Apple made a big deal about how the iPad mini is not a scaled up phone experience. It’s supposed to be pixel for pixel the iPad experience. That’s why it has the same XGA display.

If you discover that elements on your app are too small on the iPad Mini, please consider the following before hacking an iPad Mini version into existence:

• Normal users don’t understand that bigger laptop displays mean more room, they assume bigger means bigger physical elements. (It took me a while to explain to some family why the 4″ iPhone 5 screen didn’t mean bigger text than the 3.5″ screen). With the iPad mini, for the first time they’ll be right, and will expect elements to be physically smaller on the iPad mini.
• If things are in fact too small, you’re violating HIG on the big iPad as well. Just because it’s a bit bigger doesn’t mean you can use 32 pt touch targets on it. Some developers make custom controls for iPad that are bigger (64pt) than their iPhone counterparts, which is OK, but they shouldn’t be the opposite.
• Non-retina screens require a bigger minimum font for legibility. If your fonts aren’t readable on the iPad mini they haven’t been readable on the iPad 2 either.
• Placing shortcut or commonly used elements (a next page button being the obvious example) in the lower right corner so they can be one-handed on an iPad mini will have benefit on other devices as well. I hold my iPad like a steering wheel sometimes and controls I can reach with my thumb would be welcomed. Don’t limit them to the mini.
• I do my iPad testing with the iPad in a Griffin a-frame stand on my desk at roughly the same distance as my MacBook Pro’s display. Don’t do this for iPad Mini testing. Like iPhone testing, you have to actually hold it. iPad minis will held closer to the face.
• Test with your children. This is going to be one hell of a Christmas present this year. I imagine like the iPod Touch vs iPhone, the demographics for the mini will skew more towards children than the iPad.
• Test with your wife and girlfriends. You, a male developer between the ages of 20 and 50, are not the target consumer here. Yes it’ll fit in your coat pocket but if you need a bag the rest of the year you’d probably rather have the big one. Women, on the other hand, prefer adding minimal weight to their purses. Although the weight isn’t a problem, the size of the iPad is.

Bottom line: If your iPad 3 UI doesn’t work on an iPad mini, you’re probably flunking HIG on the iPad 3 and iPad 2.

Are there any ways you could be evil and not allow the iPad mini? Probably not. Doing things like requiring magnetometers or front facing cameras for apps that don’t use them just to avoid supporting under spec’d devices probably raises Apple’s ire. Although I’m not a fan of it, they do allow the whole “HD” and “for iPad” “for iPhone” thing, but they don’t allow “for iPhone 5” so there won’t be “for iPad mini” apps.

*** For those keeping score at home, the iPhone 5 rendering of the Guggenheim home page in landscape is only marginally better than the Nexus 7 and that’s only if you use full screen mode.

One thing I’m surprised they didn’t bother doing was throwing lightning on the iPad 2 for consistency’s sake. One thing is clear though, non-retina iPads are here to stay (while non-retina pocketables are gone for good). Once the add lightning to the iPad 2 they’ll just call it iPad (compared to iPad with retina display) and do the same with the iPad Minis.

There’s something magical about the A5…

• playback 1080p h.264
• drive XGA games with graphics that rival consoles
• geekbench as high as any PowerBook G4

With the mere XGA screen it really doesn’t need to get more powerful. My iPhone 4S was never “slow” other than rendering (which isn’t exactly common). When Apple develops an iPad Mini with Retina Display powered by an A6X and the iPad with Retina Display has an A7X, Apple won’t need to make an A6 XGA iPad yet, unless it’s more economic to do so (at that point they’ll probably have an A6 AppleTV, which again isn’t necessary, but it’s cheaper to make more of the same chip and they could continue using “broken” chips with only one functioning core).

First: $329. 9to5mac nailed it, we didn’t believe it. Cudos to them. Macrumors’ Arnold Kim pointed out on twitter that the often-mocked and disregarded digitimes predicted the 4th Gen iPad refresh this fall (to the skeptics credit, they also predicted it as the iPad 3 launching in September last year).

Everything else was spot on. 32nm A5 with XGA display at iPhone 3GS dpi but high quality IPS and other modern improvements (so it should look like a 11″ MacBook Air in terms of quality, which is very good). It comes in paint-chippy black, which is what I’ll be getting.

Earlier, I expressed some concerns that the 13″ retina MacBook pro would be lacking some features I love on the 15″. For one, it doesn’t have a discrete GPU, and its onboard display is 1280×800@2x. I suspect it will only have three total resolution options:1024×640@2X, 1280×800@2X, 1440×900@2X, unfortunately lacking a 1920×1200@2X which wouldn’t be too small for my eyes but is how much room I need for some stuff. As it only has the Intel GPU, even though it has 3 display outputs plus the onboard, I don’t think you’ll be driving all 4 at the same time. It could do 3 external easily if they’re all 1920×1200 or smaller or, or one 2560×1600 external plus onboard, but two cinema displays + onboard + 1080p HDMI all at once? Unlikely, or at least without noticeable framerate drops and audible fans.

Still, my girlfriend’s 2008 Unibody MacBook (the lone aluminum model before the 13″ Pro was introduced) has seen better days and this would be one hell of an upgrade if her machine enters the realm of unreasonably expensive to repair.

Consumable In App Purchases (IAP from this point on) are the worst power Apple has ever given developers. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be used for since intermediary currency and real-world purchases are supposedly forbidden. When I think of how IAP are supposed to be used, I think of this:

Subscriptions for apps with server side components and one time feature unlocks for other apps are perfectly acceptable. Games charging for additional levels is perfectly acceptable. As soon as you make a purchase consumable, however, everything changes.

Non-consumable IAP are tied to an account. You can use that Instapaper subscription on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and iPad Jr all at the same time without paying an extra dime. The same goes for feature unlocks. Consumables, on the other hand, are tied to a device, and are non restorable if your device isn’t backed up (and of course restoring means full device restoring). I’ll admit that as a developer I have way more active devices on a single Apple ID (without bending rules for family members) than most so maybe I’m not the best person to talk about this, but I’m pretty sure people aren’t used to paying an occasional recurring $50 for a game.

It seems I’m not alone, however. Please read the tale of Cow Clicker.

AppleInsider posted a list of 24 permutations of iPad Jr models. Based on the groupings, here’s what we have:

2 columns of 3 groups of 4 (2x3x4=24)

So, it looks like there will be two of one choice, 3 of another, and 4 of the last. The full size iPads have 2 colors, 3 carriers (WiFi counts) and 3 capacities. With the iPad Jr supposedly being a low priced gateway product, speculation is that the 4 will be capacities and an 8GB option will be introduced. I don’t think that makes sense.

The 5th generation iPod Touch starts at 32GB. The 4th Generation now starts at 16GB. It’s clear that 8GB is done, and I don’t think Apple will introduce 128GB on a Mini device. Plus, this also flies in the face of the standard internal “GOOD BETTER BEST” which is easiest applied to storage. So the 3 is definitely storage.

Since this is a mini model, one might want more colors but everything else has like 6 and I’m not sure which 4 I’d pick. It’ll be in black and white, and the black will be full body black like everything else released this cycle.

So it comes down to carriers… 4 carriers including WiFi… we have WiFi… AT&T LTE… Verizon LTE… and… you guessed it, international LTE. The 3rd generation iPad had a lot of international lawsuits because neither the AT&T nor Verizon LTE models supported some international LTE bands. It’s a question of whether this “international” model will be available stateside but I’m confident it’s the 4th choice. Not exactly earth shattering but there you have it.

As John Gruber noted in the Talk Show, the headphone jack on the 5^th generation iPod Touch is approaching the edges of the device in a way that suggests it may soon limit how thin a device can get.

Bluetooth headphones aren’t mainstream yet, and until Apple makes my universal wireless headphones iPod Shuffle thingie we’ll need a temporary solution other than staving off device thickness.

Conspiracies of authenticator chips aside, the reason lightning cables have them is because lightning cables can do pretty much anything. The iPhone 5 (and everything else) can multiplex out any signal it wants based on what the authenticator chip tells it is plugged in. We already know that analog audio out is supported by the lightning to 30 pin adapter, so why not make a small dongle that just turns lightning into a female headphone jack? If they choose to go with a short cable rather than solid plug, making a quarter inch jack for studio headphones would be easier too, which could be a nice touch.

Again, this would be the cheap out-of-the-box solution. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shipped with said adapter pre-attached to the included earpods. The ideal solution would be the iPod Shuffle shaped device that pairs via bluetooth and turns any headphones into wireless headphones.

1. Final Cut Pro X
2. mobileMe
3. iTunes 5 through 10
4. QuickTime 4 through 7
5. Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1
6. ping
7. BootCamp
8. Those giant double harddrive iPods (if you got the 40GB while the 20GB was the entry model)
9. The 4 button (non clickwheel) iPod
10. The buttonless iPod Shuffle
11. All but the first and second generation iPod Nano
12. Xcode 4.0

Of course, he shipped all these things under his watch. QuickTime was corrected under his watch, as well as the iPod stuff. Tim Cook is the on who cleaned up iCloud, iTunes, ping, Xcode, and Final Cut Pro X is still (very much) in progress.

I include BootCamp because I find VMWare a much better solution ever since it started supporting DirectX but more importantly, BootCamp was always slow to have drivers for new versions of Windows as they were released, where VMWare had drivers for developer builds. I guess I’m complaining about the neglect more than its implementation.

If you listen to Steve Jobs’ 1997 MacWorld speech he clearly describes iCloud. It’s haunting.

It’s fairly unanimous across those of us around for the transition that 10.2 was the first feature complete version of OS X, and 10.3 was the first version recognizably similar to today’s versions (10.3 introduced Exposé and metal Finder windows with the sidebar).

Back when we had that hack to make the iOS Simulator (pre iOS 6 gm) the first thing I tested was the store build of iDecorate – not even recompiled – and it worked great. Once we got the GM though things didn’t work anymore. No, it wasn’t because I forgot the put the Default.png in there. It was because I was using some now deprecated interface rotation APIs. This is actually really good news. It means my code for handling arbitrarily sized canvases and devices was actually working flawlessly not knowing the dimensions of future devices. Knowing the dimensions, my choice for background sizes actually remains very good.

The whole image is 3:2 (like the iDecorate backgrounds are), the blue box is 4:3 like a iPad in landscape. The bigger red box is 16:10 like a MacBook Pro. The tighter red box is 16:9 like a landscape iPhone 5 or HDTV. If we try to normalize the ratios you get something like a image of 900×600 shows 800×600 on an iPad, 900×506 on iPhone 5, 900×562 on MacBooks. Interestingly enough, the center area that’s visible no matter what you’re viewing on is pretty close to what the overscan-era “action safe” region would be. BTW, you should disable overscan compensation. And no, I haven’t submitted yet. There’s testing to do.

Eons ago, when my girlfriend an I moved in together and bought iPhone 3G’s on the same, brand new AT&T plan (awwww) I bought us some brand of dual dock (not this exact one, but pretty close). She always used a case which was great because it fits in if you don’t use one of the “universal” sized thingies in it.

This thing has been in our bedroom since late 2008 or early 2009 and continues to work well (*except it sometimes gives that incompatibility nag and one of the LEDs is out, but we turn them off anyway). Up until last wednesday it held both of our iPhone 4S’s every night.

Then my iPhone 5 arrived

She has no qualms about waiting until the 5S or whatever to get the fully subsidized price so for the rest of the term on her 4S we’re stuck needing separate chargers. When we both have phones that have a lightning connector I hope I can find a new dual dock. I have both a lightning adapter and lightning adapter extension cable on order (“ships October”) but until then I’ve actually adopted an interesting ritual.

I keep one lightning cable in my bag and one attached to my headless MacMini Server (which holds all of my iTunes content). The Mini is on a shelf next to the couch so I plug the iPhone in there during the evening and actually let if discharge overnight on the nightstand. Usually I wake up with it between 60-80% depending on if I actually got it to 100%, how many times it had to vibrate because I kept snoozing it, and how much sleep I actually got. Note: it being cold out and a nearby window cracked probably has some effect too.

Whatever charge it has left is more than enough to get me to work listening to a podcast or something and maybe some light usage. I walk to work so other than the long crosswalk waits on primary roads I generally just leave it in my pocket. When I finally get to work, I top it off via my Lightning cable from my bag, unplug it at lunch, and don’t plug it in again until the cycle repeats at night.

You’d think that I only need to top it off once, and maybe that’s true, but I’m used to using the phone for 16 hours and charging for 8, now I’m “using” it for 20-22 (discontinuous) and charging for 2-4 (discontinuous) so it’s a little different.

Before you go suggesting the obvious, the lightning cable is too short to reach the wall plug. There’s just no elegant solution until I get a dock with Lightning.

Right now, Apple sells the Thunderbolt Display with a MagSafe 2 adapter for use with newer portables. Should this always be the case? When can Apple reasonable sell a cinema display with only a non backward compatible MagSafe 2 connector?

My bet is on the 27″ Retina Cinema Display but NOT on the 24″ Retina Cinema Display. Let me explain.

Current incarnations of thunderbolt don’t actually have enough bandwidth to drive 2560×1440@2X but have enough for 1920×1200@2X. This means that many existing MacBooks with MagSafe one could be potential drivers of a 24″ Retina Cinema Display but only MacBooks that haven’t even been made yet could drive the 27″

This also leads me to believe that a 24″ Cinema Display with 1920×1200@2X resolution is what to expect first. Since the 27″ would be pushing so many pixels, having a “More Space” option on it might be something the GPU isn’t up to. However, existing cards can drive a 2560×1600@2X resolution, downsample to 1920×1200@2X while still onboard, and send the final 1920×1200@2X image over the existing limited thunderbolt.

There is one lingering question though: What would the transition look like? Leave the existing 27″ in the lineup? Update it too at a very price and make the hardware restrictions (unreleased Mac Pro replacement) obvious? Both?

As someone with 20/10 vision, Retina Cinema Displays can’t come fast enough. I would love to have a 24″ with a More Space option on it, even if my original retina MacBook Pro can only drive one or with the onboard display off or something.