My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

So long curated computing, or why it is a no brainer to jailbreak your iPad

tech
by Antonio on

Despite months of seemingly random iPhone policy decisions on the part of Apple, it was the decision to kick AdMob out of the AppStore this week that finally put me over the edge on the ability to suspend disbelief about Apple actually caring about users and not "control points," market dominance, and other corporate strategy bullshit that can often get misaligned with doing what is right for the user (and note that this is despite the fact that I abhor any kind of in-app advertising).

As such, I've decided that I'm done listening to Steve and team on how I should use their devices. I'm done with his vision of curated computing and I'm starting by importing real multitasking into my iPad through the Spirit jailbreak (at least until I can buy a decent Android tablet, as I've actually gotten to like the form factor quite a bit).

It's by far the easiest jailbreak you will ever do— it is non-destructive to your existing applications, your use of the AppStore, etc.— just about everything except for your iPad warranty. In short, I think it is highly worth it.

In the past I've jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches but that has always felt like much more of a science project than an actual useful improvement. Tethering, the main advantage of a jailbroken iPhone, actually burns the crap out of the battery, and since lasting the full day is already the Achilles heel of the device, it just wasn't worth it.

Not so with the iPad: in my experience, the apps I used the most on it are Kindle, Instapaper, Evernote, Newsrack, and iSSH— all of which benefit tremendously from being able to run in the background (mostly to sync content from the cloud or keep connections to servers open).

The one slight disappointment thus far is that a lot of these apps have been explicitly written for the iPhone app lifecycle model, syncing mainly on application initialization and a few other explicit actions (return to homescreen, or worse still, actually pressing the sync button). While this makes total sense in today's controlled environment, I would love to do see developers detecting the use of popular jailbreaks and supporting true multitasking, especially for sync operations.

This is a pipe dream of course— most of these apps being supported by small teams makes it cost prohibitive to support unofficial environments like jailbreaks. But one can dream. And in the meanwhile, I think I'll say goodbye to the curated environment. Turns out I'm probably better at knowing what is good for me than the guys fighting the Great War of the Platforms in 2010.