There has been a lull here, in this part of iXyr town for the last few days. The last post published on the website was on April 2nd, 2011. A lot has changed since that day, a lot has definitely changed in the last few months and I’d like to tell you about it. And I’m going to try and tell you that we’re back in action, without making a “It was the calm before the storm” reference.

Smoking Apples in its early days, if you aren’t aware, was a simple blog founded in 2008 by five guys who met on a community forum. Hailing from five different states in India, they had one thing in common — their love for all things Apple and their passion for sharing interesting things with the community. The first ever published post on this blog went live on June 19th, 2008. Over the last three years, we’ve been on a fabulous ride, have had our ups and downs to reach where we are today. Three of the five co-founders went on to pursue their own careers, leaving me and Milind to take up full responsibilities of the blog. Milind took on the big responsibilities of the Editor-in-Chief of Smoking Apples, while I took on a more passive role of handling the management of the abundant incoming emails, blogs, advertising, payments and things like that, while still contributing articles whenever I could.

If you’ve been following us over these years, you may have probably noticed that our focus has always been quality content and the objective has always been to bring that content to our readers in the best possible manner. The blog has always featured a design which has been aesthetic and pleasing to the eyes — and we’ve always tried to outdo ourselves with every iteration. We have never plastered advertisements all over our design or let them interfere with the actual content. The objective has been simple all along — the reader or visitor shouldn’t need to use an Adblocker or if possible, services like Readability. And we believe we’ve always met that objective in every possible way. There have been numerous new Apple blogs and websites that have sprung up next to us. And it seems the general attitude with them has been to bring you ‘Breaking News’ in the fastest possible way, with some sites at times employing means to split up content into multiple pages or even multiple posts, in order to generate more pageviews. “That’s just not how we roll around here.”

Unfortunately, over the last few months, this blog has lost its steam. We’ve never been fans of churning out articles for news that’s already reported by someone, so we came up with Aside posts, most commonly seen on Chairman Gruber‘s site. A majority of the content generated on this site lately has been by Milind himself, with Brandon contributing some great articles too. Milind has a whopping 1261 articles to his credit — effectively leading to some people thinking that this was his blog itself (I still get emails to our contact us address asking why Milind doesn’t update his blog any more).

And apparently, beginning March, our Editor lost all his steam too. I was very reluctant to write about this fact, and have waited for him to respond, but it has become clear that Milind is no longer interested with the activities here any more. Yes, I’ll wait till that settles in.

Changes?

If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, come visit the blog. We have a new design layout in place now, and we’d like your feedback. We’ve also slightly altered the typography and have gotten rid of stuff we thought was crummy.

I’m also happy to announce that the blog is proudly hosted on VPS.net‘s fantastic hosting infrastructure. They have an extensive lineup of ‘Cloud Hosting‘ products, so be sure to check them out if you’re looking for a new home for your websites.

One major change coming to Smoking Apples is that going forward, we’ll be only posting in-depth reviews, opinions and analysis. This means, you won’t be seeing news articles from one event spread over 7 different posts, no barrage of articles telling you that new betas of [REDACTED] are out and definitely no “Is <insertcompanyname> planning to introduce <insertfeatureeveryonewishesisreleased>?”. We’ll be returning to our regular schedule of articles very soon.

The very first article published on this site went live on June 19th, 2008 (exactly 3 years ago) even though our public announcement was on August 15th, 2008. As we (technically) turn three, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you, our loyal readers and visitors for the love and support they’ve shown towards us. It gives me immense joy to receive and read through every single email or tweet you send across to us and it’s that curiosity, love and support that keeps us going strong.

I don’t know if Milind will ever return here. I don’t know if I can be an editor even half as good as him. But what I do know, is that Smoking Apples has always been about quality content written by passionate individuals and going forward, will continue to be exactly that.

[Header Image by David Reece on Flickr]

Wow! Can’t believe it’s been two years already!

Honestly, I never thought we’d come this far. That we’d have survived for two years, that we’d have a name for ourselves, that we’d have a growing readership in thousands (current feed subscriber headcount at 16k+). So thank you for that!

This time I thought I’d tell you a bit about the beginning, maybe even a little before the beginning. This was a time when no one understood what Twitter was (I had a little over 20 followers), and tech forums where we used to hang out. A few of us Mac users had formed our own little community in an Indian tech forum, and shared all kinds of interesting finds there. Sharing everything from news stories, interesting software, and heated discussions with Windows fanboys over how the Mac was better. Aayush and me thought we should take that and form a Mac blog instead, but the simple problem of a name held us back, and we abandoned project. Should we have come up with a name, we’d have probably abandoned it for other reasons. It was only months later, early June of 2008, when Ashwin suggested that we start a Mac blog, Aayush and myself immediately jumped to the idea, and roped Preshit in. Extremely long Gmail conversation threads followed.

The name was a problem again. All the good domains were taken, and the rest of them just didn’t sound right. We started off with macboys.in, since this was going to be a Mac blog for Indians (never thought you guys would be interested). We then came up with desiapples.com, appleofmyeyes.com, etc. Finally, it took my intellect to come up with the name smokingapples.com. Finally, on the 19th of June, smokingapples.com was ours.

Where we thought the name was our main issue, we didn’t realise how important it would be to get the design finished. We didn’t want an off the shelf WordPress theme, so it had to be built from scratch. At the time, I didn’t want the responsibility of being the site’s designer, so we got Aditya into the team. His busy schedules lead to more delays; weeks went by without any progress, we wrote some articles just to see how we fared. Finally, after getting a working site with a theme, Smoking Apples was launched on the 15th of August, the day of India’s independence.

That was two years ago. And here we are today. It has been a fun ride, and we don’t intend on stopping it any time soon. Thank you all.

Milind Alvares – Editor,
Preshit Deorukhkar – Head of Operations,
iXyr Media.

PS: Stay tuned for a smokin’ announcement later today.

Bokeh Stars image by 4otomax

We can’t help it. Just three months ago we refreshed the site, with completely overhauled backend and polished pixels, but we weren’t satisfied. By we, I mean Patrick Patience, who was dead after me to change the design—something to the tune of “I love SA, but that header sucks”. Soon even I started feeling that way, and before you know it, Espresso and Photoshop were employed into service. A little soul searching, sleepless nights, and behind the scene fights—“You aren’t serious about that are you? Please tell me you aren’t serious”—resulted in what you see today.

There’s a lot going on with this redesign. We’ve tried to keep the same look we’ve sported over the years, but you’ll immediately notice how lean it is. I took a look at my browsing habits, asked a few others about theirs, and decided to cut down the noise. I didn’t want it to look like the next Mashable.

Everything from the header, to the sidebar, to the individual article pages themselves, have all shed a little weight. This not only created a much cleaner, more readable layout, it also allowed us to bump up the font size (after repeated requests), and to post bigger images without worrying about breaking a layout. We’re using the gorgeous font Calluna as our serif, fed via the fabulous service by Typekit. Unfortunately, the iPad without OS 4 isn’t able to handle web fonts that well, so till then it’s Georgia all the way. And lastly, it’s still running the super awesome Thesis 1.7 core.

•••

Quite important to us, we’ve set up a new way to present ads, along with the iXyr ad network. Gone are the four in-your-face ad blocks, and in comes a sleek block in the sidebar. We figured we’d rather focus the attention on a single product than dilute it across multiple blocks—much like the Deck and Fusion. We hope you enjoy the relevant advertising, and support our sponsors by checking out their products. This ad block is repeated on Beautiful Pixels and any other future projects we might have, so if you need to get your product in front of the right audience, do get in touch.

There’s also a premium ad spot right there in the header. I don’t know how to describe it other than, it’s there. Those are the only two ads on this site, so hopefully we’re winning.

•••

When it comes to comments, I’ve always been torn between either side. On the one hand, comments can be very useful. We’ve never had any problems with ‘engadget’ comments, but on the other hand, boasting of a comment count isn’t what I have in mind. So comment count is gone. We also have a new moderation policy. Up until now, our moderation policy was “If it’s not spam, it stays”. This time we reserve the right to moderate comments that don’t contribute to the discussion—posts like this one, and giveaways being an exception. If the comment doesn’t contribute to the discussion, it doesn’t need to be there.

Most of all, as always, we hope to continue to bring you unbiased, well-researched, opinionated, and fun tidbits from the world of technology surrounding Apple.

[Thanks to @Sam_Symons, @gogocosmonaut, @PatrickPatience, @SteveStreza and @Teucher for the valuable feedback.]

It’s that time of the year again, and we have a new issue of our esteemed magazine, ready for you to download and read.

This issue however is quite special to us. Ever since the iPad was announced, a lot of people have been asking us whether we’re doing something toward making our content more at home on the iPad. Consider this our first step in that direction. The PDF—it’s still a PDF—is designed to fit just right on the iPad. Unfortunately, the default PDF reader doesn’t split pages appropriately, and adds a ghastly drop shadow around the page, which is why we recommend you using a dedicated PDF reader like Good Reader. As for Mac and iPhone users, you may continue to use whatever means you did before—it’s still just a PDF.

We didn’t of course forget about the content, which includes a feature on getting a cloud based workflow up and running, a selection of the best Mac applications, opinions from around the world, and much more. We hope you enjoy it.

The magazine, as usual, is a free no-strings-attached download. We’d love it if you could tell your friends about it. In fact, we’re giving away a bunch of codes for Good Reader, and Quickie, to add to the fun (just tweet with a link back to this page to enter). So go ahead and download it. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks.

Past Issues:
Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5

The unexpected big event is tomorrow, and we’ll of course have our little Live Chat going on at live.smokingapples.com. It’s a low key event, mostly because we don’t trust Cover it Live’s reliability, but also because Apple sprung this upon us with 3 days to prepare. There won’t be any giveaways and such, but we hope you can join us. The event is at 10:00 a.m. PT for USA, and 10:30 p.m. IST for India. We’ll kick off 15 mins before the event.

A few thoughts on iPhone OS 4

There’s nothing that can be said about the iPhone that hasn’t been said before. Until Apple gives us a new reason to complain, the list will be forwarded to every event that Apple announces. Saying something today isn’t going to change what’s set to happen tomorrow. It probably won’t change what might happen next year, even. But it feels good doing so. I’ll keep it short.

A better email experience. It lacks a unified inbox, smart searches, a local junkmail filter, message rules, threaded conversations, flagging, among others.

A rewritten notification system. Understandable when the iPhone first showed up, but now with the coming of third party apps and push notifications, its attention seeking modal dialog boxes are just painful.

A usable Calendar. Totally forgets about syncing your todos, making that aspect of the MobileMe sync experience completely useless.

A systemwide accessible storage repository. Either in the cloud, or more likely, locally transferred using iTunes. Something as simple as how one transfers iWork files onto an iPad.

A Spotlight that’s actually usable. The current one doesn’t search within the body of emails and notes, and shuts off when it comes to third party developers. Totally not the Spotlight we know and love.

Multi-tasking and background processes? I’m not so excited about this, but I’ll welcome it with open arms if it does show up.

Flash® support. Just kidding!

Any hopes and wishes from your side?

[tweetmeme] It’s here, again. Just over 9 months after the release of the previous issue, we are pleased to announce the 5th issue of the Smoking Apples Magazine.

No, we weren’t trying to pull a James Cameron here. We’ve been getting a whole lot of emails about the magazine and we really appreciate the love and support you have shown towards to magazine. As always, we’ve tried to make this issue even better than the previous ones we’ve released, so we believe you’re going to love this one. This fifth issue brings along some great and exclusive content, reviews, interview, opinions and some special contributions from people you’ve probably heard on Twitter.

The magazine still remains a free download, so go ahead and get your copy right away from the direct link below.

As usual, we have a free distribution policy, so share it as you will, spread it around, upload it to your server, share it with your friends on facebook, torrent it or simply, tweet about it on twitter. A lot of work and efforts go into making the magazine, so we’d love to hear from you about this release. Hit us up at pr@smokingapples.com with your feedback or if you really loved this issue, here’s a Paypal donation link to show your support. A special thanks to our advertisers Edovia, PoweryBase and Layers app.