Dave Caolo

CNN Money:

“A rough three-day estimate, based on an analysis of order numbers: 152,000 units.”

Remember, this is for a device that the vast majority of customers have never even seen.

I’ve never gotten much use out of notes on the iPhone because I dislike typing more than a few words on it. I’m slower with it than I am with a full-sized keyboard which is frustrating. Plus, the bundled Notes app syncs with Mail, which makes no sense at all.

Now that I’m using the combination of Notational Velocity, SimpleText and WriteRoom, my iPhone is full of easily-accessed, useful notes that I wrote on my Mac and transferred with no effort. Here’s how it works.

Notational Velocity is designed to create, store and retrieve notes. Its marquee feature is modeless operation. There’s no difference between searching for a note, browsing a note or creating one. It’s extremely fast and efficient.

WriterRoom is a full-screen text editor for the Mac and iPhone/iPod touch. It works well, but I’m really using it just to display notes.

SimpleText brings the two together. It’s a sync service originally created to let Taskpaper and WriteRoom users sync documents. Fortunately, it works with Notational Velocity, too.

Here’s how to set it up.

1. Open Notational Velocity Preferences
2. Open “Notes” preference pane
3. Select SimpleText’s folder for “Read notes from folder”
4. Under storage, select ”Storage and read notes on disk as Plain Text Files”

That’s it. Now every note created in Notational Velocity is instantly synced with WriteRoom and vice versa. It’s simple, it costs all of $4.99 to set up (the price of WriteRoom) and it “just works.”

My TUAW colleague Sang Tang took the first iPad ad apart, frame-by-frame, and determined how much screen time was allocated to each function. Awesome. Go and see the full chart.

In a TUAW post from May of 2009, we considered what Apple’s next big thing might be. In retrospect, it’s amazing how close we were to the iPad:

“…. consider [ebooks] on a device with a color touch screen that also has your photos and music, maybe even a few fun apps, and ubiquitous connectivity. Also notice that Apple’s keyboards have been getting smaller and thinner lately. The Bluetooth model without the number pad would be a perfect companion.”

Eerie.

Many people are bemoaning the iPad’s lack of a camera. Actually, they’re questioning why Apple would be so thoughtless as to exclude one. These are the same people who demanded copy-and-paste of the original iPhone and Wi-Fi of the iPod. “Apple has squandered a huge opportunity” they say.

That’s perfectly wrong. They’ve seized an even bigger opportunity.

The designers at Apple know full well that users want a camera in the iPad. They know that customers will bitch and moan without it. They know they’ll lose a certain percentage of sales. They also know that taking the time to find the single best way to implement it is worth the complaining.

Apple isn’t always the 1st to market. They didn’t create the first digital music player. They certainly didn’t create the first mobile phone and they didn’t create the first tablet computer. The important thing is they took the time to devise the absolute best way to implement each of those devices.

The iPod is hands-down the best digital music player. We take the iPod touch for granted at this point, but it’s a phenomenal device. When I consider it from the perspective of a former Rio owner, I’m in awe of the touch. The same is true when I consider the T-Mobile phone I owned 8 years ago. The iPhone is light years beyond that device.

Apple could have released a “compromise” phone 7 years ago, but they didn’t. The could have crammed every feature on their list into the original iPhone, dispersing the developers’ attention from the core functions that made the original model such a hit. Likewise, future iPad models will include features that users are demanding today. They’ll be added when — and only when — Apple is damned good and ready.

And that’s how it should be.

One of the fun things we did at Macworld Expo was to get our hands on a full-scale, 1:1 iPad mockup that the folks at Hard Candy Cases had made. The detail was great, right down to the switch, ports and Apple logo. It was even weighted properly.

We won’t see the real thing for a while, but the mockup gave us a terrific impression of the device’s size and weight. Thanks again to Dave from Hard Candy.

[Via TUAW]

And now I can check this one off the Bucket List.

I’m in San Francisco this week covering Macworld Expo for TUAW. It’s so exciting. This blog will probably be quiet for the week, aside for the occasional pics and non-work updates.

So, check TUAW for MWSF updates and here for personal experiences.

If this is true I’ll literally eat a hat.