Ken: 5/10
Dana: 6/10
Went for a walk on Easter Sunday. Aside from plenty of ducks and geese, we spotted a couple of turtles and one racoon. ( Full Gallery )
Ken: 7/10
Dana: 8/10
Last January, I posted a brief summary of all the iPhone apps in my iTunes library on on my iPhone, and I updated the stats in August.
We're less than 1 week before the launch of the iPad, and I've just crossed the 300 apps downloaded mark. Feels like time for another update.
Here's are the numbers from January 2009, August 2009, and today.
| Jan 09 | Aug 09 | Mar 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default Apps Pre-Loaded on iPhone | 19 | 21 | 21 |
| Apps Downloaded | 100 | 202 | 304 |
| Games | 39 | 82 | 113 |
| For the Kids' Amusement | 19 | 29 | 51 |
| Icons Currently on my iPhone | 92 | 116 | 125 |
| Icons that are Web Shortcuts | 10 | 10 | 9 |
| Seasonal (Halloween, Xmas, etc.) | 5 | 5 | 9 |
If I repeat my calculation from the previous analysis: 21 pre-loaded apps and 9 web shortcuts leaves 95 apps on my phone downloaded from the App Store. That's around 31% of all the apps I've downloaded, meaning 69% of the those are sitting in my iTunes library unused.
It may be time to stop tracking this kind of thing. There may be a critical mass where it isn't illustrative any more, and with iPad apps entering the mix, we may definitely be there. After all, it would never occur to me to count and track the apps on my laptop.
So we'll see if there will be a Part IV or not.
Ken: 5/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 7/10
Dana: 7/10
I started wondering recently about the iPad and multiple users. We're planning on getting one, and our idea is to try leaving it around the living room. That way someone lounging or watching TV can pick it up to check email, browse the web, or play a game. Much of the rest of the time it could be docked and playing a photo slideshow, basically a nice digital photo frame.
Then I thought about the email part. If I set up my email accounts in the iPad Mail app, won't my email be accessible to anyone who uses the iPad? As far as I know, there isn't any login or anything that would indicate to the iPad OS that one user is different than another.
Mac OS X, of course, has strong multiuser support built in. Settings, preferences, and data are generally saved on a per-user basis. The iPhone supports only one user (where by "user" I'm really talking about a set of data and preferences). This isn't really a problem on the iPhone, since a phone is quite personal; you carry it with you and unless you want to show a friend a new app or let your kid play a game, you're really the only one who uses it.
The "living room" use case I'm imagining, though, means it could be pretty handy for the iPad to be able to tell one family member from another (and maybe guests, too). I could set up my email accounts, my wife could set up hers, etc. Going further, we could customize which apps we like on which pages, or even which apps we like to have show up at all. Starts to sound like we'd have to able to sync each user to a different iTunes setup (different computers or different users on one computer).
Which kind of gets to what I think Apple/Steve Jobs would say about this: not simple enough. People have said the iPad could be the computer for their grandmother to use, and adding multiple users with unique app profiles and syncing with multiple computers pulls the iPad away from the uber-simple ideal.
Fair enough.
I imagine the "living room" scenario isn't an uncommon way people would like to use an iPad, but I could be wrong Maybe the issue will never arise for any but a few iPad owners The workaround, I suppose, will be to use web interfaces for email and remember to logout when finished. Seems a shame, though, to not be able to use the Mail app Apple designed just for the iPad.
My friend Jim did the voiceover for a new iPhone ad that Apple launched this weekend. I think it may mark one of the first times that the iPhone ads have broken from the one "iPhone guy" voice and feature a first-person perspective from Joe iPhone-user.
The ad is called "On Hold". Check it out!
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 5/10
Ken: 5/10
Dana: 7/10
Went for a walk last weekend...
Ken: 9/10
Dana: 9/10
(Much better than "Crazy on the Outside")
Ken: 4/10
Dana: 4/10
To be fair, I might have liked it better if I didn't spend the first half of the movie just utterly disappointed. You see, we didn't want to see "Crazy on the Outside." We wanted to see "Crazy Heart."
Here's what we saw in the online movie listings:
Ok, so the one word "Crazy" made us a little suspicious. And "Documentary" doesn't sound right. Click on it for the full movie description, and you get this:
The top part is still wonky, but the description sounds like "Crazy Heart"! Sounds like we're all good. Click through to buy a ticket from Fandango, and what do you see:
Hoorah! All good. Let's go! So once the sitter was here and the kids were on their way to bed, we went down to the theater. I asked the gentleman at the ticket office for two tickets to "Crazy Heart". He didn't blink an eye, just issued the tix. We grabbed a Diet Coke (for me) and a popcorn (for Dana) and sat down. Previews came. No problem. The movie started. Wait, "Crazy Heart" was directed by Tim Allen? That must be a strange coincidence of names. Wait, Tim Allen appears in "Crazy Heart"? I don't remember that. Then up comes the title: "Crazy on the Outside".
I left the theater to walk up and down the hall and make sure we hadn't just entered the wrong door. No luck. We didn't want to just go home, so we watched the movie.
It grew on me a little as it went on, but it was hard to get over the disappointment. "Crazy Heart" has an 84 on Metacritic and Jeff Bridges is getting acclaim for his performance. "Crazy on the Outside" has a 32 on Metacritic. It was not exactly on the top of my list of movies worthy of our date night away from the house and kids.
Sorry Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver. You were probably better than I will remember, but you didn't get a fair chance, at least not on this night.
Ken: 4/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 7/10
Dana: 7/10
Ken: 8/10
Dana: 8/10
Ken: 8/10
Dana: 7/10
Ken: 6/10
Dana: 6/10
Ken: 7/10
Dana: 7/10