A quite legitimate criticism of iOS for some time has been the fact that you seem to end up with multiple gigabytes of unexplained “other” disk space usage after using the device for some time. It’s frustrating, especially on smaller devices.

Reinstalling iOS and restoring from your most recent backup would clear the mythical “other”, at least for a while.

It seems that the latest update to iOS, version 10.3, introduces a whole new filesystem technology, APFS. This wasn’t mentioned in the release notes, and is only really detectable by the end user in the form of a much longer upgrade process than would be needed for a typical iOS release.

Since upgrading a few devices, I have noticed a big jump in the available free space on those devices. The pesky “other” is still there, but appears to have shrunk significantly.

Hats of to Apple for fixing what was a criticism going a long way back, and for managing a quite potentially disruptive filesystem migration in such a transparent way for the end user.

May the “other” space usage forever remain small.

Some very raw and unfiltered thoughts on today’s Apple announcement:

I thought after all this time there’d be more content deals for the new Apple TV — the “apps” focus suggests that they are having to concede their former approach entirely and acknowledge that they won’t funnel much TV content through iTMS at all.

Harry Potter photos!

4K video capture on a phone is pretty amazing.

The MLB Apple TV app demo with watching two games at once must have been a Back to the Future II reference for 2015 — “give me channels 5, 9…”. Right? Right?

I’m interested to see (hopefully non-fanboy/girlish) thoughts on how the iPad Pro will compare with the Surface range. It’s interesting to me actually that if MS get the touchy style apps done well (they have to do a better job than with Win8!), the Surfaces also having the flexibility to run classic Windows apps too might make them more competitive in that “pro tablet” area.

I want to go play with 3D Touch when I can! If they’ve done it well, it could be quite cool.

I’m no artist in drawing terms, but the Pencil looked pretty amazing. I was deriding it at first as a silly stylus. I was wrong.

So. Much. Stuff!

Ever since its initial release, the absence of an iPad, or indeed any kind of tablet device, from my computing devices was notable. After all, this was the ‘future’ — and I was just getting left behind, right?

Truthfully, the full-size iPad always felt to me to be difficult to justify. While significantly more portable than any laptop, the size difference between it and its clamshelled cousins did not feel big enough. I’d just want to reach for the laptop, right?

It seemed that all that changed with the iPad mini. I hadn’t anticipated it at all, but ‘merely’ making the device smaller suddenly made me see where it fits for me.

So, what does it do better than any other device? Why is it now justified?

• It is hands down, the best (type of) device for ‘casual’ browsing. Whether for checking something quickly, or browsing around at the end of the day, it makes web browsing informal and comfortable in a way that sitting in front of a desktop or laptop just does not. Being physically smaller than a laptop makes it easier to do this.
• It is that much easier to take with you. Yet unlike a phone, which will always have limited screen size (or else not fit into a pocket), it is big enough for ‘full’ websites, richer app experiences or even in my case, full-screen SSH connections!
• Battery life and instant-on. It makes an immeasurable difference that it can just be left on, and is always ready to use. No need for chargers, mice and various other accessories.

Something about this smaller form factor suddenly made it click for me — perhaps even just made it feel less threatening to the role of my traditional computers! I am very happy indeed with my iPad mini. I had concerns about lack of a retina/HiDPI display, but I have found that in real-world usage, it is not a deal breaker. (My personal opinion is that the physically larger the device gets, the less that HiDPI actually matters.)

Consumer computing is changing. Whether ‘traditional’ PC people like me are ready or not.

The opening of a new Apple Store is always an interesting experience — and one that never fails to inspire enthusiasm unheard of anywhere else in retail! I actually went along three and a half years ago to the opening of the WestQuay store in Southampton, but today, there was the Grand Opening of the new store in Festival Place, Basingstoke.

It is a really convenient store for me — it is just a 20 minute train journey away, so it is now even easier to get to the Apple Store should anything need fixing, or anything new need purchasing. 😉

I have put together a short video of the Grand Opening event, which you should see embedded below.

Definitely nice to go along, share in the experience — and pick up that all-important Festival Place Apple t-shirt to add to the collection. 🙂

UPDATE: the scrolling fix doesn’t now work, as of 2010-11-08. This appears to be a server-side change and unfortunately I am not aware of a solution. 🙁

I put together a short screencast on how to access Gmail’s new iPad interface on your Mac. If you’re a fan of Gmail’s web interface on the iPad and would like to use it on your desktop computer too, this is a cool trick.

The user agent you need to enter into Fluid is:

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

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Over the last few years I haven’t really found myself liking the names of major new products from Apple. MacBook Air, iPhone 3GS and even the original iPhone name I didn’t like (drop the ‘i’ prefix already!)

And now we have iPad.

The name aside, though, this looks like a cool device. It feels to me to be a scaled-up iPod touch in many ways, but with software and an interface that are really capable of taking full advantage of the extra screen space and form factor. I don’t think the iPad is going to be as revolutionary as the iPhone was for the ‘smartphone’ market and I think it might take a bit of time for it really to find the right market (beyond early adopters); people need to work out how to fit it into their computing workflow. But it will force all the other companies doing tablet computers to rethink their approach.

Will I be getting one? I answered this question on the roundtable episode of The Stealth Mac podcast that I just participated in (podcast download not yet available). I’ll wait and see. I think like many people, I need to work out how it would fit into my workflow and how I’d justify my need for it. I will certainly be interested to hear how well it works for what you can do with it in a real-world setting.