The iPad, in particular, is has huge potential (I’ll blog soon on my experiences with it) and for some people it could replace their computer altogether.  But the fact that you cannot add music without doing a lengthy sync, nor delete tunes to free up disk space when you are away from your computer is a major limiting factor.  I think Apple could resolve this with with two developments: one is the long rumoured iTunes cloud and the other is Time Machine for iOS.

The iTunes cloud would allow the various (now rather fragmented) iTunes apps concerned with the playback of music and videos, whether on PCs, Macs or iOS devices, do what Spotify already can and sync your music collection over the air.  The Spotify iPhone app lets you see all of your playlists, and you can stream them so long as you have n internet connection – but, crucially, you can also check a box next to each one that you want to be available when you do not have a connection.  When you do this, the music is synced over the air to your device – and if you’re on your home wifi network this can include music in your own collection that Spotify don’t offer.  There’s no reason why Apple shouldn’t offer something like this even if its only to access the music you already own (and a similar solution could be used for viewing your iPhoto collection, with thumbnails viewable over the air and high resolution images for those albums you have checked and synced).

The Apple Time Capsule is the other element that could free their iOS devices from subservience to a PC.  Building Time Machine into iOS would allow devices to do incremental backups – ideally to any AirDisk – and the Time Capsule/AirDisk could also host the storage of the music and photos synced over the air.

If tomorrow’s iTunes announcement (there’s a teaser right now at apple.com) really is The Cloud, then iPhone and iPad world domination won’t be far behind…

The Promise

In both cases, what is offered:

• instant uploads to albums/set
• photo name, description, keywords and faces/place (depending on service) synced both ways (so if you update a name online it gets updated in your iPhoto library)
• any new photos added to albums/sets online synced back to iPhoto

What you can’t do is add an existing album online to iPhoto to manage it from there.

The Problem

All this is great, in principle, but it’s all managed through albums in iPhoto (mapped to albums/sets online). But with Flickr your photos also appear in your photo stream, of course.  This has led some to believe that deleting a photo from an album in iPhoto is like removing a photo from a set in Flickr (it normally stays in your photo stream just as a photo removed from an iPhoto album stays in the library).  This is not the case: remove it from the album and it’s removed (together with comments and views) from Flickr.  (The workaround is to remove the photo from the set on Flickr, then delete it from the album iPhoto.

What happened with me is that for reasons I don’t understand the link between iPhoto and Flickr broke for some pictures.  The pictures stayed in the Flickr sets, but iPhoto somehow had lost them from its album, so it downloaded them into iPhoto.  This means duplicates in the library.  Not only that, but the metadata in Flickr is now being synced with the jpeg in iPhoto rather than the original RAW image.

I can find no way to fix this.

The Design Flaws

This all suddenly gets a lot worse when you start to think about things like having pictures in two of the sets that are synced between iPhoto and Flickr.  If you add a photo to two Flickr albums in iPhoto, it appears in both sets on Flickr, but twice in your photo stream.  iPhoto hasn’t figured out that you don’t want to upload the same picture once for each set.  Of course then any metadata you add to one on Flickr doesn’t appear on the other (I assume this gets synced via iPhoto eventually, but still).  On the other hand, if you add the photo to one album in iPhoto and then use Flickr to add it to the other set as well, it get synced back into iPhoto into the other album as a separate picture.  Now you’ve got a duplicate in iPhoto – there’s no way to avoid a duplicate somewhere.

The photo size you upload is determined on a per-album basis. So if I start and album before going pro, I can only choose the smallest upload size, but when I go pro not only can I not change the setting for that album, I can’t even add a new photos in a higher resolution.  Surely anyway we should be able to retrospectively change the resolution and have iPhoto do all the heavy “replace photo” lifting?

Photo Recognition

Given the relatively sophisticated algorithms involved in face detection and face recognition, it cannot be that hard to develop a simple algorithm to establish that two photos are the same (even if stored in different resolution) and sync intelligently based on this?  Apple sell their software based on usability, and the fact things just work (they usually do) so why am I even having to think about this?

This evening I’ve been doing some calculations which I will share in case any of you are in the same situation: namely, you hardly ever call or text (75 minutes and 100 texts would be more than ample).  I’ve looked at 02, Orange and Vodaphone. (I wanted to include Orange PAYG prices, but I couldn’t find any info on data costs with this. And I’m assuming O2 have got their 18 month and 24 month handset costs back to front.)  I’m also working on the basis I’ll keep the phone for 2 years, so it would be worth getting locked into a 24 month deal for cheaper monthly costs.  All costs are calculated over 24 months.

O2 Pay and Go

£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £240 for 24 months of calls (£10 worth, 40 – 188 mins depending on call patterns), texts (300) and data (500Mb). No lock in. Total £839.

O2 Simplicity

£599 for the handset (unlocked from Apple), £360 for 24 months of calls (300 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 12 month lock in. Total £959.

O2 Pay Monthly

£299 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (100 minutes), texts (unlimited) and data (500Mb). 24 month lock in. Total £899.

Orange Pay Monthly

£269 for the handset, £720 for 24 months of calls (150 minutes), texts (250) and data (750Mb). Total £989.

Vodaphone Pay Monthly

£309 for the handset, £600 for 24 months of calls (75 minutes), texts (250) and data (1Gb). 24 month lock in.  Total £909.

Tesco Pay and Go

£569 for the handset, £240 for 24 months of calls and texts (for say 30 minutes and 40 texts), data (1Gb). Total £809.

Tesco Pay Monthly

£429 for the handset, £240 for the first 12 months of calls (250 minutes), texts (ulmited) and data (1Gb), then 12 months PAYG with any provider, say £120 for O2 as above. 12 month lock in. Total £789.

Tesco monthly would be a great deal if (a) they had any stock in and (b) I wasn’t getting a discount on my broadband with O2.  So would their PAYG, if I really didn’t make many calls.

It looks like O2 Pay and Go may still suit me best so long as my calling requirements remain modest… But there’s not so much in it now.

Updated 18th June: corrected with official Vodafone pricing, which makes the handset £29 dearer.

Updated 20th August: Tesco pricing.

For the record: we went to a beach where you can only get to the sand at low tide, and it wasn’t quite low tide.  We had a 2 year old and a 5 year old with us, we decided to wade round and I volunteered to carry the latter (you can already guess what’s coming).  I stepped into the water and discovered that the edge of the small wave concealed an extremely large rockpool.  Which was very well hidden.  Yes.

Me, nephew and phone all went in the water.  Me cursed, nephew cried, and iPhone didn’t make any noise at all.  Ever again.  (After a couple of hours on the beach the tide had come back up to the point where we’d need to wade again: nephew declared that he wanted me to carry him.  Slow learner…)

There are stories on the internet of iPhones that have gone into washing machines, toilets and worse and made it out.  I put mine in a box of rice (no silica for miles out there) for several days, and changed the rice very day.  Maybe it’s the salt?  When I got it home I took it to the Apple store where it was officially pronounced dead, and replaced for £120.  Which, incidentally, was just slightly less than what I would have paid in premiums if I had taken out an insurance policy.

My unit, 10 months (but not under warranty because it was a replacement for one that went in the sea) gradually stopped connecting to WiFi networks and then even detecting them.  Now an Apple Genius has confirmed the hardware is defective.  The unusual thing was there were no other problems with the phone, and there have been no error messages.  I’ve now just switched the WiFi off, although that means I won’t be able to use some apps (like remote) or surf fast at home and at work.

I now expect the rest of the phone’s functions to gradually deteriorate until it no longer rings or lets me dial numbers containing a 6.   I should be furious, but secretly I’m pleased to have the perfect excuse to buy (with money I don’t have) the next generation phone, the one I always wanted, that is going to be announced next week.

You are going to announce it, aren’t you, Steve?

So what about Fusion and Windows 7?  I’m very pleased with Fusion: it’s elegant and intuitive with all the features of Parallels 3 (the last version I used) plus access to the start menu for multiple VMs in the menu bar.  And Windows 7 itself?  Meh, not exciting.  I’m sure there’s some good stuff in there, but I haven’t been motivated to look for it yet.  Mostly, so far it just works.

No, the star of this little ensemble is: the Magic Mouse.  This is an evolution from the extraordinarily elegant and beautiful but limited single button mouse.  The next incarnation, the Mighty Mouse, which used touch technology to allow you to right click with its single button and a scroll ball for whizzing around large documents, impressed me enough that I bought one, but not so much that it stopped me losing faith in the mouse altogether and relying instead on a graphics tablet.

The Magic Mouse is starting to win me back.  It’s a multi-touch mouse: the fiddly scroll ball has gone, and instead everything is controlled by gestures.  This means left and right swiping but it’s actually a single touch action that’s the winner: draw your finger up or down the surface of the mouse and you can scroll with momentum just like on the iPhone screen.  This is so incredibly usable, you immediately forget you’re doing it.  It’s going to be like two finger scrolling on the MacBook: I automatically try to scroll with two fingers on any other machine I use.

Every other mouse on any machine I borrow I am now going to draw my finger across and then wonder whey the computer’s frozen.

If you use a Snow Leopard (or possible Leopard) machine as your media centre and you rip your own TV stuff into iTunes, you may have puzzled over why TV shows seasons that sequence correctly show up in Front Row in a random order, particularly if you’ve not added stuff to your library in the order it was originally released.

Leopard’s Front Row annoyed a few users by changing the organisation scheme from…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers ->
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3 etc.

…to…

TV Shows ->
The Avengers
The Avengers
The Avengers

Which was fine with me while I knew that each entry corresponded to a season, and seasons were in ascending order. But in some cases the seasons seemed to come out in a random order, and I puzzled over it for ages (well, I like puzzles). Had I tagged badly, and it was sorting by release dates? Were the most recently added to iTunes showing up first? Actually it turns out it was none of this. You might have entered the season number in iTunes and have it all showing up correctly there, and when you check the tags you see the correct seasons too, but to get Front Row to read it you’ve got to force iTunes to write it to some other place (I’ve no idea where) by, for example, renaming the show temporarily and then naming it back to it’s correct name. It’s inconvenient (and a disappointingly mundane resolution to the puzzle) but at least it works until Apple release a proper fix. If they ever fix Front Row.

Incidentally if you’re finding some of your TV Shows are showing up as movies (as well as TV shows) in Front Row, despite being correctly categorised in iTunes, this similar workaround suggests changing the media kind to podcast and then back to TV show.

There’s a rumour of an Apple iPhone service that will pass iPhoto your movements and sync those with your pictures to add geotags taken on cameras that don’t support them; iPhoto ’09 and its Places features makes whichever solution actually materialises first something of an essential upgrade for your kit.

Ideally, this will include a remote control for Airfoil too, so by combining with Apple’s remote (or perhaps even through a simple integrated iTunes controller) you would be able to start playing music on your Mac, decide where to send it (including, of course, right back to the iPhone) all from the iPhone itself.

So even if you don’t have an Airport Express in every room, if you’ve got your iPhone with you you’ll have access to your whole library of sound anywhere you can connect to your network.

An even nicer refinement, though one Apple may not like to implement, would allow the audio to be streamed to the iPhone wherever it is on the internet…

Now I’m starting my masters (MAVE at Sussex) I find that it’s iPhone apps that are being pushed! Shamelessly, I might add. I like this.