Gizmodo’s 10 Essential iPad Tips & Tricks

Gizmodo has a list of 10 Tips and Tricks for your new iPad. Most of these are already known to every other iPhone OS user out there, but this one about the keyboard is very impressive.

When you have a Bluetooth keyboard connected to your iPad, the virtual keyboard will cease to appear. (This is a good thing.) However, what if, for some random reason, you needed that virtual keyboard? Don’t unpair your Bluetooth. Just…

Hit the eject key on Apple’s physical keyboard. It’ll bring up the virtual one.

It’s always the little things…

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Why Mailroom changed the way I use email on my iPhone

There was Mailplane on the Mac. But nothing on the iPhone. Then came along Mailroom. This is my review of the App that changed the way I email on the iPhone.

I’m addicted to email. Back in 2005, when I first changed sides from a @yahoo.co.in email address to the exclusively-beta gmail.com, I was blown away with what I was presented with. 5 years later, today, Google’s email service is arguably the most widely used and feature-packed free email service on the planet. Over the past five years, I’ve grown increasingly fond of the interface tweaks and feature additions Google has been adding to its service. Moreover, I have pretty much adapted my workflow to make use of all the nifty features that the Web UI offers. Exceptional fast searching, labels, archiving and filters changed the way I (and most people) use email. If all this wasn’t enough, Google came ahead and launched Google Apps, a service that let us use all of the features of Google Email (and other services), but using our own domain, for free. The fact that Google Apps offered a dead simple way to manage your business email, all while having the same awesome features (and more) from Gmail, was enough for me to start using Google Apps for almost all of the domains I’ve bought over these years.

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Counting Characters (on a Mac)

Chris Bowler set out to find an (easy) way to quickly count characters on his Mac.

This is why I love being a Mac user. Solving your own problems is often possible, and usually fun.

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Charlie Brooker’s thoughts on the iPad

Two brilliant paragraphs about two of the major missing features in the iPad. First, the missing camera…

Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?

And then, “video calls”

And don’t bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it’d be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm’s length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you’d end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another’s others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.)

I’ve owned a camera equipped computers for over 5 years, and the number of times I have been in a video chat is once, that too with the genius in Goa. And this was not because it was necessary, but more because I wanted to try out iChat’s amazing UI for video chat. I can never imagine myself holding a thin sheet of metal before my face, staring into it and talking to someone. And forget keeping it on your lap. Neither do I intend to hurt my neck terribly while video calling, nor do I want to appear like I’m talking to my crotch.

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Jeff Croft’s thoughts on the iPad

Among the many things missing in the tablet…

Let’s talk about multitasking. For those of you who are bitching that there’s no multitasking, I have one thing to say: get over yourselves. You’re a fucking geek and regular people aren’t. Regular people don’t need multitasking. Shit, 95% of Windows user maximize every window, anyway. So quit your bitching about multitasking, and let’s talk about something that really matters: multi-user support.

There is no excuse for this thing not to have multi-user support. This could have been the world’s greatest coffee table device, if it only had support for multiple users.

Not one article I’ve come across since Apple’s announcement talks about the missing multi-user support.

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Three Magical Weeks with the Magic Mouse

My review of Apple’s Magic Mouse on Smoking Apples

What’s sad is, even after 3 months of its announcement in the US, the mouse is still not available for sale here in India (Mumbai, at least) and I know at least 3 people who are willing to pounce on one as soon as it does. Unless, I make them purchase a Logitech.

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A Very Interesting and Off-Beat Review of Iconfactory’s Ramp Champ

“Ramp Champ is like the serial killer who wears thick glasses and tucks his striped shirt into his pants and talks with a feigned speech impediment and holds a boring desk job at a government agency, but really goes home every night and becomes like Christian Bale or something, with ripped muscles from pumping rusty iron in his basement and hunting animals in the woods naked.”

Whether you know about the game or not, this one is a definite read.

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A Better Way to Minimize Windows to Application Icon in Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard, apart from the many subtle features, brought along a better and much nifty way to minimize windows. When enabled, no longer do windows minimize to the right of the dock, but instead, you can minimize windows into their own app icon in the dock.

Chris Clark tells us how Apple could have done even better

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Summary of Responses from AT&T, Apple and Google

Engadget’s Nilay Patel summarizes the responses from Apple, AT&T and Google.

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Neven Mrgan’s Letter to the hardworking iPhone developer

I will not be buying your software. This is no fault of yours, so I apologize in advance.

Recent developments in the area of Apple messing with both you, the developer, and me, the customer, have soured me on this whole iPhone app nonsense. I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise. All the usual suspects of Mac development are either crying foul or else deciding to just completely ignore the iPhone platform.

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