My Online Thoughts & Pontifications
Hi, I'm a Husband, Father and IT Manager based near Cambridge in the UK. I have been delivering web solutions for over 15 years and in my spare time enjoy all things tech, photography, mountain sports and am busy training for my first triathlon.
This is my blog in which I post links & random thoughts from my travels across the web, primarily focussing on web apps, web development and all things Apple. I hope you enjoy it!
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Subscribe via RSS »The Next Six Months in Apple
So, here’s my guess at Apple’s iPad plans for 2011:
An iPad 2, fairly soon. Say, a March announcement, shipping in the first week of April. Faster, more RAM, maybe more storage, thinner and lighter, a front-facing camera.1 Running iOS 4.3.
iOS 5, announced at a developer event in March, shipping in June.
iPad 3, shipping in September, announced at the annual iPod event. Running iOS 5.1, same as the next-generation iPod Touch.
How could Apple release a third-generation iPad just six months or so after the second one? Maybe it won’t be an actual next generation model. Maybe it’s more like an iPad 2.5, or iPad 2 Pro — a new higher-end model that sits atop the iPad product family, not a replacement for the iPad 2 models (which, of course, haven’t even been released yet).
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has made some interesting suggestions about the potential release strategy that Apple may try and follow with the iPad this year.
Now Gruber is widely regarded as having some of the best sources within Apple but in this article he goes to lengths to emphasise that these is pure guess work on his part. However its a strong arguement all the same.
Having a release of a new iPad so soon after the holiday buying period would be a little strange for Apple, with most of their other releases scheduled around this. And with tablets destined to be even bigger in 2011 than they were in 2010, they will want to ensure they get the largest slice of the available Christmas spending this year.
While I don't necessarily agree with Gruber that bringing the iPad in line with the iPod range makes sense, I could see the iPad being brought inline with the iPhone. After all they both run iOS and this would make their software release cycle much easier and avoid the iOS 4 issue they ran into last year, with the iPhone running it for months ahead of the iPad.
So I'm going to stick my neck out here (I know I will regret this) and suggest that rather than an iPad 2 in March followed by a iPad 2.5 in September as Gruber suggests, maybe they will just hold off on iPad 2 until June and announce it at WWDC with the iPhone 5.
Unlikley I know but its always fun to guess
New mimimal mail client for Mac is out of beta and available in the App Store
One of my favourite apps Sparrow has come out of beta today and is now available for purchase on the Mac App Store.
Badged as Miminal mail for the Mac, Sparrow takes a Tweetie style interface and applies it to email. Version 1 supports Gmail and Google Apps only but the developers are already working on a 1.1 beta which will expand support to wider IMAP services.
I have been using the beta for a number of months now and have to say I love it! The minimalist approach is fantastic and keyboard shortcuts allow you to churn through your email in seconds.
A free lite version is in review at the moment and should shortly be available in the App Store but with the paid version only being just over a fiver its not going to break the bank.
I will write a wider review shortly but if you are frustrated by Apple Mail and are looking for an alternative I would recommend giving Sparrow a try.
NewsRack now available on the Mac
via omz-software.com
omz:software have just launched a Mac version of their popular iOS RSS Reader NewsRack. Users can run it as a standalone application or use Google Reader as a centralised sychronisation service, similar to NetNewsWire.
Personally I am a fan of Reeder on both the Mac and iOS but if you are looking for something new, then its definitely worth taking a look at NewsRack.
First look at the McLaren MP4-26
via f1fanatic.co.uk
And so the Formula 1 roller coaster starts again for another year!
Hot on the heels of the first official testing session of the season, McLaren have today publically launched the MP4-26, which they hope will take either Hamilton or Button to the Drivers Championship and McLaren to the 2011 Constructors Championship.
And what a beauty it is, with innovative new side pods, air intakes and exhaust configurations that really make it stand out from the other cars on the grid.
Time will tell if these add an edge in terms of performance with the new Red Bull already looking strong. We will hopefully know more next week with the second official testing session and I for one cannot wait for the 2011 season to start in March.
Has Microsoft’s Bing been caught using Google search results?
By now, you may have read Danny Sullivan’s recent post: “Google: Bing is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results” and heard Microsoft’s response, “We do not copy Google's results.” However you define copying, the bottom line is, these Bing results came directly from Google.I’d like to give you some background and details of our experiments that lead us to understand just how Bing is using Google web search results.
Interesting blog post by Google, where they outline the evidence behind their accusation that Microsoft have been using Google search results to alter their own results.
Looks pretty damming to me and shame to see Microsoft resorting to such tactics
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