Back To My Mac

One thing that would be insanely useful for me would be support for accessing Back To My Mac services using my iPad. Prime among these would be accessing my Mac via Screen Sharing. Yes, I’m aware there are VNC clients available, but VNC uses more bandwidth and is slower than the Apple Remote Desktop style screen sharing used by BTMM. I would love to be able to quickly slip over to my Mac and do something like email myself a file I forgot or something like that.

Apple’s Extra Apps

Apple has released some extra iPhone apps over the years. I own two of these: Texas Hold ‘Em and the iDisk app. Neither of these has been updated for iPad yet, which is annoying.

Keyboard Dock

I like this thing. I bought it on a whim, but I predict I’ll actually use it pretty often. I like that waking up the iPad using the keyboard doesn’t require the “Slide to unlock” part.

Printing

It’s amazing how fast you get so used to doing stuff on the iPad that the lack of printing support from arbitrary apps becomes a problem. For example, last night I placed an order online on it, forgetting that I needed to be able to print my receipt. Now I’m stuck. Apple needs to add a printing API, or at a bare minimum a way to email a PDF of the page you’re looking at in Safari. Just emailing links to the desktop doesn’t always cut it.

First off, by and large, this is possibly the most amazing device I’ve ever used. It’s beautiful, it’s fun to use, and it seems perfectly suited to replace my laptop for those basic tasks that I used to whip it out for: email, general web surfing, quick blogging, etc.

Obviously I’ll be keeping the MacBook Pro for heavier-duty tasks.

However, I thought I’d sum up a few specific things that occur to me as I use it.

Safari

Browsing the web works pretty well in Safari, for basic surfing tasks. It feels quite natural, by and large, and pages render cleanly and quickly.

However, I do have one specific nit to pick: when you switch between tabs, about 90% of the time, Safari reloads the tab you switch into. This, for my needs, is a serious drawback.

One of the major tasks I plan(ned) to use my iPad for is basic maintenance of the Mozilla Developer Center wiki. That is, reading the recently changed articles list in Google Reader and opening up articles that need re-editing in new tabs to tweak them or proofread them, and also occasionally opening up the user ban panel to ban users.

This is all technically possible, except for this common usage scenario:

1. A user creates an account.
2. The first thing they do is post spam.
3. Now I need to both delete the spam and ban the user.
4. So I click the link in the RSS feed to open the article to delete it.
5. Now I switch back to the Google Reader tab so I can click the “ban user” button.
6. But the page reloads, and that item in my Google Reader tab, now having been read, is no longer available, so I’ve lost the “ban user” button.

Frustrating. There are workarounds, but they’re tedious and require significant changes to my workflow over how I do things on the desktop.

I fail to understand why Safari insists on reloading tabs on switch. Especially when it doesn’t do it every single time. I’d very much like it to stop, please.

Mail

Mail is good but not awesome on the iPad. To be fair, doing mail “awesome” is a difficult task, one which I don’t think anyone has really achieved yet.

My main gripe about Mail on the iPad is that it insists on opening messages automatically. This same thing frustrates me on desktop clients. Having to turn off a “preview” mode on the desktop is annoying enough; having it be the only way to fly on the iPad is annoying. I only want to see the content of a message when I explicitly tap on it. Until then, I’d rather see a blank panel next to it. Seeing the content of messages automatically makes it too easily to accidentally mark a message as read before I’m actually ready to read it, let alone act on its contents.

I’m pleased to know that unified inbox support is on its way in iPhone OS 4. I hope other improvements are coming as well.

iBooks

iBooks is the hotness. That’s all I have to say about that so far. I’ve not spent enormous amounts of time reading yet, so I don’t have more comments than that yet.

Third-party Apps

Another gripe, although not an overly important one, is that many of the apps I use on a daily basis (often many, many times a day) haven’t yet got iPad versions, or have iPad versions that aren’t quite ready for prime time.

High on the list is the Facebook app, which hasn’t been updated to use all that screen space yet. Yes, you can do Facebook in Safari, but I find I actually prefer the iPhone app’s experience over the browser experience. Curious to see what Facebook will do on iPad.

I also would like a good Google Reader-syncing RSS reader. On iPhone, I’m a huge fan of Byline. I bought “My Times” yesterday for a couple dollars, but it crashes pretty often. According to the developer, an update is winding its way through the approval process. However, I prefer the Byline UI and suspect that an iPad version of that would be nicer.

I love Rooms for IRC on iPhone, but it doesn’t have an iPad version yet. I bought a copy of LimeChat, which works well, but in landscape mode, it insists on having two sidebars, one for your channels, and one for the users in the channel, and there’s no way to hide either or both of them, meaning you’re stuck with the chat squeezed in between them. I’d like this to let me use more of my screen for actual content. The user and channel lists could easily be drop-downs.

I’m a long-time Twittelator user on the iPhone, and the iPad version was one of my first purchases. By and large I like it, but IMHO it uses too much of the screen for borders and cute effects and not enough for content. And in landscape mode, it makes the friends timeline very narrow, using most of the screen for a box that lets you look at various other views, such as @mentions. I don’t use any of those views very often. I’d much rather be able to have my friends timeline use the majority of the screen.

MDC

The big task for this week, other than getting caught up (which shouldn’t be too hard since I generally was able to triage most of my email and did handle MDC editing tasks while I was out), is to start the overhaul of the js-ctypes documentation now that I have a pretty good handle on the changes there.

We’ve scheduled — finally — our upgrade to MindTouch 2009 9.12.2, to take place during tomorrow’s maintenance window. We have hopes that this will further improve reliability and performance. It does on our staging server, at least under certain situations, but it’s hard to gauge how that will carry over to the live site, which obviously gets much more traffic and is more powerful hardware.

Weave

I’ve started playing with the code for the iPhone Weave client a bit. I think I’m going to try to build a simple web browser around the code, so I can do quick surfing to look at stuff using my Weave bookmarks and history without having to tap links to swap over to Safari to do it. At the moment, I have the existing client building but it’s crashing on me. Not sure, yet, why that’s happening. Looks like I may have pulled the repository in a state of transition, so I’ll try again tonight.

Weave has turned into something I really can’t live without, and it’s driving me nuts not having it on my iPhone.

This will become more of a problem once I have my iPad; I placed my order for a 3G iPad last night after finally having a chance to try one out yesterday afternoon. I foresee the iPad becoming my primary method of surfing and handling email when I’m at home, just because of how convenient it is to have with me. So getting a good Weave client together is pretty important to me.

I’ll take it easy through the weekend and will try again to get back to work on Monday.

Apparently just because the surgery only took 20 minutes doesn’t mean I don’t need some time to recover.

I asked if she could get some advice from the doctor for me, and she said she would and would call me back today. A few minutes ago, having not heard anything yet, I went ahead and called over to them. She went home sick early yesterday and failed to ask the other nurse to follow up, so now, since my doctor is in surgery, I’m stuck waiting another day to find out whether or not I’m correct that I should go ahead and get this done soon.

Basically, the only real information I need is “are the stones I have such that it’s fairly likely to keep getting worse until I need to have this thing removed, or is this something that could be pretty much fine for many years?”

The safest bet is probably to get it taken out right away, but I do want to get all the information I can first.

Sigh. I hate waiting. Especially when I know the likely outcome.

Hopefully I’ll have results by mid-week or so.

Oddly, I’m still having bouts of nausea and discomfort after the Hepatobiliary Imino-Diacetic Acid (HIDA) scan. The drug they injected to make my gall bladder work its magic in a hurry seems to have disagreed with me rather intensely. Still, I continue to gradually improve and think I’ll be back to normal by Monday. Bleah though.

Best case scenario: I have gallstones, and we schedule me to have my gall bladder removed.

If the ultrasound comes up negative, they’ll be immediately taking me in for another test, this one involving injecting a radioactive tracer and following it through my system to see how my liver and gall bladder are functioning. This involves an injection (thereby triggering my intense aversion to needles) and then a lot of waiting around while they take periodic pictures of my insides.

If that test comes up clear, then the problem was something other than my gall bladder and I don’t know what happens next.

If that test indicates a problem, I presume my gall bladder comes out then too. I’d obviously prefer that the first test be the one to determine that my gall bladder should be removed, since I don’t particularly want to deal with the second test. Going through both, especially if both are negative, would kind of suck.

At any rate, this is a longwinded way of saying that I won’t be around until later than usual tomorrow, although I’ll certainly be tweeting and checking mail as holding patterns in the testing allow. If the ultrasound is positive, I’ll probably be at my desk by noon or so Eastern. If it’s negative, and I have to have the other test too, then it’ll probably be early to mid-afternoon instead.