Since the iPad was first introduced people have been fascinated by the possibility of using them for taking notes.  The size and weight of the iPad makes it a great option for carrying around the office and into meetings.  Personally, I’ve always been interested in this aspect of the iPad and when I ran across a note taking application called Chapters I was immediately interested  in testing. Chapters seems specially well suited for taking notes for which a chronology is important.  The application gives special attention to the date in which a note is created and they are listed in...

An application called iMockups came recently to my attention as I was going over the drawing and diagramming tools available for the iPad.  This is an interesting application that is designed to let you quickly create sketches of interfaces for Web, iPhone and iPad applications. While I hadn’t really considered it before, the iPad does seem like a good option for conducting a one on one session for doing an early application sketch along with an application user.  In fact Endloop Systems, the creators of iMockups position it exactly as a tool for quickly creating the first rough sketches of...

Recently I published a post commenting on the fact that Flipboard was an interesting App to check out, if you were able to.  As the application was released there was such an influx of people downloading it and wanting to use it that their servers were overwhelmed.  At that point I had watched their demo video, but had not yet been able to try out the App. Now, they seem to have gotten things under control, even though you need to go through a registration process that lets them have better control on the number of people putting demand on their  back-end services. A couple of days ago I finally...

About two days ago people started talking about Flipboard. Really talking a lot.  So much so that many people, including me, have found it very hard to try it out.   Just last night I noticed a tweet from the other side of the planet in which the editor of readwriteweb.com commented that he too couldn’t try it because Flipboard was over capacity. This problem should give you an indication of just how interesting a concept Flipboard really is.  In short, Flipboard collects information from your Twitter and Facebook (other Social Networks may be supported) feeds and uses it to bring all the...

Over the past week I’ve been trying out Osfoora HD, a Twitter client of which I had never heard of until I pretty much stumbled on it in the App Store. If you are in a similar situation read on as it turned out that this app is really interesting. In the past I have used several different Twitter clients and I tried a couple of them out in the iPad but none gave me as good an experience as Osfoora HD.  At first look it seems a bit like a cross between Twitterrific and TweetDeck, but it feels like an improved version of what this cross would look like. Let’s start from the beginning, with...

Apple has made available on the App Store its new retail store application.  The application is designed for the iPhone but runs on the iPad. In fact I grabbed some screen shots using the iPad.  The application allows you to place orders for all the products you expect to find in the Apple store and has a nice feel to it, being very similar in functionality to the App Store itself, as you would expect. I experimented with placing an order for an iPad and it offers you the option of adding services such as MobileMe or AppleCare to the purchase, while making it very easy to skip over the offering with...

The App Store is now showing more than 10,000 apps specifically for the iPad.  That is an impressive mark after just two and a half months since the device was first released.  This is all the more impressive because iPad apps tend to be more complex and extensive in functionalities than their iPhone and iPod siblings. It is just natural that having much more screen area users would expect more of the applications and that developers would find ways to explore it.  Many iPad applications are much closer  to desktop applications to what you would expect and be used to on the iPhone or iPod, as they...

During his opening keynote at WWDC 2010, Steve Jobs briefly showed the Pulse news reader as one of the applications available for the iPad, on the App Store.  On the same day the application was taken down from the App Store due to a complaint from the Times Company, owner of the New York Times (NYT). Originally I found out about this through Mike Cane’s irate rumblings in his iPadTest blog.  While he is always quite colorful in his writing, he has the great virtue of being direct and to the point.  This was stupid. I started to write this post much earlier when I first learned that the New...

Wired Magazine made its debut on the iPad recently and seems to have done well for itself.  With 24,000 units sold and downloaded in the first 24 hours, things are looking good for Wired.  But, are they really? There is another number about the magazine that is quite troubling: 527.  The first issue of Wired for the iPad has a wopping 527 MBs of size.   So what?  Well, that is a lot of megabytes for a single magazine issue, specially when you consider it relative to the storage space of a base model iPad: 16 GB. If all magazines were to have similar size a base model iPad would only be able to...

Skype for iPhone 2.0 is out and you can now finally make calls over a 3G connection.  While this is great news, it comes at a price, literally.  Skype-to-Skype calls over the 3G network will only be free until the end of August 2010.  After that, there will be a monthly fee that will need to paid in order to be able to place these calls. So, Skype 2.0 isn’t all good news.  Skype-to-Skype calls have always been free, with Skype charging for calls ending on a mobile or fixed line phone.  Why should there be a charge that will apply specifically to calls placed over the 3G connection is...

Pianist Lang Lang surprised his audience in a San Francisco concert when he performed the encore on his iPad.  He used the Magic Piano iPad application from Smule in the performance. While I had seen this application before and knew that it was a serious music application, not only a toy, it had never crossed my mind that a professional pianist would use it in a concert.  I don’t know why, as almost all music these days has at least a couple of electronic instruments playing. I guess we do live in interesting times for every one. *Images: Smule Source: The Huffington Post ...

Last night I wrote a quick post about Opera Mini having been approved for the iPhone and my curiosity about when it would come to the iPad.  On the day after I’m still excited about the fact that Apple allowed a competing browser on the iPhone, but I’m quite disappointed with the browsing experience offered by the application. The fact that Apple has allowed an application which competes with a built-in function of the device, something which was expressly forbidden, seems quite positive, specially at a moment when the company is being criticized for their moves to remove Flash from the...

A coffee shop in San Francisco called Sightglass Coffee Shop has just deployed an iPad as its point of sale (POS) terminal.  The device is running the Square payment system and is inserted into a custom made wooden swiveling stand which is shown in the picture in this post. Interestingly the website for the payment system had exactly this coffee shop’s system front and center in their home page, as I was writing this post.. A credit card reader is attached to the iPad through the headphones jack on the top.  You can see the white rectangular shape on the upper left corner of the iPad in the...

It seems that the users of Mac version of iWork were in for a nasty surprise with iWork for the iPad.  The applications while generally considered quite powerful by reviewers do not support the full range of features available in their desktop siblings.  The result?  Documents that are edited in the iPad and synched back to the Mac loose some of their original formatting, angering users. I can understand how someone would be angered by loosing the result of hours of work in formatting a long document or presentation and I can also understand how this wasn’t picked up sooner in reviews.  Most...

Today I stumbled upon what looks like a very interesting application for taking down course notes on the iPad.   Its called CourseNotes and it seems specially designed for the purpose of being used in an academic environment, as the name would imply.  The interface is seems very well thought out and easy to use.  One of the things that struck me on watching the demo video was that the interface seemed uncluttered and practical to use, making a distinction between what are regular notes and notes for an assignment which is due on a particular date. The demonstration video is quite interesting though...