I’ve been mean­ing to link to this for a while. Since the iPad 3 arrived it’s time to update the images for your Apple touch icons and Reeder.app

“We’re start­ing to do some things dif­fer­ently,” Phil Schiller said to me.

No kid­ding, not only are Apple sur­pris­ing us with this announce­ment, they’re sur­pris­ing us with how they’re doing it. A one on one key­note to announce the next major ver­sion of OS X for a select num­ber of writers. Apple really do know how to work things to give the best impact.

For a moment yes­ter­day when I checked Twit­ter and saw talk of Moun­tain Lion, I had to check it wasn’t April 1st. I quickly dis­covered it wasn’t a joke and Apple had announced the next ver­sion of OS X, bring­ing some iOS apps to the Mac.

I’m excited.

Import­ant for mak­ing the new Mes­sages app on the Mac sync with all your iOS devices.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

A great art­icle from Fraser debunk­ing all the myths behind multi-tasking on iOS. I’ve heard many people, people who should know bet­ter, mak­ing sim­ilar state­ments to the ones which promp­ted this article.

(Via Twit­ter)

There is more than one per­son in Cuper­tino who cares about qual­ity, crafts­man­ship, art, and innov­a­tion in Apple’s products.

This is exactly why Apple will con­tinue doing what they have been doing for the last few years. I’m sorry to see Steve Jobs resign but I’m glad that he will be spend­ing time with his fam­ily has he battles with whatever ill­ness he has.

This makes me really want to get an AppleTV, Real Racing looks awesome.

For me, it is not the head­line fea­tures of Lion that make it such a com­pel­ling and note­worthy release. Rather, it is the thou­sand little refine­ments that all add up to what is, in my opin­ion, the most attract­ive and usable oper­at­ing sys­tem on the planet.

An inter­est­ing read from Shawn about Apple’s new ver­sion of OS X. with my lim­ited use of Lion, I agree with Shawn’s state­ment. Lion is pol­ished. Very polished.

Ryan Heise has been using Android over his iPhone for the last month or so. His conclusion:

Google wants to rein­vent the wheel that Apple cre­ated with iOS, but it’s a wheel that they’re bet­ter off to copy all the way, rather than make a fac­sim­ile and take out a few big chunks.

There’s a few inter­est­ing points in this art­icle that seem to con­firm one thing. Apple thinks about how to make some­thing and pol­ish the crap out of it. Google thinks about how to make some­thing quickly and then move on to the next thing.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

If you didn’t like the ori­ginal iPad, you’re not going to like the iPad 2. If you liked the ori­ginal iPad, you’re going to like the iPad 2 even better.

John Gruber in his review of the iPad 2.

This seems to be the gen­eral con­sensus I’m read­ing at the moment. I can’t wait to get one and exper­i­ence iPad over a pro­longed period.

Jeff Carlson on Tib­its indic­ates I may have been wrong in my assump­tions of how home shar­ing on iOS works in his Hands-On Details about the iPad 2 and iOS 4.3.

A part of the iOS 4.3 update, iTunes Home Shar­ing lets you stream media from a copy of iTunes on your net­work to your iPad, rather than hav­ing to first trans­fer it dur­ing a sync oper­a­tion. In addi­tion, Home Shar­ing helps keep your lib­rary up to date. When you pur­chase a song on an iOS device and then con­nect to your iTunes lib­rary wire­lessly, the song is auto­mat­ic­ally trans­ferred to your lib­rary. It’s like turn­ing your iOS device into an Apple TV.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

Along with iPad 2, Apple announced iOS 4.3 with be com­ing to an iDevice near you on Fri­day March 11th.

More free cool soft­ware is always a bonus and so I thought the biggest fea­ture in iOS 4.3 for me would be iTunes home shar­ing. I got extremely excited on hear­ing it would be arriv­ing on my iPhone 4. Why? Well this is how the iTunes page describes home sharing.

Browse iTunes lib­rar­ies on up to five author­ised com­puters on your home net­work and import whatever you like. You can also auto­mat­ic­ally import new pur­chases made on any of the computers.

I make use of this fea­ture a lot with my iMac and Mac­Book Pro. Any pur­chases I make on my Mac­Book Pro are instantly copied over to my iMac and con­sequently backed up. It’s an excel­lent fea­ture and brings a lot of peace of mind that my iTunes pur­chases are backed up. In typ­ical Apple fash­ion I don’t have to think about it.

So when Engad­get informed me that iOS 4.3 was to bring home shar­ing to my iPhone I jumped for joy((Well lif­ted my arm up and said yes!)). The pro­spect of being able to wire­lessly trans­fer my iTunes pur­chases from my iPhone to my other Macs without hav­ing to remem­ber to plug it in is just what the doc­tor ordered. I envis­aged a moment where I wouldn’t be caught out by for­get­ting to sync to get my latest Pod­casts. That is, until the iOS 4.3 page shattered my dreams.

Now you can play your entire iTunes lib­rary from any­where in the house. If it’s on your Mac or PC, you can play it on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch over a shared Wi-Fi network.3 And not just music. Watch a film or TV pro­gramme. Play a pod­cast. Or listen to an audiobook. On whichever device you want — without hav­ing to down­load or sync.

It seems I’ll only be able to stream from my Macs and not have my Pod­casts auto­mat­ic­ally trans­fer to my iPhone once down­loaded. This makes me sad.

Aside from my dis­ap­point­ment in home shar­ing, I’m still look­ing for­ward to Air­Play becom­ing what I always hoped it would be and Per­sonal Hot­spot arriv­ing for everyone.

iPad 2.

Drool…

The ori­ginal iPad is lis­ted on the Apple Store for £329, I’m hop­ing this is the new price of iPad 2 since $499 con­verts to £305. Please be so.