Daniel Lyons: Say What?

Daniel Lyons is missing something here...

An Apple spokesman says Flash is "closed and proprietary" and that Apple supports other development tools that are "open and standard." But banning Flash also pushes customers to buy movies and TV shows from iTunes rather than watch them on a free Web site. It pushes developers to write apps that get distributed through Apple's App Store, rather than through a Web browser.

This is ridiculous. If you were using flash before to serve free content through a browser, you'll want to stick to the browser and just use the standards in question (HTML5 and H264) to serve free content to the iPlatform now. The user isn't forced into paying for otherwise free content, it'll just come down the pipes in a standard format, and Apple is the pressure forcing developers to use these standards. Look at all the companies who have been rolling out free, standards based (read: non-Flash based) video options like mad since the iPad was announced. To quote Steve:

YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Agreed.

Citrix + iPad = Frankentablet

Using the Citrix Receiver for iPad to connect to Georgia Tech Virtual Lab remotely. This is Matlab running on a remote instance of XP. It works well and feels crazy :-)

Use iPhone tethering to get 3G on your WiFi only iPad

I figured out a way to get the 3G service from your 3G enabled iPhone to your iPad, only using these two devices and software! Although there might be other ways to achieve this, this worked for me and is relatively simple to set up.

Jailbreak your phone

There is plenty of info online about how to do this, so google it. As far as I know, the iPhone 3G and 3GS can be jailbroken on the most up to date firmware.

Buy MyWi

Any jailbreak method should leave you with Cydia. So in Cydia, search for MyWi. This application enables the phone's 3G service to be shared over WiFi. I don't condone pirating, so seriously, BUY this, don't steal it via those sinful iPhone repos that are out there that hosting cracked apps. Make sure you get the No Rock version with Cydia. If you are using Rock as your jailbreak package manager, then get the appropriate download.

Enable MyWi

Name your network, set a password. Then hit the on switch to enable to WiFi tethering. You'll know its working when you see the blue bar telling you upload and download figures.

Connect iPad to this WiFi network

Go to your iPad Settings->WiFi. Find the network that MyWi has created. Join it and enter the password.

Win

But be careful of your network operator charging you for extra data, since tethering is technically not part of your "unlimited" service, especially here in the US with AT&T

Preview the iPad Gmail interface

I changed my browser user agent string to the iPad's:

Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10

And Gmail looked like this:

Awesome, iPad interface is live! To do the same, just change your user agent string in your browser too and give it a shot. The interface looks like Apple mail, and it looks like it will look sweet as well on iPad. Of course, I figured this all out this morning before i read this:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/02/google-tweaks-gmails-html5-web-app-to-better-utilize-ipad-scree/

I really hope the demand is low at the Augusta Georgia Apple Store, where I'm going to try and pick one up in the morning.

iPhone Autocorrect makes iPad into "upas"

I'd bet a lot to say that it will autocorrect to "iPad" after the next update.