It’s official, we can now buy magic.  Bottled by our very own magician of presenting Steve Jobs Esq.  Well maybe.  Since it’s announcement I’ve been putting some thought as to why I might buy one and what I might use it for – where does it fit into my life?

Right now my digital landscape (did I just say that?) looks a little like this:  At home I have a powerful desktop with as big a monitor as I was prepared to spend money on at the time.  I have a Netbook (with 3G) which I generally carry round with me any place I go with a bag (commuting, visiting friends, holiday etc) and I have an iPhone which is always with me.

Between those 3 devices I’m generally covered for all the connectivity and functionality I desire (at the moment).  So if I did buy an iPad where does it fit or what does it replace?

The obvious answer would appear to be that the iPad is Apples Netbook in all but name.  If we take that as being the case (for the moment) and I think about how and where I use my Netbook – the iPad looks rather unappealing.  The majority of netbooking is done whilst travelling on the train.  I pull down the table in front of me sit my netbook down and write some emails, tweets, blogs – maybe have some IM conversations.  Maybe I sit back and catch up on some missed TV.  If I replace my netbook with the iPad – what’s wrong with this picture?  It’s flat.  I have to hold it up with a hand, or lay it flat on the table or pull up my knees and rest it on my lap.  If it had a stylus so I could write on it, I could buy that the issue of typing on a flat device that big goes away, but it doesn’t.

Maybe it’s not a Netbook, maybe it’s going to create a category all of it’s own and change the way we behave.  The iPhone was a game changer, but you’d hardly say it created it’s own category.  It entered a market that already existed; mobile phones with installable apps that could play music.  It just did it way better than anyone else and had the benefit of combining it with an already successful product in the iPod.

I am by no means an Apple hater (I love my iPhone) and will watch the iPad’s release with interest – but at the moment I’m having trouble coming up with an excuse to buy one.

dwynne

Having recently got myself a new desktop I needed to get my iPhone sync’d up with it – ideally doing so without losing all the applications I’d purchased and configured.  With iTunes surely being one of the most widely installed pieces of crapware, I had no confidence in it making this an easy or reliable process.  I spent some [wasted] time looking through the support articles on Apple.com without finding anything to reassure me that this was really something Apple had thought through.  Some more time spent reading through forums confirmed these suspicions.  Cobbling together other folks experiences I came up with a plan, which I’m happy to say worked - the only casualty being the order of my application icons.  This is what I did.

1.	Authorise your iTunes Account Store > Authorize Computer…
2.	Disable iTunes auto-sync Edit > Preferences > Devices
3.	Connect your iPhone Wait for it to show up under devices in iTunes
4.	Backup your iPhone Right click it under Devices and select Backup Just in case things should not go to plan…
5.	Transfer Purchases Right click it under Devices and select Transfer This will copy all your purchases (read: Apps) off your iPhone into the iTunes library on your new computer.
6.	Re-enable Sync'ing for Apps Select your iPhone from under Devices Select Applications Tab Check ‘Sync Application’ > Apply iTunes will warn you at this stage that this will delete all the applications on your iPhone - danger?  Fear not, transferring your purchases in Step 5 means you should be ok. For some reason it completely messes up the order of your app icons after this step, but otherwise everything appeared unchanged for me.  Application data and configurations were intact.
7.	Re-enable Sync'ing for Music Select your iPhone from under Devices Select Music Tab Check ‘Sync Music’ > Apply [I’m presuming at this point you’ve already copied all your music to your new machine and added it to your iTunes library.] Select Erase and Sync – iTunes will then lock up and become unresponsive whilst it deletes all your music from your iPhone.  But don’t worry; it’ll free-up again when it starts copying it all back again. This is a good point to make yourself a cup of tea and reflect on how Apple gained their reputation for usability.
8.	Re-enabled auto-sync (if you want) Reverse Step 2

I’m happy to report this worked for me without any ill effects (apart from messed up app icon order).  So thanks to all those forum folk and to Apple who’s developers obviously only ever buy 1 computer in their entire life.  I will say this though – iTunes sucks and I hate it.

Usual caveats apply: this is just a guide, use it at your own risk, don’t blame me if your iPhone runs off with your best mate.

Update 2009-11-24: I’ve re-encoded the sessions that were up before cutting them in size by over half and since Microsoft still haven’t got their MP4’s up; added 7 new sessions (highlighted below with the Old Skool Yahoo! New! Logo!).  I’ll likely take these files down when MS put their MP4’s up, which I’m assured they plan to.

I can’t quite work out whether Microsoft are intending to make all the PDC09 videos available in MP4 or not.  There’s a column on the video page for MP4, but out of the 150 videos currently available, only 2 of them also have a MP4 version.  Being somewhat impatient I’ve started downloading and converting the sessions I’m most interested in and figured I might as well share the early-MP4 love; so I’ll be chucking them up here as I convert them.

Session	MP4
CL01 - Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview	MP4
CL02 - Microsoft Silverlight 4 - Advanced Performance and Profiling Techniques	MP4
CL06 - Networking and Web Services in Silverlight	MP4
CL07 - Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services	MP4
CL09 - How Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Was Built with WPF 4	MP4
CL11 - Advanced WPF Application Performance Tuning and Analysis	MP4
CL20 - Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Microsoft Silverlight 4	MP4
CL35 - Custom Behaviours for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects	MP4
FT24 - Building Extensible Rich Internet Applications with the MEF	MP4
FT28 - Microsoft .NET Micro Framework and Intelligent Devices	MP4
FT30 - Using Dynamic Languages to Build Scriptable Applications	MP4
FT31 - Dynamic Binding in C# 4	MP4
SVC23 - Using the Microsoft Sync Framework to Connect Apps to the Cloud	MP4
VTL01 - Code Contracts and Pex - Power Charge Your Assertions and Unit Tests	MP4

All videos are converted from the WMV versions using Videora.

Microsoft had planned on releasing a version of Silverlight 2 for Windows Mobile this year, presumably with the Windows Mobile 6.5 release – in fact on the Silverlight website it still says as much (at time of writing):

I know Microsoft had a working internal beta of Silverlight for Mobile (which I nearly got my hands on) and then had a change of heart and pulled it.  They had apparently had a “change of direction.”  Whilst a bit disappointed, at the time I didn’t think anything more on it.  Then the other day when I was showing the Sky Sports Centre app on my iPhone to a Windows Mobile owning friend, he exclaimed “it’s all so slick isn’t it” – almost in desperation at how clunky most Windows Mobile applications are.  This struck a chord.

Even though Windows Mobile 6.5 is largely regarded as a facelift release, Microsoft have openly stated that with it they hope to appeal more to the non-business users, an area dominated by the iPhone.  I presume with Windows Mobile 7 they intend to continue this focus, with the consensus being the OS will get a huge overhaul.

The question is – how big a role will Silverlight play in that overhaul?

Windows Mobile 7 will have a slick, tactile interface – it has to.  It must allow developers to easily develop applications for the OS that are also slick and tactile.  So what Microsoft technology allows developers to easily create lovely looking/feeling applications?  Silverlight does (and WPF).  Wouldn’t it make perfect sense to put Silverlight centre stage?  Not just “make Silverlight run on Windows Mobile 7” but make it an integral part of Windows Mobile application development?  We shall see.

There are many Top 5 iPhone App lists, but these are my most used applications – not necessarily those that I think are coolest or even the best, but those which I use nearly everyday.

	Echofon Pro (formally Twitterfon) £2.99 I’ve tried a multitude of Twitter apps but the Pro version of Echofon is my favourite.  Most notably because it has a landscape keyboard, direct integration with TwitPic and a built in browser that also works in landscape.
	Facebook Free Not a whole lot of explanation required here.
	ShopShop Free This humble little app intends only to serve as a Shopping List and it does that very well.  You can create multiple lists, drag items around to the order you want them and strike them out when they’re in your trolley.  So basically what we have here is an application that allows you to create lists of anything.  This is both my Shopping List app and my To Do List app and my Thoughts List app etc.
	Wunder Radio £3.99 I love this application, I use every morning to listen to the Radio in bed and it means I can listen to 5live wherever I am.  There are hundreds of stations listed, including all BBC stations.  In truth it doesn’t work brilliantly on the move when 3G drops out – but on Wi-Fi it’s great.
	Cash Tracker £0.59 Another really simple application helping me try and keep tabs on where my money goes.  Whilst you can figure most of that out at bank statement level – I always have a large chunk of “Cash Withdrawals” that aren’t so simple to account for.  This app fills that gap.

What am I missing?  What can’t you live without?