My Online Thoughts & Pontifications

Truly spectacular photograph and fitting shot to remember Endeavour by!

One of my favourite songs now turns out to be one of my son's as well. For me it just reminds me of my youth working on the farm holding up the traffic. Memories of the competition to see who can create the longest tail back always brings a smile.

For my son? Well he just loves diggers!

“Now you can use Keynote, Pages and Numbers on iPhone and iPod touch to create amazing presentations, documents and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The incredible Retina display, revolutionary Multi-Touch interface and our powerful software make it easy to create, edit, organize and share all of your documents from iPhone 4 or iPod touch.”

Keynote, Pages and Numbers import and export documents from iWork for Mac and Microsoft Office; print wirelessly using AirPrint™; and include beautiful Apple-designed themes and templates. All iWork apps now include improved document management with thumbnail images that let you find your files quickly, organize them and group them into folders using intuitive gestures. From the Tools button in the toolbar, you can easily share any presentation, document or spreadsheet without leaving the app.

Apple announcements keep coming today! I'm not sure how useable these will be on the iPhone, with mixed reviews of them on the iPad when compared to their Mac equivalent. However its nice to see and hopefully the upcoming announcements on iCloud will make it easier to sync documents between all your devices.

Apple has announced that it will be indeed be releasing iCloud at this year's WWDC in June, although it looks like the launch of the iPhone 5 will be subject to delay.

In a rare email, which maps out what will be shown at WWDC, Apple explained:

"Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00am.

"At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud services offering."

Well no surprise there then, seeing as all the blogs and podcasts have been predicting this for months now. Can we now have some peace and quiet on the matter until the keynote?

The rumor mill has been churning Monday afternoon with reports that Twitter is working on its own photo-sharing service that would compete with the likes of Twitpic and Yfrog.

TechCrunch first reported the tip, citing multiple unnamed sources, Monday afternoon. And now All Things D seems to have confirmed the story as well, going so far as to say the service will be announced this week. ATD‘s story also cites unnamed sources, but claims the announcement will be made at its own conference, D9, this week in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

via mashable.com

Looks like Twitter has definitely decided to take control of as much of the user experience with twitter as possible. Gone are the days of just being an API/Pipe company!

No sooner has my favourite text editor on the iPhone added Markdown support, then my favourite text editor on the Mac, Byword, is also updated to include similar support.

For those that like their applications distraction free, then you can’t get much better than Byword, with a full screen and focus word that allows you to get rid of the day to day distractions and focus in on your writing.

I personally use Byword for all my day to day text editing, including this post which I am writing in it as Markdown. There is a 15 day trial on their website and you can purchase a full copy from the Mac App Store.

One of my favourite iPhone apps Notesy has just been updated to version 2 with the inclusions of some excellent new features, namely support for sub folders and Markdown.

Notesy is a text editing application which synchronises automatically through dropbox, allowing you to access you text from any device or machine. When combined with the excellent Notational Velocity on the Mac this makes a killer text editing solution across all my devices. My particular preference is the nvALT 2.0 branch of Notational Velocity which also includes support for the excellent Markdown.

So whether you're looking for a simple text editing solution to manage your shopping lists or want a feature rich application to allow you to draft out blog posts, then you should definitely take a look at Notesy in the App Store right now

Samsung will demonstrate an all-new 10.1-inch display at the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium next week. Samsung's new display will have a 2560 x 1600 resolution, far in excess of anything on the tablet market today. At 300 dpi, the display also compares favorably with the Retina Display resolution of Apple's iPhone 4; meanwhile, Samsung claims the PenTile technology used in the display allows it to operate while drawing 40 percent less power.

Looks like an interesting new display from Samsung both in terms of resolution and power consumption. Could this be the first good reason to hold off on buying an iPad 2 and wait for the iPad 3?