From Apple:
CUPERTINO, California - May 31, 2010 - Apple today announced that iPad sales have topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

iPad allows users to connect with their apps, content and the Internet in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad is 0.5 inches thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.

Developers have created over 5,000 exciting new apps for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch user interface, large screen and high-quality graphics. iPad will run almost all of the more than 200,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone or iPod touch.
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Awesome! That means that because I have two of them (more on that below) I have 0.000001% of all the iPads currently sold!

Yes, I have a 64GB WiFi model purchased in New York almost two months ago. I upgraded to the WiFi+3G model on Saturday. If anyone wants to buy the WiFi one from me, get in touch! You can have it cheaper than the £599 price in the UK.

From TUAW:
Despite all odds, the Mac has survived to its 26th birthday.

On January 24th, 1984, Steve Jobs pulled a 128K Mac out of its case in front of a crowd of reporters, turned it on, and let the computer introduce itself to the world. The rest, as they say, is history.

We've seen our favorite computer go from an awkward infancy, to almost dying in its teens, and now being a profitable prodigy in adulthood.

It has spawned a popular family of siblings, from the iPod series of media players to the iPhone. Somehow, it's fitting that we may see the birth of the newest member of the family later this week.

Watching the "Story of Macintosh" video in the past few weeks has introduced the young minds behind the first Mac to most of the current generation. For those of us who are a bit older, the video served as a reminder of the brash individuals who created a computer that still speaks to those who "Think Different."

Here's hoping that the Mac and all of its family may live a long and fruitful life.

You can get your copy here, but if you don't fancy accepting the terms and conditions found in the EULA, why not just grab a copy of it from here.

Now, the terms state the following:
2.1 In order to use the Services, you must first agree to the Terms. You may not use the Services if you do not accept the Terms.
2.2 You can accept the Terms by:
(A) clicking to accept or agree to the Terms, where this option is made available to you by Google in the user interface for any Service; or
(B) by actually using the Services. In this case, you understand and agree that Google will treat your use of the Services as acceptance of the Terms from that point onwards.

if you don't accept the terms on the download page, and bypass them as above, using the software automatically means you accept the terms. However, is it fair to impose terms upon you that you haven't read? I mean, download the .dmg file, install it and run it. Where are the terms? By running it you have automatically accepted terms that the software never showed you. I think that's a bit mean. I would expect the software to show you the EULA upon first launch, wouldn't you?

Trust Microsoft to release the bit of software that's going to save the company, only to totally f**k up the delivery! There are plenty of stories about this on the interwebs.

They used a crap company to deliver a product that had to be downloaded in some non-standard format; they didn't send product keys to loads of people (me included); the unpacking of these non-standard files failed with a cryptic error; you had to download another GB of 'tools' to be able to unpack the data, and then the installer didn't work for many people. What a farce!

Here's how it happened on my Mac Pro (Early 2008 model)...

- BACKUP COMPUTER!
- Put DVD in drive. Run installer.
- Go through the upgrade install.
- Computer reboots.
- Safari crashes. Mail crashes. QuickTime X won't open any files. Computer freezes - mouse can be moved, but nothing works. Nothing can be clicked on.
- Decide to format drive and start again.
- So, insert DVD and run the installer. Click "Utilities..." so I can reboot from DVD.
- Format the hard drive using Disk Utility on the DVD.
- Go through a fresh, clean install.
- Computer reboots.
- Get error message saying, "The Mac OS X installation couldn't be completed."
- Reboot, and the "fontworker" process crashes.
- Continue without a reboot.
- "SystemUIServer" crashes.
- Reboot, and everything seems fine now.
- Restore from my Time Machine backup. All working well.

So, there we go. This is easily the worst experience I've had in installing OS X. I still love it, but I don't appreciate the troubles I've had to install the latest version :(

So, Snow Leopard is out today. Where's my copy? I don't know. Perhaps it's sitting in a room somewhere in London instead of being in my hands because our postmen/women are on strike? Grrr.

Just received this email:
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Dear Valued Customer,
Your e-mail have emerged as a winner of £500,000.00 GBP (Five Hundred Thousand British Pounds) in our on-going promotion.Your Winning details are as follows: Computer Generated Profile Numbers (CGPN):7-22-71-00-66-12, Ticket number: 00869575733664, Serial numbers:/BTD/8070447706/06, Lucky numbers: 12-12-23-35-40-41(12).

Contact Mr. Francis Henson for more details through the contact below:

Mr. Francis Henson,
Email: giveaways.promoonline.03@gmail.com

Sincerely, Mrs Susan Johnson.
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Mr? Mrs? Ah, what the hell, give me the cash biatch!

Here's a small section from the BBC's story:
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Mr Curran said that the Microsoft Windows team had been poring over every aspect of the operating system to make improvements.

"We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music."
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Didn't anyone at Microsoft think of making the shutdown sound play WHILE the computer is doing something else? I mean, is the shutdown sound holding up the shutdown process? WHY?! Does the computer shutdown quicker if you turn the sound off?

No one is going to care about saving 0.4 seconds during shutdown. They care about bugs in the OS. They care about security issues. They care about non-standard-compliant standards in the web browser. They care about usability. They care about being able to do things with their computer without having popups appear in the lower-right of their screen every time anything happens.

0.4 seconds off shutdown is not a win in any sense of the word.

I can't...

I'm seriously thinking of giving up writing apps for the iPhone.

I spend many hours every week updating the games I've already released, and writing new games, but I don't see much of an income from it. There are definitely problems with the App Store; problems that Apple don't seem to want to fix. For instance, when you submit an app to Apple it takes a few days or weeks for them to review it. When they decide it's okay to release it goes live on the App Store but its release date is the date you submitted it to Apple. That means that your app is not shown in the right place on the listings when sorted by release date (that's the default). Your app may be live but no one trawls through more than a few pages of the listings, so you miss out on sales.

Secondly, promo codes - which developers can give away to people giving them a free copy of their app - are only available to US iTunes Store users. I have given away about 90 promo codes for my game, Linx, and I've had about 50 reviews from those people (thanks!), but those reviews are ONLY seen in the US iTunes Store. When someone browses the UK store they see my game with zero reviews. It's the same game in the US store as it is in the UK store, so why can't people see the reviews for the SAME APP in all stores?

I have spent a not-too-small sum of money on advertising my games, and this doesn't seem to translate to sales of the games. Review sites happily tell people that if you send them a promo code they'll review your app, but they never get around to it. I have sent promo codes to more than ten review sites, and only two of them have reviewed Linx - this is in two months.

Finally, the App Store is suffering from a phenomenon known as 'the $0.99 app problem'. People don't seem to want to pay more than a dollar for an app. In fact, people seem to want to get everything for nothing. Developers can't price their apps higher than $0.99 because users skip over them. But if a developer prices their app at $0.99 they can't then ever put the app on sale because there's no price lower than $0.99 other than free, and how does that get you any sales?

I can afford to pay the $99 annual fee, but that's not the only cost to keep my apps on the App Store. This year alone, I have spent more than a hundred hours updating my apps. I have made very little in new sales (well below £100). This is a pathetic return. Look at the reviews on Linx - they are all 4 or 5 stars! Where are the sales?

My apps have never been in the "NEW" section on the front page of the App Store, but it currently contains a number of apps released more than a month ago. If your app isn't on the front page or in the first page or two of each section, it is effectively dead.

And what's with the current influx of pointless fart apps? One is enough. More than one is just plain pointless. Apple need to start rejecting the trash apps and only letting in the good ones.

Until Apple fix these things, a large number of independent developers will fall into the same position as me. Do I continue wasting my time for a maximum of 30p an hour, or do I simply give up and get back to socialising with my friends? Currently, programming for the iPhone is not as good as Apple makes out. An app that plays a sound when you press a button is perhaps the simplest thing you can do, and yet there are hundreds of apps that do exactly this. So what if someone wrote an app in 20 minutes that plays a grenade sound? This is not innovative. This is not good. This is not clever. This is not worth the column inches that review sites and Apple news sites give to it.

Is it time to hang up the coding gloves? It looks increasingly likely that I won't be paying Apple my $99 developer's fee this coming July.