The Twitterverse was full of disgust yesterday over the announcement that popular image-sharing service Instagram was purchased by Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Despite both companies offering assurances that Instagram will continue to be developed independently, there’s still potential cause for concern.

Let’s look at where Instagram stood before the buy-out: a popular service among the hipster elite that was, until recently, an iOS exclusive. Instagram was a distant competitor to Facebook as far as online picture sharing goes, but it was nonetheless one with a decent growth curve. The hasty adoption of the recently released Android client illustrated Instagram’s demand perfectly. But, Instagram had no monetization strategy outside of acquisition, and that’s a torch Facebook must now bare.

Facebook has nothing to gain from leaving Instagram as-is, because it leaves them with the same monetization problem Instagram had before the acquisition. With Facebook’s IPO looming ahead, their job is to make money, not buy cool startups because they pose as abstract threat years down the road. Surely, part of Facebook’s acquisition strategy was to mitigate attention loss from the Facebook app to Instagram, but that same strategy needs to account for driving users back to Facebook. That is to say, the value in Instagram isn’t in keeping the service separate from Facebook’s existing services, nor is it purely in absorbing the small fraction of online picture-sharing that Instagram has claim to. Rather, it’s driving as much traffic back to Facebook’s existing portfolio to as possible, and to enrich the overall Facebook experience.

Reading into the recent Facebook and Instagram company statements after the acquisition announcement, we can’t help but think that by “improving” Instagram, Facebook will do whatever it can to inject more Facebook functionality into the Instagram app, be that in the form of check-ins or targeted advertisement. Ultimately, Facebook’s goal will be to add Instagram’s functionality into the Facebook app proper, thereby minimizing a user’s need to use both apps.¹ We wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook’s goal is to require Instagram users to have a Facebook account for logging into Instagram in the future, thus solidifying the integration between apps. Either way, Facebook’s emphasis will be on their core product, not in leaving Instagram as-is; Facebook bought Instagram for the data, and will undoubtedly use that data outside of the Instagram app. How they’ll leverage user photos in other areas should become evident in the coming months, but rest assured Facebook already has a monetization strategy for their Instagram acquisition, and that strategy will neatly tie in to their existing products.

Some critics are doubting Zuckerberg’s clear-headedness with the acquisition, and that he over-estimated Instagram’s worth. That’s partially true, considering Instagram was assessed at $500 million only a short time prior to the acquisition. But Facebook clearly saw not only Instagram’s growth potential, but also a successful mobile app built around sharing. You can argue that Facebook should have been able to build a reasonable competitor, but we all know how utterly crappy Facebook’s mobile apps have been to date. And, perhaps more importantly, there’s unseen value in the mindshare of Instagram. Despite all the kids swearing Instagram off because of the acquisition, how many will truly stop using their beloved social networking client? Even if Instagram loses a chunk of users due to the acquisition, those who remain loyal to Instagram will at minimum remain neutral to their new Facebook overlords, and in some ways, that’s a positive thing for a company that’s been ridiculed by the geek savvy for constantly shitting on user privacy.

Instagram is also a social network of a sort different from Facebook’s core offering, in that Facebook was built around reconnecting with old acquaintances and those in your real-world networks. Instagram’s photo sharing mechanism means users follow random individuals based purely on the aesthetic value of what they share, and that’s a very different beast from how Facebook has operated to date. Yet, it’s clearly a space Facebook wants to continue moving in, as it captures a networking angle that simply following friends, companies, and celebrities doesn’t.

The clear takeaway however is that Instagram will compliment Facebook, not the other way around. It may be too soon to jump from Instagram’s ship since we don’t know exactly how things will play out, but you’re fooling yourself to think the Instagram experience, sandboxed as it currently is, will remain intact.² Fortunately, there are several options to replace Instagram, both in contained apps like PicPlz, as well as combination tools like Twitter and Hipstamatic;³ whatever disappointment we have in giving up Instagram doesn’t create a void we can’t fill.

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Every couple weeks we read about someone else taking up a private journal with Day One, a journaling app available for both iOS and OS X. One of the key benefits of the app is its cloud-based synchronization, allowing you to use iCloud or Dropbox to keep entries updates across devices. The app is also acknowledged for its rather good-looking interface, which sets it apart from similar apps available in the App Store.

We picked up Day One for iOS several months back, but didn’t use it too extensively.We’ve wanted to keep a private journal for many years now, but find that we never etch enough time into our schedule to make it happen.¹

Day One is fairly simplistic as far as journaling apps go. There’s limited Markdown support at the moment, and no integration with social networking sites, nor with embedded media outside of hyperlinks. In a way, that’s one of Day One’s strengths, because it focuses you on writing, not reviewing what you posted on Twitter earlier that day, or where you checked in via FourSquare.²

Where we’ve found Day One to excel is in writing short journal entries and tracking some amount of information we’d otherwise lose sight of. For example, we’ve used other apps to track lifestyle activities like meals eaten, workout results, and general physical condition. These tend to be activity-specific apps, like Livestrong’s MyPlate, or Azumio’s Heart Rate monitor. Day One allows us to compile all this information into one daily log, which may not offer fancy graphs for tracking this data visually, but still serves as a useful log for later reference.

It’d be great if the various tracking apps we use could easily export to Day One using a URL scheme,³ but Launch Center already supports starting a new Day One entry with clipboard information, so as long as a given tracking app will let you copy information to the clipboard, a simple workflow follows accordingly.⁴

While we’re still not using Day One for longform entries, the app remains on our iPhone and iPad to track other daily notes, likes foods eaten and how we felt accordingly thereafter. It’s great for this, and we wonder why we didn’t think of using Day One to journal these types of activities earlier.

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Apple hasn’t pushed the new iPad’s specs into the limelight, a trend they’ve run with for all their mobile device offerings. Traditionally, specs were the lifeblood of a PC marketing campaign. That specs on paper were a meaningless comparison is something computer nerds have known about for years (even if they didn’t always admit it), and today comparing specs is mere mental masturbation. Consumers don’t care about which device has a better CPU or which has more RAM, they care instead about the experience a given device offers. “Does it do what I need it to?” is the question they ask themselves.

That said, there’s some merit in noting a device’s specs, if only to compare it to its predecessors. “Will this upgrade be worthwhile”, for example, is a question that specs can help answer.

Horace Dediu compares the new iPad to the 2008 MacBook Air, a device we really wanted to buy back then, but considered its specs too meager in comparison to the MacBook Pro we were using at the time.

The new iPad now exceeds the total display resolution, has similar speed and storage capacity while having twice the battery life of the thinnest laptop of four years ago. It also has very high quality cameras and GPS and cellular network connectivity which have yet to appear on mainstream PCs. It’s still a lot smaller and half the price and has a larger selection of available software titles at prices a fraction of its elder cousin.

The only value that a desktop of 2008 has over a new iPad is the size of the screen and a larger hard drive.

Dediu’s point isn’t that the new iPad is a better computer, but that it’s another step in narrowing the gap between traditional PCs and the iPad. Put another way, consumers are finding the new iPad perfectly capable of handling their daily tasks, just as the 2008 MacBook Air did four years ago. If anything, it puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that implementation is more important than raw specs, and why you really don’t need the latest hardware to be relevent.¹

Critics may dismiss this by pointing out how the 2008 MacBook Air was considered under-powered, and how no one in their right mind would buy a 2008 MacBook Air today, but that would miss the point entirely: by re-engineering the software and hardware to be both simple and fast, Apple has created a device that is replacing traditional computers at home. And it’s doing this using the hardware equivalent of a four-year-old notebook computer. The irony is that while we didn’t buy the MacBook Air four years ago because we considered it underpowered, we didn’t think twice about preordering the new iPad. In fact, since the original iPad, we replaced our MacBook Pro for everyday computing tasks.

It’s become a better PC.

Looking back at our initial experiment in 2010 to use the iPad almost excusively for home computing, we see that several things have changed since, which have further cemented our decision, and why we haven’t felt the need to jump back into the notebook game.

When we bought our original iPad, we also bought a Mac Mini to serve as a headless media center. Its chief purpose was not only to serve media to our LCD television, but to serve as a mechanism for getting stuff onto, and off of, our iPad and iPhone. The synchronization process was typically a pain using a headless Mac, and though it became easier with VNC apps, it still wasn’t an ideal solution.

iCloud has mostly changed that. Since we’ve had the ability to back our iOS devices up wirelessly to the cloud, we’ve had almost no need to physically connect our devices to the Mac Mini.² Our iPhone 4S, for example, has never once been hooked up to the Mac Mini, and we’re better for it.

In truth, we rarely listen to our iTunes library anymore; most of our music listening is via Pandora. Still, it’s nice to have our music library with us, but a requirement for this has always been physical synchonization. Not only is this no longer necessary with the latest versions of iOS, but more importantly, we don’t even need to be home to get at our music collection. iTunes match is a great service that compliments the “basic” iCloud offering, and has allowed us to dismiss our Mac Mini even more.

iCloud and iTunes Match are two big changes that came about more recently, but iOS in general has gotten better. Switching between apps is now faster than it was in 2010, and the two years of application development has enabled a much better workflow than we had when we first adopted the iPad as out primary computer.

No need for the Mac Mini anymore?

Unfortunately, we’re still not at a place where we can totally remove our Mac Mini from our home. Apple TV was another solid blow to our need for a media center, but there remain three reasons we’re still holding onto the Mini.

First is the issue of media acquisition; most of the media we consume can be obtained via our iOS devices, but there are others we still obtain through other channels. While Apple’s video offerings for film and television have expanded significantly over the past couple years, others still require alternative approaches, like being able to grab content from a TiVo hard drive, ripping media from optical disc, or downloading from the internet. As Apple’s offerings continue to expand, the need for consumers to rely on these other distribution channels will lessen, and we hope that television networks and other publishers come to understand this. In most cases, consumers will opt for the easiest method of obtaining what they want, and Apple’s service is sufficiently easy for people to forego most other channels.

Second is iPhoto, which for many of us, makes up a large portion of our media library. The 64GB maximum storage size on the iPad keeps it from being able to store our entire iPhoto library, which could somewhat be alleviated with a more well-built iCloud component for iPhoto. So basically, we’re forced to wait on either an iCloud/iPhoto revision such that our whole iPhoto library is in the cloud, else wait on a larger hard drive option in the next iPad. Hopefully, the former option will be taken up by Apple in the near future.

Third is the issue of app development, and the concept of “eating your own dog food”. There are plenty of code editors available for the iPad, but no way to run custom code on the device.³ You might argue that users can still write HTML apps on the iPad, but again, this is a somewhat limited alternative. We have to think that Apple is at least toying with the idea of an iOS app that could be used to write code for actual compilation and submission to the AppStore, but if they are, no one’s hinted at it. The closest solution we’ve come up with in the meantime is to store code in the cloud (e.g. Dropbox) and use an iOS code editor to access it (e.g. Textastic). We then need VNC or similar app to access our Mac Mini, so we can manipulate the simulator.

Of these three obstacles, the first isn’t a deal-breaker; we wouldn’t be too upset if we had to limit our video consumption to what we can get through iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc. The third issue is variable, because we’re only throwing around the idea of doing some hobbyist development at the moment, so we could very well end up either not doing it at all, or doing it in such limited increments that we could just borrow someone else’s computer for brief coding sessions. ⁴ The second issue is the real deal-breaker here, because our library is too big to fit on our iPad unless we decided to seriously limit what apps are on it too. For many people, this may not be an issue at all, but for those of us with digital photo libraries going back 15 years or so, the obstacle is unsurmountable at the present.

To be clear, these issues may all be moot for the average computer user, as such users are likely not computer savvy enough to obtain media from unconventional sources, don’t have massive photo libraries, nor do any app development. This is why we continue to recommend the iPad to friends and family who we know have comparatively low requirements.

As we plan to take ownership of our new iPad later today, we have little regrets about moving away from traditional PCs. Aforementioned obstacles aside, the experience has been quite a good one, and its enabled us to take our computer places that we would never have lugged our MacBook to. With the iterative improvements to the new iPad, we fully expect the experience to only get better after today.

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Brent Simmons was one of many who commented earlier today on OS X Mountain Lion removing RSS reading from Mail and Safari. The move makes sense when one considers parity between OS X and iOS apps, in that the latter do not offer such features. But more importantly, these features are typically unused by most OS X users, who, if they review RSS feeds at all, typically have either a dedicated reader, else use a web app like Google Reader.

Worth noting is that people didn’t use Mail/Safari for RSS reading because the experience was shit. Apple seemed to add these capabilitie as an afterthought, and not because it was deemed particularly useful. We’ve used Google Reader for years because the experience is relatively consistent across browsers, and because there are numerous third-party apps for iOS that integrate with the service. However, given Google’s evilness of late, we’d happily consider an alternative if there was one, but right now, there simply isn’t. What do we mean by “an alternative”?

• Ability to access feeds via the web to read and modify.
• Native apps for iPhone and iPad that offer all the functionality of the web version.
• Synchronization.

It’s really not asking much, and we’re rather surprised that Google Reader is the only option out there. We’d even be willing to pay for this service if it had third-party extensions, like being able to leverage social networks, OmniFocus, Instapaper, etc.¹ Presumably, Apple doesn’t want to take this project on because the average Apple user doesn’t know or care about RSS.

We’ve looked into options like Fever, but we’re not a fan of self-hosted options if we can avoid it, and it seems Mobile Safari still leaves something to be desired for viewing one’s Fever feeds.

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Over the past several weeks we’ve explored a way to simplify our blogging workflow. While we’ve used WordPress for years, we find the process of getting a blog entry published somewhat cumbersome. Admittedly, it’s not WordPress inherently, but more on how we use WordPress, or more accurately, the manner in which we self-constrained our blogging paradigm. For most users, WordPress entries are a matter of loading up their blog via a browser of choice, and then drafting an entry within the WordPress admin panel. Basically, a post from beginning to end is all done in the browser. Since we migrated to an iPad-centric paradigm, however, this doesn’t work for us, because WordPress doesn’t play well in Mobile Safari.

For awhile, we juggled this limitation by utilizing native apps, but the results were mixed. The WordPress app could post a new entry, for example, but couldn’t alter a post’s slug or set other post parameters. It’s also a very unstable app that’s prone to crashing. We tried several blogging apps that work with WordPress, but these were all either similarly unstable, or added unnecessary HTML formatting into our posts. When we began writing in Markdown, we decided to compose posts in a text editor (usually Simplenote) and then cut’n paste into the WordPress app, or paste into the WordPress interface in Mobile Safari.¹ Neither option was particularly lengthy, but neither option was particularly efficient, either. Simplenote gave us the freedom that cloud-enabled apps bring, as we could work on a piece anywhere and from any device we own, but getting the post online involved additional steps.

Our annoyance with this workflow was further burdened by our dislike of general complexity. Self-hosted WordPress provides several benefits, but it also adds additional burdens. Sometime in December, we started to look into baked blogs², a trend that began among some techie bloggers earlier in 2011. The idea of a baked blog is to save posts in plain-text (written using Markdown or similar), and then having a minimalist blogging engine convert the text files into HTML. Such a blogging engine uses templates, so site design is usually constrained to a handful of files (e.g. an index, an archive, a post page, and an associated CSS). In this manner, one’s blog is never stored in a database, and article retrievals are therefore expedited and less CPU intensive. Obviously, baked blogs aren’t as modular as dynamic systems that can use plugins and execute code, but with HTML5 and CSS3, there’s actually a lot that can be done design-wise on a baked blog. But more importantly, it’s the simplicity of baked blogs that make them appealing, and why we explored them in a desire to move mendax.org in this direction.

Unfortunately, while there are several merits behind baked blogs, there are also complications. For one, the blogging engine compiling the post files needs to reside on a computer that’s always on. In a typical setup, post files are stored on a desktop, or accessible by a desktop using something like Dropbox, and then the converted HTML files are either served to the web via a local web server, or pushed to a server somewhere else.³ This intermediary requirement makes the system wholly unsuited for our iPad-centric paradigm.⁴

One option would be to not rely on a cloud service like Dropbox, and instead copy text files written on the iPad over to a web server via FTP, and have the blogging engine run there. This is a reasonable solution, but it’s still more complex than what we’re aiming for. After all, such a system would be no quicker to post to than the one we’re currently constrained to using WordPress.

The new breed of hosted Dropbox blogging engines.

When we stumbled upon Scriptogram and Skrivr, we thought we finally found an elegant solution. Both platforms are hosted baked blogging services that tie into Dropbox. This means you can use any text editor that can access a specific Dropbox folder, and after formatting the file appropriately⁵, the post gets published to your blog. Both are great systems that are in their infancy, and both allow a degree of customization that services like Calepin do not, like being able to edit the site’s HTML and CSS templates for custom layouts.⁶

A definitive advantage of Skrivr is that it stores the HTML and CSS templates server-side along with posts.⁷ This means that you can use any Dropbox enabled text editor to tweak your blog’s layout. Unfortunately, Skrivr currently requires complete access to your Dropbox account, instead of to just one folder. Hopefully this will change in the future, but for the time being, it means security-conscious users will want to create a second Dropbox account for Skrivr’s use.⁸ Second, the out-of-box themes for Skrivr populate a drop-down menu linking to old posts, so you can imagine what happens when you have dozens of posts. Skrivr desperately needs a better way to handle archives, and while we’re sure this is in the works, it’s currently a major downside to the service for bloggers who post frequently. Skrivr also utilizes categories, which the included themes are designed to use. While there may be some SEO advantages to employing categories, we find them rather unnecessary for our purposes, and so we don’t want our blogging tool to require them.

As far as transparency of development goes, Skrivr has had fewer updates from its developer(s) than Scriptogram has, and that’s surely holding back adoption. It looks to be shaping up well, but at this point, there are enough rough edges to the system that we feel it best to hold off before we employ it full steam.

Whereas Skrivr automatically scans its Dropbox folder for updates, Scriptogram does not, and relies on the philosophy that bloggers should have to manually assert their will to post a new article. Practically speaking, this means that users must go to the service’s web interface and press the “Synchronize” button before blog changes are processed. This is somewhat ironic, in that the service is supposed to foster the notion that bloggers can simply get away with using a text editor and a Dropbox account, but the reality is that they still need to rely on a web browser. This in itself wouldn’t be too cumbersome of a process if it weren’t for the fact that synchronization is not particularly quick after many posts are stored in the Dropbox folder. We tested this by migrating over 400 posts from mendax.org to a Scriptogram-linked Dropbox account, and the biggest flaw in the process was the long synchronization time. Per the developer, the system only looks for modifications to files and doesn’t re-sync the whole folder, but this still isn’t a particularly quick process, and the last thing we want to do is stare at our browser window for minutes after we write a new post. Ideally, if we have to click on a button to synchronize our posts, the button would merely tell a process to run server-side, such that we can immediately close our browser tab and move on.

Both services don’t currently support nested file hierarchies in Dropbox, which means that navigating the folder containing all your posts is slow. At least two Dropbox-enabled writing apps we downloaded couldn’t handle displaying 400+ files in a single folder, so kept crashing. The two apps that did work for us were Nebulous Notes and iA Writer, but we found that their flaw was when we lost our internet connection: we could create or edit a file regardless of where it was in our Dropbox account, but if we lost our internet connection and tried to list our Dropbox files or start a new document, the old one was lost. For a service like Scriptogram or Skrivr to work well, there needs to be a text editor that will maintain recently-viewed files locally so their changes won’t be lost. Otherwise, you need to create files locally, and then move them into the Dropbox folder later, which is a less elegant solution.⁹ Scriptogram will have a native iOS app in the future, so perhaps this problem is already considered, but for now, it means neither service is as frictionless as they would seem if your internet access isn’t always-on.

Both Scriptogram and Skrivr are still in “beta”, so their growing pains are to be expected. We have no doubt that these platforms will evolve nicely in the coming weeks and months, but until they play a bit friendlier with the iPad, they’re currently better services for those using conventional computers.

What of Tumblr and Posterous?

When we decided to wait a bit to see how Scriptogram and Skrivr shape up, we caught wind of David Chartier’s migration to Tumblr. We never gave the service much interest in the past, but on David’s recommendation, we explored it a bit more thoroughly. Tumblr is of course free, and while some folks on the web complain that it suffers more downtime than other blog hosts, it’s really not that bad.¹⁰ Tumblr natively supports Markdown, which immediately makes it an attractive choice, and the third-party Tumblr iOS app Tumblita means posting on-the-go is easy.¹¹ Layout is customize-able, though Tumblr has the same problem here that Scriptogram does, in that the only way to edit the blog’s template files is to use the system’s respective web editor, which is not iPad friendly. This means to make layout changes, you still need to rely on a conventional computer, which we’re not fond of. Another annoyance with these systems is that starting a template from scratch isn’t intuitive, particularly in Tumblr’s case. You can modify the HTML of an existing theme, but creating one from a blank template leaves a lot to be desired.

The nice thing about Tumblr is that it has a strong community, so options for pre-built themes are considerable. Because of how the system shares tags across all hosted blogs, it’s easy for other Tumblr users to stumble across your blog. The downside is that in exchange for this readership boost, SEO isn’t as easy as with a self-hosted solution, because even though you may decide to use a custom domain, your content is still tied to the tumblr.com domain as well.¹²

Of course, Tumblr isn’t as clean a system as a baked blog, but it’s a decent alternative for those who want a pretty quick blogging workflow with basic functionality for various post types. It’s a bit overkill for mendax.org because we don’t rely much on non-text content, and we still prefer easy access to post text files. This means that even with Tumblr, we’d end up cut’n pasting content from our text app into Tumblr, Tumblina, or Mail. When we want to edit a post to make changes, the workflow becomes unnecessarily complicated.

Posterous is not very different from Tumblr, and is arguably its chief competitor. We looked into the service to see how it stands up, and while it doesn’t feel as sexy as Tumblr, it’s just as powerful. That said, Posterous does offer a couple things that Tumblr doesn’t, including a way to import posts from other platforms into Posterous, as well as a custom HTML/CSS editor that can actually be modified from Mobile Safari. Posterous charges for custom domain setup on an annual basis, and the mobile app seems a bit more stable than the first-party Tumblr app. For supposed security reasons, Posterous also doesn’t support javascript, which is a blow against it. Neither Tumblr or Posterous seem very flexible when it comes to displaying posts, unless you’re willing to really dig into the APIs.

So what’s the ideal system?

In the end, the system we want doesn’t exist. This dilemma has prompted other folks to write their own homebrew apps, and a quick web search will uncover dozens of baked blogging engines written in almost any web-friendly language you can think of. The problem is that these are all designed to work with conventional computers, and not mobile devices. This means there’s a clear niche for a developer to step in and create a solid, frictionless blogging engine for iOS and Android, with the following features:

1. Text file storage in the cloud for posts and template files, whether it’s Dropbox or another service.
2. Markdown support.
3. Ability to cache posts offline.
4. Text file to HTML converter, nicely packaged as an iOS/Android app, which pushes the final blog to a web server.

We’ve seen at least one Objective-C based engine that could potentially be ported to iOS, but the developer has no apparent plans to do so. As more bloggers rely on tablets to get content online, however, the demand for more streamlined blogging solutions on iOS and Android will undoubtedly increase. The upcoming Scriptogram iOS app seems to have the most potential to fulfill our criteria, but in the meantime, we’ll stick with WordPress and keep looking.

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The basic version of OnLive Desktop is already available, which leverages OnLive’s streaming video technology to let an iPad connect to a remote server running Windows. The idea is to give iPad owners access to native Microsoft Office products, and later expand this access to other devices (tablets and PCs alike). So without actually buying a personal copy of Microsoft Office, you can access a copy on OnLive’s servers, and thanks to fast video streaming technology, it’s almost as though you’re running it locally.

We tried out the OnLive Desktop when it was first released,¹ and were impressed by its snappiness and image quality. The technology used in this app is based off the video streaming technology OnLive has worked on for its gaming product, which streams video of PC games. For us, the Desktop streaming worked much better than traditional OnLive streaming, though both perform well considering everything’s remote. Unfortunately, there’s not much to do on OnLive Desktop yet, unless Microsoft Office apps are what you need. The free OnLive Desktop app gives you 2GB of cloud storage (proprietary to OnLive), which you can access via a web browser, too. There aren’t any other apps on the system, however.

Fortunately, that should change with the release of OnLive Desktop Pro, which runs $9.99/month and, in addition to more cloud storage, gives you access to more PC apps. It’s not yet clear whether these are pre-installed apps or if OnLive will somehow white-list or black-list apps that can or can’t be installed, but there’s a lot of potential here that we hope OnLive takes advantage of. Here’s our list of wants for this service:

1. Hopefully, OnLive Desktop Pro will not limit users to a set number of pre-installed apps. That’s because we can’t envision most apps that OnLive curators choose to be very appealing, as most of our daily computing tasks are already met. This means that the apps we would want to see are likely very niche, so we’d sooner see OnLive implement a black-list of apps that can’t be installed than a small list of apps that can. For example, OnLive would obviously ban malware, as well as apps that simply don’t make sense for the service, like Steam.² P2P apps, porn, et al would likely be part of such a blacklist as well.

2. OnLive’s cloud solution may work for some people, but since it’s not integrated with other apps we use, it’s a bit extraneous. We’d sooner see integration with Dropbox, which works with an enormous number of apps. If such integration isn’t native, then Dropbox will hopefully still be an approved add-on.

3. Fast-app switching is a must for OnLive Desktop. Right now, if you leave the app and switch back, you have to connect to the service all over again. We’d sooner see the connection maintained for a short amount of time, such that we can perform a task in another app and return to OnLive Desktop without delay. We have this same problem with Splashtop Remote, and it’s a real workflow obstruction.

4. Windows is nice and all, but how about OS X access? A virtual OS X desktop instead of a Windows one would be super-helpful for many, especially those clinging on to their Macs just for one or two apps. It’d also be great for those seeking to develop on the Mac/iOS/iBookstore, but don’t readily have a Mac handy because their main development is for Windows/Android/ePub.

The possibilities are huge if these things are integrated, and not just for hobbyists. Developers could work on apps for a given platform without buying a dedicated machine, being able to access remote IDEs and compilers for platforms they don’t already own. We’d love to tinker with mobile development, but don’t relish the idea of buying a computer just for that purpose, as we’re able to do everything else with our iPad. At $9.99/month, it”d totally be worth the $119.88/year for easy access to a virtual development box, and I doubt we’re alone in that boat.

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We mentioned earlier that we were interested in doing a side-by-side comparison of the Jawbone UP’s sleep analysis and that done by the Sleep Cycle iPhone app. Well, user alexw at the official UP forum beat us to the punch with a sample one-day analysis. As expected, because the UP is attached to you, it’s accuracy is better than Sleep Cycle, which relies on the iPhone sitting on the corner of your bed.

Another user compared the UP to another body-mounted device, and the results were very similar. It sounds like the UP’s sleep analysis will be a much better log of sleep activity than what Sleep Cycle offers, so the UP is definitely an upgrade. The downside at the moment is that several users have noted bugs in the sleep analysis display, which at least for one night, didn’t show up at all in the detailed, landscape-based mode. Jawbone has already released an update for the UP, which is a good start, but on our end, the logged sleep from last night remains missing. Hopefully the update ensures that future logged nights display correctly.

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On Friday, we drove by two Targets, a Best Buy, and an AT&T store to see if anyone was selling the Jawbone UP early. None were. The reports we heard about UPs selling early must have been very isolated experiences, though it seems people had more success at Apple stores, who apparently are more likely to not play by the rules.¹ Both Target stores we visited had places set aside, complete with labels, for the three sizes of the UP initially available, yet employees at neither store could tell me whether they already sold out of their UP stock, or if they hadn’t received any yet. We decided to return to the AT&T store on Sunday morning.

We had sized our wrist using the printable template available at the UP site. This proved to be a waste of time, because not only did the AT&T store have demo units out to try on, but the packaging on each UP box has a plastic template included, so buyers can check for their size when in the store. It’s a nice touch, and shows Jawbone’s attention to detail. So we bought our UP, and set it up in the car on the way home.² We won’t bother to give a full review here, because we found Shawn Wall’s review to be plenty thorough for a product that’s only officially been on shelves for less than two days, but we will respond to some points he made for the sake of completeness.

The rubberized bracelet is bendable to a degree. It’s not the simplest task in the world getting it on or off your wrist, but thankfully you don’t really need to take it off given its waterproof nature.

Jawbone actually calls the bracelet water resistant, and only to a fairly shallow depth. The idea is that you can wash your hands, and even take it into the shower, without worrying about it getting damaged. We even saw a picture of someone wearing it in a shallow pool, so the idea that you can wear it most places is obviously something Jawbone wants customers to understand. But don’t think about taking the UP diving. In fact, the notion of taking this thing in the ocean makes us a bit uncomfortable, and we’d rather someone else tried it first.

When we took a shower this morning, our hesitation for getting the UP wet made us take it off. It’s not like you’ll be missing out on too much activity tracking in those few minutes of the morning anyway. Though, we did notice that the black rubberized band³ attracts dirt pretty quickly, so wearing it into the shower may not be a bad idea after all.

As far as bendability goes, the UP has to be somewhat bendable to get it on and off. But that’s only for the “ends” of the band, and the bendability is temporary. In other words, you can’t bend the UP into a different shape, or make it larger or smaller.

There’s really not much in the way of moving parts here; there is a button at one end that is used for switching modes (more on that later), and the opposite end has a cap that is pulled off to reveal the 3.5mm male jack that is used to sync the device with your mobile phone (currently iPhone-only, but Android “coming soon”).

The one thing we don’t like about the UP is that the button on one end, as well as the cap, is painted silver. We’d much rather have these match the main band colour, as we don’t expecially like the accent color. The cap is only silver on one side though, so if you put it on backwards, it appears black to all but the closest observer. A backwards cap also means you’re not proudly displaying “Jawbone” written on your jewelry; we don’t need to advertise for the company we already supported by buying their product. Depending on how much we dislike the button on the other end being an “off” colour, we may end up painting it black down the road.

One really great feature in regards to sleep is that the bracelet can be used as an alarm clock using vibration. Even better, it supposedly will wake you up out of a light sleep instead of a deep sleep by getting you up a little earlier if it can (by looking at your deep vs. light sleep somehow).

This feature worked well for us this morning, though to be fair, we didn’t sleep all that great last night anyway, and noticeably tumbled around a bunch. In this case, we were quick to feel the pulsing vibration of the alarm, but we wonder if it will wake us on days that we have a deeper sleep. Today, it woke us up 15 minutes early. We’re considering doing a side-by-side test of the UP and Sleep Cycle iPhone app to see how consistent the two are, or if one tends to go off before the other. For now, though, we expect the UP to handle our alarms equally well, if not better, with the only concern being whether the vibration is strong enough to rouse us from a deep sleep.

One of my favorite feature of the device is found in this area. You can set your bracelet to remind you to be active if you are sedentary for too long. The time range is user defined. This is great as it can remind us programmers to get out of our chairs once an hour

We’re rather fond of this feature also. We have it enabled during business hours, and its a great reminder to get up and do something, even if it’s just to pee or get some fresh water.

I do not own another pedometor, Fitbit or anything else along those lines so I cannot speak for the accuracy of the UP. It feels like the numbers are too high though.

Whether they’re too high or not, all we can say is that the “lightly active” category is cake during an average weekend, and that’s not even with workout scheduled. From noon until night yesterday, we scored over 8k steps taken, which means we can easily up our steps goal to the next level. We’ll have to see how our weekend activity compares to the average workday to see whether it’s worth adjusting our goals at this time, though.

The food diary portion of the application is well… a little underwhelming in my opinion.

We haven’t played with this feature too much yet, and honestly, we’re not too tempted considering there’s no way to count calories. We’ve used other apps to compare our caloric intake to our ideal goal (at least 3k calories a day), and the fact that such a simple feature is missing makes us feel like we’d gain little from the UP app’s inclusion of a food log. Maybe once this feature becomes more robust, we’ll be more likely to keep up with it.

Game mechanics are a huge portion to an offering such as the UP, and I feel they currently fall a little short.

We agree with Shawn here, and don’t like how simply accepting a challenge means others who accepted the challenge can suddenly see your progress. We’d prefer “private” challenges that don’t involved any reporting, or at the very least, allow users to select a username instead of their registered (true) name. Sure, the public feed only uses first names, but we’d still prefer a nickname.

The problem of the food log and the game mechanics points at the one flaw the UP currently has, and that’s a very simplistic piece of software. If Jawbone maintains a regular release schedule of updates and bug fixes, however, we can truly see the pair being a useful lifestyle assistant for some time to come.

More thoughts to follow as we spend more time with our new bracelet.

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With the release of iOS 5, we had a chance to try out the upgrade on several devices belonging to us and family. The process, unfortunately, was rather inconsistent across devices, with some going smoother than others:

1. iPad 2 w/3G, 64GB: This was the first device we opted to upgrade. We did a sync first, then started the update. Everything seemed to go fine until the “restoring apps” window appeared to freeze about two-thirds of the way through. The screen on the iPad itself seemed to suggest that it was done, and we continued with the setup there. With the restoring apps status bar still not moving, we unplugged the device and had to force-quit iTunes. The device worked fine, but was indeed missing some apps. Some pictures were still present on the device. When we launched iBooks, all our eBooks seemed present, but they then deleted themselves after the device “phoned home”. The next time we connected the iPad to the computer, it did re-sync all apps, and the status bar actually moved.

2. iPhone 4, 32 GB: Didn’t do a last sync before updating, and the same thing happened with this device as with our iPad 2. Only this time, most of the apps were missing. When we installed a few of them from the on-device AppStore, we found that the data for the apps was still present on the iPhone, so we didn’t need to set every app up again. The same iBooks problem as with the iPad 2 appeared on this device, too. A second re-sync fixed the problem as it did with the iPad.

3. iPad 2, 32 GB: This device had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went perfectly smooth.

4. iPhone 4, 16 GB: This device also had very little stuff on it. Upgrade went smooth as well.

5. iPad w/3G, 16GB: Another smooth upgrade.

6. iPhone 3GS, 16 GB: Upgrade seemed to go fine, but then on restoring the last backup, we received the -34 error.¹ A quick web search suggested that this error was due to the device being almost full before the update, and because the down-convert mp3s to 128 kbps was checked in the sync settings, iTunes defaulted to trying to sync the full-size mp3s back to the updated device instead of down-converting them again. When the dialogue box popped up to try the restore again, we had to cancel out and do a manual re-sync. That worked.

One would expect these types of issues to have been resolved by Apple before the iOS 5 release. Whoever is behind the iTunes and iOS testing process, however, seems to be less serious about hammering out bugs than in other Apple products. After all, the iOS upgrade process has not been without error in the past, and this is a pretty significant update. At the very least, we’d expect there to be more system feedback on what iTunes is doing at any given time. For instance, instead of “restoring apps”, we’d prefer some indication of what app is being restored, and maybe even a count of how many apps have been restored so far, versus how many are left. Some window of where we stand in the process, and what’s left, would also be nice.

It also doesn’t help that the post-update things-to-do is not very intuitive.Our family was quick to note how they would have never known what steps to take after the update, which boiled down to getting their Mobile Me accounts upgraded to iCloud, and ensuring that syncing and the iTunes store were set up properly. To make most use out of iCloud, all of the options like Photo Stream need to be turned on, but they’re not all on by default. Further, the iCloud backup option wasn’t on by default either, nor was the ability to sync with iTunes wirelessly.². Owners who started using Mobile Me after using iTunes may also have two accounts, so they need to configure their devices with their Mobile Me/iCloud accounts, and then manually switch their AppStore username even if it was correctly configured before the update already.³

Fortunately, iOS 5 is a nice update, so the struggles are ultimately worth it. Still, it’s surprising that there are as many hiccups out there as people are reporting, especially this late in the game.

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Following up our post on handwriting apps for the iPad, we recently revisited some of the apps we tried, and replaced, with Notes Plus. We’ve been waiting for the new version of Notes Plus to hit the AppStore, but it’s likely still some weeks off, and in the meantime, the competition has released point releases offering more functionality. Maybe Notes Plus will retake the crown when 3.0 hits later this autumn, but for now, it’s not the clear winner in this genre anymore.

Penultimate has a paper store now, where you can download additional backgrounds to write on. It also allows importing of pictures to mock up, and as always, it offers arguably the best “ink” feel of any of the apps in this category. While a zoom feature is planned, the current lack of this feature keeps it from being a serious note-taking tool for more than quick sketches and notes.¹

We also took another look at Noteshelf, which now sports a zoom window that’s configurable and auto-advances. We’ve actually grown to like the non-auto-advance zoom window that Notes Plus has, if only because the auto-advance feature tends to introduce momentary lag; the Notes Plus zoom box is simply quicker to write on. That said, since the zoom window can be customized, it’s easy to write at exactly the size you want, regardless of paper style used. (And Noteshelf has a paper store too, now.)

Noteshelf has better notebook organization now, too, as notebooks can be grouped, which somewhat emulates folders. The design of the app is overall more aesthetically pleasing, too, and the inking is nearly on par with Penultimate. Between the design and ink quality, this makes using Noteshelf a far more pleasing experience than Notes Plus. Another new feature is importing photos, and while they can’t be resized once placed on a page, this is a top feature we want in this type of app, and the fact that it remains lacking in Notes Plus is unfortunate. What we’d prefer is if our scribbles over an imported photo remain independent from the photo, but this and the lack of image resizing isn’t a deal-breaker.²

Notes Plus still offers audio recording, which is an awesome feature, but one we don’t really use. It’s nice to know that the feature is there, but since we don’t rely on it most of the time, Notes Plus has fallen off our main screen and was replaced by Noteself. It’s interesting how close these apps are to one another in terms of quality, however, and we can easily see Notes Plus regaining the throne in short order, or even Penultimate launching itself to the top with the inclusion of zoom functionality.

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