Like many people, I’ve had some issues with the migration from MobileMe (and .Mac before that and iTools before that) to iCloud, and as I happen to be the sort of person people come to with questions about this, I thought I’d collect a few useful links here:

• iCloud Forgets to Keep it Simple by Ted Landau at MacObserver
• All about iCloud: Common signup scenarios by Serenity Caldwell at Macworld
• Take Control of iCloud eBook by Joe Kissell for TidBITs’ Take Control series
• Using iCloud with iWork for iOS by Lex Friedman for Macworld
• Search for all iCloud-related articles at Macworld.com — there are too many to list here

Back in June of 2010, I published “iPad apps: best I’ve found so far.” Time for an update.

Home screen

Here’s my current home screen, with the most-frequently used apps in the dock. The closer to the bottom-left of the screen, the more-often it gets opened.

Dock

• OmniFocus has replaced Things as my GTD-based task management tool of choice on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. It is indispensable.
• Apple’s Mail app is used far too often.
• Twitter is my current Twitter client, though I bounce back and forth between it and Twitterrific. I like trying lots of Twitter apps because there’s a lot of innovation going on in this space, and because it’s easy to jump from one to another. Ideally, though, I want to run the same app on Mac/iPhone/iPad, otherwise it gets easy to confuse DMs, @replies, etc. And that can get awkward.
• 1Password. Stop reading and go get it. I’ll wait. Here’s a recent post on 1Password.
• Safari, for those times I don’t need a secure log-in.
• Notes apps — an entire folder full of note-taking apps.

Other home screen apps

• Calendar, Contacts. There are no compelling reasons to replace these that I’ve seen.
• iBooks. Solid. The reading experience is very good. Recent addition of Collections is welcome. Inability to copy passages from books is not.
• Kindle. Amazon’s reader is kind of weird around the edges; getting books into it is easy, actually, but totally any other iPad process I’ve come across. Still, their book selection is excellent, and reading in the Kindle app is just fine. Lack of clipboard-export support is as frustrating as with iBooks.
• Instapaper. Marco Arment’s little app that could. Send all the web-based stuff you want to read later to this service, then read it at your leisure on your iPhone, iPad or on the web. Might sound bizarre, but it’s awesome.
• Reeder. My favourite way to consume RSS feeds. The fact that the icon is a different colour than on the iPhone (where it debuted) or on the Mac (where it’s different altogether) makes it quite difficult for my visually-oriented brain to actually find this app; I wish the developer would bring the icons into sync.
• iPod. Yes, I acutally use this. Mostly for podcasts on the iPad.
• Videos. Movies (mainly backups of my DVDs or Digital Copies from my Blu-Ray™ collection), videos I’ve shot myself and video podcasts. Awesome for the treadmill.

Notes folder

• Evernote is fantastic. Mac/iPhone/iPad/web. Sharable, OCR-searchable, GPS-enabled, awesomeness. Job-related notes go in here. Everything goes in here.
• Penultimate. Just got it. Looks great. Looking forward to using it. Others, like Adobe Ideas, never really worked for me, and the Griffin stylus I have isn’t great for drawing (too much friction); a finger works fine, though.
• PlainText, with Dropbox support, seems to be my go-to app for quick notes.
• iA Writer is very nice. I’m not a writer, though, so I don’t use it very often.
• Pages. Never use it.
• SoundNote is great if you wish to record the audio in a meeting and be able to cue up what was being said when your typed something out. A revolutionary concept in note-taking, really. Can be handy, but get permission from meeting participants first — there is a creepiness factor otherwise.
• Trunk Notes is a wiki-style editor with Markdown and Dropbox support. Never really use it.
• TextExpander is especially great if you also use it on the Mac; it allows short, user-defined keystrokes to expand into longer strings of characters. Type “TII”, for example, and get “Tantramar Interactive Inc.” as output. Despite iOS not supporting the kind of background processes that would enable this on the Mac, enough apps have built-in TextExpander support that this turns out to be quite handy. When you remember it.
• Notes, Simplenote, Audiotorium, Adobe Ideas (a drawing-based notes app), and Chalk (an iPad-only, web-based, drawing-oriented notes app from 37Signals, round out the notes apps.
• WordPress, which used to be buggy, and which once deleted an entire post on me, sits here, languishing, until MarsEdit for iPad comes along. Are you listening, Daniel?

Work

I have a conflicted relationship with most of the apps in this folder. In theory they’re all great. I never open this folder.

• Daylite. Sigh. This might be awesome if I ever find the time to finish setting up a proper server for it.
• OmniGraffle. One of the best apps I never use.
• Keynote, Numbers. They’re great. I don’t need them.
• Bento. Why do I keep imagining that I will need this one day?
• Doodle. Website is all I need.
• Insight. Please don’t make me use Basecamp any more.
• LinkedIn. Website is more than I need.
• CSS3Machine. I’m sure this would be handy if I was smart enough to figure it out.
• AnalyticsPro. I tend to prefer Google’s web-based version, but this is sometimes handy.
• dbd, Delibar & Bookmarks: Delicious apps. Delibar is my favourite on the Mac, but I think I would like dbd better if it supported multiple accounts. Maybe it does, but I haven’t figured it out if it does.
• iTeleport. One of the best apps I never use.
• Server Admin. I actually use this regularly. It’s quite good.

Reference

• Dictionary. The full, paid version. Love it.
• Maps. Handy.
• Google Earth. Don’t know why I don’t delete it. It demos well, but it’s useless to me.
• Translate. From Google. Mind-blowing.
• Star Walk. Real-time observational astronomy app. As someone who used to teach introductory astronomy at the university level, I love this app. The iPhone version is just as cool.
• Soulver. Very cool concept. Never use it.
• Wolfram. Very cool but hard-to-grasp concept. Is it reference? Is it calculation? Is it Q&A? Never use it.
• iMDB. Use this far too often.
• Articles. Award-winning Wikipedia app. Also great on the iPhone. Unnecessary. Get it anyway.
• Google. Never use it (I use Safari’s built-in Google search bar instead)

Social Media

• Twitterrific. On heavy rotation with Twitter.
• Friendly. Because Facebook has said they don’t view the iPad as a mobile computing device. Also because their iPad app — were it to exist — would likely be as frustrating as their iPhone app. Or their website, come to think of it. Never mind.
• Ego. Never use it. I never like what it has to say.
• Stumbleupon. No time.
• Droplr. A cool idea. Never use it.
• Birdhouse. A place to save Twitter drafts. Uh, what are twitter drafts? (drafts are built-in to most clients now)
• Echofon. Not on heavy-rotation as my Twitter client, but I like that it can sync my twitter stream’s read/unread status across platforms. Why do none of the others do this? Sadly not a killer feature, apparently. Still; not deleted.
• Osfoora HD. Huh. Forgot this was here. Twitter client.
• Tweet Library. Save your tweets, archive them offline. Handy, say, should you meet someone across the country and you want to review the timelines for a blog post…

Games

Not much to say about games, really. I don’t play them often. But then can amuse people who want to see what an iPad can do. mondoSolitaire from Ambrosia Software is probably my favourite. Osmos HD is cool, awesome sound, and also available on the Mac App Store.

Utilities

• Dropbox. The glue that holds it all together. So many apps sync/store their data via Dropbox. Love, love, love Dropbox. Works on all platforms. Get Dropbox free here.
• Awaken. Yes, my iPad and iPhone are my alarm clocks.
• DisplayPad lets you use your iPad as an external display for your Mac. Stupidly cool, especially if you have an 11″ MacBook Air with a small screen, and already carry your iPad around with it. Requires a wifi network.
• Pastebot. Copy and paste clipboard data between an iOS device and your Mac. Woah.
• Calcbot. Because Apple doesn’t ship a calculator app for the iPad.
• Napbot. Ambient/white noise generator. Handy for those with tinnitus.

Twitter’s popularity continues to grow, second only to Facebook in terms of the sheer number of users. The Twitter.com website offers a sophisticated interface, but there’s a healthy community of third-party developers providing apps that access Twitter’s features on the desktop and on mobile platforms.

The Apple ecosystem has been blessed with a number of really solid Twitter clients for Mac OS X and iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch), and one of the best — Twitterrific (which was featured among Macworld’s “10 best reading and productivity apps for 2010″) — has just released a major new version for Mac OS X.

Download Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac OS X:

• from IconFactory
• from the Mac App Store

Priced at $10 for the Mac, where the iPhone/iPad version is free for use with a single Twitter account, though you can purchase an in-app upgrade that unlocks advanced features, this price is not out-of-line considering the cost of competing apps and the value it provides.

As a regular user of many different Twitter clients (I’m not a fan of the Twitter website), something I value highly is having the same interface available across devices. Using Twitter’s iPhone app together with Twitterrific or Kiwi on the desktop is a recipe for confusion. Confusion that can result in sending what you thought was a private reply (a Direct Message) out to all of your followers on the public stream. Oops.

The main contenders offering Mac OS X and iOS clients are Twitter, Echofon and Twitterrific.

Twitter’s Native Apps

The Twitter app for Mac OS X (née Tweetie) was late to the game, and is very good. It’s also free, and has the competitive advantage of inside-knowledge of where Twitter’s feature-set is headed.

Despite that, the leap-frogging of iPad/iPhone/Mac versions of the client has resulted in a somewhat disjointed experience, with the iPad version in particular feeling a bit over-the-top in terms of interface conventions.

Twitter for iPad is also a bit buggy (direct messaging is a mess, frankly, with disappearing text and “send” buttons, inexplicably-inverted direct message timelines that lose position, etc.)

Echofon

Echofon costs $20 on the desktop, and has solid iPad and iPhone versions, and offers a compelling feature that I wish all Twitter apps would embrace: remembering what messages you’ve seen already — across devices. What Echofon lacks is an interesting interface. They’ve chosen a minimalist approach that many will love, but which doesn’t make it appealing to me.

Twitterrific

It’s hard to pin down what’s so good about Twitterrific. The cross-device consistency is a big part of it. It’s got an overall spit-and-polish that other platforms lack. Twitterrific’s colour-coding of your public stream, mentions and direct messages is one of my favourite features. It makes things easy to grasp at a glance and is very easy on the eyes.

Minor niggles

I only mention these because I like Twitterrific so much. Most people will never notice or care about these things, but I do.

1. the page-up/page-down keys do nothing in Twitterrific 4 for Mac (this harkens back to Tweetie, which fixed this in Twitter for Mac. Please fix this! The Home button scrolls you to the top of the stream, but that’s little consolation…)
2. when the timeline is scrolled to the top, there’s a gap at the top (the elevator/thumb/scrollbar doesn’t ever get to the top of the window), which makes it look as though there’s another message. The iPad version has this gap, but it’s much smaller.
3. messages (e.g. “Connection error”, “Message posted”, etc.) show up at the bottom of the window. But your attention is at the top of the window, where new Tweets show up. On a 27″ or 30″ display, that makes them effectively non-existant
4. Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac continues Twitterrific’s disjointed tweet-specific menu system. Right-clicking a tweet brings up one set of commands, while clicking the tweet’s arrow brings up another. Worse is that on iPad/iPhone, it’s hard to hit the arrow, which brings up the other menu, which is frustrating.
5. Twitterrific’s Messages pane mixes all of your DM conversations together; Twitter shows you each person’s avatar and lets you view conversations separately, which is better in that you’re less likely to send a reply to the wrong person

One of the best things about Twitter as a service is that it’s easy to switch clients, just to try them out, and switch back. There’s a lot of great, innovative work being done in this space, so download some apps, try them out, and reward the developers with a few dollars. They’ve earned it!

John Brandon has posted a glowing review of Agile Web Solutions’ 1Password 3 at Macworld.com.

1Password is simply indispensable. It runs on Apple’s Mac OS X (in Safari, Firefox and Chrome), in iOS (for iPod touch, iPhone and iPad), for Microsoft Windows and, via 1Passwordanywhere, via the web (providing access for Linux users and Mac & PC users when they’re not at their own computers).

1Password has many things going for it:

1. Less-filling, tastes great — it’s both convenient to use and highly secure (the holy grail of security in any context)
2. Encourages security, rewards laziness — 1Password makes it easy to use a different, high-quality password at every site you frequent (by generating them for you automatically, avoiding the dangerous tendency to recycle the same password at multiple sites)
3. Anti-phishing protection — by using pattern-matching to only show you the appropriate logins for the site you’re on, it will recognize when you’ve been lured onto a site that’s masquerading as your bank or sears.ca and won’t provide your login credentials.
4. Cheaper than the alternatives — It costs much less than the time and hassles involved with compromised online banking or ecommerce accounts
5. Active development — Agile Web Solutions has always provided timely updates for new browsers and operating systems — this is one of the most actively-developed apps that I use daily

@savoieadam was wondering what to get for his iPad, which prompted me to post this (I’d been meaning to anyway, since people keep asking…) To keep this short, I’ll limit it to iPad-specific apps, and leave out the iPhone apps I’m using. As on iTunes, “+” indicates universal iPad/iPhone/iPod apps.

Productivity Apps

• Things for iPad — first iPad app I bought
• Instapaper Pro + — indispensable
• Evernote + — indispensable
• OmniGraffle — very nice; again, takes some getting used to. Steep price, but worth it if you use it on the desktop, too.
• Bento
• Pages/Numbers/Keynote — export is annoying; takes some time to get used to UI conventions
• FlightControl HD — (this is the productivity section, right?)
• mondoSolitaire for iPad — see FlightControl…
• Brushes — iPad Edition — fun; has free Mac companion app
• Adobe Ideas + — Flash-free! (now there’s an Adobe Idea!)
• Stanza + — includes access to the O’Reilly bookstore
• iBooks — only Winnie the Pooh plus Project Gutenberg titles in Canada, so far; desperately needs to lose the fully-justified typesetting-sans-hyphenation. Sorry, Steve: it’s fugly.
• WebEx

News Apps

• BBC News + — best news app I’ve found yet.
• NPR for iPad — very nice
• Editors’ Choice (NY Times) — weird leading issue (extra space before last line of every paragraph) makes it irritating to use. Call me fussy; polish matters.
• WeatherBug Elite — nice; not sure I need the map; still looking for the perfect weather app that does metric.

Utilities

• 1Password Pro + — indispensable
• Dropbox + — indispensable
• iTeleport + — stupidly cool
• Server Admin +
• Awaken + (for getting through long Powerpoint presentations…)

Social Media

• Twitterific for iPad — not bad, but a little buggy; multiple accounts requires a not-unreasonable in-app purchase
• IM+ +
• FryPaper — Stephen Fry’s wit and wisdom
• Tweetdeck for iPad — I don’t use it
• Mashable! for iPad

Reference Apps

• Articles for iPad — Sophiestication‘s Apple Design Award winning app; love it
• IMDb + — indispensable
• Flixster + — indispensable, and actually has local cinema listings, including the Vogue here in Sackville!
• Dictionary
• WolframAlpha + — still trying to figure it out!
• PCalc Lite +
• WebMD for iPad
• Epicurious +
• Jumsoft Money +
• Shazam for iPad
• Google Mobile App — mostly just links out to web sites

Downloaded, installed, deleted

• GoodReader — bizarre interface
• National Geographic World Atlas HD — what is this for??
• Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Globe & Mail’s Globe2Go — indecipherable
• NYTimes Crosswords
• Tweeps
• Reuters News Pro
• Pulse News Reader

Anxiously Awaiting…

• Reeder — currently in Apple approval hell
• MarsEdit for iPad (unannounced, but fingers crossed)
• Analytics Pro
• Twitter (née Tweetie; for Mac and iPad) — currently in development hell
• Billings
• CBC Radio
• CBC News app (mobile sites only get you so far…)
• FlickIt Pro
• Skype
• Pastebot/Convertbot/Tweetbot
• TED

…and why did Apple leave out…

• a clock?
• a calculator?
• a notes app? (not that I like theirs…)
• Messages? (could’ve included it on the 3G model…)
• Compass?
• Weather?
• Stocks? (again, not that I’d use it, but…)

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the iPad is how I’m left-handed on it.

Someone commented the other day that they found using a computer difficult because they were left-handed. That seemed odd to me, since I’m predominantly left handed and I’ve never found it to be a problem on a computer. It may have come down to the fact that they shared a computer with a user who had a right-handed input device like a curved mouse.

On the desktop, despite being left-handed with a pen (for writing or drawing), I’ve always been a right-handed mouser; can’t use a mouse with my left hand to save my life. But that also means I’ve always had room to the left of my keyboards for a Wacom tablet of some sort — the ideal switch-up if my right hand or arm gets tired.

After a couple of years using an iPod touch and a couple of iPhones, I’d never really noticed whether I use my left or right hand on them. I’d guess I use each about equally, especially since I’m a reasonably-proficient two-thumbed typist (in portrait mode, please) on those devices. I could be wrong, but that’d be my guess.

On the iPad, I seem to prefer using my left hand for a lot of input, even when it’s on the right side of the screen. It doesn’t feel awkward to do that, it feels natural. I think that’s interesting.

A device with a virtual keyboard feels natural. That somehow seems counter-intuitive to someone like me who’s used so-called traditional computers for more than 20 years. Like Steve Jobs said: on the iPad, it’s like touching a web page directly. The device gets out of the way. I naturally gravitate towards using my left hand, without even thinking about it.

I even find the keyboard pretty easy to get along with, especially as I become less conscious of it; it’s still not quite as fast as a physical keyboard, but that’s mainly a case of adjusting to the slightly different arrangement from the iPhone. I have no doubt this will improve with a bit more use (I’m writing this on my iPad).

Every time I see some website drag out that old saw about how Flash has been installed by all sentient beings in the universe — and it’s been dragged out a lot lately, given the public spat between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad — I’m reminded of a quote by Abraham Lincoln:

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” —Abraham Lincoln

A recent article featuring similar logic (but without the sense of irony) can be found on DevGrow.com: Why Flash is here to stay.

Let’s be clear — I’m not saying Flash isn’t here to stay — Flash has a lot going for it.

DevGrow.com states: “Let’s face it, Flash is everywhere these days” and “…almost everyone has Flash player installed (99% of internet users, for those too lazy to check the link).”

Please: let’s stop pretending that Flash is ubiquitous, shall we? It’s misleading, as they say in parliament.

Those of us who weren’t too lazy to follow the link will note that Adobe is a bit more careful with their claims, qualifying this impressive-sounding statistic with the term Internet-enabled desktops.

It’s not a small difference.

While Adobe is careful in the small print to specify that it’s 99% of “internet-enabled PCs”, they’re happy to run the chart under the misleading subheading Flash content reaches 99% of Internet viewers.

The impression Adobe is trying to create here is:

People without Flash = nobody

I’m not sure why they don’t go one tiny step further and point out that 100% of people with Flash installed have installed Flash.

According to Steve Jobs, during the iPhone OS 4 keynote, iPhone has 64% of the mobile internet market. So much for Flash’s supposed ubiquity. Interestingly, Flash isn’t currently running on any of the remaining 36% of the mobile internet market, either. Certainly not in the author-once, publish-everywhere sense (Flash lite isn’t Flash).

While Flash will begin to ship for some non-Apple mobile devices after Adobe releases the full 10.1 player, at least for those users whose providers allow it, it isn’t even there now. So why act as though it is?

The fact remains that pretending Apple’s mobile devices don’t exist, and barging ahead anyway ignores the fact that 85 million Apple devices (plus more than a half-million iPads) that will likely never have Flash enabled, are in use today.

So should we use Flash or not?

If your website specifically targets Android or Blackberry users, great. Ignore iPhones, iPods touch and iPads. Otherwise, there are 85 million Apple devices — and untold millions of non-Apple mobile devices — in the wild that can’t see your Flash content.

The impression Apple is trying to create is:

85,000,000 ≠ nobody

I think a reasonable person must agree with Apple on this point.

As for Adobe’s claim… Back to you, Mr President: “You can fool all the people some of the time…”

It’s 2010.

There are no flying cars, but we’re living in the future.

You can tell because people keep pointing to the iPad as proof.

But the future isn’t perfect.

There have been rumblings about the clumsiness of document synchronization between the Mac and iPad with iWork documents from Keynote, Pages and Numbers.

John Gruber has suggested, in his thorough iPad review, that you should be able to “specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document“, so that there’s no more user-management required and no more duplication of your documents every time they migrate between devices.

Agreed.

In fact it’s a bit surprising that it doesn’t work this way today, given how magical the iPad is according to many.

Why isn’t it this easy? I think the trouble is that iWorks documents can get huge.

Most of my presentations, by the time they’re 15 or 20 slides, have 200 MB of embedded graphics and video. Today’s high-res photos and HD videos — which Apple has encouraged us to store in iLife or Aperture, and easily adding them to iWork documents is a key selling point — leads to this. My Numbers files rarely contain graphics, but that won’t be true for others; same for Pages.

The end result is that on a typical high-speed connection, it could take an hour or more for a graphics-heavy document to upload. That will take a fair bit of the “magic” out of the iPad experience.

Which is why I think the USB-tethered syncing of iWork files to the iPad is tolerable. For now. Even with a DSL or cable connection, which is typically much faster into the home or office than out to the cloud, it would take a long time to move all that data around. It isn’t going to be like adding a new contact on your iPhone and seeing it on your Desktop a few minutes later: it could take an hour or more to upload even a moderately-large file at 30 or 50 kilobits per second.

Time to check that your ISP is delivering the bandwidth you’re paying for.

Yes, Apple can get smarter about storage (keep the file local and the linked/embedded media in the cloud; or only keep low-res proxies of the media on the iPad, especially where it can’t print).

These problems will diminish as network speeds improve, but they haven’t in 10 years, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

For now Apple needs to work on the iTunes-based file transfer and iPad-based file management — no mean trick on a device designed to shield users from its file system — and hope ISPs (or Google!) solve the network problem soon.

Or let us all move our iPhoto/Aperture/iMovie/iTunes libraries onto MobileMe or Dropbox where our digital assets will always be available all the time.

I’d pay for that.

Now… where did I leave the keys to the hovercar?

Update (9:50 pm) — John Gruber has just posted a piece quoting Tim O’Reilly on iPhone/iPad media syncing. Gruber’s take: turn MobileMe into a free cloud-sync service.

I’d still pay for it.