Again, full credit for this tip must go to the great folks at Maclife.com This simple tip allows you to pull a widget out of dashboard and place it on your desktop, which is really kind of cool.

To make it happen, open a Terminal window and enter this command

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

You will have to logout and log back in or restart your Mac to make the change active.  Then activate Dashboard and click/drag the widget you want, and then exit Dashboard without releasing the click on the widget.  The default key is F12, but you’ll want to make sure you know what it is on your system.  On mine with the Logitech Illuminated Keyboard and Logitech’s Control Center to make the Performance Mouse MX work properly it is Command-F12, so again check your system settings in System Preferences just to be sure.  You can also send the widget back by selecting it and then invoking dashboard.  To disable this feature use the same command replacing YES with NO.  Logout and back in as before to make the state change effective.

Dashboard widgets moved to the desk work the same as they did in the Dashboard.  The only caveat is that if you use Spaces, the widgets you have dragged out of Dashboard will appear on every space.

FUN

Full credit for this tip goes to the team at maclife.com who published it in their August issue.  If you don’t subscribe, you want to think about it.

To enable xray view in Quicklook open a Terminal window and enter the following command;

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders -boolean YES

Now when you Quicklook a folder you’ll representations of the icons of what is in the folder.  It’s a little thing and definitely geeky but kinda cool.  If you get tired of it, turn it off using the same command, just replacing YES with NO

Recommended

I’m a big user of Spaces in OS X.  I’ve set certain apps to open on certain spaces and because I use dual monitors even set where I want the windows to appear.  Surprisingly I use Spaces more where I have more screen real estate than on a smaller display.

But there were things that were just a pain.  On one of the MacHeist promos, I got as part of the bundle a little app called Hyperspaces and to my own failure, didn’t take a good look at it until a month ago.  Hyperspaces simply gives you richer control over OS X spaces without breaking anything.

I wanted to use different HDR photos for each space.  I also wanted to be able to see at a glance which space name I was on.  Hyperspaces does this simply and without a ton of system overhead.  The only time I’ve ever had a gotcha is when the Drobo with my Aperture library failed to come up after a long system shutdown and I ended up with plain colours.  Once the Drobo was back up, a relaunch of Hyperspaces and all was well.

You can download a trial of Hyperspaces from the CocoaBots and customize up to three spaces for free.  If you like Hyperspaces and you probably will, and want more Spaces and you probably will, you can buy a license at the site for $12.95 USD which to my mind is a good deal for the power and simplicity these folks deliver.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

For the last couple of years I’ve been using a Dell 24″ LCD alongside an Apple 23″ Cinema Display because I liked the flexibility and control available to me with two monitors. About a month ago, I heard Robert Scoble on TWiT talk about how he used two displays, one in portrait mode and one in landscape mode. So I tried that, rotating the Dell 24″ by 90 degrees. It had a powerful positive impact on my workflow.

BUT, every time I’m in an Apple Store I invariably drift over to the 30″ Cinema Display and remind myself how usable all that screen real estate would be for audio, photographic and video editing, not just for the editor window but for all the palettes I use. So on Father’s Day, I went to Dell’s site and ordered up their 30″ UltraSharp. I admit that I did it via phone because I wanted to ask a couple of questions and check for specials. Syed was very helpful and I got the order placed. The device showed up in five business days.

While the instructions say installation takes two people, it really doesn’t as the screen is not heavy. (those 21″ CRTs were HEAVY). Connections are easy to make and in addition to DVI-D and power, there is a USB 2 connection and a built-in USB hub as well as a memory card reader. The reader supports Compact Flash, SM/SD/MS/MMC so covers pretty much everything.

The screen has no contrast controls and rudimentary brightness capability. There is an OSD, but the manual instructions to launch it don’t work for me and the software provided only works with Windows (BAD DELL!!) Max resolution is 2560 x 1600 and requires a dual link DVI connection. I recently upgraded to the nVidia GTX 285 in the Mac Pro and it has two dual link DVI connections on the back. The card drives both the 30″ at 2560 x 1600 and the 24″ in portrait mode at 1920x 1200 without issue.

The colour at first was a bit wonky and using the OS X built in calibration made decent corrections in advanced mode but the lack of a contrast adjustment throws off the Apple calibration a bit. I have been using a Pantone Huey Pro for a while because of its size and my expectation that if anyone understood colour it would be Pantone, and after running the calibration on the new screen, I am very happy with the outcome. I set the Huey Pro software to do automatic roomlight compensation and that helps more than you might expect.

The display goes to sleep from a power perspective when the Mac Pro sleeps the screen and restarts pretty much immediately. Several days in I’ve noticed that the colours have settled and are even better than when I first set the display up. Fonts are smaller of course because I sit further back now, and the only real downside is that I find myself punching up the font size in browsers and the zoom in applications, but I am loving the increased space.

As noted, I kept the Dell 24″ in play and in portrait mode, the only change is moving it from the left side to the right side, mostly to make fitting into the desk layout easier. I use Hyperspaces to manage Spaces and backgrounds and find running Word or NeoOffice Write in portrait so much more efficient. It’s also perfect to stack BusyCal above Things for workflow management.

When it comes to working with Aperture, or any of the Adobe CS5 apps, the increased space is incredibly empowering and I think I’m more productive although that could really be subjective justification for the expense.

And that’s the only downside. 27″ displays of very good quality (I really like the Samsung) are now under $500 where I live, but the jump to 30″ significantly reduces the option pool and more than doubles the price of entry. If the past is any indicator, expect prices for 30″ displays to plummet now that I’ve bought one. The Dell unit has a richer contrast ratio than the Apple Cinema Display according to specifications. The Apple unit has not changed in years and is still nearly $2,000, still too much for me. Would I have preferred that Apple display? So far I am very happy with my Dell purchase. The display is height and angle adjustable, where the Apple is only angle adjustable. The height adjustment is important to me as I want to have the upper third sightline in line with my eyes and as I have a longer torso the Apple display would be angled up for me, whereas the Dell is exactly parallel to my face (or pretty darn close). Kudos to the Dell monitor guys because adjusting the height is finger strength easy with no goofy latches or slippage or any of the other annoyances found in some other vendor’s height adjusters; this one is brilliant.

For a 30″ LCD display that does excellent 2560×1600 for around $1,200 the Dell UltraSharp cannot be beat.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If you are like me and upgraded your iPhone 3G to the supported iOS4 when offered, you’re probably suffering the June of your discontent.

iOS4 while fine on the iPod Touch 3rd gen and the iPhone 3Gs is a disaster on the 3G for many users.  Lots of things are blamed, too many apps, use of the Exchange connector yada yada yada.

All I know is that my device which was slow but functional became basically useless after I “upgraded”.  So I looked for ways to downgrade.  The process I followed was using a Macintosh and the iPhone but I believe it can be done if your primary OS is Windows, but I have not tried that so if you do, best of luck with that.

After lots of searching, and ZERO help from Apple, I found this article on Lifehacker.  I don’t propose that there are not others, but I used this one because it was easy to follow and got me where I wanted to be.  Mostly, but more on that later.

So first step is to go to the Lifehacker article and read it.  Seriously read it all the way through.  Then print it off.  Then go to the link provided in the article and download Recboot (Mac link) because YOU’RE GOING TO NEED IT.

Here’s the one other piece that you will have recognized if you did as suggested and read the Lifehacker article before starting, specifically the last paragraph where it tells you that you will need a 3.X backup to get your world back without starting fresh.  Here’s the joyful surprise.

Apple in their wisdom to “help” you (into a migraine) has deleted all your old backups once you have upgraded to iOS4.  If iOS4 actually worked on the 3G this would be ok, but since it doesn’t you can now say ratzenfratzen%#(()@^*@(**(!!!!!

Fortunately you have a Time Machine backup, or other backup where you can easily recover a directory structure from the Library.  If you don’t have a backup, you can still revert your iPhone to 3.1.3 but you will be setting it up as a new device.  But since you’re very smart and have a Time Machine backup, pop into Time Machine and navigate to your_main_drive_HD:Users:username:Library:Application Support:MobileSync:Backup or use ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup in the Go To Folder finder command.  As you will recall the ~ means your username.

Now look carefully at the longnamed folders and select the ones that are closest to the date of when you did the iOS4 update but PRIOR.  Select the folders you want, using Command-Click for multiples and then select Restore.  This will restore the old backups to the right place.  You may get a message saying a newer folder exists do you want to overwrite?  If any backups have been done since you updated to iOS4 you will see this message and you do want to overwrite.  Remember if you have multiple devices syncing to iTunes, the folder naming conventions don’t make it easy to figure out which device which folder applies to so when you do the restore, you may be overwriting a backup for an iPod, an iPod Touch or an iPad.  This is where useful naming would have helped but Apple doesn’t provide it so you’ll have to tough it out.  I suggest that as soon as you get your iPhone restored you sync and backup all your other devices just to be safe.

Anyway, back to the show.  If you’ve done the restore properly and BEFORE running through the process to downgrade, when you get to Step 4 in the Lifehacker article, you’ll be able to select to restore from backup.  You will see all the backups available to iTunes in the drop down, so select the iPhone 3G backup with the date you just restored and click continue.  Your iPhone settings will be restored.

Slow down a second there friends, because you are not done.  You’ve downgraded and you’ve restored your settings.  Now go watch TV or read a couple of chapters because iTunes now needs to put the content specified by the settings back on the iPhone.  This will take as long as it takes depending upon how much stuff you had specified to be synced in the settings.

I would suggest you let the restore process work it’s way through before you make changes such as adding or deleting music, podcasts, TV shows or Movies.  Keep it simple.  Also remember that if you had set up iBook syncing when iOS4 was installed that setting is now hosed because iBooks needs iOS4.  Of course I live in Canada and the only thing on the iBooks store up here is the same content I’ve been able to download for years from Project Gutenburg, so iBooks at least to me is a complete waste of time.

When all is done, you should have your iPhone back to normal with the 3.1.3 OS.  Sync it up to current, make sure your mail and calendar work and you’re back in the game.

There’s lots of speculation about whether Apple will fix iOS4 to work properly on the iPhone 3G.  I have always enjoyed my Apple products, but I also believe that Apple is a business that has turned planned obsolescence into an art form.  Compared to the 3Gs, the 3G is very slow, and with iOS 4 being designed for the A4 chipset in the iPhone 4, my guess is that iOS4 is always going to suck hard on the iPhone 3G.  I should have waited to see the impact of the upgrade so I did not have to go through this time wasting effort, hopefully if you jumped too, this will help save you a lot of time.  If you have to have the functions in iOS4, then better to buy an iPhone 4 or a 3Gs and understand that in two versions whatever you have will be useless again.  And yes, I believe that that sucks hard event was well known at Apple and is a design point to get iPhone users to upgrade.  You can certainly choose to believe that Apple would never do this to a customer, and that’s fair.  If you do believe that, I have some wonderful vacation property for sale completely surrounded by water.

US carriers tend to run 24 month terms that align with the Apple obsolescence plan.  Canadian carriers are bloodsuckers and the 36 month terms are customer hostile, so expect to take a bath every couple of years.  Apple Canada has announced that the Apple Store will sell unlocked iPhone 4 units that won’t be bound to a carrier and whenever the devices show up in Canada I will go that route instead of looking at the subsidized price as a saving at the price of being shackled to the carrier.  You should do what suits you best.

It may have happened to you that over time you have run out of space on your Time Machine volume, but did not want to lost the older backups it contained.  Or you’ve received one of the Time Machine errors that it can no longer back up to your Time Machine volume and all the fixes focus on you erasing the volume and starting over, and this option doesn’t fill you with joy.  With full credit to the staff at MacWorld, here’s a great tip.

Connect your older Time Machine volume to your Mac by whichever connectivity suits the volume and your Mac.  Then without disconnecting your current Time Machine, Option Click the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.  If the icon isn’t there, you can make it visible in the Time Machine pane in System Preferences.  When you option click, you’ll get the option you see in the graphic above, to Browse Other Time Machine Disks.  Select it and point to the older volume.  Now you’ll be able to go even further back in time to retrieve that critical file.

There are a lot of these option click options in Snow Leopard for menu bar icons, this one happens to be really useful.

Five days in and I have to say that the upgrade to 10.6.4 has been pretty darn seamless. I upgraded the MBP 17, the MBAir, K’s MBP 13, D’s MB 13, the Mac Pro octal and the little Dell Hackintosh. Every one when completely smoothly using software update except for the Dell which uses the combo updater and the good graces of Meklort’s tools.

I love the new reader function in Safari and the extension capability having installed the adblock and instapaper extensions. I was also glad to see that ClickToFlash also works in the new release. The extensions will prove more manageable than the old plugin model I can see already.

There were changes in Mail that broke most of the add-ons initially but Letterbox has been updated as has Dockstar since the first update.

iCal was also updated but in fairness I haven’t looked at it as I love the amazing BusyCal and use it by default.

All of the utilities I autolaunch work just fine (Launchbar, Textxpander, Hyperspaces amongst others). This is usually where an OS X update causes me the most grief, but not his time. In the past I have seen the dreaded bsod on update but this one was flawless. One tip I strongly recommend is to disconnect all your external devices during an OS X update. Apple notes this in their docs but not everyone is zealously reading them.

I don’t think the new release is any faster in my workflows but given the security fixes and the updates to Apple utilities it’s worth your time to do. Of course, be sure that you have a recoverable backup before making any major system changes.

It’s now been about six weeks since the receipt of the new MacBook Pro core i7 machine. As I usually do, I went with a 17″ model again, and again chose the non glare screen option. While this means no glossy black bezel, it also means no annoying reflections off the super bright screen. I chose the 500gb drive and upgraded the RAM to 8gb. In selecting the Core i7 version I got the faster CPU and top end graphics capability.

First Impressions

This is my first unibody machine although I had bought a 13″ MBP for my wife. It feels lighter and more compact than the old MBP although technically they are about the same. The new screen graphics are really fast and the colours are amazing. I notice it most when working on HDR photos. I’m not a gamer but I do some video work and find that the machine is definitely faster rendering and even the redraws seem faster. This week I will be stress testing the machine building some content with the latest Camtasia:Mac that will include some HD video. The drive is quick enough and while the SSDs are faster the price differential is not justifiable to me.

Ongoing Use

Like the old unit I still have kernel panic issues with the eSata card that uses the Siig chipset sometimes on insertion and sometimes on removal. I am using their new drivers with my card that came from Griffin. Annoying but not a show stopper. eSata is so much faster for backups and Time Machine.

I use the machine for presentations several times a week and the mini display port adapter works great and is easier to connect than the old DVI adapter but I have more issues where it wants to mirror the screen even though I always select dual screen mode when connected. I just ran the 10.6.4 update so maybe this will improve. I also have a Targus bluetooth remote but it has become very unreliable for use with the new machine. I’ll need to see if others are experiencing this issue.

When traveling I use the machine to extend the hotel room internet connection to my iPad and iPhone and although the procedure seems to have changed since I last tried this, it works wonderfully. The new black keyboard is much easier to see in low light than the old aluminum topped one and I think I may type marginally faster on it. It’s the same keyboard as on my first gen MacBook Air and has a good feel, with decent resistance and return.

I kept the predecessor in production for just over two years and while there were few things wrong with it, other than the case starting to separate at the seams, I’m very happy to have upgraded and believe that the expense was worthwhile.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Well I did it. And I did it before the device was even available in Canada where I live. I was in Texas for a while so I decided to bite the bullet while there and try to get an iPad. Several phone calls in different cities found that the Apple Store at The Domain in Austin had 32gb and 64gb units in stock. Since Austin was my last stop before home, and with the help of Austin based co-worker, the inestimable Jim Rileyy, I was able to get in and get out of the store in under 10 minutes and get to the airport in time to get squished into a United seat strategically placed so I could be kicked in the back for three hours to Chicago by a screaming capuchin monkey dressed like a small child.

Ok, you don’t care about that, and I don’t blame you. Suffice to say that instead of charging me twice for the seat as they like to do, United could charge for and make money by guaranteeing child free flights. And on to the iPad.

I was unable to connect to the iTunes Store to complete registration but fortunately Apple figured out that this could happen and I was able to start syncing the iPad with the MacBook Pro I use for business. Sync was reasonably quick and I got TV shows, and music copied over early in the flight. Putting the MacBook Pro away, I then focused on the iPad.

The screen is bright and contrasty and easy to view from multiple angles. It has the gloss finish as on the iPhone and some of the newer MacBooks but unlike the gloss screen on my MacBook Air, the iPad is very reflective and finding the right angle is something you will need to do when working with it in the presence of directional lighting. Not a flaw, more a what’s so and influenced by my personal preference for matte displays.

Despite much speculation about performance both positive and negative, the Apple A4 processor is very fast and even while being really snappy (effectively making my iPhone 3G look like its permanently doing the quaalude shuffle) it’s easy on the battery. I watched two episodes of Fringe, listened to a couple of podcasts and on the leg to Toronto watched an episode of Castle and on landing or more accurately “put all your useful distractions away” time, battery level was still at 89%. By contrast, the MacBook Pro would be on fumes after 2.5 hours and the Air would be legs up like a raccoon on the side of the road in under 2 hours. This is the first time where I think I will be able to travel for an entire day and be able to use my stuff without having to hunt for AC power until that night.

Given the time between the purchase and boarding, I did not add any applications, and I was under the impression that the AppStore where my account is (Canada) did not have any iPad apps available since the device is still not available here in retail stores at the time of this writing. The built in apps are awesome. The calendar is extremely usable and a much richer experience than on the iPhone or iPod Touch. I did wire syncing initially waiting to activate over the air MobileMe sync until later (more on that below). The Address book is similarly rich in interface and usability. The Photo viewer is excellent and produces great images. I’ve used Safari a lot since getting home and it’s a much more mac experience than the iPhone, although I have noticed the lack of Flash support much more than I have on the iPhone, which confirms that I am using the device for the web more than my mobile options. iTunes is, well it’s iTunes. No rocket science to use that. The only minor niggle is that I did a lot of work to ensure I had good cover art for all my music but when it’s blown up to display on the iPad, I see I will need to go back to CoverScout and do some significant updates.

On the subject of audio, I connected my Motorola S9-HD bluetooth headphones to the iPad. Setting up the Bluetooth was simple enough once I unpaired the headphones from the iPhone. I have a love/hate relationship with these things as they sound great but cutout a fair bit and can only be paired with a single device at a time. If regular bluetooth earphones can be paired with multiple devices, these should too, but that’s a Motorola issue not the iPad. The iPad supports the A2DP standard but doesn’t handle the full range of bluetooth commands, just like the iPhone and 3rd gen iPod Touch.

I am underwhelmed by Mail for iPad, or at least halfway. In portrait mode, Mail follows what appears to be a design standard with dropdowns in the left margin edge to ease thumb scrolling. But the only way to switch messages is to pop up the menu and tap around to see other messages or other accounts. I’m looking forward to the consolidated inbox promised this fall in iPad OS 4. I know Steve jobs referred to the coming OS as iPhone OS 4, I will refer to it as iPad OS 4 as it comes later than the version for the phone and I promise you it’s not the same OS. Back to Mail. Rotate the device 90 degrees to landscape mode and Mail becomes much more usable with a split window view, more like on a Mac. I don’t like Mail in Portrait mode, it’s unpleasant to use and hope for a change soon. Landscape mode is fine though.

Watching TV or Movies is incredibly easy, just like in iTunes. Display is super sharp and showed no artifacts even with fast movement on the screen. Audio through the headphone jack is quite good, even with the ZAGG earbuds I was using since I ran down the battery on the Bose QuietComfort 15s I usually try to use on flights over an hour. This morning I was surprised when Night Stand woke me up using it’s alarm function by playing a song selected from iTunes. I did not expect much from the built-in speakers and I am pleasantly surprised. I still think that headphones are better for personal listening, but it’s quite nice that they aren’t mandatory so long as you are in a place where the speakers aren’t going to cause you grief with other people or ambient noise. If you were expecting the kind of sound that you get out of the iPhone internal speakers, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised. Good high end and strong mids, bass not so strong but there’s no 15″ sub hidden in this thing anywhere.

I was unable to get the Apple sleeve for the iPad but friend Ross Brunson strongly recommends it. I will have to wait until it’s available through the Canada Apple Store. The Tekzilla crew felt it was overpriced compared to the less expensive and excellent leather cover for the Amazon Kindle II. The point is, you’re going to want a case/cover of some kind. Preferably with a prop up feature because after a while, nearly a kilogram gets heavy. I also find the polished aluminum back hard to keep a grip on without feeling like I’m holding the iPad too hard. I plan on ordering one the excellent Zagg Invisible Shield products. I have them on both Mac laptops and used to have one on my iPhone until I discovered that however thin it is, once on, it made getting the iPhone in and out of the Mophie Juicepak Air a real pain. However, the Invisible Shield while completely smooth if much easier to hold onto than the direct polished aluminum and glass.

I did get the VGA adapter and the dock (sans keyboard). The VGA adapter works with videos and with the Keynote application. The second function is what I bought it for, but Keynote is not yet available for purchase here yet, so I cannot advise how it works. Ross tells me that it works beautifully. I went for the dock without the keyboard because I felt the one piece unit might be overly constraining so instead I use the Apple Wireless Keyboard that I’ve had for a while. The bluetooth connection is as simple as it should be and it works very well.

I must admit that I am surprised by the usability of the onscreen keyboard. I expected that the touch with no feedback would be less usable than it turns out to be. Using Twitterific to post tweets is simple and I didn’t end up with a lot of typos. In landscape mode the keyboard spreads out and you can use more of your traditional typing skills. It’s not a thumb typing thing like the Blackberry or to a lesser extent the iPhone, but you can get decent throughput once you acclimatize to the layout. Andy Ihnatko said that the onscreen keyboard is actually a bit wider than a MacBook keyboard in landscape mode, but I find that the altered key layout slows me down a bit. I would not want to try to do a lot of typing on the iPad as there is really no wrist rest and the touch typing will get tiring after a while. Plus the rounded back means the iPad doesn’t lie completely flat. For short emails, tweets, Facebook posts it’s really quite good, but don’t plan on writing your dissertation with the onscreen keyboard.

So what about apps? When I got home I connected to the US store and downloaded a couple of free apps for testing. Simple as you would hope. The next day I jacked the iPad into the Mac Pro and as expected was informed that if I wanted to connect the iPad to this computer, it needed to be wiped as it was already linked to a different computer. So I did the deed and then used iTunes to select what I wanted on the iPad. I was pleased to see that all those free apps (both of them) were retained. I then ran the Application updater in iTunes and found to my pleasure that some of my apps had been updated to be both iPhone and iPad ready. I searched for iWork on the Canada App Store, and got no results so I assumed that iPad specific apps were not available yet. I was wrong. Coworker Kevin Smith pinged me from the UK pinged me to advise that he had found iPad apps on the UK App Store so I searched for some that I knew I wanted such as the iPad version of 1Password. Happily there are a ton of iPad apps available on the Canada AppStore and I’ve already bought and installed a number of them. Note that at the time of this writing the iPad App Store app reports that it is not available in my country so for the time being I have to get the apps via iTunes.

The downside to some apps is that while many app developers are treating their paying customers to dual mode apps as a free upgrade, others are releasing iPad unique versions with the same features and functions as the iPhone versions but at up to double the purchase price of the iPhone version. I have been a big fa of Cultured Code’s Things app but seriously $20 for an app that does the same thing as the $10 version on my iPhone? Nice customer attitude folks. Not.

Now to the usability of iPhone mode apps on the iPad. In normal view they look and act like they are running on an iPhone except for the wireless network finders that all abort everytime. Apple has pulled this class of app from the AppStore and I think that they have done something in OS 3.2 to cripple them. Bad! You can click the 2x button on any iPhone mode app to have it fill the screen, and the app will work fine. Because it is actually growing the pixel count by 4x (two dimensions) the results are fuzzy and if I look at any of them too long I get a headache. Consider this a stopgap only until an iPad version of your favourite app is available, and hope you don’t have to buy the thing again. Apps are displayed the same as on the iPhone using a grid system and multiple screens. You can move App icons by holding one down until they all start to jiggle and then drag the App to the screen and location you want, just like the iPhone. I’m at about 60% iPad native now with the other 40% being apps not yet available in an iPad version, such as DropBox and GWweb that I use to get to GroupWise WebAccess. The pre-alpha of GroupWise Mobility Synchronizer that Novell made available last month works fine for calendars and contacts but email is inconsistent. Cannot complain as this is truly early access, but I do look forward to being able to use the iPad for business as well as personal email.

Apple is working hard to load the App Store and there are lots of apps to choose from already. Some feel like they were rushed out a bit. Comixology’s comic book reader, also used by Marvel displays comics wonderfully but the trick to reveal the menu bar so you can close the comic when you are done isn’t well documented. Not picking on these folks, this is just an example of the kind of thing that will improve rapidly as momentum increases. If you used the version of iPhone OS that actually allowed 3rd party apps when it was first released, this is deja vu all over again.

iBooks are neatly done, with 30,000 free books from Project Gutenberg and a fair number of books already in the iBook store. Since I already have a Kindle, and Amazon has already delivered a free iPad app, I can read anything I bought for my Kindle on the iPad. Will I dump my Kindle? Nope. The Kindle is much lighter in weight and the Whispersync is just too convenient. Sure I could have waited to get a 3G version and then paid for another data plan but I think I will keep my Kindle as it works great and gives me more agility than buying through the iBookstore.

Why not wait for the 3G version? As I travel in the US a lot but live in Canada, 3G would only drive me into roaming bankruptcy. As for at home, I think I will get a MiFi instead, solving the connectivity problem for multiple WiFi devices in one place. Maybe someday cross-border roaming won’t be so brutal. And maybe I’ll be able to eat ice cream without putting on weight.

So what don’t I like? Well that whole fingerprint resistant oleophobic coating is a load of horse pucky. My screen looks like a smudgefest and I have very dry skin. Other buyers are also hugely underwhelmed by this not functioning capability. Apple pulled screen protectors from the Apple Store a while back to convince people that they weren’t necessary because of this coating. Yup, the coating that doesn’t work. So now I have a microfiber cloth in the Incase case I bought.

I also don’t like that my MacBook Pro apparently doesn’t have enough power on its USB port to charge the iPad when it’s awake. Put the iPad to sleep and it will charge at half the normal rate

I did try to buy the USB camera connector because I use cameras that don’t use the SD Card, but that connector won’t be around until the end of April. That’s disappointing but moreso is that the ability to put files on the device looks to be pretty difficult. I’m going to buy the iPad version of AirShare and see if that gives me a workaround. Mailing stuff around is to use docs is just goofy.

In my launch review, I was concerned about the lack of cameras, and we’ve learned that there is already space made for one. Now that I have handled the device and grown fatigued holding it for long periods of time, I’m backing off on my camera griping. I have cameras on all my Macs, and I really don’t use them for video chat very much, mostly for recording videocasts. Not enough ponies in the iPad for that. But I expect V2 to have a camera to make the masses buy new ones and to piss off those who know it could have been there in V1.

I also was concerned about the use of the Micro SIM slot. Speaking to a really helpful and talented rep from Rogers last weekend (he’ll quit and get a different job soon enough – way too competent), he shared that the micro SIM is a pain in the ass since no other device they have uses them. So it probably is the big suck to AT&T that the pundits think the move is to prevent people from moving their iPhone SIM cards over. It’s still an asinine choice.

Apple has locked the filesystem up tight so adding files is much tougher than it should be, but I’m still annoyed by the lack of expandable storage, the lack of a simple USB or SD card slot and that you have to use iTunes to get most anything on or off the device. I understand the Apple constraint for simplicity mantra but this lack of flexibility is really starting to tick me off.

No stylus. I’m going to find that pogostick and try it with Autodesk’s Sketchbook app. I would really like to be able to take jot notes on this thing in meetings. Figuring that one out is still pending.

Multitasking is coming in OS 4 so I’ll leave that one alone. I bitched about other stuff and declared I wouldn’t buy a WiFi only model. Well I did and at this point think it’s the right decision. If I change my mind, someone will buy this one and I won’t take a huge bath on it.

The Result

RECOMMENDED – but you really should spend some hands-on time before dropping the dimes and nickels, and also be honest with yourself about what the iPad is and what it isn’t. It’s an amazing handheld device to watch video, look at photos, surf the web, do email and social networking, play games, use simple apps, read books and newsfeeds on a fabulous display with 10+ hour battery life. It’s not a replacement for your computer unless the only things you do and I do mean ONLY are those listed above. It may be a replacement for a cheap netbook since they are often storage bereft and have keyboards sized for the hands of a four year old, but it doesn’t compare to a MacBook or even a Windows 7 laptop. So any reviews that say it is were probably working with the other iPad – the imaginary one. The iPad is a great device, better than I expected and there is absolutely a fit between the smartphone/media player and the laptop where the iPad rules. Less than a week in, I have no regrets and really like the unit. Magical? Not really. An amazing price? Well, it’s less than a grand if that is what’s needed to be amazing. But if it fits your needs, you’re going to love the darn thing.

Every now and again I run across a little tool that is just killer. Thanks to the nice folks at the Mac Attack I learned about Secondbar by Andreas Hegenberg.

I have had dual monitors on my Mac Pro since the upgrade from the old PowerMac and I am very used to the side by side displays. On the left is a Dell 24″ and on the right is an Apple 23″ Cinema Display. But when you deal with this much screen real estate, mousing over to one monitor to get to the menu bar while hardly traumatic is very mouse intensive. Hence Secondbar.

Secondbar is a very simple tool that creates a menubar at the top of the second display. That’s it. No rockets to Mars or quantum mechanics, just a second menu bar. I love focused answers to problems. Since any Mac Pro or Macintosh laptop can be connected to a second display via cable, and since you don’t have to mirror the displays, this is just incredibly useful.

Download Secondbar at http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79 The author and version number says that this is early code but you get used to it pretty quick and it’s such a timesaver that you cannot complain about free and working. Very cool.