More about iOS5 and iCloud – Reminders and Twitter

Still talking about 12th October iOS 5 and iCloud day, what else do we have? There is the new Newsstand application and for me it really doesn’t mean an awful lot as I am unlikely to partake of any of the magazines available. Although if I did see the Imagine FX magazine at a reasonable price available in Newsstand, then I could be tempted. Imagine FX magazine is a magazine about concept art, digital art and as an artist and ex-art teacher, I would find it very interesting. I have ordered that paper based magazine before, it is a UK magazine, but I live in Spain so it works out too expensive to get it sent here. Where Newsstand would be useful, would be if the price of the magazine in digital format, would be the same as, or hopefully a little bit less than the dead tree version. Now you’re talking!

Another thing about the magazines and reading them on the iPad as iPad magazines, is the layout of the text and artwork. With HTML 5 you can make some really stunning HTML5 magazines, that have a lot more to offer than what you would see in paper format. You can have more interactivity, more multimedia, such as audio and video. Overall a magazine on the iPad does have the possibility of being a lot better than buying the magazine off-the-shelf at the newsagents. Perhaps even more so for me, considering all the magazines in the newsstands here tend to be in Spanish.

Don’t forget to do something or other – Reminders

On my iPad I already have a mountain of to do applications, that I mostly don’t use, but they are there just in case I want to get organised. I have Wunderlist which I use on my Mac and which is simple enough for me to actually make use of here and there. I also have a Remember the Milk and I recently downloaded an application called Orchestra, which although is not a native iPad app, is useful enough to keep. In iOS 5 and iCloud Apple are bringing us an application called Reminders, let’s have a look and see what it can do for us.

What will be the most useful thing of this application, is the fact that it will be there, installed and ready to use. They do say that 90% of success comes from actually just being there, turning up. You won’t have to try out any number of Get Things Done type of applications, if you try Reminders and find that it does as much as you need.Using PhatPad you get lists with handwriting recognition included.

When you use the location-based features of reminders you will be else to tell the iPad or iPhone to give you instructions to pick up some bread or cheese, when you drive into the supermarket car parking space. It looks like the Reminders application will be good for making all sorts of clean ordered lists. It will be a simple case of making a list and adding items to that to-do list. Second part of the process, will be to set locations and or the time that you want to be reminded. Only thing then left to happen then, is to be able to see the notification in your alerts, that will just appear magically, when you’re near your destination.

An integrated twitter iOS 5 and iCloud

Having things integrated, with an iOS5 Twitter application having hooks into the operating system does make things easier and quicker. Instead of having to change from one of application you are in to open up a Twitter client you will be able to send a twitter message from whichever application you are using at the time. How cool is that then? You could be looking at a web page in Safari, and have the sudden urge to share that page with a friend or two on Twitter. No problem, and the same goes for when you’re using photos, camera, YouTube and maps.

In our contacts list we will be able to have the Twitter username within the contact details. When you start typing the name of one of your contacts, the integration will help you do the mention or reply. I expect that the application will cover the basic and main points of using Twitter and for some power user requirements, you will still open up a Twitter client.

There are more things that iOS 5 and iCloud will give us, when we get it tomorrow. As you can tell I am getting impatient and I can’t wait much longer to get my hands on the new iDevice operating system for the iPad, iOS 5 for iPad and iCloud for iPad. I can tell you that I will be doing some serious playing, I mean testing, of the new and improved system that is iOS five.