The video was shot on my iPhone 4, edited with iMovie on the iPad 2 and then uploaded to YouTube directly from the iPad

Video Out

Although this functionality is available on the first generation iPad, on iPad 1 the support for “video out” (as many people call it) is provided by individual apps, and not all apps support it, whereas with iPad 2, the support is provided by the iPad which means that the output of all apps, as well as the Home screen, can be displayed on an external display.

Delivering a Presentation

One of the main uses of video out and mirroring in a work/business environment is delivering a presentation. Hook up the iPad to a projector or large TV screen (many of our meeting/conference rooms have replaced projectors with TV screens) and run the presentation on the iPad.

The latest version of Keynote (Apple’s presentation app) allows you to display your presenter notes and/or upcoming slide on the iPad whilst the actual presentation is displayed on the external display device. Keynote supports video out which means you can do this on both iPad 1 and iPad 2.

I’ll be covering this in more detail in another blog post.

Sharing Ideas

Another app that supports video out is Adobe Ideas, a sketchbook-type app that can be used for capturing ideas in graphical form. In the image below, it is running on the iPad 1 and displaying the sketch/diagram (without the app’s drawing palette) on the monitor.

Another app that I use for organising ideas is Corkulous. This doesn’t support video out, however, by connecting my iPad 2 up to an external display (see the image below), i can share my ideas with colleagues without us all having to cram round an iPad.

Playtime

Of course, all work and no play makes Mike a dull boy so I thought I’d check out how Garageband looks on an external monitor:

Zero Configuration

Whether you have an iPad 1 or iPad 2, to display the iPad’s output on an external display, simply connect the iPad to the display device using an appropriate adapter. One end of the adapter plugs into the iPad’s 30-pin connector (the one that you connect the charger to) and the other end plugs into the external device. That’s it. There is nothing to configure.

VGA or HDMI?

iPad 2 supports a VGA adapter and an HDMI adapter, but iPad 1 only supports the VGA adapter. If, like me, you already have a VGA adapter that you used with iPad 1, the good news is that it will work with iPad 2.

The VGA adapter allows you to connect the iPad to a VGA-equipped TV, monitor or projector. You can purchase a VGA adapter from your local Apple Store or online here: http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MC552ZM/A?fnode=MTc0MjU4NjE&mco=MjE2MzE2MDc.

If you have an HDMI-compatible display device (monitor, TV or projector), you can use the HDMI adapter instead. The HDMI adapter has 2 connectors on it – one for the display device and one for charging the iPad, so you’ll never have to worry about running out of battery power in the middle of your presentation or demo.

It has a faster processor but the storage capacities remain the same (16GB, 32GB and 64GB), it has 2 cameras (one on the front and one on the back), both of which are capable of taking still photos and video (especially useful for video conferencing), although the quality of the output from the cameras is poor compared to the iPhone 4 and the reflective screen is still too shiny use when sitting outside in the sunshine (not a problem in the UK).

So why, when I already own a 64GB iPad did I drive 80 miles on a cold Spring day and queue up for 7 hours outside the Apple Store in Liverpool (with little food and one toilet break) in order to ensure that I got my hands on one on “Launch Day” in the UK?

The killer feature for me, as a Trainer and Presenter, is the ability to display the iPad’s output onto an external monitor or projector, either via VGA or HDMI. To do this requires an appropriate cable. One end connects to the iPad’s Dock Connector and the other end connects to the monitor/projector. This functionality is available on iPad 1 but is dependent upon individual apps supporting it and also there is no HDMI support in iPad 1.

The original iPad was only available in black but this time around, Apple gave us a choice of black or white. I’d planned to purchase a 32GB in white, my reason being that in 10 months I’d filled less than 50% of the available space. However, it was pointed out to me that the 64GB version was only £80 more expensive than the 32GB so on a per-gigagbyte basis it was more cost-effective to buy the higher spec model. Somebody in the queue made a point that the white one looks like a gaming console and would not be taken seriously in meetings, a point that I agreed with so in the end I bought a 64GB black one for £559.

In addition to the iPad, I bought a Camera Connection Kit which allows you to connect a USB device, such as pen drive or external hard drive, or an iPhone to the iPad in order to transfer photos and videos.

I also bought a red leather “Smart Cover” screen protector that magnetically attaches to the front of the iPad 2. The cover has three folds which allows it to convert into a stand, which is also held together by magnets. When the Smart Cover is “closed” – ie covering the iPad screen, the iPad is automatically put into sleep mode and when you “open the cover”, it automatically wakes the iPad up – this must be why it’s called a Smart Cover! For more information about Smart Covers, see this page on the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad/smart-cover/

Once I was back home, I plugged my iPad 1 into my Mac and backed it up via iTunes. I then connected my iPad 2 to my Mac and ran the Restore command. This was the quickest way to get my iPad 2 up and running with all my existing apps and settings.

So was it worth the 80 mile round trip and 7 hours standing in the cold? Well, put it like this, when a friend who had been contemplating purchasing one rang several Apple Stores on Saturday morning, he found that there wasn’t one to be had anywhere in the North West and nor would there be until next week when limited supplies will dictate that the queue merry-go-round will start again.

I’ve organised the apps into “pages” or screens. Each page can hold up to 16 apps and I have 10 pages of apps, although, if you do the maths, you will realise that not all the pages are “full” (in fact only one of the pages contains 16 apps).

I’m not going to describe all 10 pages but to give you some idea, the first page contains some of my most regularly-used apps (including iPad, Messages, Phone, Mail, Echofon and Safari), the second page is for what I call Utilities and includes 1Password, Calculator, Clock and Settings, the third page is for Entertainment apps.

On my Pad, rather than organising the apps into multiple pages, I use Folders (this feature was introduced in iOS4 and allows you to group apps together, similar to the way that the Program Manager used to work in Windows 3.1). To be honest, for me, the jury’s still out on Folders which is why I haven’t implemented them on my iPhone.

Both the iPhone and the iPad screens contain a “Dock” – a row of icons at the bottom which remain visible, no matter which screen (or “Page”) is displayed.

The iPhone’s Dock can store up to 4 icons and at the moment, my Dock has the Camera, DropText, ToDo and iTalk. These aren’t necessarily the most frequently-used apps but as the icons are always accessible, it means that I can quickly and easily take a photo/shoot video and record audio. Making quick notes and adding to my to-do list are also tasks that I perform regularly, as things pop into my head.

What’s on your Dock and why?

The iPad can be used in both portrait and landscape modes (the shape of the iPad is rectangular) and I use both. For example I prefer portrait mode when I read a book and take notes as it feels more natural, but I use landscape mode for watching a movie or a TV programme. With the orientation lock turned off, unless the iPad is in it’s stand or lying flat on a desk, it is very easy with a simple wrist action, to accidentally switch modes.

Prior to 4.2, once I’d run my chosen app, before going any further, I’d set the screen to the desired orientation and lock it into position by simply “flicking the switch”. To turn off the orientation lock, it was a simple matter of flicking the switch again.

To turn the orientation lock on and off under 4.2 I have to double-tap the Home button and slide my finger to the right along the Task Switcher until the playback, brightness, and volume controls come into view. To the left of the brightness control is the orientation lock.

Press it once to lock and again to unlock (when the lock is on a padlock appears in the middle of the button).

Before this change, if I wanted to mute the iPad, I could either press and hold the volume control button for 2 seconds or use the on-screen volume control slider.

I am so used to using these methods to mute the iPad that I hardly ever use the mute switch now.

But the good news is that this week, Apple announced that in iOS 4.3 users will be able to choose, via a setting, how the switch functions.

I explained the issue to the Genius, who verified that it was a fault. I then assumed that it would be a simple case of exchanging my faulty iPad for a new one (assuming that they had one in stock). How wrong I was! The Apple Online Store and the Apple bricks and mortar stores are different companies and because I had purchased my iPad online I would have to send it back for either a refund or exchange.

I wasn’t happy with this and told the Genius that I could understand if I’d bought it from PC World or Currys as these are obviously different companies but surely Apple is Apple is Apple. I had pre-ordered the most expensive WiFi-only iPad over 2 weeks before it was available because I was told that there was no guarantee they would have them in stock in the store on the first day of sale and although Apple didn’t put the transaction onto my credit card before the items had shipped, they had my credit card details and therefore could have done so. I had re-arranged my work schedule to fit in with their (changing) delivery schedule and now I would have to be without an iPad for, well however long it took for the exchange to be completed.

I was assured that a courier would pick up my iPad free-of-charge and provide me with a new one at the same time – but what if the replacement had the same problem – or worse. The reason that I wanted to do an in-store exchange was so that I could check the iPad and if I wasn’t happy with it I could “exchange the exchange”.

He understood what I was saying and said that he’d love to be able to help but the online store and the real stores have different barcoding systems so my transaction would not be recognised on their system and therefore he couldn’t initiate an exchange.

I packed my iPad away, walked out of the store and immediately walked back in. I had the bit between my teeth and asked to see a Manager. Claire, one of the Managers, came out to see me and I repeated everything that I’d told the Genius, but this time I also added that we have a business account at The Arndale Store, hoping this might sway her. Unfortunately she couldn’t (and I say couldn’t rather than wouldn’t) authorise an exchange – but “if there’s anything I can do to help…”

So back to the car to discuss the situation with Elaine. We found the Apple Customer Support telephone number (thank goodness for the MiFi) – maybe they could authorise an exchange – but it’s an 0845 number, which is free from landlines but not the iPhone. OK…here’s what we do…go back to the store, speak to Claire again, ask to use their phone to call Customer Support and if they still won’t exchange it then I’ll buy another iPad and return faulty one at my leisure.

Back at the store, Claire was on her lunch break so we spoke to Dean, the other Manager on duty. He couldn’t have been more helpful. He listened, understood, apologised and even called Customer Support for us. This had the advantage that when he handed the phone to me, the Customer Support Representative had already been briefed by an Apple employee, which speeded up the process. Whilst I was talking to Customer Support, Dean had reserved me a 64GB WiFi iPad.

Ten minutes later it was all sorted and we walked out of the store with a new iPad (plus 2 iPad stands and a wireless keyboard). I have a returns number, the courier will contact me within a couple of days to organise picking up the faulty iPad and the money will be refunded to my credit card.

We celebrated with a cup of tea – well Elaine did. I made myself dizzy by looking at every single pixel on my new iPad.

Uh Oh – what’s this? There was a mark. It was under the screen. Not a dead pixel but definitely a faulty screen. Back to the Apple Store to exchange the exchange! Again Dean was extremely helpful. He verified that there was a problem with the screen and yet again went into the back of the store and came out with another 64GB WiFi iPad. He also told me that I was the first person to bring back an iPad purchased at the Arndale Apple Store.

Another iPad, another cup of tea! Another 10 minutes staring at the iPad screen. This one’s perfect! So we finish our drinks go home to install some apps.

Three days later UPS came to pick up the faulty iPad and Apple refunded the money back to my credit card just before the bill was made up, saving me laying out extra money.

I spent most of the morning refreshing the tracking page on the UPS website (Elaine’s had been delivered by TNT) – all I knew was that it was on a van that had left Tamwworth (about 60 miles away) at 6:30 that morning. I was running a training course in the afternoon which gave the F5 (Refresh in IE) key a break. Our training room is in a building that seems to have lead lined walls – at least that’s how it feels – I can’t get a data or phone signal on my iPhone. I had a break on my course at 2:30 and on checking my mail (my work email via Outlook) I had a mail from Elaine simply saying “it’s here”. Finally!

I already had a prior engagement on Thursday night and although I was working from home on Friday, I managed to refrain from playing with my new toy until Friday night. All was going well until I watched a video on YouTube. At the end of the video, the screen faded to black I noticed a red dot on my iPad screen. “Noooooo!! I’ve got a dead or stuck pixel.”

“It’s going back” I said. Now I know that when you buy a device with an LCD display there is an acceptable number of dead pixels – a local computer supplier has a sign in the shop that explains this, but having paid almost £600 I wanted a perfect iPad. So I logged on to the Apple website and made an appointment at the Manchester Arndale Genius Bar for the next day.

Read The Magical and Revolutionary iPad – Part 3

Fast forward three-and-a-half months to May 10th. This was the date that Apple announced the prices (though there’d been confirmed rumours for a day or so on the rumour websites and Twitter feeds) and began to take pre-orders outside the USA (the iPad went on sale in the USA on April 3rd so our friends across the pond had already had several weeks to play with theirs and make us jealous).

Apple being Apple there was no indication as to what time the prices would be announced so when I got up at 6:00 to take the dog for a walk, I had a quick check of the website – and there it was…the prices and the link to pre-order – but, unlike in the USA, there appeared to be no option to reserve and pick up from an Apple Store. A phone call to an Apple Store later that morning confirmed that to be the case, so I left it in Elaine’s capable hands to order me a 64GB WiFi model (at least I didn’t have to choose between black and white as well this time).

Why did I go for the WiFi and not the 3G? Well, I guessed that I’d be using the iPad primarily in the house, in the garden and at work. As my Twitter followers and MacBites listeners know, despite it being one of the most affluent areas in Cheshire, the area that I work in is sadly bereft of 3G (I don’t actually work in the middle of a field but from a technology point of view, it sometimes feels like it).

When I take Meyer for a walk I take my iPhone and usually listen to podcasts or music and keep up with Twitter and Facebook, read and reply to emails and surf the web. Sometimes I use dog-walking time as “thinking time” and if something comes into my head I’ll open Evernote or one of the other note-taking apps and make a note of it, and if there’s a football match on Sky, I sometimes watch that (rain permitting). I can hardly see myself holding my iPad in one hand, building a Keynote presentation or putting together a Pages document whilst being dragged around by a large Samoyed! If I do go out somewhere and need Internet access, I’ll take the MiFi with me.

On the 22nd May I received an email from Apple advising that my iPad had shipped (along with the £30 “official Apple iPad case” and the iPad Dock). However, Elaine’s status was still showing as Not Shipped, so I had to keep my excitement to myself. I’d already decided (and it’s documented in my Twitter feed) that should hers not arrive on time, I’d leave mine unopened until we both had them.

On 26th May my order showed “Shipped – delivery due 27th May”. Now this should have been greeted with cries of ecstasy, however Elaine’s was still showing as Not Shipped. I checked the credit card statement online and both transactions had gone through, so I persuaded her to check the status again – and this time it showed as “Shipped – delivery due 27th May”.

Read The Magical and Revolutionary iPad – Part 2

My first job this morning was to reconfigure my desk for my new acquisition and then take a photo of said desk…

So what is on my desk? From left to right…

• iPhone in a Dock
• iPad in a Griffin A-Frame stand. Elaine has written a review of iPad stands on her blog
• 17 inch monitor connected to Vista laptop
• Vista laptop
• 17 inch monitor connected to MacBook Pro
• A cheap USB mouse connected to the Vista laptop
• MacBook Pro
• Apple Bluetooth keyboard
• Logitech MX Revolution mouse

The plant in the background is on my colleague’s desk – with all that tech, do I look like I have room for a plant?

After the photo-shoot it was time to put the iPad to work (well you don’t think I just bought it as a toy do you?). Today I was running 4 x 1 hour training sessions “how to get the most from your Vista laptop” (OK you can all stop laughing now).

I had the names of the attendees in a spreadsheet which I copied onto the iPad. As delegates arrived, rather than ticking their names off on a piece of paper I simply marked them off in the spreadsheet, which I had opened in Numbers. I also had the training course running order and some notes on the iPad as PDF’s – of course I just “had” to refer to these notes during the sessions!

All in all, a good first day at work for the iPad. No wonder the battery was down to 20% when we got home. It’s now fully charged and ready for tomorrow!

Before starting the installation, there was some groundwork to be done. I have several virtual machines set up, each one with a different name:

“Base” contains just the Operating System
“Office 2003″ contains an installation of Office 2003
“Office 2007″ contains an installation of Office 2007

All these machines (or Images as I call them) have Windows XP installed as the Operating System. Rather than starting from scratch with a new VM, I made a copy of “Base” – my logic being that to add some realism to my presentation, most people will be upgrading – either from XP or Vista (gone are the days of the DOS prompt – unless you’re an uber-geek of course!)

For anyone who has never used Fusion, each virtual machine is represented in the OSX Finder as a single file so making a copy of a VM is as simple as copying the file. Once I had a copy of the “Base” VM, I renamed it to “Windows 7″ and opened it (in Fusion)

The Windows 7 Ultimate DVD was already in the DVD drive of my MacBook Pro and Fusion was configured to “take control” of the DVD drive. Once Windows had loaded, I opened My Computer and double clicked the DVD to begin the installation process. I worked my way through the first few screens until I was stopped dead in my tracks…

At the point that I had to select which drive and partition to install Windows 7 on, the following message appeared:

“Windows cannot be installed to this disk. Windows needs the driver for device VMware SCSI Controller. Click ‘Load Drivers’ and load the required device driver.”

I didn’t think that I had any SCSI devices on my MacBook Pro and even if there was, I had no drivers anyway. Frantic Googling of the message resulted in a link to a file on vwmare.com – http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp.

Tip: When I tried to download it using Safari, it opened what appeared to be a text file directly in the browser. Using Firefox resulted in a successful download.

The file vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp is a “virtual floppy drive” file and contains the required driver.

Back to the task in hand…abort the installation and shut down Windows. The virtual machine should be powered off i.e. – not put into Suspended Mode. (Depending on your settings in the Fusion preferences, a virtual machine is either powered off or put into Suspended Mode when it is closed).

Click the Settings button on the Fusion toolbar (ensure that Fusion is not running full screen so that the toolbar is visible)

Click the Other Devices icon

Click the + sign at the bottom left and select Add Floppy…

Select the file vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp and click Open

IMPORTANT: Ensure that the Connected checkbox is NOT checked. If it is checked, when the virtual machine boots up, it acts the same way as Windows acts when there is a real floppy disk in a real floppy drive – in other words, it tries to boot from the floppy disk. In this case the “disk” is not bootable, which results in the following screen:

I think I pressed “any key” a few times after which I then restarted the virtual machine (actually this was the second time that I restarted the virtual machine – the first time resulted in the NTLDR is missing message – which is how I realised that the Connected checkbox should not be checked at this point.

Once the VM has been restarted and Windows XP has loaded, the floppy disk needed to be connected. As before, click the Settings button on the Fusion toolbar, click the Other Devices icon, highlight Floppy in the list of devices and tick the Connected checkbox.

Even though there is a message indicating that the settings cannot be changed until the virtual machine is switched off, the floppy drive is connected without the need to power off so the Settings dialog box can be closed.

At this point the VM was ready for Windows 7 to be installed. The Windows 7 Ultimate DVD was still in the DVD drive of my MacBook Pro so I opened My Computer and double clicked the DVD to begin the installation process. Again I worked my way through the first few screens. When I got to the point where I had to select the location of SCSI Controller driver, I clicked Browse and selected the A: drive. Windows duly found the Controller and the installation continued.

40 minutes later I had successfully installed Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro.

The next problem came when I tried to activate Windows as I found that I had no Internet connection. Fusion was configured correctly (to use NAT):

However, the Windows 7 Device Manager indicated a problem with the Ethernet Controller:

I found the solution here. In a nutshell…

With the VM shut down, open Finder and find the actual virtual machine file (the .vmwarem file). Right click on it and select Show Package Contents. Inside the Package, find the file with a .vmx extension and open it in a text editor. Add this line

“ethernet0.virtualDEV = “e1000″ (without the quotes)

I added it at the end of the file

I restarted Windows and hey presto, I had a working network adapter and an Internet connection.