Review: Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad

As I mentioned in my post about new apps and tools for 2012, I’ve been playing around with a Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad, which is available at $69 through Logitech’s website or $59 on Amazon. The Tablet Keyboard connects to the iPad (or any iOS device) wirelessly over Bluetooth, comes with built-in batteries, a carrying case that can be turned into a stand for the iPad, and media keys that trigger some of the tablet’s functions such as audio controls and Spotlight. Here are my impressions so far.

Normally, I wouldn’t have much to say about a keyboard except for “it’s comfortable” or “I can’t type anything on this”. Fortunately, the Logitech keyboard for iPad fits into the former category, with a sturdy plastic design that feels “premium” when compared to other keyboards available on the market, a good keyboard layout, and a carrying case that’s not as premium as the device but certainly gets its job done. Below, the Italian layout of my Logitech Tablet Keyboard:

As you can see, the keyboard isn’t necessarily “standard” as it’s been designed to include iOS-specific keys like shortcuts for Spotlight search, Home button, volume controls, slideshows, media playback and screen lock/unlock controls. The basic layout is the one of a Mac keyboard, and the function keys can be activated by holding fn. Obviously, this isn’t as intuitive as simply reaching out to the screen with your finger to adjust volume, but if you’re going to work with your iPad using the keyboard, you’ll want to know it’s possible to do more than just type.

Which brings me to this: why would you want a physical keyboard for your iPad when the system one is more than acceptable? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working mainly from my iPad in the past month, and I found a physical keyboard to be a must-have if you’re serious about getting real, regular writing done in a text editor or word processor. iOS’ multitouch keyboard is fine to fire off quick email replies and tweets (and iOS 5’s new split keyboard helps a lot for “general typing” in every day usage), but I still can’t give up on the allure of plastic QWERTY for long-form content and serious email time. Logitech’s iPad offering fits nicely in my workflow (and Tom Bihn Ristretto Bag): I can get it out of its case, turn it on, wait a few seconds for the iPad to connect (once paired, the Bluetooth connection process is very fast on iPad 2) and start writing. Read more

MacStories Reading List: January 15 - January 22

At MacStories, we strive to produce great content every day. From news to stories and app reviews, we care about quality content to deliver to you, our readers, with insight and our personal analysis every day. But we can’t cover everything. And there’s some great writing on the Internet that we often can’t link to in our daily coverage, if only because there isn’t much we can add to an already excellent article.

Today we are introducing MacStories Reading List, a weekly selection of great stories from Authors that you should read. Every Sunday, we’ll publish a collection of links that we think you should read, such as the ones below. A very simple format for the great writing that is happening in the Apple community.

Even better, you can subscribe to the Reading List in your favorite RSS reader or Instapaper. We have created an Instapaper account dedicated to the Reading List, so head over this link to get the Instapaper feed for the links we’ll post here every week. You’ll also be able to able to find us in Instapaper if you’re already following @macstoriesnet and linked the service to your Twitter account.

On behalf of the entire MacStories team, I wish you a good reading. - Federico Viticci

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World of Apple’s Alex Brooks reflects on his past few years of blogging, and ultimately decides that quality content, not the page views alone, is what matters. A must-read.

The site I want to read and will produce will post thoughtful commentary on Apple. The kind of commentary and prose that that’s sensible, articulate and adds value to a wider discussion happening across the internet. There are already a handful of sites just like this, authors who have in some cases taken grave risk to quit their day to day lives to produce content just like this. I value those sites, I enjoy reading their content.

- Reflecting on Change, Alex Brooks (@alexbrooks)

Every month or so an analyst comes out and claims the iPad can’t be included in the same market share numbers of PCs, and vice versa. Asymco’s Horace Dediu collects actual numbers and puts things in perspective, revealing the true effect Android and iOS devices are having on the PC market.

This last view corresponds to the data in the first graph (line chart). If iOS and Android are added as potential substitutions for personal computing, the share of PCs suddenly collapses to less than 50%. It also suggests much more collapse to come.

- The rise and fall of personal computing, Horace Dediu (@asymco)

How has the App Store third-party ecosystem evolved in the past four years? Is there still much of a difference between smaller developers who actually want to charge for their apps, and bigger studios that have adopted the “freemium” or in-app advertising models? App Cubby’s David Barnard has an insightful article from an indie developer’s perspective that’s worth reading and reflecting upon.

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

- Free and Low-Cost Apps, David Barnard (@drbarnard)

Wandering Coder’s Pierre Lebeaupin makes an excellent case for iOS needing some sort of file management system at this point. You can disagree with him, but it’s undeniable the majority of users who want to use iPhones and iPads in a professional environment are still working with documents, and iOS doesn’t offer a native, integrated way for easily managing and searching them.

Let us contrast that with another situation. My father is a high school teacher; for the last 20+ years he has been working using computers, preparing teaching notes, transparent slides to project, diagrams, tests and their answers, student average note calculation documents, etc. on his Macs (and before that on an Apple ][e). He shares some of these with his colleagues (and back) and sometimes prints on school printers so it’s not like he is working in complete isolation, but he cannot rely on a supporting infrastructure and has to ensure and organize storage of these teaching material documents himself. He will often need to update these when it’s time to teach the same subject one year later, because the test needs to be changed so that it’s not the exact same as last year, because the curriculum is changing this year, because the actual class experience of using them the previous year led him to think of improvements to make the explanation clearer, because this year he’s teaching a class with a different option so they have less hours of his course (but the same curriculum…), etc. Can you imagine him using solely an iPad, or even solely an imaginary iOS 5 notebook, to do so? I can’t.

- iOS lacks a document filing system, Pierre Lebeaupin (@wanderingcoder)

An amazingly detailed and in-depth overview of the iOS gaming scene with a series of post-mortems and sales figures for “blockbuster” and smaller iOS games. If you only read one article about mobile gaming this week, make it this one.

Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.

Angry Birds had taken off, Plants vs. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago.

- Money And The App Store: A Few Figures That Might Help An Indie Developer, Emeric Thoa

Dov Frankel explains how the iPhone’s mute switch and audio controls really work.

On the last episode of The Talk Show, Gruber and Dan Benjamin discussed the design tradeoffs at length. During the discussion, they mentioned that you can set the iPad’s volume level to 0, but you can’t with the volume buttons on the iPhone. I understand the difference, and it’s something it took me a little while to figure out, way back in the early days of the first-generation iPhone.

- Different Levels, Dov Frankel (@MrDov)

Last week, Apple unveiled its iBooks Textbooks project as the result of deals with major US publishers that have agreed to release digital versions of their textbooks in a new iBooks format. Brian Lam has an interesting interview with former Apple intern Joseph Peters, who might have fueled Apple’s interest in textbooks back in 2008.

In 2008, Apple had its iContest in its Town Hall building. The iContest is sort of an American Idol for great ideas that gives interns a chance to present their best thoughts to executives. Here, Joseph Peters and some friends outlined the idea of bringing Textbooks to iTunes, before the iPad even existed to the rest of us. They won a set of Macbook Airs for their idea.

- Open-Mindedness, Brian Lam (@blam)

Much has been said and written about Apple’s decision to make iBooks Author a proprietary file format that only allows for selling eBooks into the iBookstore. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber looks at the “issue” from Apple’s perspective.

Glazman looks at these new iBooks books and sees a nonstandard proprietary format. Apple looks at these new iBooks and sees layouts and design features that no other e-book platform offers today. One man’s nonstandard is another man’s competitive differentiation.

- On the Proprietary Nature of the iBooks Author File Format, John Gruber (@gruber)

Egg Freckles’ Thomas Brand looks back at Apple’s platform history and how the company has built its success on directly controlling the user experience in every possible way, from content sources to delivering software to the end user.

The iPhone may have been destined to become the world’s most popular smartphone due to the amazing multitouch technology it introduced, but Apple’s control over the iOS operating system, Xcode developer environment, and App Store distribution model have made the iPhone the central member of a new application ecosystem that can’t be beat.

Yesterday’s introduction of iBooks 2 and iBooks Author were significant announcements because they complete the platform pyramid Apple needs to enter the Textbook Market with the same control as its previous successes.

- The iBooks Platform, Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand)

Macworld’s Serenity Caldwell follows up on Apple’s iBooks Author announcements and notes how authors welcome Apple’s entry in the digital publishing industry, but are still looking forward to a broader ePub-compatible publishing tool with advanced features, a polished interface, and Apple’s refined user experience.

It’s crazy that we have so few options after five years: The ebooks market is clearly making money. If Apple’s release of an authoring tool has shown anything, it’s that the demand is certainly out there. The publishing industry needs a Dreamweaver or Hype-type ePub application—one that won’t be limited by EULAs, or insistent on proprietary formats.

I’ve already written a wish-list for my perfect app; had I the talent, the skills, and the time to build it, I’d be half-tempted to try coding it myself. Silly, of course, but when it comes down to it, I just want to be able to make awesome ebooks. It shouldn’t take two weeks and six programs to create a book with images and interactive content.

- Holding out for an ePub hero, Serenity Caldwell (@settern)

Fraser Speirs, who knows a thing or two about iPad in schools, thinks that textbooks aren’t necessarily the future, but a way to get there.

Apple already revolutionized education when it invented the iPad. While iBooks textbooks are a bridge from the past to the future—and we do need a way to get to the future—they are not that future. If Henry Ford had been an educational publisher, his customers would have asked for electronic textbooks instead of faster horses.

- Apple’s announcements further iPad revolution in education, Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs)

How does Apple’s iBooks Textbooks initiative look from a teacher’s perspective? Kieran Healy’s post on the subject is insightful and detailed.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

- Apple for the Teacher, Kieran Healy (@kjhealy)

Screen Sharing For Alfred Brings VNC To Your Fingertips

Screen Sharing is a feature built into Mac OS X for remotely controlling another computer through the use of virtual network computing (VNC). Apple’s native screen sharing client is buried in the operating system making it nearly impossible to find the app when you actually need it. On top of that, it really lacks basic features like being able to store a connection for future use. Due to these shortcomings, most people turn to third party applications for managing their VNC connections. A quick search in the Mac App Store will turn up some pretty great options including Edovia’s Screens. Although apps like these work extremely well, not everyone wants to spend that much to easily connect to a remote computer. This is why I created the Screen Sharing for Alfred extension. I wanted Alfred to be able to function as my VNC client and really extend the functionality of the Apple’s native Screen Sharing app.

Screen Sharing for Alfred adds the ability to store information about VNC connections and quickly access them with a simple keyboard command. It is written in a beautiful fusion of shell scripting and AppleScript so it is fast, efficient, and capable of interacting with the user through AppleScript’s GUI prompts. It also incorporates David Ferguson’s genius Extension Updater system in case any new features are added in the future. For those unfamiliar with Updater, it is an extension for Alfred that allows developers to make bug fixes and add new features to released extensions – then when users run Updater, it will download the latest version of any extensions that have updates available. Read more

A5 Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 Released

The long-awaited jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both devices running Apple’s A5 processor, has been released. As posted by hacker p0sixninja a few minutes ago on Twitter – p0sixninja and other developers including Cydia’s Saurik contributed to the release of the latest jailbreak tool – users can head over greenpois0n.com to download the OS X version. A Windows version is said to be “coming soon” and, at the moment of writing this, greenpois0n seems to be down/very slow.

The A5 jailbreak, teased in the past weeks, comes with a graphical user interface called “Absinthe” that guides users through the process of jailbreaking A5 devices running iOS 5.0 and iOS 5.0.1. Absinthe has been developed by the Chronic Dev Team, whereas the iPhone Dev Team has created a CLI (command line interface) for more advanced users and diagnostic purposes. As usual with jailbreak releases, a backup of your data is advised and you should probably wait a few hours before rushing in to jailbreak your devices, so that any possible bugs left will be fixed.

The A5 jailbreak is available now, it is an “untethered jailbreak” and it’s currently out for OS X users on greenpois0n.com. [image via]

xScope 3: Measure. Inspect. Test.

Any designer will tell you how important image sizes and spacing are to their craft – graphics, the web, etc.. Measuring each element can take tedious time unless you have all the right tools. There are ‘measuring’ and ‘location’ tools out there, but none work better or have more bells and whistles than Iconfactory’s (and Artis Software) xScope. xScope 3.0 is out today and it brings over 70 new features to its already complete pixel toolkit.

xScope 3.0 (Mac 10.6 and higher) is a huge update to version 2.x with two components: a Mac side and an iOS side for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. If you feel a little bewildered at first with all these new features, be sure to use the useful in-app help, as it outlines everything and answers many questions. I’ll cover some of the great new highlights of version 3.0.

The most notable feature of xScope 3.0 is the Mirror tool. Remote viewing lets you easily view the contents of any Mac desktop window on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the accompanying iOS app (via iTunes, Free). Once xScope for Mac is open, launch the iOS app and it will find your Mac over Wi-Fi and ask you to pair them together.

Once paired, the Pin & Lock tool lets you move the Mac window anywhere, always staying in focus on iOS. The iOS app has a chromeless UI: there’s no overlaid chrome to get in the way while you’re working. Multiple iOS devices can connect and view the same window on a single Mac, which is great for demos or meetings. Read more

iBooks Author From Apple’s Perspective

In following the interesting debate that has arisen with the release of iBooks 2.0, iBooks Author for Mac and a EULA that doesn’t allow authors to sell iBooks outside of the iBookstore, I’ve seen two kind of reactions: it’s either a draconian move or the “obvious choice” for Apple. I think the reasoning for Apple to release iBooks Author 1.0 today lies somewhere in the middle, so I’m trying to analyze this story from Apple’s perspective, if possible.

Earlier today I tweeted:

John Gruber posted similar thoughts on Daring Fireball:

Second, it’s about not wanting iBooks Author to serve as an authoring tool for competing bookstores like Amazon’s or Google’s. The output of iBooks Author is, as far as I can tell, HTML5 — pretty much ePub 3 with whatever nonstandard liberties Apple saw fit to take in order to achieve the results they wanted. It’s not a standard format in the sense of following a spec from a standards body like the W3C, but it’s just HTML5 rendered by WebKit — not a binary blob tied to iOS or Cocoa. It may not be easy, but I don’t think it would be that much work for anyone else with an ePub reader that’s based on WebKit to add support for these iBooks textbooks. Apple is saying, “Fuck that, unless you’re giving it away for free.

To recap: iBooks created with iBooks Author can be given away for free or sold through the iBookstore, where Apple takes a 30% cut. iBooks created with iBooks Author cannot be sold outside the iBookstore, as stated in the iBooks Author EULA

Now let’s consider the complicated scenario Apple must have faced when deciding as to whether iBooks Author 1.0 should have been a broader authoring tool, or a desktop editing suite for the iBookstore. Many devices nowadays are capable of displaying eBooks: smartphones, computers, tablets. There are several participants in the eBook race with the biggest player being Amazon, followed, I guess, by Apple with the iPad/iBookstore and many others including Barnes & Noble, Google, and so forth. eBooks are variegate: there are many file formats, different distribution networks with their own licenses and terms, different desktop editing programs that comply to a few standards, the most popular one being EPUB, which Apple also accepts for iBooks and the iBookstore. Apple is not alone in the eBook market.

Apple, however, doesn’t make much revenue off Internet services and the various Stores it operates. It’s a known fact iTunes and the App Store have been a break-even operation for many years, with the main goal of providing content and not making a serious profit. I assume the numbers for the iBookstore fall in line with iTunes and the App Store – Apple doesn’t make much money out of iBooks, nor did they ever plan to base their business on it. But: iBooks, apps and media are ways to get people to buy iOS hardware, which is where Apple makes money. Apple is a hardware company that produces fine software that helps them sell a lot of hardware. The iBookstore is, ultimately, a way for Apple to tell people that an amazing eBook reading experience is possible on iOS devices. iBooks is a brand that Apple should care to protect and maintain because it is associated with its main source of revenue – the hardware. Other companies, too, seem to understand that software and content drive hardware sales.

Because iBooks is Apple’s brand and platform now, Apple obviously wants to have some kind of control on the whole experience and distribution. And this is where things start to get tricky. On the App Store, apps have technical limitations that force them to go through the approval process before a user can install them. You can’t install apps in any other way, unless you’re willing to hack into your device’s operating system. Apps are made with Xcode and sold by developers enrolled in the iOS Developer Program. The setup is fairly similar with the iBookstore: iBooks are created in iBooks Author by writers/editors enrolled in the program, sold in the iBookstore so a user can download them. But there’s a big difference: we learn today that iBooks can be distributed for free elsewhere. This is not possible for iOS apps, and this is the reason I believe today’s announcement has been so controversial.

The problem, I think, is that allowing iBooks to be distributed for free anywhere but forcing authors to sell them only through Apple is seen as a pretentious move from a company that many were expecting to announce a grand plan to save the publishing industry today. It’s the sort of gray area that’s open to discussion and generally causes the sort of debates we’ve seen on the Internet. But, in fact, it is a move from a company that wants to make money: if you were to run a business you know it’s going to break even, giving away a great desktop application that costed thousands of dollars in research and development knowing that you’ll have to maintain it for years to come, wouldn’t you want to have products in your own Store and at least ask for a 30% cut?

Others say the main issue is not with the 30% cut itself – we’re used to it now – it’s with the requirement of having paid editions of iBooks only in the iBookstore. It’s not like it’s technically impossible to sell them elsewhere, right? It’s not like apps – and that is correct. In theory, Apple could allow .ibooks files to become just another file format that you can distribute digitally online, and even sell it for a price as several designers do, for instance, with .psd files. But the problem lies deeper, not in the revenue cut but in the locking-in philosophy that is leading some people to believe this is akin to banning free speech. So let’s look at this from a more conceptual standpoint.

I mentioned above iBooks is a brand that is functional to Apple’s primary way of making money. Imagine this: if Apple were to allow distribution of paid eBooks anywhere, nothing could stop an author from selling it on other channels – I’d say Google and Amazon but let’s assume “his website” for now. What would stop this author from selling his iBook at a lower price on his website, and at a 30% more on the iBookstore to make up for Apple’s cut? And now with the second scenario: imagine Google rolling out support for .ibooks files in the eBookstore. Why would Apple want Google, of all companies, to get to brag about .ibooks? And even if it’s not about the .ibooks published format (of limited use outside of iBooks 2.0), why wouldn’t Apple require a small kickback for the result of a desktop program they gave you for free?

Keeping a brand, lock-in, revenue cut: it’s all part of a bigger plan, which is selling hardware people want because of the experience it provides. This experience is provided by content. Again, ecosystem.

So, in a way, iBooks aren’t too different from apps. I could even argue that in Apple’s vision, everything that goes through iTunes has some sort of exclusivity attached to it. Yes, even music and movies: iTunes Extras and LPs aren’t as popular as apps and books, but they’re an example of the integrated media/platform experience that Apple sells.

From my perspective, of course I would have been more excited to see a broader authoring tool announced today with no licensing terms for paid eBooks and full EPUB support. But as I’ve stated in a Twitter conversation with Jason Snell, this is a 1.0 version of a tool that was clearly meant for textbook publishers, and released today for other authors as well. What I could really argue is that it’s not like Apple doesn’t have the resources to come up with a full-featured authoring tool on Day One, and it would have been much better to appeal to all kinds of authors and audiences starting today with a great format and a great app. But: not all apps are perfect on day one. Not even Apple’s. Political speculation aside, I wouldn’t be surprised to know they had to get this out of the door today in preparation of the big iPad 3 launch. We’ll never know why iBooks Author was released today and not in two months with more features, but we know that Apple is a company that in the past months hasn’t been afraid of reversing a couple of unpopular decisions.

As usual, we wait.

Considering iBooks Author For Your Next Book Project→

Considering iBooks Author For Your Next Book Project

Matt Gemmell has put together a nice overview of what it’ll be like to work with Apple’s new authoring tool. To sum up: you can sell iBooks only through the iBookstore with a maximum price of $14.99, but you can also give them away for free elsewhere. iBooks 2.0 is required, as well as an iPad. iBooks Author is Mac-only and it doesn’t have any collaborative features yet.

But here’s the most important part, which I think Apple could have explained a little better: iBooks Author-created book files can be sold through iBookstore and Apple takes a 30% cut. iBooks Author-created files can be given away elsewhere, for free. Content from an iBooks Author file (read: your actual text and images) can be-repackaged in another authoring environment. Lex Friedman pointed out in a Twitter conversation that the model is similar to apps but misguided because apps can’t be given away for free, whereas iBooks when sold must go through Apple’s Store. Again, we’ll see how authors will respond in the next months.

Also keep in mind this observation from Gemmell:

Naturally, once your text is in iBooks Author, you’re essentially writing and editing within a page-layout application, rather than a word processor or text editor. As with any publishing workflow, you will want to do the writing and editing first, and then put the book together (as much as possible). iBooks Author is resolutely not a writing environment.

Question now remains as to whether the iBooks Author EULA is something that will stick around, will be clarified, or if it’s simply the work of an overzealous lawyer. Dan Wineman writes:

In other words: Apple is trying to enforce a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

[…]

When I make something myself, no matter what software I use to make it, then — assuming it doesn’t infringe any copyrights — it’s my right to distribute it however I want, in whatever format I choose, for free or not. I don’t lose the right to publish my novel if Microsoft determines that I wrote it using a pirated copy of Word. Would I lose that right if I tried to sell my iBook outside of the iBookstore and Apple got wind of it? I don’t know; we’re in uncharted waters here. Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

Hopefully an online turmoil will force Apple to clarify this.

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