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Happy Birthday, iPad!

One year ago today, the original iPad went on sale in the United States. It was 365 days ago, and we really didn’t know what to expect from the “magical device” Steve Jobs unveiled on stage roughly two months before, at a special event on January 27th. We just knew that Apple was up to something, and we needed to check out this “new thing”. Then many of us realized an Apple tablet was exactly what they had been looking for: smaller than a laptop but bigger than a smartphone, the iPad was meant to create a new market for all those who didn’t need a physical keyboard anymore, for all those who wanted the simplicity of iOS on a large multitouch screen, for all those who believed technology wasn’t just about the RAM and Gigahertz. That was April 3, 2010.

One year later, the iPad has been a terrific commercial success for Apple. More than 15 million copies sold, over 75,000 native apps available in the App Store, long lines around the globe to get the chance of buying an iPad 2. The iPad has become an iconic device in 12 months; and for those who believe, it’s become more than a simple piece of glass and aluminum. One year of iPad has changed everything for Apple, and the millions of consumers who get things done with it every day. The doctors, the journalists, the school teachers, the students, the writers and the sports fans. A single device with simple hardware features (touch, large screen, thin design) has proved that apps and a well-designed operating system can make a huge difference. And one year later, I still have the feeling we’re just getting started.

So happy birthday, iPad. It’s been a year already, but we know the best has yet to come.
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iFiles 1.9 Can Paste Images and Text Files In The Cloud, Adds SugarSync Support

Long-time MacStories readers know that iFiles is one of my favorite apps for iOS: both on the iPhone and iPad, iFiles lets you access all your accounts in the cloud and transfer files between servers and iOS devices, or a local computer. iFiles is a file manager with a cloud workflow that supports Dropbox, MobileMe, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon S3, WebDAV, Google Docs, Rackspace Cloud Files, Picasa and Box.net. Thanks to the excellent integration with all these services, iFiles offers a powerful feature set to manage your files and backups on the go, move files around and even upload them directly to the cloud. The 1.8 update, released in December, added support for the popular Amazon S3 service, AirPrint and text editing in the cloud that made the app more powerful than ever before.

Version 1.9, however, takes another leap forward by adding three new important functionalities: SugarSync integration, FTP support and the possibility of pasting items directly in the cloud from your clipboard. Managing your SugarSync account in iFiles works as expected: once authenticated, you get a list of files and folders on the right and you can do whatever you want with them through the contextual menu that appears once you swipe on an item. FTP support is simply great: web developers and website owners are going to love this, as iFiles can be configured to work with standard FTP, FTPS and SFTP servers. With the lightweight text editor and image previewer, iFiles can now be used as a quick way to manage and edit websites from an iPhone or iPad. And if you need to quickly upload something to the cloud, but you don’t want to create a new document every time, iFiles 1.9 can paste images and text documents in the cloud. This is very convenient if you’re copying a file from a specific service, and you want to send it to another one.

iFiles keeps getting better and better on each release. I can’t recommend this app enough if your life and workflow are in the cloud and you depend on files stored on remote servers on a daily basis. Just go get it in the App Store.

New iPad 2 Ad: We Believe

But when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful.

What separates Apple from other companies can be summed up in a single quote. Apple isn’t a company that’s competing on specs, nor do they wish to win the gigahertz war. Quite simply, the answer to the tablet computer isn’t the ability to play Flash media or score the highest on a GPU benchmark. Apple understands that it’s how you use a tablet, and not what it is, that makes the iPad a very real Post-PC device. At the iPad 2 announcement, Steve Jobs said:

Technology married with liberal arts, humanities, yields the result that makes our hearts sing.

This video is a representation of just that. You can catch the video after the break.

[via YouTube]

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Saddleback Now Shipping Next Generation iPad 2 Case

Saddleback Leather Co. makes some of the finest leather products from the Southern United States, rugged enough to haul a day’s load across the Mississippi River twice over and chic enough to protect your MacBook from the hipster-mobs of San Francisco. If you don’t know what the hype is about, we’ve previously taken Saddleback’s Leather iPad Case from the great American educational institutions back to the backpack before leaving the spoils on MacStories for all to see. Built pigskin tough and bound with enough rawhide to turn your aluminum slate into a cowboy’s workstation, the successor to the iPad will need its own set of skin for all of you early adopters. Now shipping is the iPad 2 Leather Case, hand made from the same bull-tough materials and kevlar stitching that’s now tapered to the iPad’s every edge. Available in Carbon Black, Chestnut, Coffee Brown, and Tobacco Brown (pictured) to fit your rugged personality, Saddleback’s iPad 2 Case is available for $104.00 online.

Instadesk: The First Instagram Client for Mac

Thanks to Instagram’s huge success and the release of an API that allows third-party developers to plug into the service to fetch images, user information and much more, in the past weeks we’ve seen the quick rise of dedicated Instagram clients for iOS that don’t focus on shooting and uploading new images (the API doesn’t allow that, yet) but instead turn Instagram’s social aspect into a central part of the experience. Apps like Instagallery for iPad or the popular Flipboard make great use of Instagram’s API and third-party tools by letting you browse popular photos and read comments directly from the tablet’s larger screen; they also let you like and comment on pictures, see your own photos and profile or follow other people. Photo taking capabilities aside, these apps are proving that there’s a whole world of social interactions and media behind “a simple iPhone app” that deserves to be studied and implemented through native software for iPhones and iPad. Not to mention other clever experiments with the Instagram API we have covered on MacStories, such as printed photos and web apps.

But what about the Mac? When you follow a link to an Instagram picture from, say, your Twitter client of choice, the photo will open into the web browser. Instagram’s website lets you see the photo at higher resolution and check out the author’s details, but there’s no “social backend” to browse photos and people just yet. Instadesk, a new app available in the Mac App Store, wants to bring Instagram’s full experience to the desktop. The app has a clean and nice design with thumbnail previews and beautiful icons in the top toolbar; it enables you to create local “albums” to save photos for later; it lets you share photos from you or others through a variety of social networks supported by Instagram.

Instadesk is a full-featured Instagram client built specifically for the Mac. Once you’ve authorized the app with your credentials and granted permission to access your account through the API, Instadesk will place a link to your profile in the sidebar, right below links to the feed, most popular photos and tags, and status updates. In the profile tab you can check out all your photos, people you follow and your followers. As you click on a thumbnail in Instadesk, the photo is automatically brought in the foreground with a slick animation and a new screen that shows the author on the right (with buttons to follow / unfollow) as well as comments and likes,  and a box to leave a new comment yourself. You can like a photo or open it in the web browser, download it locally on your computer or hit the Share button to share the instagr.am link with your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and email contacts.

The popular section offers a selection of the most viewed photos and tags, whilst the Feed displays items posted by you and the people you follow. Instadesk also comes with a slideshow functionality and a “find user” option to manually search for a person on Instagram.

Instadesk provides a nice way to browse Instagram from your Mac. At $1.99 in the Mac App Store, it’s not a bad deal if you’re a loyal (and addicted) Instagram user. More screenshots below. Read more

Angry Birds Rio: 10 Million Downloads In 10 Days→

Angry Birds Rio: 10 Million Downloads In 10 Days

Perhaps Rovio’s success with the Angry Birds franchise doesn’t surprise anymore as much as it did in 2010, but we still think the numbers these games for iOS and Android are generating are impressive. The latest game of the series, Rio, is based on a collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox to merge the gameplay of Angry Birds with the world of Rio. With a tweet, Rovio said that Angry Birds Rio hit “10 in 10” – suggesting 10 million downloads were achieved in 10 days since the release of the app for iOS and Android devices, both in free and paid editions.

A bit of investigation by Mobile Entertainment has proved that, as expected, said tweet referred to the number of downloads in the same number of days.

Rovio didn’t provide detailed numbers for iPhone, iPad and Android sales, nor did they specify whether the free version was downloaded more than the paid one. Still, 10 million downloads in 10 days is impressive. Now about that fake movie trailer…

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iPhone Has 25% Market Share In The US, Verizon iPhone “Most Acquired Handset” in February

Data released yesterday by market research firm comScore for the November 2010 - February 2011 period details smartphone market share numbers in the United States and provides additional insight into platform vendors’ stats and performances. First off, the study “study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers” to find Samsung the top cellphone manufacturer with a 24.8% market share; comScore also claims for the three month period detailed by their study 234 million Americans “ages 13 and older used mobile devices”. As far as OEM market share goes, Apple ranked 5th behind Samsung, LG, Motorola and RIM with a 7.5% share in February, up 0.9% from November 2010. As comScore notes Apple saw the “strongest gain” thanks to the release of the Verizon iPhone 4, which was the “most acquired handset in the month of February” in the United States.

The situation is different from the smartphone OS point of view, with Google’s Android operating system seeing the strongest growth:

69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period. Google Android grew 7.0 percentage points since November, strengthening its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share.

Data from Nielsen referring to the last months of 2010 indicated Apple’s iOS and Android were on the same level of market share in the United States with approximately 28% and 27%, respectively. Another report from January indicated Android had become the most popular smartphone OS worldwide with a 33% share in Q4 2010. comScore’s new numbers place Apple at 25.2% market share behind RIM with 28.9%. RIM, however, saw a 4.6% decrease from November 2010, whilst Apple had a 0.2% increase – not as significant as Google’s Android but still growth.

It’s also worth considering that, as comScore only tracks iOS’ market share on the iPhone, Apple can’t compete by the numbers with the variety of Android and BlackBerry devices available. It would be interesting to see statistics about iOS and Android total market share on every mobile device (media players, smartphones, tablets) to gain better insight into the US’ market trends and sales.

iPhone 5 To Feature 8-Megapixel Camera from Sony?

9to5mac reports Sony CEO Howard Stringer, in an interview with Walt Mossberg at Carnegie Hall in New York City, said shipments of camera sensors to Apple will be delayed due to Sony’s facility in Sendai that was affected by last month’s earthquake and tsunami. Stringer’s statements come as a surprise considering Sony has never been a supplier for Apple’s camera-enabled mobile devices (iPhone, iPad 2, iPod touch 4th gen) as the company chose to implement Omnivision’s image sensors in the past years. Omnivision’s lens modules are used in the iPhone 4 (5 megapixel sensor), iPod touch and iPad 2.

Stringer just said that their camera image sensor facility in Sendai was affected by the tsunami. Getting image sensors to Apple will be delayed.

MacRumors also points to a transcript of the interview by the Wall Street Journal itself, which seems to confirm Stringer’s hints at image sensors set to be shipped to Apple in the near future:

Early on, he raised the irony of Sony supplying camera components for Apple devices. It “always puzzles me,” he said. “Why would I make Apple the best camera?”

It is unclear what devices he was talking about as Sony isn’t known to supply key camera components, known as image sensors, to Apple; A Sony spokeswoman declined to comment and an Apple spokesperson couldn’t be reached for comment.

Following Stringer’s interview, speculation is running wild on the Internet about whether he was referring to a brand new Apple product still in early production stages, or a new version of the iPhone or iPad. A report from April of last year, however, provides more insight into Stringer’s mention of image sensor for Apple: analyst Ashok Kumar claimed that Apple had signed on with Sony for an 8-megapixel camera lens to be used in the “2011 iPhone” – which would be the iPhone 5 set to be announced sometime between summer and fall. The report from Kumar also correctly indicated that Omnivision would be the supplier of a 5-megapixel sensor for the iPhone that Jobs would announce at WWDC 2010 – indeed, the iPhone 4 with a 5 MP camera module from Omnivision. In the past months, several bloggers also speculated Apple could implement Omnivision’s new 16:9 CMOS image sensor in the iPhone 5, although the reports didn’t provide any additional details. The iPhone 5 is also rumored to feature a bigger screen, the same Apple A5 processor seen in the iPad 2, NFC capabilities and a new aluminum design with internal antenna.

dPad Is A Lightweight iPad HTML Editor for Bloggers

I haven’t written many blog entries from my iPad, and the main reason is that inserting links and rich content like images and video embeds can be really, really annoying on the tablet. No HTML editor for the iPad nailed it when it comes to offering an interface and a set of tools that allow bloggers to rely on the device as their main blogging machine; and especially if you write for blogs with several articles every day and you need to keep up at a fast pace, wasting time trying iPad apps is impossible. But I believe also those folks that post status updates and journal entries on their personal blogs must have noticed the iPad is far from being an ideal mobile blogging device, and the lack of dedicated apps is worrying. Sure, there are plenty of iOS text editors out there, even with advanced HTML and Markdown formatting capabilities; for bloggers like me, though, that is not enough. Either with WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal or a custom CMS you might be using on your blog, there are usually a lot of writing and management options to consider that most apps don’t support. The official WordPress app doesn’t even accept custom fields and many, many other things that millions of bloggers rely on every day. The situation is almost unacceptable, and I really don’t understand why – with more than 15 million iPads out there – someone hasn’t set out to create the ultimate iOS blogging app. I really don’t. Yet we keep hoping. Read more