Since owning one myself, I’ve fallen even more in love with it. With the exception of writing code and designing, it’s my main computer. I’m even writing this post on it. I’ve linked my Dropbox to a service called DropDAV that allows me to open and save iWork documents directly to the cloud and then on any other machine I use. My email, calendar and contacts are all synced across my phone and iPad via google. I use the iPad more efficiently than any desktop computer I have ever owned and because of this I find myself more organised. As well as doing the stuff I already did on my PC, the iPad has allowed me to consume news, blogs and RSS feeds in a way that I simply wasn’t able to keep up with on a PC.

All of this is great, but until Apple add a few things and tweak a few others it isn’t a fully viable PC replacement, and no, one of them isn’t the addition of Flash. Let me explain:

1. User accounts.

iOS was originally called iPhone OS. The clue is in the name. It’s an operating system designed for personal devices. You’re the only one who uses your phone and it’s the same with your iPod touch. The iPad, however isn’t necessarily a personal device. You might have one for your household and keep it in the living room for casual browsing for the whole family. If this is the case, things get sticky. When you use the device you want your email accounts in the email client. You want your twitter account in the twitter app and you want your bookmarks and saved passwords in safari. There are a multitude of other preferences that any one user might want to set slightly differently as well; wallpaper, home screen layout and screen brightness for instance. It’s even more important than it is on a desktop PC. This is because on a PC users use the browser more than individual apps (though this is changing) so they can simply log in to their services as they browse to them but unless you want to add and then remove your twitter account from the twitter app each time you use your iPad, we’re gonna need a user account system.

2. Slide to unlock? Really?

This is yet another symptom of the OS being lifted directly from a pocket device. On your phone you need to make sure that the device doesn’t unlock itself in your pocket but on the most part this simply isn’t an issue on a tablet. When people put them in their bags, they tend to use a case which will largely prevent buttons being pressed and the screen being interacted with. I’m not saying it should be removed all together but I’d wager that the vast majority of users don’t need the feature so it could be turned off by default.

3. A native “My Documents” area.

The problem with each app having its own sandboxed document storage area is you can’t access these documents from other apps. This means one of two things; you either have to do things in a backwards way, (such as tell a photo to put itself into an email rather than composing an email and then attaching a photo to it.) or not being able to do the thing you want to do at all. To be fair a lot of apps can access the photos folder, which is okay but what about documents, or notes, or contact cards? You just can’t access these things because they’re all held hostage by the app that created them. Just think how amazing it would be if you could access your Dropbox from whatever app you wanted to. This leads me nicely on to my next point…

4. File uploads from web forms.

I recently changed jobs. When I was looking for a new job I signed up to a few job search websites. You know the ones where you can upload your CV and employers can seek you out. Problem was, although I was able to make a nice looking CV in Pages, I couldn’t use the sites’ web forms to upload it. I had to fall back on to my PC, which was frustrating. If iOS had a central, native My Documents area that the browser and other apps could access this wouldn’t have been an issue. I could have simply uploaded my CV from that folder. At present you can’t even upload from the photos folder in most cases so setting avatars and profile pictures either has to be done on your PC or using the iOS app if there is one. Not ideal.

At the moment these are the only changes I can think of that would improve iOS on the iPad. Cue the Android fans jumping up and down going “God! We’ve been able to do that stuff for ages!” but guess what; I don’t want an Android device. I have yet to find one that offers the level of user experience found in iOS and even early reports of the Motorola Xoom, which some say is the first proper threat to the iPad, suggest it is clunky and sluggish even compared to the first generation Apple tablet. Not to mention that I could only find four things to moan about on the iPad. I might not complain about these four things in Android but I would bet a fair amount that I would find a lot more than four other gripes.

So what do you think? Are there any features that you would like to be changed or tweaked for the iPad?

Those following the development of Tweetbot won’t be unfamiliar with the difficulties that Tapbots had to overcome when making the app, most difficult of which was Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie, which later became Twitter for iPhone. By doing this, and making the app free, Twitter pretty much shut down the market for iPhone twitter clients overnight. Tapbots, it seemed needed to do something pretty special to get people to switch to a paid client. Guess what… They did it.

If one word summed up the feeling of using Tweetbot, for me it would be “right”. The level of functionality that has been shoehorned into such a sleek, minimal UI is unbelievable. Tweetie brought us the beginning of gesture based control with pull-down-to-refresh and swipe-to-reply/retweet/more but Tapbots have evolved this concept dramatically. Not only are there more gestures, you can set a custom action (triple tap) to do one of a number of things. Swipe left to view related tweets and right to view all tweets in a conversation. It just seems like the way things should be. The best thing though, is that Tweetbot doesn’t feel alien. I’ve used Tweetie/twitter for iPhone for well over a year but picking up Tweetbot was a breeze. Things you would expect are still there and work in much the same way, pull down to refresh, for instance. The new functionality compliments existing UI conventions, it doesn’t defy them.

My only gripe is one that doesn’t even apply to me; Tweetbot doesn’t include any push notification support. Up until recently I used Twitter push notifications and I know a lot of people who still do. The fact that switching client means they would lose that feature might be too jagged a pill to swallow for some people. That said, if Boxcar include it in an update, it could be easy to overcome.

So all in all, this is a very, very good app. Stable operation, exceptional UI all with Tapbots’ trademark design and sound effects makes Tweetbot well worth the £1.19 price tag. Get in there while the offer lasts, you won’t regret it. I now hope that Tapbots put some of the revenue that Tweetbot generates into developing an iPad version. The iPad has been without a half way decent Twitter client for far too long. If anyone can do it, Tapbots can.

Earlier today Andy tweeted:

No train journey is complete without strangers wanting to play with my iPad.

Quickly followed by:

If you don’t know how to use an iPad, you’re probably still figuring out how soup works.

I can only assume that the second tweet came about due to one of the aforementioned strangers having a tough time picking up the UI.

Bearing in mind that the iOS UI is regarded as the finest in the world, it would be reasonable to junp to the conclusion that the nameless stranger was, in fact in the business of eating soup with chopsticks. I mean, it’s simple right? Touch what you want to use and hit the home key to go back. Easy.

Or is it? Let’s not forget that this kind of rich, intuitive touch UI is still very much in its infancy and there are precious few, the likes of Apple and HTC that have come anywhere near getting it right. The market is still flooded with inferior, complicated touch and button based UIs. With this in mind the issue becomes a lot less black and white. Allow me to illustrate. I’ve handed my iPhone to a number of friends and family members who I would never think of as stupid. Some of them are even fairly competent when it comes to technology and more than a few of them have stuttered or struggled in its initial use. Interestingly, the constant with all of these people is that they owned older or inferior mobile phones with complicated button based UIs.

This got me thinking, it’s probably not the people being stupid, more a case of them being conditioned, over time to use mobile devices via complex key combinations and menus within menus within menus. When handed a device where carrying out a task is as simple as touching the icon it is totally understandable that it would appear alien to them. After all we only regard things as intuitive if our past experiences with similar things condition us to have compatible expectations. Not everyone has used a touch enabled phone before. As such, however slight, there is still a learning curve. And let’s not forget; this is just with mobile phones. There are many similarities between an old Nokia and an iPhone (the way you hold it and use your fingers and thumbs to type, for example.) An iPad is a totally new way of computing. No desktop, laptop or Netbook has worked quite like an iPad before and as such no one will have any subconscious expectations.

We need to apply this thinking when crafting UIs for anything from a simple brochure site to a fully featured complex web application. What might seem like second nature to us will be perceived and picked up differently by others depending on their experiences with similar things in the past. We need to be patient and sympathetic towards those who are not as fast to pick up a UI as we are. Moreover we must constantly think of them when we make things. Failure to do so will always come at the cost of the end user.

I had to rack my brains and do some serious internet combing to find model numbers and pictures of them all but I think I’ve documented them fairly well. So have a read… if you’re a total nerd like me.

Motorola AM3180 – Vodafone

Everyone remembers the first phone they ever had and I’m no exception. This unwieldy heavy beast made the pocket of my school trousers bulge when I was in year 11 (1999). It was one of the earliest PAYG handsets and typical of its time was very light on features. Alas it did all the jobs it was meant to do (calls and texts) perfectly well.

I was the only one I knew at that time with a Motorola. Cool when you consider that around this time the company was releasing its game-changing Star-Tac line of clam shell phones and the world was going mad for them. And so what if someone didn’t appreciate it. You could throw it at them for a quick hospitalisation.

Pros: Street cred, handy weapon.
Cons: Big, heavy, devoid of features

Sony CMD J6 – Vodafone

I got this sweet baby in my first year of college and kept it for the whole duration of my A Levels (1999-2001). Its sleek, lightweight design and refreshingly different, jog dial based UI made it stand out to me. At a time when the “cool kids” all had blocky, bland old Nokias I felt like a champion of good design.

It was really well built being Sony and was packed with decent features such as the newly emerging WAP and great sounding ring tones. Sadly the talk-time battery life was a bit of a let down, flat-lining around the 3 hour mark. For its time the J6 had a very high resolution display, albeit still monochrome. After pixelated green/black WAP porn sites lost their novelty factor, however the J6 didn’t offer much in the way of fun. Games were limited and a bit pants.

Pros: Compact, sleek, light, good UI, good build quality
Cons: Low talk-time battery life, poor games

Nokia 6510 – O2

This miniscule little phone was my first contract phone and also my first Nokia. Not only that, it was the smallest handset I’ve ever owned. Based loosely on the iconic 8210, the 6510 was geared more towards the executive market with its non-offensive colours and blue back-light instead of the usual green or white. What was also pretty awesome was that the LEDs behind the keypad were stupidly bright so you could pop the cover off and have a pretty sweet flashlight.

The 6510 sported the same great Nokia UI that had become famous with phones like the classic 3210 and games like snake and free cell were all there too. Where it fell short, however was with its lack of modern features such as polyphonic ring tones. These features were just starting to appear on phones released around the same time and would have been more than welcome on the 6510.

Pros: Small, light, executive look, great UI, doubles as flashlight
Cons: A bit light on cool features

Nokia 6600 – O2

Ah, my first “smartphone”. To this day I still love this phone and consider it to be one of my favourite nokia designs of all time. The 6600 was one of Nokias first widely adopted S60 camera phones, mainly because of its compact, stylish design and wealth of clever features such as video recording out of the box.

Although the design was lovely, the build quality left a little to be desired. The fit and finish was a little bit crappy and dirt worked its way into the seams and onto the screen. Not a huge deal but it did start to piss me off. Also, the series 60 OS, still in relative infancy was pretty buggy and the phone seemed to crash more than it should.

Pros: It sure was a looker, camera with video
Cons; Poor build quality, Buggy OS

Nokia 3230 – O2

I traded in my 6600 for something similar in features but smaller and with a better camera. The 3230 had a nice part-aluminium case and a modern screen orientated design. It ran S60 again but featured a supposed faster processor and more memory.

The reality of this phone was a nightmare. It was one of the slowest phones I’ve ever had the misfortune of using and it crashed like every 5 minutes. It took 20-30 seconds to capture a photo and the screen became caked in pocket dust inside 48 hours. No interchangeable covers meant that you had to dismantle the phone to get this crap out. 3-4 times a week.

One cool thing about this phone though, was the games. It came with a rally game and the first augmented reality app I’d ever seen in the form of a space invaders type game that used the camera to make an image for the background.

Pros: Kinda cool games
Cons: Slow, buggy, crappy fit and finish resulting in screen dust

Nokia 6310i – Orange

Now I didn’t actually own this phone, it was given to me as a work phone to use when I was on callout. It was a strictly business, function over fashion handset with no colour screen, no camera and a basic design.

That’s not to say it was a bad phone, far from it. The battery life was bordering on supernatural. I’d regularly exceed 2 weeks of standby time on a single charge. Also, everything about it was super-robust. It was built tough, the OS never crashed and it had one of the most stable Bluetooth implementations I’ve ever seen.

Pros: Massive batter life, good build quality, stable software
Cons: Only very basic features

Nokia N80 – Orange

After suffering the horrible 3230 for a year I looked for a phone that actually delivered on its promises. One of the original lineup of Nokia’s N Series, the N80 boasted 3G, 2 cameras including an unheard of 3 megapixel beast in the back and a beautiful high res screen.

Aside from a few minor crashes and a slightly cheap feel to the slide action this phone was a belter. The OS was stable, the UI was really nice and the camera took surprisingly crisp photos. The battery life was not the best but I’d regularly get 3-4 days out of a charge which is all I could really ever need. I liked this phone so much that I kept it for longer than my minimum contract.

The only thing that pissed me off was the fact that a beautiful all black version was released a few months after I got my silver one.

Pros: Cutting edge features (for the time), high res screen, fast and stable OS
Cons: Cheap feel to the slide action, underwhelming battery life

Nokia 6500 Slide – Orange

I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t choose this phone because of its features. The main reason I got this phone was because Orange gave me an iPod touch for free. On paper the phone was an upgrade… it had similar features to my N80 but they were all slightly improved. The camera shot the same resolution but Carl Zeiss optics made the images way clearer. The phone was built better, was smaller and the slide action felt reassuringly solid. So solid in fact that the phone was actually notably heavier than the N80.

It was a looker, too. Gloss black and brushed stainless steel made it look and feel really nice.

The downside to this phone was the UI. It lacked the intuitive simplicity that the N80 had and certain parts looked jagged and unfinished. Using the phone just wasn’t as pleasurable as it had been with the N80. I don’t regret having it though; the iPod touch made my mind up about what the next phone I bought would be.

Pros: Solid build, good camera
Cons: Nasty UI, heavy

Apple iPhone 3GS 16GB – O2

This brings us up to date. The phone I currently have is the iPhone 3GS. I gave the previous two versions of the iPhone a miss because, although they were good phones, they lacked some pretty fundamental features such as 3G and video capture. When the 3GS was launched with video, improvd camera with tap-to-focus and improved GPS with the added compass I only had a few months left on my 6500 contract so come December I got myself one.

Quite simply the best phone I’ve ever owned, the iPhone takes smartphone power and makes it easier to use than any other device on the market. Tens of thousands of apps mean that each phone is unique to the requirements of the user but the cutting edge UI means that the ease-of-use never suffers. And with each hardware and software release, the iphone just keeps getting better.

Pros: Best UI on earth, unparalleled app market, shaped the landscape for future mobile devices
Cons: Hard to name any but the battery life is pretty bad and the lack of flash *can* be annoying.

The timeline.

So there you have it. It’s not many phones by any means but I think it tells a story. What are your favourite/least favourite phones. What have you got now?

Having the app installed is no more handy than having a clubcard attached to your keys, in fact the process of finding the app, tapping it and waiting for it to load makes it marginally less handy. The beauty of smartphones is that they are two-way media. You can both send and receive information on the fly. Because of this, Tesco could, and should, implement the following features:

1. The ability to check your points balance from the app. EDIT: Literally the day after I posted this, Tesco released version 2.1 of the app that now allows the user to check points balance.
2. Special, app only offers and coupons delivered to the screen in the form of scannable barcodes.
3. The ability for customers to redeem their points balance in the form of a clubcard voucher on the screen.
4. The ability to pass points vouchers directly from the app to the tesco online store. (may only be possible in iPhone OS 4. I’m no expert)

These features, although not groundbreaking, would take a half decent app and make it outstanding. Chances are it would be fairly expensive to implement the infrastructure for these features but once it’s in place there’s no reason it has to be limited to iPhone users. Android and Windows mobile could have apps and even a simple mobile site could provide the same functionality to other phones. Low end phone users could even have the info and offer codes texted to them.

Although I’ve singled out Tesco, any outlet with a loyalty card system could jump on this bandwagon and improve the experience for all customers. So bloody get on with it!

DIBI, an acronym for “Design it, Build it” is a two-track conference meaning that there was one schedule for design talks (the ones I attended) and another for development talks with the option to move between tracks if you so wished.

Let me say, right from the off that the event was just excellent! Gavin Elliott and the team did an insanely great job of putting it together, not just in terms of the speaker line-up, which was superb but all the extras too. We were provided food, drink and stationary in the form of a field notes notebook not to mention a great after party with a free bar and free pizza. I heard from many people who had been to the likes of FOWD and dConstruct that DIBI blew them out of the water in terms of talks, atmosphere, professionalism and of course price and value.

The Talks

These were all great. The organisers couldn’t have got together a more wonderful group of speakers. Adii, Sarah Parmenter, Tim Van Damme, Simon Collison, Dan Rubin and Andy Clarke all gave inspiring, in some cases surprisingly helpful talks about a variety of web design issues from how to involve design in your startup from day one all the way through to taking a “hardboiled” approach to browser and device support.

I found all of the talks to be relevant but I did come away with some personal highlights. Simon Collison’s unparalleled obsession with design theory was beyond inspiring. He took a single dot and through manipulating it in various ways explored how the most basic shapes or colours can communicate so much more than what most would believe. I also found myself hugely surprised at how useful I found Sarah Parmenter’s talk about the principles of iPhone UI design. I learned things about Apple’s UI guidelines and app store entry requirements than I ever thought existed.

My favourite talk of the day, though had to be Hardboiled Web Design with Andy Clarke. I’ve always been a fan of his direct, uncompromising approach to browser support and his ethos of build for the best browser then strip back layers of eye candy accordingly for the older ones. In that respect, his talk didn’t really cover anything new but what it did push, and very well, was the “why” in all of this. He spoke about how when it comes to users, ignorance is bliss and that we should all wake up to the fact that most clients don’t even know what a browser is, let alone know that there are many available. As long as what they see in the browser is appropriate for purpose, they’ll enjoy the eye candy if their browser supports it and won’t miss it if they’re running IE it doesn’t. I certainly left inspired to push the boundaries in my next project and also to make Safari my default browser.

The Extra Bits

Like I mentioned before the organisers made sure everyone was well looked after. We all got field notes notebooks, as much coffee and juice as we wanted and ice cream and free Red Bull in the afternoon. On top of this, lunch was thrown in as well. Parking? Yeah they made sure it only cost me £3 for the whole day. Blam!

DIBI provided attendees with not one but two parties and although I didn’t make the first one I’m told it was excellent. The after party with open bar and free pizza was nothing short of legendary. The venue was a little hot and a little cramped but I’d be a dick if I said that made a difference. There was poker, roulette and blackjack tables (all playing for funny money, of course) and of course it was an excellent opportunity to meet great people and put faces to @names.

These guys clearly believe that it’s the little things that make a big difference.

Shout Outs.

Well here’s where I name drop a little bit. Firstly, a massive virtual pat on the back to Gavin Elliott and the team for pulling off an event with such gloss and precision. You’d think they’d been doing it for years. Now on to the excellent people I met. Ash Baxter, Paul Stanton, Chris Spooner, Amy Mahon, John O’Nolan, Adii (and the rest of the WooTeam) David Appleyard, Sam Brown, Jack Osborne, Sean Hood, Emma Persky, Hector Simpson, Andrzej Kała, and so many others who I’m struggling to name as my brain reached capacity about 7pm, you guys were great too.

Next year? Oh hell yeah!

Case in point, the one where the woman starts by saying “So you receive an email that looks like it’s from your bank, you click on it…” Woah, woah WOAH!! What the fuck!? So now you’re saying “it’s fine to be a complete fucking idiot, your browser will stop all the nasty Internet scammers from running a train on your bank account”?? Jee, thanks for the mixed messages there Microsoft. One minute your software is so paranoid you can’t even run a program without it freaking out like Rainman at the airport and the next you’re saying, “you know what, that message from ‘your bank’… go ahead and click on it, it’s all fine”.

There’s another one where the woman (sexist overtones?) starts by saying “So you click to get this free download and…” Now I admit that it’s less moronic to be duped by a dodgy site offering wallpapers and screen-savers than it is to get caught on a phisherman’s hook but still you have to be pretty dim-witted to fall victim to either.

The really worrying thing is that the adverts are probably pretty effective. People are probably now thinking “it’s okay I’m using that there Internet Explorer, I’m safe online because the man on the TV says so.” when there’s a very real chance that they aren’t even running the latest version and an even realer (more real?) chance that they have out-of-date or no antivirus solution installed. Let’s not forget that IE8 is still an unconscionably awful browser that EIGHT VRSIONS IN still can’t render a rounded corner or a fucking shadow!

Seriously, Microsoft. Pull your heads out of your arses and get real! It’s not like you make any money from IE so why put all that money into bullshit advertising. Do what other vendors do and put the money into developing great standards support and actually making websites look good. If you still feel the need to parade a bunch of over-happy fuck-wits on the TV why not spend 8 seconds with one saying “So you receive an email that looks like it’s from your bank. You should delete it immediately as 99 times out of 100 it’ll be a virus or a scam. If your bank really want to give something to you, they’ll use the post.”

/sigh. Rant over. Next: “Windows 7 was NOT your fucking idea, cocknose. And even if it was, that’s not something to be proud of! Now get back on your fucking treadmill!”

What the hell kind of book would you write!? I hear you ask. You see, I’m a cynical fucker. I make observations of the world’s shortcomings that people with a normal brain wouldn’t notice or ever care about. In a way I’m the bitter old bastard that yells at kids for doing something that affects him in no way what so ever. I see problems and annoyances where others don’t. So the “book” would be a sort of Clarksonesque indictment of the world as I see it. I think I’d split it up into chapters based on what I was talking about (the web, TV, movies, people etc.) however, seeing as it will more than likely be a website, I’m thinking of doing something along the lines of an art-directed blog. Sort of like how Sam Hardacre and Greg Wood and Jason Santa Maria do it with each “article” being styled in such a way that it would compliment the theme and subject.

Exactly how I’d execute it is still up for debate. I don’t intend on having comments open so maybe I could hard code the lot. That, however would present the problem of it requiring quite a lot of tinkering each time I posted a new page. Ollie Kavanagh’s Hip Hop Quoted site seems to do exactly what I’m after and it’s built on WordPress (win) but what that dude’s development skills make me look proper retarded. It’s all a learning curve, though and I think I’ll get there one way or the other. Maybe this will help… If you have any resources to share or tips that will help me cut my art direction teeth then please get in touch.

As for web standards, the site will be highly experimental. It will take much inspiration from the Sam Brown school of thought and will include fancy CSS3, HTML5 and browser specific pretties that mean it will not look the same in every browser. (Read: if you use IE you’ll probably be shit outta luck.)

There is no signing up, no lengthly login procedures and no bullshit. You land on a page to choose your channel and once you do that, the QuickTime player loads and you’re watching (nearly) live TV. You can, like with all websites, add a link to your home screen and use it like an app (see above next to the iPlayer). Obviously I’ve only tested it over Wi-Fi (I only have an iPod Touch) but I hear on good authority that, provided you have a decent 3G signal you shouldn’t have much of a problem viewing on the go.

The picture and sound quality are great with only Channel 4 and E4 giving me audio issues (possibly encrypted, or copyright issue) and it behaves like any other video you watch. you can view it in landscape or portrait and double tapping will toggle full screen/wide screen cropping. So all in all this little service is very very cool. At the very least it’ll mean I’ll never miss Bargain Hunt again!

EDIT: After initially broadcasting with no sound, Channel 4 and E4 both regained full audio later in the afternoon.