Good Will Blogging
How do you like them apples...

As much as I would love to live the independent developer lifestyle, unfortunately, I have a day job. I work for a big financial company as a software architect and I manage a large team of engineers. For those who don’t know what the finance industry is like, one of its defining traits is an obsession with information security. As such, there is no way in hell my company would ever let me connect my iPad to the company’s network. Actually, they don’t even have a wireless network.

Nevertheless, I wanted to start using my shiny new iPad (3) in anger at work, so over the past two weeks I have ditched my trusty paper notebook for an iPad. I’ve gone all-in. Mostly I take the iPad to meetings, where I use the gorgeous Meetings for iPad to take notes. The app includes a brilliant feature to email the notes to attendees, but of course sending from my iPad meant the email would come from my personal email address. Most people wouldn’t notice that, so when they reply all to comment on something, I get emails to my personal email address. Definitely not cool with the information security folks.

Luckily, it turns out there is a simple way to get around this, using Gmail’s “send mail as” feature. Now I can send emails from my iPad and they appear for all the world to have come from my work computer. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Sign up for a new Gmail account. Yes, you’ll want a new Gmail account for this, as we’ll see later.
2. Go to Settings (now hidden in one of the two gear-icon buttons… ugh).
3. Click the Accounts tab.
4. In the “Send mail as” section, click “Add another email address you own”.
5. Type in your company email address, and deselect “Treat as an alias”. Click “Next Step”.
6. On the next screen, leave the first option selected, to send via the Gmail mail server, and click “Next Step”.
7. Click the “Send Verification” button, and check your company email. You should get a confirmation code from Google, which you can enter on the next screen.
8. Back on the Accounts tab in Gmail Settings, click the “make default” link next to your company email address. This means that all emails send from this Gmail account will use your company address by default (which is why I advise setting up a new Gmail account for this).
9. Now, on your iPad (or iPhone), set up the Gmail account as you would normally.
10. Finally, go to Google Sync on your iPad, and select the option to allow “Send Mail As”.

Now when you send an email from iPad, just select your “work” Gmail account in the From field. That’s it!

The following is a note to myself to remember how to set up Gmail and Google Calendar properly on iOS.

1. Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account…
2. Don’t select Gmail. Instead, select Microsoft Exchange.
3. Enter the following details and tap Next.
   Email: your email address
   Domain: leave blank
   Username: your email address
   Password: your password
   Description: “Gmail”
4. A “Server” field will appear. In it, enter “m.google.com” and tap Next.
5. Choose the items to sync.
6. Open Safari, and go to https://m.google.com/sync/settings/iconfig/chooseCalendars.
7. Sign in with the Gmail account address & password.
8. Select the calendars you want to be selectable on iPhone/iPad.

There are more detailed options in the Settings app, but the defaults you get with the above steps are pretty good.

The main benefits of setting them up this way are:

• Push email, contacts, and calendar.
• In my experience so far, this seems to help battery life, since there is no need to have a regular fetch every 15 minutes.
• Calendar editing is two-way, so you can create and edit appointments on the iPhone, and have them show up everywhere else.
• Invitations work.
• You can select subscribed calendars as well.

Just checking in on my predictions for the third-generation iPad, which was announced today. Here is what I predicted back in January:

• Name: iPad 2S.

Nope. It wasn’t “iPad 2X” as I predicted in my update, either. It seems that Apple is using both “The new iPad” and “the third-generation iPad” in their marketing copy.

This begs the question, what will this iPad be called next year, when the fourth-generation iPad is announced? “The old iPad”?!

Since this is a post about predictions, I may as well go ahead and predict that iPads will start to follow Apple’s convention for iPods and iMacs: a combination of “3rd-generation” and “early 2012”.

• Form factor: Exactly the same as iPad 2.

Not quite. The basic design is exactly the same, but it’s a hair thicker — 0.6mm to be exact. Since the shape and size of the body were really the core prediction I was making, this comes as a big shock to me. Still, the existing Smart Covers and third-party cases will still fit, and I guess Apple didn’t need to do a huge amount of factory retooling.

0.6mm doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is almost a 7% increase. It’s often surprising how good our hands are at picking up subtle differences like that, so we’ll see how insignificant that is in the tech press reviews, I guess.

• Screen: 9.7-inch diagonal; 2048 x 1536 resolution at 264 ppi. (This will qualify as “Retina Display” by way of typical viewing distance.)

Spot on.

By yesterday afternoon, the retina display seemed like a forgone conclusion, with actual parts leaking out of the factories. But it was much less of a sure thing back in January, so I’ll chalk this one up as a win.

• Storage: 32 GB, 64 GB, and 96 GB.

Nuh-uh. This was also surprising. Although it’s in line with the storage increments in the third-generation iPhone, I had expected a bump to help handle the bigger files you will need to make the retina display worthwhile.

• Chip: Next-gen (“A6”?) dual-core SoC; improved graphics.

The chip, as it turns out, is called “A5X”. I got the dual-core and improved graphics right.

• Cameras: At most, a modestly improved rear camera.

Right that it was the rear camera only, but I could hardly call that a modest improvement. That’s a pleasant surprise.

• Software: Siri support; a point upgrade to iOS, probably “5.2”; more iCloud-based features; and at least one new feature that doesn’t work outside the US.

As I noted in my update, the seemingly imminent iOS 5.1 update never came out, so the point upgrade was “5.1” in the end.

I was right about new iCloud features. From the live blogs I followed, it seems like at least:

• Movies added to iTunes in the Cloud
• “Beaming” directly between devices (not sure if this is via iCloud or something more akin to AirDrop)
• Photo Journals

It was surprising and interesting that instead of the full Siri support I predicted, we got just the text dictation feature. I am utterly stumped as to why.

I have to say I’m pleased to see Japanese support for Siri. I am not hopeful that it will work well, though. But that’s a topic for another day.

As for a feature that won’t work outside the US, I didn’t see anything on the software side, but “4G” LTE is pretty hard to find. I’m told that NTT DoCoMo has it here, so it will be interesting to see if they finally cut a deal with Apple this year, to carry the 4G iPad and potential 4G in the next iPhone.

• Release date: 16th March, 2012.

Spot on. Not bad for a prediction 2 months out. Happy to see release date parity in Japan.

• Price: USD $499 for 32 GB WiFi model; $829 for 96 GB WiFi + 3G model.

Correct, except for the storage sizes.

So, I count that as about 5.5 out of 9. Not bad.