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...

TweetDeck, a powerful desktop Twitter client application, is pushing hard for the top spot of Twitter clients on the iPad.  Today, when you access the TweetDeck website you are greeted to a large image of two iPads running the application and it looks gorgeous. I have been TweetDeck user on the desktop almost from the moment I started using Twitter, but even though there is a version of the application for the iPhone, I was seduced away by its competitors in that space.  It seemed to me that TweetDeck’s major strengths resided in how it organized and displayed information for you, using a large...

A pair of university students are raising the bar of what note taking should be like on the iPad with an application called smartNote.  These fellows are designing an application that matches their needs for their current classes which should provide them with a decent insight on what might prove to be useful, or not. Taking notes seems to be a natural consideration when you think of the iPad as it seems like the kind of device you would want to carry around from class to class with its light weight, Internet access capabilities, eBook readers and productivity applications.  So, if you are going to...

As the moment you will finally be able to pick up your very own iPad and take it for a spin, the new version of iTunes has started indicating applications that have iPad specific versions.  I had just gone into the store to see what possible listings of other small bits of information about the new iPad applications I could stumble upon when I noticed that it was identifying a large number of updates for my Apps. I decided to take the time to have a quick look and perhaps start the download of the new versions of my applications.  My surprise was total when I noticed that the list of Apps was divided...

I’m sure that a couple of months after the iPad’s actual release, we will have so many note taking applications that we will be able to make list of which are better for what kind of activity.  To me it just seems like a natural function for a device with the form factor of an iPad and it seems that I’m not the only one to think so. In addition to plain text notes which you can handle with the iPad’s built-in Notes application, you will be able to create notes that include images and drawings with applications such as SketchPad, which you can see in the screen shot in this post...

…at least some of them do.  On a post on The  Next Web, Kim Heras, makes a statement that Apple is mistreating its international developers  because the iPad will only be available on some markets about a month after it is available in the US. He makes his point with the example of an Australian game developer that he is quick to add hasn’t really complained about it, but he feels that since they’ve sold 2 million copies of a game at $0.99, they’ve made Apple $600,000, so Apple could afford to give them special treatment and ship them some iPads. While I won’t say...

Recently I wrote a post about how the iPad might herald the end of software retail as we know it.  As an example I pointed to Bodega, a company that is aiming to bring the same kind of buying experience of the AppStore to Mac users. Today,  a post by Jim Dalrymple announced that the Bodega AppStore has left beta testing and is now fully open for business.  The whole idea is quite compelling and if the store works as seamless as Apple’s AppStore does on the iPhone this could a proposition that is difficult for users to resist. (Supposing they wanted to.) How long will it be until this moves...

In an email sent out to developers, Apple informed that it had started accepting submissions for iPad applications.  This announcement started a flurry of good humored puns flying around on Twitter.  One of the most interesting one I noticed was inviting everyone to get their super sized bear drinking simulations ready for submission. I’m quite curious to see what developers have come up in the short time since Apple introduced the iPad to the world.  As much as some people still seem to think that the iPad is just a super sized iPod, the screen size difference is a huge difference and just...