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Life with the iPad has gone really, really well. Performance is great, size is great, screen is really nice, the lack of Flash hasn’t hurt me at all…and then it happened. We started researching new cars and for the first time since owning the iPad and it became very difficult to do without Flash.

I get it, I’ve been an OS X user for 8 or 9 years now and I know what the Flash player can do. The CPU goes up, the fans kick in, and the performance goes down. I’ve been there many times. But even if the world decided to make html5 a killer Flash replacement it would not change over night. I would like to make the decision on running Flash or not. It ends up that I do want the “complete” web experience and good or bad, Flash is a part of that.

It’s a shame that Apple didn’t take the approach or working with Adobe to improve the Flash experience instead of an outright ban. Maybe all of that past Windows preference by Adobe had something to do with it. Steve has made his position clear I guess, but tonight was the first time that i had to use something other than my iPad to use the web and that is unfortunate.

So here we are, a little more than a month after the release of the wifi iPad models and it’s still going strong for me. Since the release on 4/3 I have tried to use the iPad for my only computer at home and I’ve been (mostly) successful. After using the iPad exclusively for a couple of weeks I handed my MacBook Pro over to my wife and I haven’t had any regrets. Whether the iPad will work exclusively for you is an individual decision, but I thought I would post some of the things that work well, and some that need a little more work.  One thing that really surprised me – I apparently need Flash a lot less than I thought I did.  I don’t think I have run in to a single issue in the past month where the lack of Flash has caused me a problem.

The good:

• The battery life is amazing
• The size and weight work out really well
• The screen is beautiful, sharp, and bright
• The on screen keyboard is way better than I better than I expected
• Apps written for the iPad look very nice

The other:

• No wireless sync, so you have to activate and occasionally connect to a computer.  This is why I said “mostly” above.  You still need a computer to activate.
• The screen is a magnet for finger prints. The good news is you only see them when the screen is off or dark.
• iBooks has set the standard for how to turn a page. Now go make that work for the built in calendar and contacts applications. All developers should implement this, I don’t want to hit a next button to turn a page again.
• No alarm. I know, I complained about this before, but it really makes no sense that this is not included with this thing. I know there are third party alarms available, but you have to have them running (which I do) but if that alarm app crashes for unknown reasons overnight you are going to be late for work. Trust me, I speak from experience on this one.
• I still want a customizable home screen so that I can display a clock with an alarm, the current weather, the forecast, and maybe a news feed or 2. Call it nightstand mode.  Is that so much to ask?

Overall I do enjoy using the iPad. As someone who has been in the IT field for almost 26 years I did not think this was going to work for me. But I was wrong and the iPad has worked out just fine. But, and here is the important part, I still ace access to another computer if i need to access a little heavier lifting, like Skype. Other than that I am full time iPad. I think my next move is the 3G model so I can stop using the Verizon mifi when away from wifi, but you can’t find one anywhere.

It’s funny, but giving my MacBook Pro to my wife was a huge upgrade from her older G4 PowerBook, so she was immediately happy with the additional performance. But guess what she reaches for when she wants to use a computer? Correct, the same thing my youngest daughter reaches for, my iPad. I think the wireless thin client – I mean, the wireless tablet – I mean, the wireless iPad, could push the whole “home server” market a little further, but the safer bet is probably that the iPad makes for an excellent thin client for cloud computer.

You have to give Apple credit for one thing at least – they certainly know how to get press coverage when they want to announce something.  I won’t get in to all of the specs since you can go read about them here, but I have been asked about the iPad enough that I thought I would just put together a quick post with some of my thoughts.

For all of you uber-geeks out there this may not be for you.  You wanted power – lot’s of power – in a small package.  You wanted something like a MacBook Pro screen without the rest of the computer.  You probably wanted it to run OS X.  You wanted full support for Flash.  You wanted a camera in the front for video conferencing and a camera on the back so that you could take pictures.  You wanted GPS.  You wanted an OLED screen.  You wanted multitasking.  You probably expected all of this with 4+ hours of battery life.  AT&T?!  Are you kidding me?  No wonder you are so upset about this thing.  And what’s with the name?  Even my wife thinks this thing is stupid.

But there is a different demographic that Apple is aware of and they don’t care about most of that stuff.  They love what their iPod Touch can do and they just wish it had a larger screen.  Maybe they would have liked to have the Touch but the screen was just too small (trust me, hit 40 and reading small screens starts to get interesting).  They would be happy reading their “newspaper” online with this thing.  eBooks?  Sure, why not?  It’s not open like Android.  They don’t care.  Truly they don’t.  They don’t understand vendor lock-in and they really don’t care as long as it does the things that they want it to do.

I think of it kind of like the Nintendo Wii.  The Wii is the least powerful game console out there.  The XBox 360 and the PS3 just crush the Wii’s hardware specs.  The XBox 360 and the PS3 are both capable of doing much more than just games, yet somehow the Wii just keeps chugging along and is one of the most popular game consoles around.  I know a ton of people that have one.  But the serious gamers I know have the XBox 360, PS3, or use a Windows PC.  The Wii is accessible and easily used by the masses.  The interface and controller require very little thought – you can just pick up the controller and play most games.

Personally, I fit more in to the geek category than the non-geek category but I am sure that I will buy one.  I’ll buy it because I love technology and like to think that I occasionally understand where things are headed – and I don’t think this is such a bad product at all.  Just like the iPhone and iTunes before it, the apps and the acceptance will come.  I’m even dumb enough to think that we could still see some changes to it for the launch.  Maybe that camera will show up as well as a new version of the OS that will allow multitasking.  Remember, this is Apple’s chip in this thing so we really don’t know what it can, and cannot do yet.

I’m certainly not right all of the time, and many of the smartest people on the Internet (as well as my wife) seem to think that this one falls short, but I still believe that the iPad will do very well.  I would be surprised if Apple sells less than 2-3 million of them by the end of this year.  And maybe, just maybe, as technology continues to advance and costs come down, Apple will give us some of those MacBook components in a tablet form – including the OS.  Until then, I can see no reason why they would be willing to cannibalize their laptop sales by giving us everything that we really wanted in a tablet.

The iPad is the iPod Touch for an entire generation that has a lot of disposable income and needs reading glasses.  You already know them because they raised you as children and are now showing up on Facebook in droves.

I’ve been fighting an issue with OS X’s Mail application and it has finally driven us apart. You see, I have a bunch of friends that like to send me email with various jokes in the form of video attachment and the problem is that once I open the email, Mail takes the CPU on my MacBook Pro to the ceiling and the fan kicks in. Eventually the only way to stop it is to force quit Mail and restart it.

But lately even that isn’t taking care of it. I’ve tried rebuilding the mailbox that I use via imap with gmail but that only lasts for a short while. So until I get this one figured out Mail and I are on a break. I have turned to Microsoft Entourage and things seem to be fine. I know many really dislike Entourage, but I’ve had pretty good success with it in the past as I used to use it to connect to an Exchange2003 server with work.

Back to the internets to see if I can find the solution.

The main reason I had a jailbroken iPod Touch is because I really liked the game Five Dice.  Five Dice is an excellent version of the old dice game called Yahtzee.  I was hoping that the developer would bring it to the App store once version 2.0 of the software was out and they came through.

This is not the exact same game that was available for free if you were jailbroken.  This version has a lot more polish and the graphics are very professional.  The game play is very smooth and the little touches of animation are pretty slick.  Another big difference is that the game is no longer free – it costs $3.99.

I’m sure there will be people that enjoyed the jailbroken version complaining about the costs, but I think it is definitely worth the few bucks it costs.  The game is every bit as polished as any other professionally developed game and I see no issue with the developers getting paid for their work. 3.99 – what’s that – a cup of fancy coffee or a pack of cigarettes?

Hopefully they will make a ton of money from this little application and put some of it back in to the game to provide over the air multi player capability.  That would be pretty cool.

If you grew up playing the game Yahtzee you should take a chance and spend the few bucks it costs to try it out.  It’s definitely worth it.

In infrastructure we face outages of systems at any time.  When people can’t get to their applications, data, or email one of the most important things we can do is to communicate openly and honestly with them until the issue is resolved.  People tend to be a little more understanding of the issue if they at least have some idea of what is going on.

Seeing Apple start to communicate on the recent MobileMe issues is a great start and I hope they start to be more open with any system issues they are facing to help keep everyone more current with information.

I realized a mistake I have been making with purchasing applications from the iTunes App store and the iPhone.  I thought it would work like this:

• Purchase an application from iTunes and it would then sync with the phone – check.
• Check for updates to purchased applications with iTunes and have those updated applications sync to the phone – check.
• Purchase an application using the iPhone and have it sync back to iTunes – check.  Well, that’s how I thought it worked once.

Continued from Part 1…

Thankfully I was able to get her phone operational again by holding down the button at the top edge of the phone until it asked me if I wanted to power it off.  I powered it off and back on again and all seemed fine, but I lost just a tiny bit of confidence at that point in time, kind of like when a car has an issue and you never quite trust it again.  It happened to me a few more times that night – some times it would let me power it off and some times I would have to hold that top button and the button on the front at the same time until the phone reset itself.  More recently none of those tricks seemed to work and I had to do the top and front button reset dance numerous times before the phone finally came to life.  That one was really scary.

I am not a stranger to computers and failure.  I am in my 22nd year in infrastructure and see bugs all of the time.  But this one hurt a little somewhere deep inside because, like many, I had fallen in to the fuzzy, happy world where Apple would never, ever make mistakes like this.  And this was just one little piece of the issues that would rock my happy little Apple world and slap me right back in to reality, where you remember that these are things engineered, designed, coded, and tested by humans.  Humans are imperfect and make mistakes, and now the entire world knows that Apple makes them as well – Activation, 2.0, MobileMe,  Welcome to the real world Apple.  That’s a lot of things happening at the same time that should have been avoided.  It will be interesting to see if Apple learns anything from this.  Scaling is hard.  Enterprises are hard.

The 2.0 software and the App store are an amazing example of systems and integration.  But they are not perfect.  I have applications crash on me all the time.  I actually blame Apple for most of these as I don’t believe any application’s crash should be able to take down the phone’s OS, but it sure seems like that happens a lot.  Those apps that just crash back to the icon screen I believe are probably the developer’s issue to resolve, but the rest should sit firmly on Apple’s shoulders.  If you are running applications from the App store I would encourage you to check for any updates daily.  The developers seem to be working hard to get any bugs eliminated and I have seen a ton of updates to applications over the last 2 weeks.

I don’t know if Apple has a beta program for these developers and their testers, but they need to get one in place if it doesn’t exist.  Right now we, the people, are Apple’s beta testers and that would bother me a little less if I hadn’t paid 10 bucks for that privilege on my Touch and if Apple would have just stated that initially.  Let’s be honest, Apple still would have picked up thousands and thousands of people that would be willing to test their software – and probably pay for the privilege.  But, no application crash should ever take down the entire phone.  Period.  

It’s probably a good thing that Apple is out of iPhones all over the country or this could be a bigger black eye than it already is.  It will be interesting to see how many people stay up late at night clicking that Check Now button in iTunes when the next release rolls around.  Apple, we need 2.0.1 or 2.1 or what ever you are going to call it, soon.

What do you think, will you be cautious the next time Apple releases something or will you move ahead as you normally do because it is the next great thing from Apple?

There is so much to catch up on since Apple released 2.0 for the iPhone and iPod Touch that it’s hard to figure out where to start.

On July 11, 2008, we were getting ready to leave for a vacation to Myrtle Beach when I noticed the 2.0 software release for the iPhone was out.  Since my wife has the original iPhone I decided to download 2.0 and apply it once we got to the beach.  2.0 downloaded so fast that I figured I might as well apply it before I got in the shower, so I did.  (By the way, this was less than 10 minutes after my wife begged me not to touch her phone before our trip as she likes to use it when we’re on the road.)  Hey, it’s Apple, and Apple has never let me down before.  What could happen?  Well, thousands of you probably know the rest – after the 2.0 update the phone reset itself and needed to communicate with Apple’s servers to activate.  Since those servers were totally overwhelmed, nothing was happening.  So I jumped in the shower and figured it would be done by the time we were ready to leave.  No such luck.  I checked the Apple forums and found I was definitely not alone, but we had to get on the road so I grabbed my wife’s iPhone, her laptop, my laptop, and my backpack and we headed out the door. 

She was not a happy camper.  No phone to play with on the road trip meant no Goggle Maps.  It doesn’t matter that the awesome Garmin Nuvi 350 was less than 5 feet from her head, it was not her phone and Google Maps.  So she asked to use my iPod Touch since it was jailbroken and had FiveDice on it.  Well, unfortunately I had restored it to factory default to get ready for the 2.0 software for the Touch, which didn’t come out for another 13 hours.  If the software had been available for the Touch I would have never touched her phone at all.  So, no FiveDice.  Strike 2.

Then it hit her that we packed the Nintendo DS and that would surely give her plenty to do for a while.  Except that it was packed in the trunk of the car, which was an amazing feat in itself as we were originally going to take the mini van but decided to take the car to get better gas mileage.  The DS was buried deep in the bottom of all the luggage, beach chairs, and body boards.  Strike 3.

I had no intention of taking her laptop to the beach that day, but I grabbed her PowerBook because I didn’t know if I would have to complete the activation process on the same computer that had started it on or if I could use my MacBook Pro.  Unfortunately I wasn’t smart enough to grab the power supply and the battery on her PowerBook has seen better days.  If we’re lucky we’ll get 30 minutes on a full charge.  So I turned on her PowerBook and killed every program that started up and launched iTunes.  I turned the screen down to 1 little bar and hoped I could find a wireless signal.  Thankfully the hotel we were in that night had wifi and the iPhone activated itself almost as quickly as I plugged it in to the PowerBook.  Success!  We can now use the iPhone as a phone.  ”Apple must have resolved their capacity issues.”  ”Hey, where’s all your data?”

Next came the fun of holding my breath through the longest initial restore of data to a device in my lifetime.  I would continually take the screen down to 0 bars, then back to 1 a little later to watch the restore progress.  The battery indicator was down to 14 minutes and had turned red.  Not good.  Turn the screen back off.  With just 7 minutes of reported battery life left the iPhone retuned to its glorious former self.  It was a phone with all the data she had on it previously.  Life was good.

“Hey Valerie, check out all these cool apps I loaded on here for you” I said with the joy of a child on Christmas morning.  ”Watch how…hey, why is it just a black screen with an Apple logo in the middle of it now?”  Uh oh.

That would not be the last time that I saw that black screen with the Apple logo.

To be continued…

I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.

Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)

Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!

As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive.  In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.

So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:

• For email, either use a web browser to access your email at your ISP (or GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) or configure your mail client for IMAP so you always have a copy of your email at your mail provider. If you must do POP/POP3 configure the client to leave a copy of the messages on the server. This way you will not have to deal with email recovery in the event of a disaster.  If your ISP purges email from its servers every X amount of days – find another email provider.
• Do yourself a favor so you never have to go through the recovery process I just went through – go buy an external USB drive and use it for backups. The performance will be fine and if you are running OS X Leopard it will immediately recognize the disk and ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. Answer yes and move on with your life. I probably spent close to 12 hours trying to save the data because I knew very few others would even try to save her data at all. The drives work just as well with Windows. I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the backup software that comes with the drives, as the operating system will have something you can use that it probably better.

There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac – just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.

Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.