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With the release of iOS 4, Apple also updated the ibooks app for the ipad. I was looking forward to one app for dealing with epub and pdf’s. Unfortunately, ibooks is not very usable for reading pdf’s, at least for me.

The first problem is organizational. You have an epub bookshelf and a pdf bookshelf. I would prefer a unified bookshelf. It would make things easier to find when there are large numbers of documents and one doesn’t remember what the document type is.

The more important problem is that pdf support doesn’t have a way to crop margins that I can see. You can unpinch to zoom in but that’s a bit fiddly and to make matters worse, it zooms back to full page view when you change pages. I was hoping I could use ibooks as the One True ebook reader but it’s not there yet.

I don’t particularly like itunes but I use it because I don’t have any practical alternative. Getting things onto my iphone requires it and I haven’t used anything music management that I’ve liked better. Over the years, I’ve learned to limit my expectations and this has kept me from getting too annoyed. My biggest gripe with itunes is metadata management and codec support. Neither of those has changed but one itunes feature previously limited to the ipod shuffle has finally been added to other ipods including the iphone and presumably the ipad. That is the ability to downconvert high resolution music on the fly during sync to 128k bps aac.

This means I can finally stop keeping two itunes libraries, one with apple lossless for the home theater system and another at 128k bps for the iphone. I’m willing to trade the increase in sync time (because of the need to convert the files prior to sending them to the phone) for simpler file management. It only took three years of submitting this through itunes feedback for it to happen. Perhaps there is hope for my requests for flac support and for being able to have better support for multiple artists, composers and genres on a track.

Last night I stopped in the Apple Store at Reston Town Center to see if I could play with a Magic Mouse. This mouse doesn’t have any buttons or wheels or nipples but sports a smooth, multitouch surface. It sounds great on paper, but how would it feel in the hand?

Pretty good, actually! Left and right clicking worked as I intuitively expected and scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) were equally simple and intuitive. The only downside was that, at least currently, there is no way to do a “middle click.” That’s a fairly big drawback for web surfing where I frequently use middle clicks to open a link in a new browser tab. That one lack could be a show stopper. I hope not though because I’m still looking for a mouse I can really like instead of just tolerating.

Fortunately, it was a decision I didn’t have to make last night as they don’t have any mice in stock yet (though they are shipping in new macs).

Apple made a bunch of announcements yesterday mostly about new iPods. But, they also announced the demise of the 4GB iPhone. That’s not really a surprise since the price difference between the 4GB and the 8GB models was small compared the price of the 4GB so it wasn’t much of a stretch to just get the 8GB. Apparently the rest of the world agreed with me and almost nobody bought the 4GB.

What annoys me is the $200 price drop of the 8GB phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see the price come down, but I’m not happy about what it says about Apple. Anyone who is an early adopter of new technology knows that it’s going to cost more than if we wait. That’s a given. However, such a big drop so soon after the initial release stings.

Apple had to know this was coming and they set the initial price to gouge their most loyal customers. That’s not really a smart thing to do. It will certainly make me less likely to jump on a new Apple product bandwagon. Historically, Apples prices have tended to remain fairly stable for a long period of time so this came as a fairly rude surprise.

When you factor in their ringtone pricing and policy it’s just plain apparent that it’s greed at work. Making people buy the song from the itunes store and then pay again to convert it to a ringtone strikes me as being greedy. And what about the music I already paid for on CD? Why can’t I convert that to a ringtone? Of course, I can with third party tools but the latest itunes appears to get rid of ringtones from other sources.

Not that I even want to do much with ringtones. But, Apple’s announcement did give me an opportunity for some righteous indignation and that’s always a fun pastime.

In general I’ve become a fairly big fan of the Mac and OS X. The OS avoids many of the pitfalls of Windows and the hardware is pretty good and not nearly as overpriced as it used to be. But, nobody’s perfect and I’ve got a few pet peeves.

Apple still resizes a window like they did in 1983. Only allowing resizes from the lower right hand corner is kind of insane. One thing that Windows and just about every other GUI on the planet gets right is allowing resizes from any window edge. I’d really love to see this change, but like the next pet peeve it seems to be in Apple’s blood to stick to it because it’s the Apple Way.

The other one is the single mouse button. This actually isn’t nearly as bad. I bought my Mac Pro with Apples’s wireless Mighty Mouse and it actually has four mouse buttons plus a scroll ball. But, out of the box the right mouse button isn’t configured. And, why does the MacBook Pro, a high end laptop have only a single button below the trackpad? It’s something like four inches long. Can’t we sacrifice one of those inches to a right button?

Generally, I don’t mind the menu bar at the top of the primary monitor rather than as part of the application window. To some degree it makes sense and it can actually save screen real estate since the menu bar needn’t be duplicated on every window. But, when you’ve moved your application onto a second monitor, it’s awkward to have to look back to the primary monitor to get to the menu bar. I suppose one could put the menu bar on the display that has the active window or at least where the active window originates but that may have issues. At the moment it’s a moot point because the menu bar is firmly tied to the primary display. With a more ideal dual monitor setup than the one I’m using it might be less of an issue but my monitors are the laptop display and a separate LCD monitor. They really function as two totally discrete displays because of the way they are positioned. So, all the blame doesn’t fall on Apple for this one but if the menus were part of the application window it wouldn’t be an issue.

Still, even with these annoyances, it’s so much better than Windows. Plus there’s Unix underneath! And, for those few apps that I have that are Windows only, there’s Parallels. Still, they so obviously call out for fixing that I can’t believe they are still there after all these years.