Category — Bugs and other shortcomings

My co-writer, Dennis Cohen, has an interesting post on his own blog about the state of the iPad world. Dennis makes intelligent, thoughtful remarks on the iPad 2, the iPad 2 release and iOS 4.

There have been numerous complaints recently about a new iOS feature that moves the orientation lock function to the multi-tasking tray (double-click the Home button and slide left to see it), and changes what used to be the hardware orientation lock switch on the side of the iPad into a mute switch. However, none of the complaints I’ve seen have mentioned this: the new mute function of that switch doesn’t work.

That’s right: when I have the iPod app or Pandora running (haven’t tested it with any other apps yet) and I flip the mute switch on the side of my iPad, I see the mute icon (a speaker with a line drawn through it) appear on my screen—but the music keeps playing. And it’s not just not working on my iPad: the same thing happens on my sister-in-law’s iPad, too.

However, holding down the volume rocker switch for a couple of seconds does silence the iPad, just as it did prior to the 4.2.1 iOS update.

Weird.

Update: The switch DOES mute the ABC Player app, but not Apple’s Video app. Even more weird.

Another update: It doesn’t mute YouTube nor Netflix, but DOES mute the PBS app.

Yet another update: I’ve been told that the mute switch function is intended to mute notification sounds and similar transient audio, and not to mute audio from player apps. If so, it does not work correctly in the case of the PBS and ABC Player apps. In any case, users shouldn’t have to play trial-and-error games to find out what the switch does.

Today Apple released a minor update to iTunes (to 9.2.1), which provides the various performance improvements that such updates usually include. You can get it from Software Update, or just choose Check for Updates from the iTunes menu in iTunes.

Of more interest, to me, is the update to iBooks that was also released today. iBooks version 1.1.1 now supports audio and video in epub books (which will be cool when more books include those types of material), provides the usual performance enhancements (including better performance with PDFs), fixes a glitch that can interrupt some downloads, and, my favorite improvement, allows you to double-tap an image in a book to see it larger.

This last has improved the ebook reading experience of The Lord of the Rings: I can now actually read the maps! Once you double-tap an image, you can unpinch to get the image bigger than the screen, and then drag the expanded image around. The operation is both fast and slick.

You don’t need LOTR, of course, to see this feature in action; try it with the pictures in the free and included copy of Winnie the Pooh.

Thank you, nameless Apple software engineers who finally made images expandable in iBooks!

Update: I just discovered that this update also fixes the PDF link problem that I described here.

Tonya Engst, the Empress of All Content at TidBITS publishing, tweeted the following earlier today:

Anyone else have a Take Control PDF in iBooks 1.1 on iPad? Links mostly not working in portrait view, but a-okay in landscape.

Using my very own copy of my marvelous (really, you should buy one!) Take Control of Syncing Data in Snow Leopard, I have the same experience: tapping an intra-book link when the iPad is in vertical display mode has no effect; tapping the same link when the book is displayed horizontally works.

I have no idea why this happens, but it seems to be related to the current version of the iPad OS; iBooks 1.1 on an iPhone running iOS 4 does not have the same problem according to Tonya.

According to a MacInTouch reader post today (and a confirmation by site owner, Ric Ford), the 3G iPad doesn’t seem to want to let go of a 3G connection even when it is range of a Wi-Fi base station and even when it is asleep. The reader had connected to a weather radar feed over 3G and put his iPad to sleep: the iPad keep the connection alive and kept downloading data. What’s more, the sleeping iPad was in range of an AirPort Extreme base station while asleep. Ford, in confirmation, reports that “I find that our iPad 3G won’t automatically switch off ATT 3G when it gets WiFi, nor vice versa, I have to manually switch each of them off when I need the other, which seems like a bother.”

I hope this isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

Dan Frakes notes if you’re traveling with your iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard, and you use the iPad Passcode Lock:

Make sure you turn off the Bluetooth keyboard before sticking it in your bag if you want to be able to use your iPad when you reach your destination.

Otherwise, as Frakes notes here:

If you forget to turn off your Bluetooth keyboard, or to disable the iPad’s Bluetooth, before tossing your gear in your bag, chances are you’ll arrive at your destination with an iPad in lockout mode. The keyboard’s keys will get pressed in transit, those key presses will be interpreted by the iPad as attempts to enter your passcode, and unless your luck is very good, those attempts will all be wrong.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at a friend’s home to watch some NBA playoff action. Like me, he’d ordered an iPad on Day One, but, unlike me, he was having all sorts of problems with the Wi-Fi in his home: it seemed like almost every fifteen minutes or so, his iPad would drop the connection, forcing him to re-enter the long hexadecimal password required by his FiOS-supplied Wi-Fi router. In addition, he’d been having all sorts of trouble with his iMac—every time he woke it up from sleep, he’d get the spinning rainbow cursor of doom.

I brought my iPad with me, just to see if the network problem was confined to his device or if it was a general problem. It was general: my iPad, which performed perfectly at home, was also unable to maintain a connection with his router for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

During halftime in the basketball game, I decided to investigate the problem. I woke his iMac, and then had to initiate a forced restart because of the spinning rainbow cursor. Once the iMac was up again, I opened Safari and logged into the Admin page of his router. I immediately noticed that the Verizon folk had set the Wi-Fi security method to WEP, the famously least secure of all wireless security methods. So, before I did any further exploration, I changed the security method to WPA and set a shared-key that was easier to remember and to type, even though the Admin page warned me that using anything other than WEP was “for advanced technical users only.”

As expected, the router restarted and all of the devices on his network lost connection, including the iMac. We then reconnected our iPads and the iMac using the new shared-key and, mirabile dictu, everything connected perfectly. But halftime was ending, so I said I’d finish trying to investigate the drop-out problem at the conclusion of the game.

But I didn’t have to. By changing the security method, my iPad, my friend’s iPad, and his iMac maintained a rock-solid wireless connection. Nor did putting the iMac to sleep and then waking it result in the rainbow cursor. All was suddenly well on the network.

Conclusion: not only is WEP poor security, but it really doesn’t work or play well with Apple’s latest line of gear. At least, not as implemented on my friend’s third-party Wi-Fi router.

According to Take Control‘s exceedingly savvy Tonya Engst on Twitter:

According to iPad manual and my testing, ebooks downloaded from the iBookstore ON the iPad do not transfer to iTunes.

Any confirmation? Work arounds?

I’m assuming that they’re backed up when iTunes does the iPad backup?