Stop The Clocks.

The name change from Apple Computer to Apple Inc made complete sense for a company seeing it's revenue split increasingly driven by products like the iPhone, iPad and AppleTV. What Apple brings to these largely consumer products is, high end design, a famous attention to detail, intuitive user interfaces, and market changing approaches to problems and solutions. They lead the pack in smart phone design, and have created a market from nothing for the tablet computer. So it's business as usual at Apple – right?

Apple has always marched to the beat of it's own drum; a leader, not a follower, of fashion. It's niche segment of the pc market afforded the company both the time and space to get things right, without the hassles of pleasing all of the people, all of the time. Both the company and its' customers benefitted enormously from this situation. But with increasing shares of the smart phone and tablet market, that luxury is slowing disappearing. Further, Apple themselves appear to be locking themselves into an annual release schedule, (iPads in the spring, iPhones in the summer) something they have studiously tried to avoid with their pc based products. So where is this all leading and what are the concerns?

Apple, purposefully or not, has set up market expectations of a yearly refresh for iPad, iPhone and iPod products. The pressure on design, software and manufacturing teams must be immense. Sooner or later you would expect something to go wrong. Failure to deliver white iPhones and the issues surrounding the iPhone 4's antenna could be early indications. Apple's hard won reputation for quality products that just work, has seen it become one of the most successful and profitable brands around. But consumers and the press are nothing if not fickle. One major misstep or a series of smaller ones, could tarnish that brand and perception almost overnight.

So why not stop the clocks and slow down? Would consumers really mind? I doubt it. We'll all quite happily wait 14, 16, 18 months before upgrading are iPhones, iPads and iPods. Sure, Apple's bottom line would suffer a bit, but at this stage the alternative fears could see the bottom line and stock value affected to a much greater degree.

I'm also concerned with the fragmentation of the iPhone and iPad experience caused by the rapid release cycle. It's understandable for any technology company to concentrate on new products and support previous versions less and less. We've been used to this in the Apple community: the move from PowerPC to Intel, upgrades to Mac OS X 10.3/4/5/6 and iLife packages. As computing power increases, new software innovations are only supported by newer machines. But we are talking about machines of 3, 4 or 5 years missing a few of the new features. We are already starting to see, between two incarnations of the iPad, Apps supported on the new technology and not the old: iMovie for iPad. And with the iPhone and iOS the situation is even more fragmented for models and Apps. For the Apple fan and geek this is one thing, but for Joe public buying an iPhone or iPad it's somewhat confusing and goes against everything they were led to believe Apple offered in terms of making their life and technology choices simpler.

And would competitors in the form of RIM, Nokia, Google really close the gap? Maybe a little, but with the extra breathing space and time to take stock between release cycles the pressure could be taken off Apple's key staff and free them to be even more creative and revolutionary than they are at present. More importantly, it might allow Apple to retain key staff before they run them into the ground and burn them out. The market focuses on an Apple without Jobs, but what about an Apple without Ive, Forrestall etc?

Apple products are, more often than not, things of beauty and simplicity. Don't make the environment they inhabit any more ugly or complicated than necessary for a quick million bucks.

iPad & DropBox – The Perfect Couple.

Whether you're eying up an iPad2 as your first foray into tablet computing, upgrading from iPad1, or simply looking to increase the productivity of your current device, one given is that at some stage you are going to want to transfer documents and files to and from your iPad. Apple and third party App developers offer several options in this regard: adding files to applications during an iTunes sync, local network WiFi syncing, Apple's MobileMe iDisk and other dedicated server solutions. But by far the most successful option is to use the DropBox service. A visit to their site will do a better job of describing the service than any attempt here, and what I really want to talk about are the tricks to get the most out of using Dropbox on your iPad.

The first port of call is to install the DropBox App on your device. Once signed in you'll be able to access all your Dropbox stored files and have the facility to download and store files locally on your device. At the most basic level, you can view all manner of file formats from jpegs, tiffs, pdfs and pngs, to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents. You can't edit or amend a document in the DropBox App, but you can send it to another App capable of handling and editing the file on your device.

So far, so good. But the first drawback is that there is no way to directly upload or add files to your Dropbox using the DropBox App. Step forward GoodReader and DropDav. The first is an incredibly powerful App that I urge you install on your iPad on day one. I'm not even going to attempt to list its features and abilities, but simply say that it will allow you to connect to your DropBox to both download and upload files. It's capable of viewing and passing on as many, if not more, file formats than the Dropbox App itself. And the second is a fantastic service that allows Apps with no built in features to access your DropBox, to instead access those same files via the WebDAV protocol. Once setup, Apple's Pages, Keynote & Numbers Apps load and save to your DropBox with no problems at all.

I think the final validation for the importance of connecting your a Dropbox account to your iPad is the sheer number of Apps that support or make a feature of DropBox sync. A few prime examples are PlainText, Audiotorium Notes, and Elements.

We spend a lot of time, here at The MacDoctor, helping clients become more productive with the tools at the their disposal. Dropbox is a key ally in those efforts.

Buying an iPad, Second Time Around.

As soon as Apple announced iPad2, earlier this week, clients have been asking for purchase advice. For some it will be their first iPad, for others an upgrade or second device. I thought I'd share that advice, and also my own purchase decision and thinking.

With the release of iPad1, the main questions seemed to be; WiFi or WiFi & 3G, and 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage? It was hard to know what role and situations the device would lend itself to at first. But after nine or so months living and using the iPad, it's become easier to answer that question for clients.

For the majority of users and clients, the iPad has taken up residence alongside desktop and or laptop machines. In essence, few are attempting to use the iPad as their main computing platform. Rather, it's become an additional device. In this case, our advice has been and remains to purchase WiFi only models, with 16GB or 32GB of storage. Most of these the devices rarely leave the home, and at a extra £100 pounds the 3G option is a luxury many are happy to live without. Most don't miss the lack of 3G, ourselves included. With third party apps and services like AirVideo, TVCatchup, BBC iPlayer and Spotify, many have found it preferable to stream media content to their devices in the home environment, rather than store it onboard. The same goes for data, with services and apps like DropBox, Box.net, MobileMe iDisk & Gallery allowing access to files, without the necessity to store all data at all times. Apple's inclusion of Home Sharing in iOS 4.3 supports this mode of operation yet further.

Some clients do want the flexibility of a WiFi & 3G model, but they tend to be business or frequent traveler clients. Many are seeing a MiFi as a better investment, both in terms of cost and flexibility, providing connection for up to five devices from one accessory. Here at The MacDoctor, we tend to agree.

There are a minority of clients trying to use the iPad as their main computing platform. It's interesting to see and hear their experiences. They've all either 32GB or 64GB models, and after an initial setup rarely sync back with a host machine, relying on IMAP email, MobileMe sync, DropBox etc to provide backup of data.

I'll personally be upgrading form a 32GB WiFi iPad1 to a 16GB WiFi iPad2. The extra storage hasn't really been of any use for me. My only hesitation would be with the release of iMovie and GarageBand for iPad2. Both these apps could and would see and argument for more storage if you intend to use them heavily.

We love the iPad to pieces, but still see it as an evolving platform. As such, we want to stay on board, enjoy the ride, see what it can do and where it's going; we just want to keep the cost as cheap as possible. Unless you have a specific use case, I'd encourage you to do the same. When clients or twitter followers ask, that's the advice we give them.

It's The Software, Stupid!

Yesterday's announcement from Apple of iPad2, had been largely trailed by rumour and news sites in the run up to the event. What they all focused on were additions and improvements to the hardware – would there be a USB port, card slot, one or two cameras, a partridge in a pear tree? But what few if any focused on, was what would any such hardware improvements actually allow users to do tomorrow, that they cannot do today.

At this point in time, it's a given that computer and consumer technology will increase in power, price and size year on year. So what really matters is not the makeup of such technology, but what we actually decide to do with it. And it's here that we at The MacDoctor feel the most significant part of yesterday's announcement centred around Apple's introduction of the iMovie and GarageBand Apps for the device.

Working with clients everyday, we still hear the most basic question regarding the iPad is also the most frequent: What can I do with it? And as you stare at a flat slab of glass and aluminium, with just one main button, it's a fairly understandable question to ask. The best answer we can always give is simply to demonstrate a range of different Apps on the device. It then quickly becomes apparent to clients, that the answer is largely up to you. So it was good to hear Steve Jobs indicate that Apple's main reason for developing Apps such as iMovie and GarageBand is to keep raising the bar on what is possible and productive to do with the iPad. It inspires developers, users, media producers and the whole industry to keep re-thinking and exploring the possibilities, of what seems on the surface to be, a very simple idea - a flat, touch sensitive screen.

The iPad is one year old, and as fun and productive for many as it's already proved to be, you can't help but feel we haven't seen anything yet.

MobileMe iDisk & iOS.

The last few days have seen updates to Apple's iWork Apps for the iPad; Pages, Numbers & Keynote. Alongside useful file type handling improvements and the usual bounty of feature & UI tweaks, the most important addition to the suite has been the ability to read and write direct to a MobileMe iDisk. This allows for simple transfer and editing of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents, between Mac's, PC's and iOS devices.

Here at The MacDoctor, we spend a lot of time helping clients find solutions and products that will help them manage data transfer, manipulation and sync, across desktop, laptop and iOS devices. And it's been as surprising to us, as it has to many, why Apple didn't make MobileMe's iDisk a native cloud service, available at an API level for all Apps on the platform, from day one. Perhaps this is indeed the start of such a move, and something the platform badly needs. For while DropBox, GoodReader and several other Apps make a stab at providing some form of native file system, it's more realistic to believe Apple would offer their own service to be addressed at an API level first. At a stroke, it provides more fluid movement and transfer of data between the sand boxed Apps on iOS devices.

So who'd of 'thunk' it; iDisk is dead, long live iDisk!

MobileMe Troubleshooting at me.com.

As we've discovered for ourselves and on behalf of our clients, there's clearly been sync problems for Apple's MobileMe service in recent days. And as fantastic as the service is, there will always come a time when a little troubleshooting and perhaps a reset is in order. But what's been brought home to us in the last few days over at The MacDoctor, is how much simpler life would be if Apple would simply provide a few troubleshooting tools over on their revamped me.com website.

You can discover for yourself over at Apple's online support section, exactly how to reset sync data for your MobileMe account. But it involves making changes on each machine and user account connected to a MobileMe account. We're surprised Apple have yet to include a simple option on their web interface to reset sync data globally from one central place. Even an indication of which devices are currently sync'ed to a specific account would be an improvement.

As resetting your sync data can have dramatic results if not done correctly, it would be prudent for Apple to attach multiple warning dialogs to any such ability. But we can't help but feel handing a little more control over to users would be of benefit to MobilMe subscribers and a huge release on Apple's excellent mobileme chat support infrastructure.

MobileMe's sync abilities alone, are for many, worth the annual subscription. Once experienced the service becomes something that's difficult to live without. An needless to say any interruption of service is quite unnerving and frustrating. Handing back a little control will be a good thing for all concerned.

Advertising in iBooks.

An interesting article in the WSJ, picked up by TUAW, discusses the notion of placing ads in eBooks on the iOS platform. When taken together with Apple's iAd platform, you start to feel there really could be something in this. And as both article's mention, it's certainly not a new idea to place advertisements inside a book.

Here at The MacDoctor we've noticed many clients enjoying and embracing eBooks for the first time since the introduction of Apple's iBooks App & store. Both the iPad and new iPhone 4 with Retina Display, make ideal reading platforms. And with their audio, video, internet and wireless network capabilities, also present themselves as a great opportunity for the publishing industry to begin to evolve some form of appropriate advertising.

It could be as simple as publishers promoting their own catalogue and future titles. This could be in the form of simple text and graphic based ads or even short video, audio or other HTML5 based content. Perhaps other advertisers could promote products related to the nature of a book title; holidays, films, products etc. Up to one iAd placed at the end of each chapter could theoretically work. And with the nature of Apple's iAd platform, prove quite un-obtrusive.

This could be a really interesting development for the publishing industry and provide not just additional income but perhaps even additional information on users reading habits and preferences. Certainly and idea worth bookmarking.