Like many others on the West Coast of the US, I woke up at the unreasonably early hour of 05:30 this morning to place my pre-order for the iPad. I wasn't planning on waking up so early, but my internal alarm clock had other ideas. I ordered two iPads — the Wi-Fi-only model for myself, and the 3G model for my wife. Plus most of the accessories.

Anyway, I (and others) noticed that Apple has just added more information on the iPad product pages. One change of particular interest to me is that they've changed the mute switch on the side of the iPad (above the volume rocker) to a screen rotation lock switch:

I think this is a great change. The mute switch is very useful on an iPhone, to easily switch to vibrate mode while watching movies and such, but would be much less useful on an iPad. It would be nice if they made it a setting, so people could opt to use the switch for rotation lock or mute (like the home button can be configured), but rotation lock is a more sensible default setting.

This particularly interests me as my new iPhone app, Tweeps (an app to easily manage your Twitter accounts) includes a software-based rotation lock feature, as shown in the following looping movie. I'm about to start adapting it to native iPad support, and was thinking about how I'd adapt the rotation lock feature... and now I have an answer: I should just remove it in the iPad edition. It'll still remain very useful on the iPhone edition, though.

I'm fine with that — having a system-wide setting that is easily accessible is much better than individual apps having to implement their own solutions. Though I must admit, part of me is a little sad... I'm proud of my implementation.