I just reserved an iPad.

As a developer I need one so I can test future versions of my apps on an actual device. And as an early adopter I crave one because I want to play with it before everyone around me has one.

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t sell the iPad in Canada yet and I do want to get mine as soon as possible. As a Canadian I can’t just order one at Apple’s US website since you need a US credit card linked to a US address to shop in the US online Apple Store.

But as a Canadian (and any other nationality) you can reserve an iPad and that’s what I did. I’ll pick it up (or have a family member pick it up) on April 3rd in a brick and mortar Apple Store that is located near the Canadian border. (Coincidentally April 3rd is very close to my birthday on April Fools Day, so I have yet another good excuse to get an iPad now.)

One only needs a US iTunes account to reserve an iPad, and that is easy to obtain, even without a credit card.

Here’s how you can reserve an iPad, in 23 easy steps:

1. Start iTunes
2. Go to the iTunes Store
3. Log out of your regular account if you see your email address on the top right by clicking it and clicking the “Sign Out”- button
4. Click on the flag icon on the bottom right
5. Change to the US store by selecting the US flag in the next screen
6. Now search for a free app
7. Buy the free app
8. iTunes will ask you to sign in: Press the “Create New Account”-button
9. Navigate to the next few screens by filling in the necessary details.
10. Make sure you enter a valid email address, and your real birthday in case you forget the password. In case you have no email address that’s not already linked to the Apple store you could use an email alias at MailExpire.com
11. When you reach the screen where you have to enter your address (with the credit card pictograms) make sure you select “None” as the payment method.
12. Enter an address in the US; this can be a real address but if you don’t have one that’s not really necessary. If you need a zip code use 94111, San Francisco and the state of California, a phone number could be 650 555-8211.
13. Now click the button and check your email! You should have received an email with subject “iTunes Store Account Verification”
14. Confirm your account by clicking the link in the email
15. Now, back in iTunes, enter your email address and password you entered in step 10
16. Okay, now it’s time to reserve you iPad: start by going to the iPad reservation site
17. Click the big blue button and on the next page select (or locate) an Apple Store that is either near a friend or family member that can pick up (and pay) your iPad at April 3rd or that is at a convenient location for you to pick it up yourself.
18. On the next page select which model of iPad you want to reserve
19. Press Next and enter the email address and password of the account you just created
20. Continue the reservation process by confirming your reservation
21. Now when you check your email again and everything went right you have received an email with the subject “Your iPad has been reserved.”
22. Print the email and take it to the Apple Store on April 3rd, or forward it to your friend or family member so she can use it to pick up your iPad. Update: it might be a good idea to also print the account details you entered in iTunes for the unlikely event they ask that. You can get this info in iTunes under the account link at the top right under ‘Quick Links’. You can’t print it directly, but you can take a screenshot and print that.
23. That’s all! Enjoy your iPad!

Your US iTunes account can also be used to buy free apps (Apple’s own iBook reader?) and free music from the iTunes Store that are not available in your country. It’s a bit speculative but when Apple’s iBook Store opens you might be able to get free ebooks for your iPad when they become available. For instance Amazon doesn’t sell free books on its international Kindle stores, they’re only available on the US Kindle store. Apple might do the same, and for now, there won’t even be international iBook stores.

It can be very useful to have a US iTunes account, even when you don’t reserve an iPad now.

Update 4 April:

It turned out there were no issues at all to buy an iPad as a Canadian, they asked for my Zip Code but when I said I was Canadian the Apple sales clerk -Oh sorry, the Specialist- just entered 00000 in their iPhone Credit Card POS app. The iPad is pretty cool and Clean My Screen on it, even as an iPhone app in double-pixel mode, is pretty amazing. It instantly made me decide to make an iPad version.

But you do need your US iTunes account to buy iPad apps, so you better put some money on it when you’re at it. I bought a couple of iTunes gift cards when I bought my iPad and that works fine. Don’t worry, iPhone apps that you bought in your own country sync just fine with iTunes.

The iPad can only connect to the US iTunes Store. But Apple doesn’t check your physical location (unlike sites like Hulu and Comedy Central) so you can log in fine, even when you are not on US soil.

Sorry to everybody who still wants a free copy of Clean My Screen.

During the introductory promotion more than 40,000 people downloaded Clean My Screen! Of course they are all eligible to free updates in the near future.

Something that also will arrive in the near future is Clean My Screen Lite. Clean My Screen Lite will have fewer features than the full version but in return it will be absolutely free.

More about that soon.

I was asked how I made the demo video that you can find on the Clean My Screen home page. Since making it was a fairly complicated process, using several tools and applications I thought I’d write it up into a post on this weblog. If you haven’t already, go watch the video before you continue reading. I’ll wait.

Making a demo video using an actual iPhone or iPod Touch is possible but it never looks clean enough. It’s very hard to light it so it’s doesn’t have a lot of glare on the screen and still is recognizable as a shiny Apple device. It’s much easier to use the iPhone Simulator, an application that is used by developers to test their creations on their Macintosh computers before they transfer them to the actual device. It works much faster that way since the connection with an iPhone to a Mac is quite slow.

There is one annoying thing the iPhone Simulator does. It thinks that all video is in landscape format. So when you start playing a video it “helpfully” rotates itself 90 degrees counter clockwise. And that’s not at all helpful when you try to make a screen cast of an application that has videos in it that are not in landscape orientation. There is a keyboard command to rotate the iPhone Simulator back into portrait mode, but you lose a second or two and there are some artifacts in the resulting video. So you need to record more than one take and edit the video. More about that later.

Irritating rotation

In order to make sure the iPhone Simulator is always located at the same position on my screen I used Simfinger, a very handy utility made by Loren Brichter, the developer of Tweetie. If you launch Simfinger with the iPhone Simulator running, it will automatically reposition the iPhone Simulator. That way if you have to come back and make another shot for your demo video (after an update for instance), your screen is in exactly the same place and splicing the old and new video footage together will be possible without too much hassle.

Simfinger “blacks out” the background of the iPhone Simulator with a white background including a glossy screen and a reflection underneath. Very neat is that it includes various fake application that you can “install” into the simulator to really simulate a genuine iPhone, just out of the box.

Simfinger has a simulated cursor in the form of very inconspicuous white circle, but I needed something more spiffy. I wanted to use one of the cleaners in Clean My Screen as a presenter. Another utility came to the rescue! It’s called PhoneFinger and it replaces your Mac’s arrow cursor with a finger or hand. But you can also make your own “hand” cursor and that’s what I did with Pepper’s paw. The hairiest cursor I’ve ever seen.

Blocking out the background and a very hairy cursor.

Okay, so now we have two utilities, but still no way to record the action. There are various applications to capture videos of your screen but I chose ScreenFlow and I was very happy I did. ScreenFlow allowed me to do the capturing of the Clean My Screen app in the iPhone Simulator and the editing of the resulting demo video in one application. No need to save, import, make changes, save again, render video etc. using several separateapplications. I even used ScreenFlow to add the various captions and to compress the resulting video into an mp4 that could be used on the website.

ScreenFlow is not perfect, I’d have loved if it had some precise ways to position things, right now you can zoom in but there is nowhere that you can punch in a couple of co-ordinates so you know that a certain element is at the same place in the whole video. Now there is some guess work involved.

ScreenFlow also allows the user to add a simultaneous voice-over soundtrack, which is useful if you have a voice. Unfortunately while I was making this demo video I lost my ability to speak because I had a laryngitis (infection of the vocal cords). This was actually what inspired me to use Pepper as the presenter. Since Clean My Screen is a rather quiet and serene application I thought having a voice-over would disturb the natural cleaning sounds too much. So I just added some sound effects when Pepper’s paw hits the screen, and lined them up in ScreenFlow and that was it. I saved the video, still from ScreenFlow, into an iPhone compatible mp4 file and I was done.

Well actually I did this many times because there were some text corrections, and even some new recordings after I didn’t like certain aspects of the earlier footage. Doing so was easy because I didn’t use a voice over, and because I used the utilities as described above to keep the background and position the same between recordings. I’m also not afraid when I have to alter the video after I’ll release an update to Clean My Screen and I need Pepper to demonstrate new features.

On the home page the demo movie is presented to you in a Flash interface (provided to me as a present by my friend Colin Holgate) when you view the page using a computer, but when you access the page using an iPhone you get the same mp4 video but now presented as a Quicktime file and it plays just fine on the iPhone.

When you selected your cleaner in the original version of Clean My Screen, the last item in the picker list was “More cleaners soon…”. We put that in so the user is aware there will be updates and there will be more content in store for her.

Apple’s reviewers told us today that our application obviously wasn’t “feature complete” beacuse of that line, and was rejected because of it. We don’t agree, but there’s not much you can do as a developer. You can argue with them and then it takes even longer before your application will be in the App Store. If it ever will.

So we just swallowed our pride and removed the sentence. But boy does that picker look empty now. Only four short names in a big picker… That “More cleaner soon…” just made it look so much… better.

We submitted a new version and now the waiting game continues. Or it starts again. It’s very unclear.

Clean My Screen has been officially submitted to Apple. We hit a snag at the last moment because our final application refused to be “code signed” (Apple makes us do that so you know the application is the real thing, really made by us).

But we found a clever solution and all is well now. Better even.

Now the waiting game begins. Apple on average takes about 7 days to approve a new application, hopefully it won’t take much longer than that. After the long development we’re dying to sell Clean My Screen. Sell? No, give away! 

The first week Clean My Screen will be absolutely free. So tell all your friends to download it as soon as possible. In these dire economic times there’s not much that can beat “free”.