Apple in Talks with Italian Publishers

According to this post from Macity (Italian blog) Apple has started contacting publishers in regards of the imminent iPad launch, scheduled for late April. It seems like Apple is pushing for digital version of school books, a market which (personal experience) is really bloated in Italy. The launch of the Italian iBooks Store is rumored to happen this fall, and school books should be one the strongest selling points of the initial lineup.

Could Apple really save or reinvent the Italian publishing industry? Starting with the school system, I do hope so.

Discovering GTD Once Again with Omnifocus

I remember when I started using my Mac in a professional context, I went around asking for “the best application” to manage tasks on a Mac. Many people suggested Omnifocus from the Omnigroup, and many told me to give a spin to Things, the new kid on the block from CulturedCode, which featured a clean design and a very streamlined interface. I went for Things, as you may have read in my review some weeks ago.

Things is a great piece of software. It doesn’t get almost anything wrong in any section, it could be the perfect GTD application, but – sadly – it’s not. Indeed, I came to a point where I needed to sync my Things database between the Mac and the iPhone not only within my local network, I desperately needed to access my tasks while on the go. And if you’re a Things user, you should know that’s not possible, though Cultured Code promises it will come soon with an update. So I decided to try Omnifocus again, and here we are today. Turns out Sync is only one of the features that made me switch, as I found way more than simple over the air sync in Omnifocus.

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Osfoora, a New Take on Tweetie

I lay my head in the guillotine with this post title, but I have to get this out of the way: If you’ve ever used Tweetie 2, you’ve used Osfoora. And while I don’t want to say it, the feature comparison is so similar it’s not even funny. So with this said, I’m going to review Osfoora as perhaps a re-imagination of Tweetie 2 – what does it do better and what does it do worse?

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Neven Morgan on Apple’s Design Imitating Real-Life Objects

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“After you’ve read your twelfth ebook, you don’t need the candy anymore. Ideally, the candy isn’t so distracting that you hate it, and what was once cute (swiping to flip the page!) turns into sheer utility (tapping to turn the page, which I have to believe will also be possible in iBooks.)

But that flip matters because it gets you going. And it gets going everyone who sees you reading your twelfth book in iBooks. How will you demo it to them? Will you tap or will you slowly turn the page? If your booklist was also available as a boring (and useful) black-and-white table, would that be the screen you’d show your friends?”

No, definitely. And just as they did with the iPhone, they need to push the simplicity effect, make it clear that there’s one and only one  way to browse and view books - and that way is beautiful. They could have used awkward thumbnails for Contacts.app on the iPhone, but they didn’t.  And like it or not, consistency and simplicity are what made the iPhone stand out.

New Reference to Multitasking Found in iPhone SDK

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“New to Apex, some devices/builds have spotlight lumped in with the multitasking dialog box. If we couldn’t get to springboard the old way, try the new one (it’s just a double-tap of home button)”

I guess that would be the most natural way to activate “backgrounding” for apps and switch back to the Springboard. At least ProSwitcher implemented it in a great way months ago.