that waste space. It’s very buggy. The table of contents appears in an annoying modal dialog right in the middle of the screen, the table hierarchy is flatten and slow to scroll down… I actually find the web version of Safari Online Books to be much more usable than the IPad app, even if the web version does not support offline storage.

Amazon Touch Shopping is not as buggy but you will find similar clunky rounded dialogs, wasted space, slow scrolling plus some very annoying sounds that acknowledge every user action.

Although it’s fantastic to be able to watch BBC programs on the IPad for the price of a TV license, the BBC IPlayer app suffers from the same sort of web-like sluggishness.

What’s frustrating is that we’re not talking about cheap farting apps here: Safari Books Online, BBC IPlayer and Amazon are all extremely useful platforms supported by companies that have a habit of being innovative. I guess it’s just poor technological choices. I don’t know how they’re designed but I suspect that all 3 apps are actually web browsers running javascript… At least that’s what they feel like.

Update: (13/02/2011)

• I read that OReilly removed Safari To Go from the app store on 24/11/2011, 3 weeks after it introduced it. They’re currently working on a new version (yeah!).
• There is now a proper BBC IPlayer (released 10/02/2011) designed for the IPad from the ground up. It’s much much much nicer than the previous one.

A week-end in the South of France using the Ipad

I enjoyed a long and sunny week-end in the south of France at a friend’s place (Gordes, Provence). I spent many hours near the swimming pool toying with the Ipad (the first Apple device I’ve ever bought).

I like the sexiness of the hardware but plenty of little things keep annoying me.

Intended home usage:

• read my RSS feeds
• browse Oreilly Safari
• read kindle books

I’m still looking for:

• A better browser, because Safari lacks some really obvious features such as tabs or page text search.
  • A1 Perfect browser: would be great if it didn’t reload the last page every time you switch back to it.
  • ICab Mobile
    • To be tried
• a RSS Feed reader that compares to Feedly. I use Feedly on the desktop but it does not exist on the Ipad yet so I looked for alternatives:
  • Feedler:
    • the experience is similar to Google Reader, hence functional but a bit boring.
  • Reeder: could not install
  • Early Edition:
    • Visually pleasant although not as much as feedly
    • Very slow to refresh
    • imports feeds from Google Reader but does not sync automatically.
    • No mark for later function
    • Doesn’t remember what you read.
    • Displays original posts with embedded browser instead of opening Safari (which a good thing).

Some random observations:

• You can’t see anything on the screen if you wear polarising sunglasses. :D Not a problem but it’s the first time I notice something like this on any device…. Update: (12/09/2010) When using polarised RayBan sunglasses, the IPad screen becomes invisible if you hold it in portrait mode. In landscape mode it’s fine.
• The absence of notice means you have to play around to discover some features of the hardware/OS/virtual keyboard, that’s actually quite fun.
• The WIFI issue
  • I observed that my Ipad loses the Wifi connection if the connection is unused for more than 5 minutes (does not occur at 4 minutes).
  • Router tweaks I tried with no success:
    • Disabled security
    • Changed the wireless channel
    • Switched down to 802.11b.
    • Used a static IP address
    • Updated the firmware of my Belkin F5D8635v1 from 1.00.17 to 1.00.23

Apps reviews:

Wired
PadGadget

Update: (07/08/2010)
Safari Books Online plans on releasing an app for the Ipad this summer.