To fight the sticky fingered set.

iPhones are not that easy to steal. Sure you can pinch the thing but the number is registered to the owner and MobileMe users can track your location and rat you out to the cops from any computer with internet access. There are many instances of this happening, the average thief seemingly unaware that all iPhones come with GPS. The theft of your iPhone is comparable to a small car accident. It’s not the loss or damage to property that hurts so much as the incredible amount of time you have to spend dealing with the various parties involved. With the car accident it’s the criminals at the insurance company. With the iPhone it’s the criminals at the local police station – the guys who retire at 50 after being promoted to ‘sergeant for a day’ to maximize their pensions. The honest guys are mostly the ones behind bars.

The collateral damage does not stop there. The least valuable thing about an iPhone is the device itself. The real value resides in the content which is likely replete with passwords and access data to your various financial accounts and records. The thought of losing those makes me shudder.

Now things are about to get an order of magnitude more risky. The iPad, with its tremendous promise as a photography tool, will be a very appealing thing to steal. It’s not especially cheap but it is very light and portable, and has substantial resale value. And a really smart thief will know to disable MobileMe on it, which is the tool used to locate a stolen iPhone or iPad from your desktop computer, using GPS triangulation or 3G if your mobile device has it. It’s very accurate even using triangulation, by the way, and is a great reason to buy MobileMe. But the real beauty of MobileMe, now a robust product after a disastrous premature release some 18 months ago, is the ability to synchronize contacts, calendars, to do lists, etc. between your iPhone and your desktop. Having used MobileMe for some 15 months now I could not live without it. You can buy it from Amazon for some $75 a year, far less than the $100+tax the Apple Store will charge you.

Now my iPhone is password protected. A 4 digit code unlocks it and anyone who does not use this approach is likely insane or has no assets. I can lock a lost iPhone remotely through MobileMe and also remotely change the password. Powerful. But right now, once it’s unlocked, the user only has to look in my Contacts to find a myriad of logins and passwords. Not good.

In olden days I had one password for all my various logins.

Now everyone seems to want a different password methodology and length. Some want numbers and letters, some insist on characters, some are case sensitive, etc. It’s becoming impossible to remember everything (plus I’m getting senile).

So I’m testing (30 days free) a product named 1Password. So far, I’m pleased. It is Mac (Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard) and iPhone/Palm only. I tried it a couple of years ago and it was clearly an unfinished product. Now it’s much more polished. What put me over the edge was that I was in the Apple Store yesterday having my iPhone’s battery checked and struggled remembering all the wretched passwords necessary to have it reset. I consoled myself with the thought that I was some 50 years older than their average customer, many of whom looked like they either needed a change of underwear or a good bath and shave.

1Password integrates into popular web browsers (Safari, Firefox, Camino) on your desktop, allowing you one click access to all sites for which you have saved information in the application – you see this small ‘1P’ icon in your browser’s menu bar which you click to enter any site which requires a login name and password. If that site is saved in 1Password you get in with a minimum of typing.

The product has been around for ages and seems to garner rave reviews. Here’s a typical page from my installation for the things in my wallet:

It also syncs with your iPhone – a couple of screen shots:

Not cheap at $39.95 but so far I have input:

• 10 Logins
• 18 Accounts
• 17 Software keys
• 6 Wallet items ….

…. and counting.

What an insane world we live in. As an example, AT&T’s Uverse service, when you call them (sadly a disappointingly frequent event), always asks a different security question, as they are so totally messed up. These can vary from your phone #, your 9 digit account #, your 4 digit passcode, your favorite actor (no kidding), your 10 digit wireless password …. and, doubtless coming soon, your dog’s favorite snack. I’m no great fan of Islamic law, goodness knows, but there’s something to be said for chopping a thief’s hand off. Next stop? A password-free world. As for rapists ….

I’ll likely buy 1Password in 30 days if it’s glitch free – I have the Sync set up with my first generation iPhone (also works with a Palm phone) and sync works perfectly. So what I input on my desktop is reflected on the iPhone and vice versa, all of it requiring one password (or two for the paranoid) to access. If I do buy it the first thing I will do is to erase all password information from my Contacts. That’s really not a safe place to store that information. Your 1Password data reside on your desktop and your iPhone – the information is not know by the application vendor.

There’s also a way of setting it up for one click use on your iPhone in Mobile Safari but I have yet to figure that out.

As for the iPhone’s problem, it turned out that some file had become corrupted and was misleading the battery indicator, so the device was shutting itself off prematurely. The Apple Store ‘Genius’ (meaning expert – he’s no more a genius than a survivor of a catastrophe is a ‘hero’ – the word for that is ‘victim’) wiped it clean and I restored it from my desktop. It seems fine. On a related note, this is the first time my iPhone has been reset since I bought it some 33 months ago – testimony to the robustness of the mobile OS in the device which it will share with the iPad. So I am optimistic about the iPad’s software robustness.

Update April 1, 2010: The 1Password folks are on the ball and expect to have an iPad version available when the iPad is released on April 3.

Update July 26, 2010: 1Password has now added automated cloud syncing of your devices if you have a (free) Dropbox account and a nice guide how to set it up. Primarily what you have to do is to move your 1Password secure datafile on your desktop to a stated directory which Dropbox monitors. You have to have Dropbox installed on your mobile devices for this to work (something the instructions omit to mention) but once that’s done, syncing is automated and I can confirm it works well. I mostly update 1Password on my desktop and now no longer have to through the former, tedious wifi sync process which required input of two new cryptic passwords each session. Any change made on any of my iPad, iPhone or desktop Mac is automatically made to the other two devices at a moment’s notice. This greatly enhances the value of 1Password.

There is, however, one limitation. Your devices must be on the same network. So if you update your iPad, say, on the road it will not update your home desktop until you return home and have both logged in to the same network. If you have more than one home network, be sure that all devices where you want to update/sync are logged in to the same network, or you will get into trouble. Tested and confirmed.

Some interesting data

For the inner nerd in all of us, I did a bit of figuring to see how the display area of the two devices compares – iPad and iPhone.

These are for the display, not the outer dimensions of the devices.

I made these measurements by printing a copy of the iPad’s picture from Apple’s web site for the iPad and measuring/computing, and by actual measurement of the display area on my iPhone.

Full display area

iPhone: 2.95″ x 1.95″ = 5.75 in^2 (native ratio is 1.51:1. 3.54″ display diagonal)
iPad: 7.86″ x 6.17″ = 48.5 in^2 (native ratio is 1.27:1. 10.0″ display diagonal)
Ratio iPad:iPhone = 8.4:1 area, 2.82 :1 diagonal)

Watching a widescreen 16:9 movie

iPhone: 2.95″ x 1.66″ = 4.90 in^2 (85% utilization. 3.39″ display diagonal)
iPad: 7.86″ x 4.42″ = 34.75 in^2 (72% utilization. 9.02″ display diagonal)
Ratio iPad:iPhone = 7.10:1 area, 2.66:1 diagonal)

Watching a 4:3 traditional movie

iPhone: 2.60″ x 1.95″ = 5.07 in^2 (88% utilization. 3.25″ display diagonal)
iPad: 7.86″ x 5.90″ = 46.37 in^2 (96% utilization. 9.83″ display diagonal)
Ratio iPad:iPhone = 9.15:1 area, 3.02:1 diagonal)

Looking at a Leica aspect ratio picture – 36mm x 24mm:

iPhone: 2.93″ x 1.95″ = 5.70 in^2 (99% utilization. 3.52″ display diagonal)
iPad: 7.86″ x 5.24″ = 41.19 in^2 (85% utilization. 9.45″ display diagonal)
Ratio iPad: iPhone = 7.23:1 area, 2.68:1 diagonal)

The iPad’s near 4:3 display area aspect ratio means it makes very efficient use of the available display area when playing a 4:3 movie or displaying a traditionally sized photo. On the other hand, the iPhone makes better use of available pixels when displaying a widescreen movie or a Leica aspect ratio (1.5:1) picture.

It would have been nice had the iPad adopted a slimmer aspect ratio for the screen rather than the traditional squarish 4:3. The use of 4:3 may reflect a compromise to accommodate newspapers, books and magazines better. On the other hand, the gain in screen area over the iPhone is very large in all instances profiled above.

For comparison, most netbooks use a 10.1″ diagonal widescreen, making them very efficient for watching movies but less so for many applications which require a squarer screen. Netbooks typically display 1024 x 576 pixels compared to 1024 x 768 for the iPad and 480 x 320 for the iPhone. The iPhone is the ‘sharpest’ in terms of pixel density (smartphones like the Motorola Droid are sharper still), as follows:

Pixels per square inch:

iPhone: 26,700
iPad: 16,215
Netbook: 13,085

Finally, the reason that the iPad employs such a seemingly broad inactive bezel area (0.65″ and 0.9″ on the long and short sides, respectively) around the display area would appear to be to satisfy the physical need of having something to hold onto when used in the hand; extending the touchscreen all the way to the edge would cause all sorts of unintended activation issues.

To read all my iPad ruminations just click here.

No, not the waistline.

Feeding Americans’ gluttony with supersized portions is nothing new. Three patty hamburgers, gallon sized drinks of sugared water, jumbo fries and so on. All readily visible in the waistlines of the world’s most obese nation.

But a supersized iPad is not a bad idea. Now I realize this is a bit premature given that the iPad does not hit the stores until April 3, but my thoughts along the lines of a much larger touch screen device were sharpened by my eight year old this weekend.

You see, Winston is now tall enough to ride in the front seat of the car and on the way back from the San Francisco Zoo his natural delight in pushing buttons meant that the interior of the car went through several cycles of Death Valley heat to Alaskan winter over the space of the journey, a smile of pure delight playing on his face as he pushed every button in sight. Like all kids’, his is a tactile world. And being a typical device designed by left brain guys for left brain guys, there are more buttons in the wretched car than you can shake a stick at. Sort of like modern home theater systems. In other words, an ergonomic nightmare.

But it’s no secret that kids love buttons. They have yet to unlearn that the simplest user interface is the one which requires least effort and which is most fun. A button meets those dictates. Later they are forced to use ridiculous keyboards and even dumber devices like the mouse, and the charm of the simple is obfuscated by decades-old designs which should never have seen the light of day. Once upon a time computer keyboards came with trackballs which allowed movement of the cursor without totally removing your hands from the keyboard but, for some reason, the separate mouse prevailed.

I look at the way I use Lightroom and it’s almost all mouse-based. The cursor is used to drag adjustment sliders, to rotate and crop, to apply localized adjustments and so on. About the only time I resort to the keyboard is when adding new keywords or exporting pictures. So a touch device would lend itself well to tailored software that replaces the mouse with the finger.

Those who think of a slate computer as an output device (to read, to watch, etc.) only just don’t get it. They are mired in the left brained world of keyboards and sequential thinking. That’s not how artists and photographers work. The ability to change things by touching and dragging controls is the way we see the world.

So a giant sized iPad – say 20″ diagonal – resting at a 15 degree angle on your desk may just be the ideal input tool for a creative thinker. Sure, man has been using vertical input devices from Cromagnon to Titian and later, but do you fancy holding out your hand to apply a tool to a vertical touchscreen all day?

Here’s wishing for a jumbo iPad in our future. Microsoft demonstrated the concept with its boringly named ‘Surface‘; the site is just comically awful, as you might expect from a company with no class. And who on earth is naming products at MSFT? Procter & Gamble detergent marketers? It’s a thrilling product from the ultimate in left brained companies but like all Microsoft concepts it has no chance of coming to the market at an affordable price for the right brained among us. Shame.

JumboPad, I’m waiting for you.

P.S. I’m delighted to add that Winston is left handed, like most right brained creative types.