So I Went a Little Crazy

My iPhone is a 3G running OS 3.1.2 and it’s jail broken and unlocked. Everything was fine and dandy with it, but I kept hearing about the new OS, iOS 4, and and how it included many little tweaks that would improve my overall experience.

I knew that I wouldn’t be getting the multitasking features and a few other things as I have the older not so snappy hardware, but I thought I’d give it a go all the same. I backed up the phone’s data to iTunes and then hacked a copy of 4.0 and installed it and restored the backup. Doing this, and restoring my carrier and a few other tweaks was a long, but relatively straight forward process.

Now I was up to date. There were many little improvements that I noticed, such as universal spell checking, being able to group app icons into groups or folders, and at last — a character count in messaging. All good.

What wasn’t good was the slow down in responsiveness. Half-second delays had turned into one, or even two second delays; and boy, was it noticeable?

I remembered an article written at the time of the Apple Newton. They talked about how studies had shown that any more than a half-second delay before the software responded in some way, and the user rapidly loses interest. How true it turned out to be for me. I decided to trade the new features to get my half second back and I invoked a disaster recovery restore back to my old OS.

It’s not like Apple to put out OS updates that slow you down — usually it’s the other way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a faster leaner 4.1 sometime soon. Maybe, just maybe, when that happens I’ll wait for the verdict to come in before making the leap again.

Two Weeks with the iPad

So if Apple asked me in to a secret clinic and asked what I’d change my answer would be something like this.

Don’t change anything about the hardware. It’s perfect.

I miss my Clock and Stocks apps. Please include them. I particularly miss the countdown timer. I’d like to be able to toggle location services, 3G, Bluetooth and Wifi via some sort of widget; maybe a wipe across the titlebar could invoke it.

Lastly, I’d like to have the option to have the Safari toolbar scroll off the screen like on the iPhone.

And that’s it!

All Things Considered

First my task manager of choice was Things, then I switched to 2Do, and now I’m back with Things again. 2Do was fun to use and it synced wonderfully with Toodledo for backup purposes; but it really was stand alone. I thought that would work out but what with using three devices in three different scenarios as I am now, iPhone when out and about, Mac when at my desk, and iPad everywhere else, I needed a way to keep everything in sync.

Things now does that.

Whenever I have all three copies of Things open at once they are constantly chatting to each other and keeping up to speed. Also, none has any more features than the others (with the small exception of repeat scheduling which is handled by the desktop version).

Things is the expensive option on all three platforms but the cost is soon forgotten as all the versions work so well together, and with such grace and clarity.