I do like a good concept video, and iPad Keyboard Prototype (YouTube) is certainly that. It explores a new way to edit text on iOS, which is currently a tedious task. You must tap-hold to move the cursor and thereby define a selection point, and getting the right position isn’t fast nor is it always accurate. Selecting characters and/or words is fiddly, although I’d also argue Apple did a pretty good job at figuring out a means of manipulating text by using a piece of glass rather than a physical keyboard and separate pointing tool.

In the video, a new system is suggested, based around swiping. The idea is you slide your finger to move the insertion point and use hold to select text while doing so; a two-finger slide speeds up the cursor’s movement.

The video initially sparks the I WANT THAT reaction, until you realise that it fundamentally contradicts existing behaviours. Apple uses slides and held keys to enable you to move quickly between letters but also to access additional characters. If this prototype ended up implemented in iOS 6, I can imagine a lot of typing issues through systems clashing. You’d have to be slower and more considered in your interactions to avoid this—and then you’re back to square one anyway.

Source: iDownloadBlog, via Jake Desaulniers.

The Verge has reported on Cydia app Quasar, a system that I can’t help feeling utterly misses the point. The $9.99 app for jailbroken iPads

brings window-style app management to the iPad, allowing you to view multiple apps at the same time by resizing, going in and out of fullscreen, switching orientation, and rearranging them on your desktop at will.

I admire the technical skills of the author, but am dumbfounded at the commenters on the Verge piece and elsewhere clamouring for such functionality to be built into iOS. First, the Quasar system is pretty ugly, with chunky ‘Close’, ‘Full Screen’ and ‘Rotate’ buttons. With the assumption Apple would deal with aesthetics, there are still hardware considerations: some iPads have enough trouble running a single very advanced app, and would keel over if you had several running on-screen at once. But even if that problem was eradicated via a new A999 chip that somehow didn’t melt the device and your fingers, there’s the question of focus.

One of the greatest things about the iPad is that it forces you to concentrate on the task at hand—the device becomes whatever app you are using, with a few exceptions (such as background audio) and notifications (which can easily be disabled). Compare this to a PC or Mac running Windows or OS X. You get the flexibility to run umpteen apps simultaneously, but with that comes clutter and distraction. These days, I’m more productive on the Mac when I kill pretty much every app bar iTunes and a text editor. Now and again, I’ll fire up Safari, and I’ll periodically check email and Twitter. But this is how the iPad works by default.

A lot of people consider iOS to be some kind of retrograde step—a return to the bad old days of computing before we could run a whole bunch of apps at the same time. Me, I’m increasingly thinking the more ‘modern’ take of desktop computing was a mis-step. People aren’t programmed to cope well with multitasking; studies have shown that when we are distracted from a task it can then take tens of minutes to get fully back into the task at hand. To that end, any system that can help me concentrate and work better is a boon, not a hindrance, and so even if Apple went mental and allowed Quasar into the proper App Store, I’d still give it a miss.

In February, I wrote about motion-sickness problems I was experiencing because of OS X Lion. The full-screen transitions on my 27-inch iMac were making me dizzy, meaning I had to stop using them. A couple of weeks ago, I was shown ReSpaceApp, which looked like it could be a solution. The app is now called TotalSpaces and has joined Binary Age. It’s also had an update that brings precisely the functionality that I was hoping for. If you are having the same problems I was, here’s how to set up the app.

Install, then select Preferences from the app’s menu-bar icon. Under Layout, click the top-left grid (thereby reducing the number of desktops to just one) and check ‘Navigate right to full screen desktops’.

Under Transitions, uncheck ‘Use transitions’.

Under Hotkeys, you can define system-wide shortcuts for moving ‘left’ and ‘right’ between your desktop and full-screen apps.

Note that TotalSpaces doesn’t affect transition animations elsewhere—apps still ‘morph’ into full-screen, for example. However, for switching between apps, it does exactly what I needed, meaning I can finally start using full-screen apps in OS X, nine months after the OS first arrived.

In March, I wrote Why do magazines look so bad on the new iPad?, which fast became one of the most-read articles published on this blog. It was essentially a response to a Mashable article that attempted to explain why most magazines looked terrible on the new iPad. Since then, I’ve seen plenty of similar articles, arguing that the iPad’s Retina display has been tough for publishers, because the tools they use mostly export to rendered flat images at a set resolution rather than using native text. And every time I see such an article, my heart sinks a little, because they bang on about the future being PDFs and also inevitably fail to mention Tap! magazine.

I was invited to write for the launch issue of Tap! by editor Christopher Phin, and have edited the games section since then. From the very start, Tap! strove to be different. Mostly, this was down to the content: it had lively and punchy copy, and the reviews weren’t just rewritten press releases/App Store descriptions with a quick half-opinion bolted on the end.

Initially, the app was distributed digitally on Zinio, but there had always been plans to launch an app. Instead of simply churning out a PDF wrapper, the team built its own solution, and the workflow involves creating each issue on iPads or in the iPad simulator on a Mac. John Gruber recently referred to Cargo-Bot, an iPad game created on the iPad, as a “glimpse of the future”, but the iPad version of Tap! has been made on an iPad for months now.

However, technology isn’t the most important thing about a magazine: content is. As journo chum Gary Marshall points out on Tap! and magazines’ digital future, too many digital magazines that provide anything beyond PDFs treat the medium like it’s the 1990s, offering some kind of experience akin to CD-ROM. With Tap!, interactivity isn’t there for the sake of it—it genuinely enhances the magazine. In the video below, the editor takes you through some of the current issue:

http://youtu.be/G3B1yfeD7Bw

Although there are some cute visual touches in the magazine (such as the particle effects mentioned in the video, which make a round-up on astronomy apps look rather pretty), many of the things that I find most exciting about Tap! are the ways in which it increases usability and directly helps the reader.

In the latest issue, there are quite a few ‘comparison’ shots. These are simple drag-based affairs, but provide a great way to quickly switch back and forth between two images. Examples in Tap! magazine’s May 2012 edition include photos of the new iPad screen and that of the iPad 2, and a comparison of photo filter apps.

In the Games section, each review has a screen grab, but there’s also an in-context embedded video of the game, so you can get a better idea about it. These are also created in-house, so they’re not marketing fluff. Additionally, as the following grab shows, Tap! text is native, and so it can be copied and pasted. The mag also has built-in search and social-sharing functionality.

Other reviews also benefit from relatively subtle interactivity. In the Kit section, some of the images can be spun through 360 degrees. Again, this benefits the reader. Most press shots get a piece of kit’s best side, but in Tap! you can see if an expensive speaker looks good from all angles.

And from a purely content-oriented perspective, Tap! still goes a bit beyond, for example including a developer column by beardy coding wizard Matt Gemmell.

The Tap! app is available on the App Store, for free, and several previews are available for download. If you fancy experiencing an iPad magazine that looks fab on the new iPad (the latest update is fine-tuned for Retina, although it looked lovely anyway) and also has great content,  I urge you to give it a try.

In February, I wrote OS X Lion and motion sickness from full-screen animations and transitions. This outlined a problem I have with OS X Lion, in its full-screen transitions between full-screen apps making me dizzy. I’ve since written to Apple, practically begging for the company to bring in an option in OS X Mountain Lion to turn the transitions off, or at least change them to something less likely to fry my brain (such as a simple cross-fade). My thinking: if Apple can provide largely aesthetic alternate Dock minimisation effects, a checkbox in Mission Control’s settings that either enables a full-screen cross-fade effect or just turns off the slide isn’t too much to ask.

Based on the response I got on Twitter, I’m not alone in terms of OS X Lion and motion sickness, and today’s seen the article picked up by The Code Project. I hope, if nothing else, it might help the message get out there, and perhaps someone from Apple will even take note and become interested in solving the problem. The company, after all, makes a big deal out of universal access, and so I would hope it would attempt to reduce motion sickness in a sub-set of users.

In the meantime, Lukas Mathis earlier pointed me in the direction of ReSpaceApp. (Update: The app has now joined Binary Age and has been renamed TotalSpaces.) Currently in beta, the app aims to recreate the 2D Spaces grid functionality that Apple ditched from OS X Lion. But what Mathis pointed out to me was the app’s Transitions settings in the preferences—with a single click, transitions can be turned off, and user-definable hot-keys can be used to switch between spaces and to full-screen apps.

ReSpaceApp isn’t specifically designed to solve the problem I have—it’s an add-on for bringing Spaces-like grid functionality back to OS X. However, the settings nonetheless work much as I’d hoped. Command-tabbing to a full-screen app immediately switches to it, with no delay and no animation. It’s also possible to use shortcuts to move between full-screen apps. Currently, you cannot turn off the grid entirely, thereby forcing you to use at least two desktops along with full-screen apps; however, the developer tells me this will soon be fixed. (Update: This is now fixed.) Also, ReSpaceApp doesn’t affect Apple’s own code, and so the odd and—in my case—dizzying morphing effect as an app becomes full-screen remains.

Despite this, I can already recommend OS X Lion users suffering from motion sickness when working with full-screen apps at least check out ReSpaceApp. And while I wish the developer well with his product, I also hope someone at Cupertino is listening. Although transitions can be useful in providing direction to where things are located spatially, that’s no good if some people cannot use them at all, because the transitions make them sick. The transitions should certainly remain on by default, but Apple should also enable you to disable them.