Shawn Blanc, now full time blogger, posts his extensive look at the HP TouchPad. If you’re slightly curious about WebOS on a tablet device, then have a read.

It puts at rest my thoughts on WebOS. Aspects of the UI seem interesting to me, it looks like a nice blend of desktop UI and tablet UI, but it fails to deliver it seems. I’m especially interested in the Kindle App, given that its not an app, just a placeholder.
Keep trying HP

The Mac App Store is set to be the definitive place to get applications for the Mac. And it’s almost an ideal situation. One place to buy apps that you cam guarantee are from a reliable source that won’t leak your credit card details. One place to browse for quality applications (and crappy ones). And one place to go to reinstall your apps on all your machines.

The license agreement allows you to log in with your iTunes account, which continues to grow in usefulness and becoming the one place to spend money online. Once logged in, you go to the Purchases page and hit the Install button.

Where this could start to fall down is when relying on developers to stay active. Imagine this. You’ve spent £39.99 on some app from the MAS and you have just gone and bought a brand new iMac or MacBook Air. Unfortunately, the developer of the wonder app you love has shut shop and closed his developer account. Now you can’t reinstall your app because it doesn’t exist now. We’ve already seen this with the iPhone, where a number of apps have been removed later. This leaves the only trace of that application on your old computer.

For normal users, they may not even think about backing that up. They’ve been conditioned to believe that the MAS is there to go and reinstall all their apps.

In the old days, you would still have a CD with a printed license key there to reinstall even years later without issue. It’s not friendly but it’s always there (unless you lose either part).

This isn’t a problem exclusive to the MAS but it’s more prominent given how Apple promote the store.

So what is the expectation? If Sony closed, you wouldn’t expect them to support your TV that is still in warranty. If the company is gone, you lose your support. It’s a risk we take without thinking about it, but with bigger companies, we’ve come to expect they will be here for years. When it comes down to a single iOS developer working weekends to build that cool app you can’t work without, where is that expectation? How far can you reasonably expect the developer to support that app?
Honestly, the truth is not at all. You don’t buy software with a support warranty. You buy as is. It could be gone the next day and you’re stuck. No update, bug fixes or support and no refund.
What could you expect a developer to do? Well they could continue to support an app for a set time period, or suggest alternatives to their “killer app”. Or they could put the app in a DMG and stick it on a web host somewhere. That allows users to carry on using it, and download it regardless of it’s presence in the MAS.

In some ways the solution comes down to backup again. But it’s also having someone who knows to backup those apps, a friendly tech savvy person who knows this stuff. As that tech savvy person, we are already doing this. We have our SuperDuper nightly clones and Time Machine backups and know what to do to get it back.
But we’re not the normal users are we?

Yesterday, Google announced their Music Beta service at Google I/O, the developer conference for the Goog. Music Beta is a cloud based music service (not that unlike Amazon’s Cloud Music service). You run a local client, upload your music library and then you can access your music anywhere.

So whats wrong with that? Well firstly, you can upload up to 20,000 songs. There is no mention of file size, so you could upload 320kbps FLAC files if you want. You can even upload your m4a audio from iTunes, unless its protected m4p files. Once my library is uploaded (taking probably 2 days on a decent broadband connection) I can access my music from up to 8 different Android devices, or a web browser. But not simultaneously. So I had a phone, and a XOOM (hah!) which my fiancée borrows, but now I can’t listen to my music, because she is listening to it. You have to stop listening on one device to start on another.

When you lose you internet connection, its not a problem. The recently listened items are still available to listen to as they are stored locally, which seems to contradict the claim that it requires no storage space on your device. You can also select albums to store locally on the device for later consumption (similar to Spotify). But to me, recently listened to songs is useless. I don’t listen to the same 25 songs over and over. I jump around my library and want to listen to stuff I haven’t heard for a while. At least you can copy all your music to your Android device via USB (if you have enough internal storage). Thats novel.

The problem of being able to access your music anywhere is difficult, and realistically, it requires a mix of local syncing and streaming. For me, an iTunes solution with local syncing and wireless access to the non-synced content is the goal.

Maybe we’ll see that in the North Carolina Data Centre.

A few comments on this idea.

1. It requires a double-press and swipe to reach the notifications screen. And adds another swipe to be able to access the iPod and volume controls that already exist.
2. The UI on the lock screen feels more integrated into the OS, rather than making the users feel like the notifications are also in a new app (and do we need a whole app for this?)
3. The idea that I would go into the “Notifications” app, to view my Twitter notifications, then switch into Twitter seems to be a few extra, unnecessary steps.
4. Confuses users with the Slide to view information box that resembles the Slide to Unlock bar, mimicking the UI but not the functionality.
5. Doesn’t look like a 3 year old designed it, like this.

My suggestion on this problem is this:
From your home screen, you see a visual cue that there is a notification (status bar perhaps). You swipe right from screen 1 to the current search screen. You see the usual search box, as well as a list of notifications for each app, similar to how they appear on the lock screen of this video. In the top right corner is an X in a circle to clear all notifications, and you can scroll through the list to see each notification

This system would keep the notifications as part of the iOS, rather than subjugate  then into a whole “app” It also adds more use to the Search screen, which feels unloved at the best of times. It is also gives iOS the ability to infer more content right of the first home screen. You could perhaps swipe right again to view some widgets maybe? Perhaps put a weather widget, and iPod controls here on a second screen to the right?

This could be the first of many Linked List items, brought to you by this lovely plugin, WordPress, and influence by Daring Fireball, Shawn Blanc and Ben Brooks.

The news has come across the wire that Twitter has bought Tweetdeck, the popular desktop tweeting application. This comes after rumours of discussions with both Tweetdeck and Ubermedia.

This adds to Twitters acquisitions, now including Tweetie for Mac and iPhone, both developed by Loren Brichter. What this calls into question however is the place of Tweetdeck as an application.

Twitter already has a great Mac application, Twitter for Mac, available in the Mac App Store. Given that Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application, it leaves the question of where it stands as a desktop client. If it remains as an active program, then where does it stand with Mac users? How do you tell new users there are two applications, and how do they choose? If its aimed as a Windows only application, it makes for an inconsistent user experience, if they switch between the two OS’s.

So will it even stay? Perhaps Twitter bought Tweetdeck to get all its users, and intends to push them to a native Windows client, and ditch the current Tweetdeck application. Or maybe Tweetdeck gets scrapped entirely, and this is purely a purchase of talent and to remove the competition.

Tweetdeck only accounts for about 13% of usage amongst non-official applications (5.46% overall), but is still second place to Ubersocial, and far behind the web interface. So it seems hard to believe that its a $50m purchase for 5.46% of the market. That would give Twitter an estimated value of $915m, which is ridiculous. Or is it?