Bob Martens

As a person who is generally very pleased with his iPhone 3GS (by far the best phone I’ve ever owned, and very close to the best technology device I’ve ever owned), the announcements of iOS 5 are welcome, but not as exciting as either Lion or iCloud to me. I’ll run down just a few things that matter in just a bit.

First, I’ll just recap really quick thoughts on the stuff that really doesn’t excite me all that much but other people will find interesting.

Game Center … meh. I don’t play games on my phone so no use. Twitter? Eh. I already use Twitter. I guess being able to send a twoot from Photos will be nice but not a huge deal. iMessage? I guess it will be nice for Laura and I, but nothing huge for me. Newsstand? Nope.  Reminders? I just ditched Things for pen-and-paper for the sake of simplicity.

Enough of that.

Camera/Photos

My next iPhone is going to replace both a point-and-shoot and camcorder for me. The iPhone 4 would already do that, but I don’t have one. The 3GS is good, but not quite good enough to completely replace everything. Be it a 4 or 4S/5 it really doesn’t matter because it will be replacing my camera.

So the quick snap from the lock screen is going to be a very nice addition. Re-purposing the volume-up button for shutter will be nice, but it still doesn’t sit right with me to reuse a button like that. Perhaps the next version will have a dedicated hardware button for shooting pics, who knows, but I guess it will be nice to get my finger off of the screen for pics.

Some simple editing capabilities along with some improvements to how it handles balancing colors and focusing are all good improvements. People use their phones as cameras, so adding features that make it easier is a good thing.

Notifications

Probably the single biggest headache for me has been dealing with notifications. My way of handling them has been to turn off all pop up notifications that I can and just use badges when needed (mainly for Twitter). Of the notification systems that I have been able to use, I’ve like Android’s the best and I am somewhat pleased to see Apple use that, seemingly, as a template.

You can find out how it works somewhere else, but being able to get at any of the notifications from the lock screen is a nice touch (just slide on the notification). My one hope, for now, is that I can disable the weather and stock tickers. I have no need for either.

PC Free

Being able to set up your phone before attaching it to a computer is awesome, and I’m sure my friends still working at an Apple Store will appreciate not needing to have access to an iMac to get people set up. More of this will be covered in my post on iCloud.

This is another step toward iOS devices being completely and totally independent of any other device. Another page out of Android’s book (somewhat), it is good to see Apple continue to go in this direction.

It is also exciting because it means I will be able recommend iOS to more of my family and replace some of the complex PCs soon(ish).

Wi-Fi Sync

This one is more for power users, and I’m excited about it. Sure, it will probably take all night, but being able to plug in your phone (to the wall) and then have it wirelessly sync with your computer while it is charging is seriously awesome.

Granted, it needs to be plugged into a power source, but I can understand why this is needed. The last thing I would want is for me to come home, have my phone wirelessly sync, leave the house and find that my phone only has 5% battery power left because it really wanted me to have the latest episode of Back to Work.

AirPlay Mirroring

This wasn’t really touched on during the Keynote, but I am most excited about this as a person working for an educational institution. Essentially, you can have one Apple TV (2nd gen) hooked up to an HDTV and any number of iPad’s in the classroom and they can wireless share whatever is on their screen from anywhere in the room (or school for that matter). Seriously cool, and I agree with Fraser Speirs:

The interactive whiteboard has had its day.

That’s seriously cool and, if it works well, could change things considerably in a classroom. The key is that is has to work seamlessly for it to be effective. I hope that some developers are starting to think of new ways to exploit this 1:1 screen-sharing opportunity in the classroom.

Overall Impressions

There is a lot in iOS 5, but I’m still more excited about Lion.

A lot of what was announced directly hits at what other platforms have been doing better, but brings it to iOS and just makes the platform that much stronger. It seems like the elevation of iOS to the Mac’s peer instead of an accessory to the larger, older platform … which is both cool and kind of frightening at the same time.

Some people have been saying that the entire presentation seemed to be saying “we’ve been listening to you for the past four years and here is what we’ve come up with to fix these issues.” I’d agree with that. Apple has been listening, and it will be even more interesting to see how everything works once it is released … this Fall.

I’d expect a simultaneous iPhone 4S/5 + iOS 5 release right around the time we usually expect iPods.

If you don’t like Apple products, you might as well skip over my next few posts. I’ll get back to more interesting things after a while, but for now I’m going to cover some of my thoughts on the announcements from Apple’s keynote for WWDC 2011.

First on the list is Mac OS X Lion (or 10.7, I’m not sure if they’re going to get away from numbering their OS from this point forward). Where 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was a great upgrade from the standpoint that it didn’t change much in the UI but tightened everything up and cleaned up a lot of legacy code (adios PowerPC), Lion is bringing a lot of new stuff to the table. You can find more information at http://apple.com/macosx. I’m going to cover just a couple of things that stood out to me.

Auto Save and Versions

This is a long time in coming, and it should have been something added a long time ago. Auto Save does what it says it does, it automatically saves your work for you without you having to think about it. I’m hoping that this will just become something that will become normal across all platforms because losing your work sucks, and this should make it suck just a little bit less.

Combined with Versions, it becomes quite cool. You can look back at your changes and bring stuff back if you need it on a per-document basis while working. That’s pretty cool. While there are a lot of specifics that are not known yet (how much disk space will this take up, what amount of work will it take on the part of developers to get this as well, can developers tie into this system), the idea as presented basically fixes many issues that people have about forgetting to save their work.

That’s a huge deal!

The idea that if one of my parents starts a document and it will continuously be saved while they are working so that I don’t have to go through the Microsoft Office recovery file rigamarole is very pleasing to my ears. I’m hoping it is as good as it sounds.

Mail

I currently use the Gmail web interface for my email, but the new Mail app looks pretty good. A better conversation view was definitely needed, and it has been provided. The search feature looks much improved, the interface looks nice and clean and there are probably other things I am missing. Will it be able to topple Gmail’s web interface? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try.

One person on Twitter was asking for Apple to add in labels (Gmail labels I am expecting), but that seems odd to me. I like labels, but that is most obvious way Google has embraced email and then extended it beyond the standard, and by doing so, has caused people to be locked into Gmail’s interface and their service.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of Gmail, but sometimes I wish that Google would have instead focused on keeping the basics of Gmail more in line with the RFCs, but that is neither here nor there.

I’ll give the new Mail.app a try and see what I think.

UPDATE: So it seems that there are going to be labels in the new Mail app. I’m not sure if it is a 1:1 correlation to Google’s implementation, but it is another thing for me to try out.

Lion Server

$50 from the Mac App Store when it is all said and done. I’m wondering if there is a client limit on that, but I’m excited about the prospects of a $79 server edition of Mac OS X that will allow small businesses you see what can be offered.

Granted, you need to have a Mac to take advantage of a lot of this stuff, but I am now going to be actively looking for a Mac Mini to put this on in the near future so that I can play around with the idea of hosting some of my own stuff on Mac OS X.

I do wish that they would bring back some rackmount hardware.

Overall Impressions

Lion looks like another huge leap for OS X, which is always exciting. Any inkling that the Mac is dead can be quickly tossed aside when you look at the amount of effort that has gone into Lion. It is refreshing to see so much focus on fixing problems that have been plaguing people on computers for a long time.

There are a ton of other changes, but I will leave you to look at them.

Lion, at $29, is proof that Apple is a hardware company, and that their software strategy is to help them sell more hardware to people by making their products that more compelling. Will it work for everyone? No, of course not. However, Lion is shaping up to be another great release of the OS.

The main question I have is how we are going to be able to recover from complete hard drive failures in the future. As Lion is being distributed through the Mac App Store (I guess exclusively), will we be able to burn recovery media? How will I be able to wipe my drive clean and get Lion onto it? That’s the most important worry I have at the moment.

Next up will be iOS 5.