Lex, Briefly

Suppose, I don’t know, you suddenly have to make an overnight trip to Philadelphia when you realize the day before your Bahamas vacation that your passport expired. You want to stay connected, though, so you launch the Yahoo! Messenger iPhone app, which keeps you signed in and alerts you to new messages via push, even if you exit the app.

Folks IM you.  You tap out your answers. It’s lovely.

You get a few more IMs. You know this because you hear them, as you cruise along the interstate. You’re a smart and safe driver, though, so you don’t text — or IM — while driving.

When you’re safely parked, you glance at the list of IMs and see you have open conversations with a half-dozen people. Too many to navigate the iPhone app expeditiously, so you figure you ought to fire up your Mac and IM them through Adium, as the good lord intended.

It’s at that moment that disaster strikes. The moment you sign in to Yahoo! Messenger anywhere else, the iPhone app signs you out. That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense, though, is that now you can no longer see any of your conversations. The boneheaded design decision in a nut: You can’t see your chats unless you’re logged in.

That’s painfully frustrating, and renders my desired scenario here completely unworkable. To see those conversations again, you have to sign back in, which forces you to start replying from the iPhone again, which was just what you were trying to avoid.

1. As you probably know, you can leave your iPad (and even your Kindle) in your carryon bag. Unlike your laptop, it doesn’t need to ride through in its own bin.

2. Paper boarding passes are for chumps. Almost all major airlines now let you rely on a barcode pass on your iPhone’s screen. If you’re going to use one, though, take a screenshot of it on the iPhone (by holding down the home and lock buttons simultaneously). 

Extra-bonus tip: Go into your iPhone’s photos, and set the boarding pass barcocde as your wallpaper. Then you can simply lock and unlock your phone to show off the code. When you’re checking email as you shuffle through the long security line, it’s comforting to know that you won’t need to quickly exit the Mail app and load up the boarding pass with a series of tap; just lock and unlock and you’re ready to go.

Note that security is unacceptably more lax when you go the iPhone route; I frequently find that the boarding pass screeners just wave me through when they see the barcode on my iPhone. Yes, they’ll scan it before you board the plane, but you could in theory get pretty far into the airport’s so-called “secure area” without a legit boarding pass when the TSA doesn’t scan your iPhone’s barcode.

Remember, contrary to what 99% of air travelers think, you don’t need to show your boarding pass as you go through the metal detector. This is especially true if your pass is on your iPhone, which has to go through the x-ray machine.

3. I also like to take an iPhone photo of my parking space in the enormous airport lot, so that I can find it more easily upon my return.

I’m in Santa Monica for work this week. Last night, I left my laptop at the office, taking just my iPad and my iPhone back to The Georgian Hotel where I’m staying. The Georgian provides free WiFi for its guests.

Like many WiFi providers, The Georgian redirects all web traffic to a login page until you authenticate. The hotel provides each guest with the WiFi username and password at checkin. (It’s always the same username — “guest” — and password for everyone.)

The web form that the Georgian uses wasn’t behaving like a good iPad citizen. For some reason the iPad didn’t like the Javascript on the login form; when I clicked the login button, nothing would happen beyond locking up the interface for a moment.

My iPhone, however, could login with no problem.

As many WiFi providers do, the Georgian’s system has a special link for VPN users. Clicking that link merely provides you with a static, public IP address, making VPN access easier.

That was my in.

Using my iPhone, I took advantage of the VPN/static-IP option, and logged in. Then I went into the Settings app and tapped on the network connection to see its details.

On my iPad, I went into Settings and tapped into the Georgian’s network, but instead of leaving the default “DHCP” option enabled (where you get provided with an IP address by the network), I switched to “manual” mode, where you tell the network exactly what IP address you want.

I painstakingly copied the IP address (and subnet, router, and DNS information) from my iPhone onto the iPad.

And as you’ve guessed, it indeed worked. From then on, I could surf the Internet on my iPad without a hitch. As a pre-caution, I logged out of the network on my iPhone, and then reconnected it without the VPN option. That way, I could avoid having two devices trying to share the same IP address.

Developers creating apps for the iPad enjoy one immediately obvious advantage: All that extra screen real estate vs. the iPhone. With great screen size, however, comes great responsibility.

We’ll get into that,  but first some background: When you click on a link inside an iPhone or iPad app, the developer has a choice to make. The app can either exit and launch Safari, or it can integrate what Apple calls a WebView. That essentially means the developer gets the guts of Mobile Safari — the rendering engine, the zooming, and other niceties, without some of the “chrome” — the bookmarks button, the “tabs” button, and the like.

Unsurprisingly, many apps whose utility involves frequently viewing web pages choose the embedded WebView approach. 

On the iPad, developers are faced with a follow-up choice on precisely how to integrate that WebView in certain scenarios. NetNewsWire and Twitterrific for iPad — the massively popular RSS reader and the massively popular Twitter client — each implement WebViews, and they represent the two sides of the Great WebView Implementation Debate that I’m considering here.

The apps look more than superficially similar. Like Apple’s Mail app for the iPad, they each employ a two-column view in landscape orientation, with a source list on the left (feeds for NetNewsWire, timeline views for Twitterrific) at one-third of the screen’s width, and the main view eating up the other two-thirds.

When you click on links as you read posts in NetNewsWire’s wider right panel,  the WebView takes over that entire area. That is, the blog entry you were just reading in that wider column is entirely replaced by the WebView; clicking the back arrow takes you back to the original post.

Twitterrific takes the other approach. When you click on a tweeted link, the app displays a modal WebView. It’s precisely the same width as the wider list of tweets, but instead of replacing that column, it’s overlaid — like a dialog box in Mac OS X — and centered atop the iPad screen. In thus overlaps the source list on the left and the timeline on the right. The entire background is dimmed, as well. To get back to your timeline, you need to tap the “Done” button at the upper-right of the modal WebView.

It’s a small but significant difference. And I struggle to find any advantages to Twitterrific’s approach. 

The one potential benefit I considered regarding that modal WebView display is the fact that, in theory, you can still see the main content (in this case, the list of tweets), whereas in NetNewsWire you completely lose out on seeing the original blog post until you go back. In practice, though, the only element of the tweet list that remains visible under the WebView overlay is really the relative timestamp — i.e., how long ago the tweets (whose content and author you can no longer see) were submitted.

In NetNewsWire, on the other hand, the inline WebView leaves the left-side source list completely visible. That means that you can switch to another source — another feed folder, or another individual feed, or another post within a feed — instantly, without needing to dismiss the WebView first.

The WebViews are the same width, so size isn’t the issue. Once you’re in the WebView, you use back and forth navigation arrows to move between webpages as you’d expect, and in NetNewsWire you can go “back” all the way to the original blog post that launched your current web sojourn. In Twitterrific, you’re forced to hop from the back and forth arrows to that “Done” button to get back to where you started. 

I like Twitterrific a lot. But I don’t like its WebView implementation, and I don’t like that modal WebView in any other iPad app, either. It feels like a remnant of the mostly-bygone pop-up era, and clunkier than my iPad surfing should be.

I’ve downloaded oodles of Kindle books. I started scouring for good Kindle books when I became a proud owner of the Kindle 2, and I haven’t stopped. I download two kinds of books for my Kindle: Books I really want to read, and books that Amazon makes available for free or for insanely cheap.

Many of the free books are crap, or in genres of no interest to me (like romance or Christian fiction). But occasionally, free (or heavily-discounted) books introduce me to incredible authors, like Jonathan Tropper. Since it’s so painless to get those cheap books, and so easy to trash them if I can’t get into them, I’ve literally acquired a couple hundred over the past few months.

When my iPad arrived in early April, I relegated the Kindle 2 to a lonely corner of my nightstand, and began reading with the Kindle app on the iPad instead.

So I’ve been less inclined to purchase books at the iBookstore, Apple’s digital bookstore for buying iBooks books. (Book book book book book.) But I’ve been tremendously eager to read a few books with iBooks, to gauge the experience and compare it to the Kindle app.

Sarah Silverman, and more specifically her new memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, finally afforded me the opportunity to play read with iBooks. It’s a new book, and cost $9.99 in both bookstores.

I found the book-reading experience within iBooks decent, but not exceptional. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, the app does some things far better than the Kindle app. But it’s missing some obvious features, too.

Let’s start with the good stuff. While page-turning animations are entirely superfluous in an e-reader — and indeed you can simply tap in both iBooks and the Kindle app to turn pages — I enjoyed iBooks’s virtual pages. I like to curl my finger under the next page in a book, and I found myself repeatedly recreating that gesture in iBooks; since the page curls precisely where you “grab” it, the effect is pretty slick. You can also turn back a page from the right side (theoretically the “next page” side), just by swiping to the right, which is a nice touch.

While some find iBooks’s font options too limited, I found reading The Bedwetter in Palatino worked out just fine. The in-app ability to look up words is excellent; the Kindle hardware supports this, but oddly not the Kindle app. Annoyingly, though, if you take advantage of the iBooks feature that lets you look up words/phrases in Wikipedia or Google, the app quits and launches Safari, instead of using a far saner in-app web-view. 

But iBooks’s weaknesses, while fewer than its plusses, are really dopey. 

The Kindle itself is lousy for nighttime reading. You need a book light, since the device itself has no backlit screen. The iPad’s single biggest reading advantage is the fact that the screen illuminates itself. If you can read on the screen for extended periods of time without eyestrain or fatigue — which I’ve been able to do, to my own surprise — you can toss your book light in the same forgotten corner as your Kindle itself. 

The Kindle app lets you toggle between three “modes”: Black-text-on-white, sepia-toned, or white-text-on-black. My daytime reading is sepia; my nighttime reading is white-on-black. The app offers a brightness slider; I drag the brightness way down at night. That way, there’s no bright screen burning my retinas in my dark room before sleep beckons. 

iBooks doesn’t do that. The app offers no option to change text colors. It presents merely a brightness slider. Drag it to the darkest setting, and your text remains dark, too. 

This makes no sense.

When you want the background dark, you need contrast with the text. It shouldn’t be neon sign bright, but it should stand out against the page in user-configurable ways.

Basically, it should behave exactly like the Kindle app already has for ages.

I’m very familiar with the configurable shortcut to invert the iPhone’s screen with a triple-tap of the Home button, but it doesn’t work well in iBooks. It leaves either the text or the background too bright as you play with the slider.

To make matters worse, iBooks doesn’t remember your brightness settings in between launches, or even if you put the iPad to sleep and wake it up again. If I need to make a quick visit to escort my three-year-old to the bathroom, I put the iPad to sleep. I wake it up, and iBooks blasts my eyes with its brightest white background again. 

(For fun, try sliding the brightness slider to the darkest setting, leaving the control open, and then putting your iPad to sleep. When you wake it up, the slider remains at the darkest setting, even though the background is back to bright white.)

These are flaws obvious to any nighttime reader. The good news is, they’re all fixable. The better news is, in spite of its own weaknesses, Kindle gets enough of the core reading necessities right that I can comfortably forego the dictionary and page-turning niceties that iBooks offers. For now.

Let’s say you bought a brand new iPad. Completely enamored of your new device, you took it with you anywhere. On a whim, you went to Starbucks, iPad tucked under your arm. You order a hot chocolate (this is my fantasy, and I don’t drink coffee), maybe a brownie, and sit down to tap (one-handed, while you eat) away.

Nature calls. You answer. When you come back to the table, your iPad is gone. 

Did you lose it? No. Were you an utter fool to leave it unattended? Of course. But now that your pricey gadget is gone, I assume you’d be pissed off if you found out that a third party:

• Entertained overtures from the guy who snagged it, now looking to pawn it off for extra scratch
• Went ahead and actually paid the guy for the iPad, which we all knew wasn’t his to sell
• Took it apart
• Posted all the details I could find about it.

The third-party in my hypothetical scenario is clearly scum. He bought your iPad from someone who freely admitted it wasn’t his to sell. 

Gizmodo’s post today — “This is Apple’s Next iPhone” — describes events that mirror my bogus scenario. Gizmodo’s the third-party in this version, and is impressively a much bigger asshole in the real story than the fictional third party in mine.

Gizmodo got ahold of what sure seems to be Apple’s next iPhone. Gizmodo writes:

It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.

That’s unethical. It’s lousy journalism. And if I hadn’t dropped Gizmodo from my RSS reader many moons ago, I’d sure as heck drop it now. 

I want to be clear, here: If an anonymous source dropped off, say, iPad 2.0 at my house tonight, leaving it on my doorstep, I’d probably take it out of the box, play with it, snapsome photos, the whole deal. But I don’t think that makes me a hypocrite.

The anonymous source that dropped the fictional iPad 2.0 on my front porch could easily have been the same folks who give Uncle Walt and Uncle David the latest Apple goodies a week before anyone else. Gizmodo, on the other hand, knows full well that its source wasn’t meant to have this iPhone in its possession. Gizmodo hasn’t said so publicly yet, but the site paid to get its metaphorical hands on the new iPhone.

Acquiring knowingly-stolen goods isn’t just crappy journalistic ethics, it’s crappy human behavior. 

This morning, as I struggled to feel awake enough to get out of bed — as my three-year-old and one-year-old daughters were urging me to do — I skimmed through the morning RSS influx using NetNewsWire for the iPad.

It was a nice moment. Sierra (16 months) was using the iPod touch, Anya (3 and a half) was using the iPhone, I was using the iPad, and Lauren was wishing we’d all turn off our screens and let her sleep some more.

Anyway, NetNewsWire. I was skimming through, sending various interesting-looking articles to Instapaper, and noting the same tiny small handful of NetNewsWire bugs that I keep encountering in the app, and thinking not for the first time that I ought to email developer Brent Simmons to make sure he knows about the few annoyances I keep running into.

Now, I don’t “know” Brent; we’ve never met, we’ve never spoken, and we’ve never even IM’d. We have exchanged emails, and I’ve reviewed his software (NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone), and written Macworld stories about various projects Brent’s involved in. But I figured that as a developer, he’d appreciate knowing about bugs in his software if they were reported with enough detail.

Still, I didn’t (and haven’t) sent the note yet. I’m guessing he already knows about the way that not every post in a folder gets marked as read when you tap the button, and that some posts only show up in the individual feeds when you tap into them, never surfacing in the folder view. (I suspect those two bugs are related.) And he’s already posted on the NetNewsWire for iPad FAQ that support for “Mark as Unread” is on the to-do list.

So that’s the background. After I served my girls breakfast, I tucked them in the playroom and began cleaning up the kitchen. Oh, and browsing those stories I’d filed away in Instapaper.

Brent had a good one. He wrote it geared toward his fellow developers, as a missive on being nice in dealing with others online. As I read, I was thinking about how it applied far beyond software developers, thinking I would send the piece to folks on my “Product and Community” team at my day job about the need to respect and appreciate customer feedback. Brent’s advice includes thanking people who write fair reviews, and ignoring obnoxious people who write jerky comments on the App Store. (He even advises trying to learn from those jerks if possible, which is an admirable goal; I too often only learn “I would like to avoid Jerky Person X for eternity.”)

When I approached the end of the piece and saw Brent’s postscript — saying that he’s not perfect, and that he still owes one Lex Friedman a thank-you for a certain NetNewsWire for iPhone app review — I was truly surprised.

Reading a post I was really enjoying (and planning to share), from a developer whose software I use literally every single day across multiple Macs and i-prefixed gadgets, and then spotting a thank-you to me was, in a word, shocking.

So, Brent: You’re most welcome for the review. Keep up the great work. Thank you for singlehandedly sparking the shift to an RSS-centric world for me and thousands of others. And I found a couple bugs in the iPad version of NetNewsWire that I’d love to talk to you about.

“Jackass of the Week” is already taken, so I’ll highlight the occasion douchebags I come across. Rafe Needleman at CNET today writes that the iPad isn’t living up to his expectations. That’s fine.

It’s his arguments that are douchey. 

I shall call him, ”Smudgy.”
Everyone knows the first-gen iPad is lacking a camera and multitasking and that many of its apps are overpriced. Annoying.

My toaster is also lacking a camera. The iPad does indeed multitask; I can listen to music or streaming radio while I do other stuff, and new emails arrive in the background, or calendar pops up. It doesn’t allow 3rd-party app multitasking, and won’t until Fall. But neither does the iPhone, and I like both devices a lot.

April 3: No chamois
MacBooks and iPhones come with little screen-cleaning cloths, and they don’t collect fingerprints in nearly as spectacular a fashion as the iPad. Come on, Apple, at this price you can afford two pennies of cloth.

I assume he’s joking. The oleo-phobic (literally “oil fearing”) screen can be cleaned with a tissue, napkin, or sleeve. But there’s rarely a point in doing so (though I admit I do it too): The thing’s going to get smeared in fingerprints as soon as you start using it again. Nature of the beast.

April 4: A hobbled New York Times app
It’s Sunday, and the New York Times is sitting on my kitchen table. Apple’s ads have me thinking that I can read the whole thing on the iPad instead, and if so I’ll happily cancel my paper subscription. But the current ”Editor’s Choice” NYT app gives me only a limited selection of stories. Cruelly, the iPhone version of the NYT app gives me everything in the paper. I didn’t pay all this money only to choose between a tiny version of the Times and an abridged version at iPad size. Give me what you advertised, please, Apple.

This isn’t up to Apple. Rafe’s beef is with the New York Times.  

April 6: Where’s the kickstand?If the iPad is meant as a media-consuming device, how exactly are you supposed to arrange it to watch said media? You can buy Apple’s overpriced case ($39.95 for what appears to be a file folder made from recycled milk jugs), as I did, and that works pretty well, but the device should have some form of stand so you don’t need to spend yet more money just so you can do with what it’s sold for without generating chiropractic bills.

I agree a kickstand of some sort would be nice, and I suppose the next version may have one. Maybe. It interrupts smooth lines, and Apple doesn’t go for that often. But I’ve been using mine sans case and haven’t needed to see a chiropractor yet. It weighs LESS THAN TWO POUNDS. I’ve literally eaten hamburgers that weigh more than my iPad, and they didn’t come with kickstands either. 

April 7: Missing apps
Waaaait a minute. Where’s the clock? The calculator? Come on, Apple. These are freebies on the iPhone. The clock omission is particularly galling. The iPad is a good e-book reader and it’s been spending nights on the table next to my bed, so why doesn’t it have the one other app that would be useful there, an alarm clock? And without multitasking support (at least for now), third-party clocks don’t even work. (Workaround: Set an appointment in the calendar, which has audible reminders. But see below.)

Wow. Even for a lamely-written piece, Rafe’s article is really stretching here. The clock? It’s in the header on EVERY SINGLE SCREEN. It’s also on your lock screen. If he’s looking for an alarm clock, I found a free alarm clock and a free calculator app (PCalc Lite) in about 4 seconds of searching in the App Store. I installed them. I almost never use either; the iPad is a comically large calculator, and I rarely have need to use it as such. I still have an iPhone, and truth be told, I almost never use its calculator, either. When I need to run a quick calculation, I use Google.

The line that 3rd-party alarm clocks won’t work is hogwash, and I guarantee that Rafe knows it’s hogwash. There are many, for the iPhone and the iPad, and the all work. Some use push notifications; some rely on your leaving the app running. But to make a blanket “they don’t work” statement is pretty disingenuous. And as Rafe points out but dismisses, you can use the built-in Calendar app to set alarms very easily.

April 12: No arrow keys on the keyboard
Back at work, I’m trying to get productive with the iPad… But try writing or editing anything other than a short e-mail or Tweet on the iPad’s virtual keyboard. It has no arrow keys and obviously no mouse, which makes quick edits go slow. Selecting text by pointing and dragging over it works and looks cool but is just not efficient. It’s an annoying roadblock. (The external keyboard accessory has arrow keys, but I’d rather carry my MacBook with me that schlep that thing around.)

He’d rather “carry” his Macbook than “schelp” the Keyboard Dock (or, one assumes, a Bluetooth keyboard). That’s his right, I guess. But I don’t know why the keyboard gets the schlepping label. If you need to lots of typing, use a real keyboard. 

There’s more, but you get the point. If Rafe doesn’t like his iPad, that’s fine; he just needs to write honestly about why.

Oh, and don’t miss his conclusion about just how bad the thing is:

I’ve been adapting to the iPad’s niggles for two weeks and I will continue to. It’s a fun and beautiful device, and it is actually useful both at work and at home. 

A week and a half is plenty of time to judge the quality of launch-day iPad apps, right? Well, since we’re agreed, here’s my take on some of the best iPad apps out there right now:

1. Netflix. The app works like magic, and truly feels like the future. You can watch any of thousands upon thousand of movies, at your fingertips, in seconds.

2. Kindle. I’ve spent a little time with iBooks too, and I like it, but I already own dozens of Kindle books, so my reading’s been focused there. Kindle for iPad is the real deal; I use “sepia” by day and white-on-black by night. And knowing that you can pick up from exactly the same page on your iPhone while you wait in line is simply magical.

3. Instapaper. I’m admittedly a very late Instapaper adopter. But the reading experience on the iPad is so pleasant that I’m now leveraging the browser and NetNewsWire shortcuts a lot. The “Pro” version of the iPad app works just beautifully.

4.  Pages. Pages on the Desktop is fine. Pages on the iPad is really elegant. I enjoy writing longer pieces with it on my iPad (using the Keyboard Dock). It’s a 1.0 release and needs updates like a word count feature and change tracking, but it’s strong as is.

5. Strategery. As Gruber wrote recently, the 3.0 upgrade to make this lovely Risk-esque game iPad-friendly took a major stumble. But a series of subsequent upgrades since iPad launch day have resolved those issues. There’s no game I play on my iPhone more than Strategery, and it’s the second-most played game on my iPad, too. 

6. Flight Control HD is in first place in that contest. Unlike Strategery, Flight Control requires a brand new purchase to go iPad-friendly. But it’s worth the $5 asking price. The game is excellent.

7. New York Times Editor’s Choice. The best of the Times. Free.

8. KidArt. A drawing/stamping app/game for kids. Mine love it. So I do, too.

9. Redacted. It’ll launch later this week, and it’s the most fun I’ve had on my iPad yet. Not a game, though.

It’s worth noting that Apple’s own built-in apps—particularly Mail and Safari—are truly excellent on the iPad, too.

No.

And no.

The iPad Keyboard Dock is a fine, heavy accessory. It’s a full-size keyboard, weighted so that you can dock your iPad in it without the whole caboodle falling over. And it works well: I’ve typed emails, voice documents, and more with the dock thus far, and it feels natural.

As Dan Frakes’s tweet references, the keyboard dock is a little too good: It makes you forget you’re using the iPad, and you’ll reach down for your laptop trackpad, or reach over for your desktop mouse — and they’re not there. Where normal computing is a combination of keyboard and mousing, iPad computing (with the keyboard dock) is a mix of keyboard and touching.

That’s a decided mental paradigm shift, but a manageable one. 

As good as the keyboard is, though, I have my first sliver of iPad-related buyer’s remorse. Had I instead purchased the Apple iPad Case and Apple’s regular Bluetooth (wireless) keyboard, I might be a bit better off:

You can only use the keyboard dock in portrait mode. Apple’s case, on the other hand, can prop up the iPad in landscape mode. (I don’t yet have the case, so I don’t know how easily it can be rigged to stand up vertically with the screen visible. My guess: Not especially well without propping it up on something else.) The ideal external keyboard for iPad, though, should take into account the frequent need to switch the device’s orientation. I want to be able to type on real keys with the screen oriented either way.

I don’t, however, need the added mobility that a wireless keyboard could afford. You can’t realistically lean back in your chair, keyboard on your lap, iPad a couple feet away on the table. You need to be able to touch the iPad’s screen at least as frequently as you’d reach for your mouse or trackpad today. 

There are other pros and cons on the Bluetooth keyboard option. The Bluetooth keyboard is lighter than the keyboard dock, but it also requires batteries. And of course it can’t charge your iPad the way the keyboard dock can. 

Anyone who regularly uses the Mail app in portrait mode on the iPad is nutty; the landscape mode is immeasurably better. Any time I want to check my email, then, I need to remove the iPad from the keyboard. And if I then want to type out a longer reply, I then must re-dock the iPad again. Not a scalable solution.

Were I to place my order today, I think I’d get the regular iPad dock (which, again, only holds the iPad in portrait mode), the Bluetooth keyboard, and the iPad case. The combination is lighter (and thus more portable) than the iPad plus the keyboard dock, and more flexible, too.

On Friday, news broke that Twitter acquired Loren Brichter’s Atebits, the company behind Tweetie. Twitter plans to rename Tweetie for iPhone as Twitter for iPhone, slash the price from $2.99 to free, and apparently release a custom iPad client as well.

I’ve previously reviewed the iPhone apps Tweetie and Tweetie 2 for Macworld, the latter scoring a perfect five mice. I wrote specifically that Tweetie 2 wasn’t just the best iPhone Twitter app, but the best Twitter app on any platform.

So it makes sense that Twitter would want to own Tweetie. Twitter’s extremely open and easy API has had several near-simultaneous effects:

It allowed developers to make (far) better tools for using Twitter than the Twitter website itself. This in turn contributed to the popularity of the site overall, as it was easier to use and get notifications from. The increased popularity exhibited the familiar “network effect”; more interest meant still more Twitter clients. More Twitter clients meant increased competition, which thus meant the quality of the best Twitter apps continued to rise. As a result, Twitter (the website) became increasingly less useful, serving mostly as the interface for newcomers to the site who didn’t know any better.

Twitter software developers have, to date, generated more revenue than the Twitter site.

By acquiring Tweetie, Twitter now owns the best Twitter client, which makes sense. But regardless of whether it’s the right business decision for Twitter (it is), does it unfairly and negatively impact other developers who make numerous other very good, very popular Twitter clients?

The knee-jerk response is: Yes, it sure does.

I tried to come up with an apt comparison. Apple makes a free default Mail client, but others can offer premium email clients for the Mac desktop. Few do, fewer make any money from it. But the analogy isn’t perfect, since Apple doesn’t “own” the email protocols the way Twitter owns Twittering.

Google does own Gmail. But you don’t have to use the Gmail website; you can use any email program to access your Gmail email, and a few developers even offer for-pay dedicated Gmail clients. A closer, but still imperfect analogy. And again: I imagine very few of those developers make any real money.

A much closer analogy is the world of instant messaging. AIM and Yahoo! offer their own dedicated clients, but software like Adium and Trillian compete with those free apps with their own interfaces to the messaging protocols. And here’s the tricky part: Both are offered for free. Adium is open-source; Trillian comes in free and premium flavors.

The biggest impact Twitter owning Tweetie will have on developers is that, from this point on, no more Tweeties — that is, premium, paid-only Twitter clients — will ever see much success again. Twitterrific has long been freely available using an advertising model, and the latest incarnation (for iPad) wisely offers in-app upgrades (to remove ads and to enable support for multiple accounts).

But if Twitter née Tweetie for iPad offers multiple accounts for free, how many people will ever give Twitterrific money now? And I don’t think the answer changes much even if Twitter for iPad is only 75% as good as Twitterrific.

This isn’t a death knell for other Twitter clients. Mozilla has success with Firefox even though they don’t charge for it, have a relatively small market share, and don’t sell it. In-app advertising (in this case, revenue agreements with search engines when searches are triggered from the in-browser search field) keep the (open-source) project flush with cash.

But it does mean that future Twitter clients on any platform where Tweetie/Twiter competes (iPhone, iPad, Mac) will likely never again be able to charge up front with any real success.

Today, Steve Jobs unveiled some of the hallmark “tentpoles” of iPhone OS 4.0. I did okay with my predictions; I’m generously awarding myself a 2.5 out of 5.

The multitasking approach is smart, sane, and scalable, I think. By nature, limiting the view of simultaneously-running apps to what is essentially a second dock is smart — even though the list becomes horizontally-scrollable, its visual confines will theoretically influence users to keep fewer apps open at once. 

I don’t quite get how you’ll choose to quit apps, as opposed to exiting them whilst leaving them running, but I suppose we have plenty of time to learn about those nuances.

Other announcements, like local push notifications (so that developers needn’t rely on third-party servers and Internet access to alert you to data already available on the device) and Folders are certainly welcomed improvements. The biggest announcements, however, are the iAd and Game Network platforms. 

Apple’s smart to try to own these areas on the iPhone. Bit players like OpenFeint may get screwed, but an Apple-powered, free-to-implement high score system and the like is good for developers and consumers alike. (It’s a waste of a developer’s time to implement a unique system, and that’s time not spent working on the fun parts of the game instead.) And if Apple’s able to find advertisers willing to create those custom “ad apps” that can integrate less invasively into the iPhone experience, I’m okay with it. Particularly if the ads are implemented less obnoxiously than some of the blinky flashy scrolly ads endemic to cheaper games these days.

The biggest disappointment — which, of course, could improve between now and the “Summer” release date (or even harder-to-wait-for “Fall” release for the iPad version) — was the lack of improvement to the modal push notification interface. 

Today, if you get successive push notifications, the prior ones are lost to the ether by the newest arrival. Slide to unlock too quickly, and even that latest notification vanishes forever. Steve showed nothing different today, and that’s a shame. Apple can clearly do better here; push notifications should stack, retain a history, and be less invasive to your work flow.

But perhaps the biggest question of all is: Does “Summer” mean June? Or late August?

I imagine numerous teams have worked long hours at Apple these past few months. Just two days after the iPad’s release, Apple announced an event (scheduled for this Thursday) to unveil iPhone OS 4.0.

I have no inside sources at Apple (yet). So my predictions about what OS 4.0 might contain are nothing but guesses, conjecture, and drunken rambling, sans alcohol. 

1. The “easy” guess is multitasking. I expect it will be there, using the apps-posé interface we’ve seen, or something similar. Like cut-and-paste, I expect the final version will feel functional and work well, but lack 100% intuitiveness. (You wouldn’t know how to cut and paste if you just picked up an iPhone for the first time.) Bonus prediction: I wonder if this and other 4.0 features might not be available on all iPhone OS devices. Maybe some multitasking and other niceties won’t work, say, on a first-gen iPhone or iPod touch, because of slower processors or less available memory.

2. Push notifications will also work better, so that the arrival of a new one doesn’t punt off the previous one, an obvious and major annoyance now. 

3. Dan Frakes predicts on Twitter that Apple’s “Ink” technology could find its way into OS 4.0. It’s a reasonable guess; I had been holding out hope that some kind of Ink-related preference would show up in the iPad’s Settings app. It’s often forgotten or denied that the Newton’s handwriting recognition technology was actually pretty good at the end. I think it’s smart for the iPad and its brethren to adapt more text-input methods, since some methods will always strike some consumers as trickier.

4. On that note, I do think that the iPad’s text-entry improvements will make their way other devices, perhaps standardized as part of 4.0. 

5. Wildcard: Built-in transcription mode. It’s employed to great success by apps like Dragon Search and Google Mobile App, and the latest version of the Android OS offers it in most (all?) text-entry fields. If Apple can successfully emulate that technology, it could be an additional, easier-to-use text entry method for times when tapping at virtual keyboards is unwanted or unmanageable. 

As you’ve gathered, I already think the iPad is awesome; it exceeded my high expectations. I think that OS 4.0 will be a major upgrade for the iPad and other iPhone OS devices. While Apple-bashing pundits will characterize it as catchup (Pre and Android already do multitasking!), I fully expect (and hope!) that Apple’s implementation of those features will characteristically leapfrog what’s available on other devices.

Much text will be written about the mere process of writing text on the iPad. I’m pretty delighted by a few very impressive refinements Apple made to the iPhone OS’s typing itself — improvements that I look forward to seeing on the iPhone as well. At the same time, I have noted a few weaknesses that only a software update can fix.

One feature I already lauded on Twitter is the iPad’s newfound ability to correct words with missing spaces. On the iPhone, I often type the letter b instead of a space. (Virtual keys will do that to a man.) On the iPad, I’m occasionally getting erroneously-mushed words auto-corrected into two. I haven’t yet figured out precisely when it happens, but I love it when it does.

As I type faster on the iPad, though, I’m noting that it frequently neglects to automagically capitalize the personal pronoun I when my keystrokes are rapid. Grrrrrr.

On the plus side, the iPad does correct typos even when they’re not precisely character matched. That is, for the first time on iPhone OS, you can type more or fewer letters than are truly in a word, and still get auto-corrected. I accidentally just typed “fewer” with two w’s, and the iPad fixed it.

Just as awesome is the newfound presence of the red squiggly underline. Misspellings are now much more obvious, especially after quick, verbose writing.

The iPad, unlike its younger siblings, knows how to spell iPad.

I’ve found that, annoyingly, if you don’t start with a capital I and just type I v e, expecting the iPhone’s standard correction to I’ve mid-sentence, you’ll instead get “vie.” I eagerly await the fix for that disaster.

On the whole, I’m greatly pleased with the obvious and understandable focus Apple placed on virtual typing on the iPad. There’s more room for improvement of course, but the strides made already are substantial, and greatly ease the text-entry process already.