Twitter made bold decisions regarding the design and the usability, and no one can deny it’s well executed. The app is polished and has lots of subtle features.

However, the user interface and interactions being quite different from the usual iPad apps, and I’m afraid the average user will find it too confusing. Only future will tell, but I bet Twitter will have to make major changes to its iPad app.

Note that you need to install the latest version of Safari (5.0.1 – released today) in order to see a “Install Now” button next to each extension.

If you visit @daringfireball’s twitter page on a Mac, you’ll most likely see the ✪ character on all the URLs. If you’re on Windows, there’s a chance you’ll see a square instead. Why? Because that special character is not part of the default system font, so it displays a generic square as an alternative.

Despite not displaying the right character, the link is not affected, because it is converted to the right URL. It’s called a punycode.

TweetDeck, a vastly used Twitter client, simply removes those special characters, it doesn’t even replace them with a generic one, it just removes them. Therefore the URLs don’t work because they are transformed. http://oogle.com is not the same domain as http://google.com, as much as http://df.ws is not the same as http://✪df.ws.

Well TweetDeck displays http://✪df.ws URLs as http://df.ws. Ditch TweetDeck, you cannot rely on a program that transforms links.

Putting iChat on the iPhone, would have meant to use either an AOL or a MobileMe account. I thought it could have been a good strategy for Apple to try pushing more people to sign-up for MobileMe through iChat. However, not everyone is ready to spend $99/year for it. Apple could have offered a ‘lite’ version, but what’d be the point? Creating an account just to use a software is too tedious for most people, and would refrain a lot from using the service.

Forcing people to sign up to a service to use video-conferencing is the way we have been used to. Yet Apple found a better way: no sign-up.

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Until now, to use your smartphone in a foreign country, you had pay high data roaming fees, that it made it impossible to use.
But this is going to change with the iPad 3G.

• First of all, the iPad 3G is not locked to a wireless carrier. That means you can use any micro-SIM card, from any carrier in the world.
• Secondly, iPad data plans offered worldwide don’t require to sign a contract. They are automatically renewed every months, but you can simply cancel any time.

Both points mean you can travel in a foreign country, buy a mico-SIM card with a data plan for your iPad 3G, use it anywhere during your trip, then cancel the plan before you leave.

And with the upcoming iPhone OS 4, people will be able, for example, to let Skype run in the background and receive/make calls.

Let’s be clear, when you see any license agreement / terms of service / whatever legal stuff, and click the ‘Agree’ button, that means you agreed. If you don’t agree, don’t click it. It’s that simple and it also works with any contract that you sign. If you don’t agree, you don’t sign.

Now I don’t mind that people fight for their cause, but Apple is not the only player in the mobile industry, so developers are free to go ‘have fun’ on other platforms like Android…

When the iPad was introduced, the Apple team was proud to show that there is no specific way to hold it. It can be upside-down, portrait, landscape, it doesn’t matter. Also, the large frame around the screen is made so that you can hold it without touching the screen. But you would then put your fingers over the camera…

Considering this, where do you put the camera? Last year, AppleInsider reported that Apple filed a patent for a camera hidden behind a screen, maybe this is the answer, and Apple is still working on a way to do it.