I Don’t Typically Do This

HP has been giving out free Pre 2s to developers in an effort to attract more of them to webOS. I signed up for one in mid-February and it finally arrived in early May. I used the Pre 2 as my main phone for a little over a week, relegating my iPhone 4 to audio-playing and gaming duties. These are some of my thoughts from the experience.

After spending just a week with webOS, I am astounded at how much more fluid it is than iOS. Not just with regard to notifications, where webOS’s have been heavily praised and iOS’s heavily derided, but also when it comes to the ease of navigating the OS, switching apps and performing tasks quickly.

All webOS devices have a gesture area below the screen. In order to enter app switching mode, you swipe up from the gesture area onto the screen. Contrast this with iOS’s home button double-tap, which is physically more difficult to do and has worse results if done too slowly. In webOS, a slow swipe up brings up the dock, which like iOS, has four user-customizable apps (in addition to a launcher icon). In iOS, a slow double-tap registered as two single taps will bring the user back the home screen and take them to the first home screen or Spotlight.

The navigation stack paradigm commonly seen in iOS apps is also present in webOS. The only difference being that there’s no need for a visible back button. A right-to-left swipe in the gesture area serves the same functionality. Again, the swipe is much easier than having to awkwardly reach for the top-left corner of the screen.

THE FUTURE

When iOS 4.3 betas shipped, the big news came that Apple had enabled support for multitasking gestures (in order to solicit feedback from developers). A four- or five-finger swipe up showed the multi-tasking bar, left and right swipes switched between apps, and pinch returned the user to home screen. While fun for a few days, I quickly disabled the gestures because they interfered with GarageBand. If I was playing with the on-screen piano, it wasn’t uncommon for me to have at least four fingers on the screen at once, leading me to triggering a gesture erroneously, getting myself kicked out of GarageBand and ruining many a masterpiece.

The multi-tasking gestures were the first time Apple violated the suspension of disbelief that allows us to think that the iPad is not a tablet that runs apps, but that each time an app is launched transforms the iPad into a single-purpose device.

Still, as iOS grows, the Home Button will become increasingly limiting. Prior to the introduction of multitasking in iOS 4, a Home Button double click could be configured to open phone favorites, go to Spotlight, or launch the iPod app or the camera. Without a dedicated gesture area, Apple was forced to restrict the double-click to just showing the multitasking bar and making it that much harder to quickly access two functions that often require quick access.

After growing accustomed to the gesture area on the Pre 2, going back to the iPhone’s overloaded Home Button feels like a step backwards. A dedicated gesture area would go a long way to giving iOS the additional physical resources it needs in order to improve the fluidity of the OS and I really hope we see it in the next generation of iOS devices.

Gruber seems to think that Apple will release two new iPads this year, a small bump sometime in the spring (with perhaps a camera and better internal specs), and a more impressive bump during the yearly fall iPod announcement in September. My thought is that Apple is better off delaying an iPad 2 launch rather than launching two devices too close together.

First off, I don’t think Apple wants to be perceived as having the same problem that Android does, which is that a bigger and better thing is right around the corner. Even if the shortened interval is just a realignment, the perception can stick around for a long time.

The Xoom, Playbook and TouchPad (which I’m very impressed with, by the way) are all playing catch up to the almost year-old iPad, with only the Xoom has a firm release date (and a higher-than-expected price and confusing fine print regarding WiFi only being available with at least a month’s data subscription). The fact that Apple has had no competition in the past year is a luxury, and as the tablet space blows up, it certainly won’t be the norm.

Apple can afford to delay an iPad 2 launch for a few months, even if the competition is able to match or best the iPad’s hardware, since Apple will still have the software advantage. A lackluster successor to the iPad would give competitors more ammunition against Apple than a languishing first-generation device. Imagine all the horrible headlines: “Steve Jobs’ Absence Felt in Underwhelming New iPad” (despite the fact that we all know that the iPad 2 was finished or close to finished while Jobs was still day-to-day at Apple).

As Gruber mentions in a follow-up post, the iPod touch launched in September pretty much matches the iPhone released a few months prior. This means that developers have had since the iPhone launch in June to develop apps that take advantage of any new hardware features. By the time the iPod touch launches, there are apps out there to take advantage of the new features. There’s no comparable device to serve as an iPad hardware preview, which means developers are going to be releasing apps awfully close to the holiday season, if they even make it in time for the holidays at all.

If Apple does significantly shift the iPad’s release schedule, I can see Apple launching the iPad closer to the iPhone in June than the iPod in September, but that if they do make the shift to September, that the shift will be spread out over two or more revisions.

Reggie Fairchild, Product Manager for AOL 4.0:

When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production for several weeks. Think of that. Not a single music CD or Microsoft CD was produced during those weeks.

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Only thing missing is the “availability date” column.

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OS X’s Preview.app is a great PDF reader but not a very good PDF editor. It doesn’t support pasting images into PDFs, so when I’ve had to add my signature to a PDF in the past, I would drop the PDF into Acorn (and previously Pixelmator) and paste away.

My main problem with this approach is that Acorn (and Pixelmator) rasterizes the text in the PDF, resulting in blurry text and a resulting PDF that no longer has selectable text or form fields.

Today I discovered PDFescape, an online PDF editor which allowed me to upload a PDF, paste my signature into it, and download the new file — complete with selectable text and form fields. I highly recommend it for any PDF editing that Preview.app can’t handle.

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