The Daily – the first iPad-only newspaper – has had another update this week, to Version 1.2.3.
The details for this update state that once it’s applied ‘the app experience should be faster’. Here’s the full change list for it:
• Increases speed by deleting old data.
• Biggest fix: crashes! Increased stability of the app.
• Increased reliability of newsstand downloading.
• Fixes app in newsstand so you’ll see the most current cover.
• Fixes the issue with the new content (green) banner getting stuck.
Happily, the app does seem to be performing a little better following this update, at least for me thus far. The progress bar for new issue downloads zips along much faster than it used to. This latest update comes with some (familiar looking) notes on how to get best results from it:
ALERT: The first time you use this version you may experience slowness while the app is performing background maintenance. FOR BEST RESULTS please delete your current version of the app before updating.
Once you’ve updated it should take about 1 minute until an issue is fully loaded.
I know we have quite a few readers of The Daily here. If you’re one of them, let us know in the comments what you think of this update and performance following it.
From Horace Dediu’s Asymco post on the second Year of the iPad in a row.
The iPad has out-sold the Mac since inception and is now about three times the volume. However, the growth rate in the Mac has not changed much.
The new data shows that the iPad alone would be the largest PC vendor and Apple with iPad and Mac combined is selling 5 million more units (or 30%) than the top PC vendor.
Selling three times as many iPads as Macs at a time when Mac sales continue on a nice upward trend is impressive – but that last bit that I’ve bolded above is the truly amazing part. The new data (latest quarterly results) shows that iPad alone would be the biggest PC vendor if it was considered a computer.
Maybe the Post-PC era that Steve Jobs talked about is not so far off.
Pocket Informant HD – one of the leading calendar and task management apps for the iPad – is on sale right now for $9.99 – 1/3 off its standard $14.99 price.
The sale is a Macworld / iWorld Expo sale, so presumably it will run from today through January 28th – as the expo does.
Pocket Informant HD is a rare app that offers both calendar and GTD-based task management. It’s a very capable and feature-rich app. Here are just a few of its notable features:
❖ Today, Month, Week, Column Week, Agenda, Task, and Search views
❖ Swipe between Months, Days, and Weeks
❖ Easily jump to any date in any calendar view
❖ Timebars to show your free/busy time at a glance or show mini-text on the month cells instead
❖ Icons for Events and Tasks
❖ Event Location Mapping
❖ Calendar Filtering: Filter tasks and events by one or more calendars
❖ Templates for Events and Tasks
❖ Support for sub-tasks
❖ Tags and Tag Filtering
❖ TextExpander support in most text fields
❖ Expanded detail view to see events and tasks on any day
❖ Tasks integrated with the Calendar Views
❖ Task Grouping and QuickSearch/Insert
❖ Full Search of Contacts, Tasks, and Calendar items
❖ Send Appointment Meeting Requests
Here’s an App Store link for Pocket Informant HD.
I generally use the Mail app on the iPad in landscape mode, because I like that it shows both the Inbox (or whichever mailbox is selected) message list (as a sort of left sidebar) and shows an individual selected message content, in the right portion of the page.
This morning I found a nice tip for making the Mail app on iPad nicer to use in portrait mode – an easy swipe gesture to pull up the Inbox message list when you’re in portrait mode. Here’s how:
All you have to do is swipe left to right to see the message list as a popover on the left side of the page. Swipe right to left to hide the message list again.
When you do the left to right swipe to bring up the message list, you can then swipe again in the same direction to show the list of all your mailboxes and folders.
Although you can accomplish the same things by tapping on the Inbox and Mailboxes buttons, using gestures feels far easier and faster to me. It makes using Mail app in portrait mode a whole lot nicer I think.
Hat tip to Mac OS X Hints for sharing this hint, which I’ve expanded on a bit here.
The iPad is an amazing and versatile device, and this week is providing plenty of evidence of the amazing numbers that back that up. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has also offered up some thoughts on why the iPad is such a huge success and how huge its potential is.
Here are a few of those amazing numbers that have caught my eye, along with some of those thoughts from Tim Cook, and a few of my own thoughts:
– As Alicia noted the other day, Apple sold over 40 million iPads in 2011, and over 15 million in the last quarter of the year. Both numbers are well ahead of all other tablets sold combined. The 15 million sold is also triple the number of Macs sold in that quarter – and it was a record quarter for Mac sales. Tim Cook said in Apple’s earnings call earlier this week that he believes there will come a day when the tablet market is bigger than the PC market.
That day may not be that far off, as highlighted by this comment noted by TechCrunch:
Towards the end of the earnings call, Tim Cook dropped a huge nugget of information: led by 15 million iPads sold last quarter, the tablet market is now larger than the entire desktop PC market.
– More than 55 million iPads have been sold in less than two years on the market. Among the dozens of supposed rival Android, Windows, Blackberry and other tablets it doesn’t look likely that any of them have even sold 10 million thus far.
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