Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
IPad on a lazy Sunday
The great thing about the iPad is that you can use it in so many places that a laptop just wouldn't be convenient. You can practically use it all day without thinking about the battery. On this Sunday before Memorial Day, we fired up the grill, put up the portable gazebo and all relaxed and consumed content. The girls each had a book and I had my faithful iPad to read the news with Early Edition, Press Rack and other favorite apps. I even got to watch an action pack foreign film called B13 on Netflix.
Free App Round Up - May 30, 2010
The good thing about the iPad is that it runs iPhone apps too! Get your App on!
i-Vacation
Looking for ideas for your next vacation? Be inspired and informed by real travelers with similar interests as you! Interested in viewing wildlife but not sure where to go? We've compiled the best wildlife viewing destinations based on experiences shared by real travelers and WikiTravel. We've done the same for many other types of trips that our travelers have shared to help make planning your trip a little easier. Aside from finding the most popular destinations by interest, you can read about each category to get an idea of what you may expect when you get there!Current Version: 1.1
Released: 2010-03-09
Price: FREE!
Category: Travel
[ Download Now ]
KidDrNotes
KidsDrNotes also provides space to track both food and drug allergies.
KidsDrNotes knows there is one thing worse then forgetting what specialist to follow up with...your impatient child in the waiting room. KidsDrNotes has a charming farm animal game, like a see and say, to keep your child engaged even during the longest office waits. Thanks to KidsDrNotes the days of jumping on the chairs and pulling out your hair ARE OVER!
Released: 2010-05-20
Price: FREE!
Category: Productivity
[ Download Now ]
Free Drinks for iPad
Free Drinks is the best drinking application by far. It is the most customizable and user friendly application. Every single thing about Free Drinks is drink-centric.
Free Drinks Exclusive Features:
-Add any drink or edit ours!
-Keeps up with your ratings
-Send 'Drink-Mail'
-Drink Variations
-The Buzz-O-Meter
-Search by: Drink Type, Alcohol Type, Taste, Theme, Mood, Glass, Location or what ingredients(inventory) you have on hand.
-Favorites
-16 Different things you can customize
- Blood Alcohol Content Tracker
-Beer Fridge/Wine Cellar/Liquor Cabinet storage and search
Current Version: 1.0
Released: 2010-05-25
Price: $0.99
Category: Lifestyle
[ Download Now ]
TuneTweet
TuneTweet does one thing and one thing only: it allows you to post what youre listening to on youre iPhone or iPod Touch to Twitter. Each Tweet is entirely customizable, and in fact, if you decide that you actually dont want to tweet about what youre listening to, you can just use the app as a simple tool to post anything to Twitter. Also, using new capabilities in iPhone 3.0, the app allows you to navigate within your playlist.
Current Version: 1.0
Released: 2009-07-26
Price: FREE!
Category: Social Networking
[ Download Now ]
A Quick Discussion about the Apple iPad Case
Im sure this has been discussed but prob. before I joined.
Is the apple ipad case worth having ($39 bucks worth)
or are they similar, better and cheaper ones to be had, I have not looked at all just asking.
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Saturday, May 29, 2010
GrooveMaker Drum'n Bass for iPad - Special Promotion from May 28th thru June 6th, 2010
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Barnes & Noble Launches iPad eReader App - BN eReader for iPad
InformationWeek
In launching eReader for iPad Thursday, B&N is catching up with rival Amazon, which launched its Kindle app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch last month. Amazon and Apple launched their respective e-book reader applications the day the iPad was released.
While the basic functionalities of the applications are the same, B&N differentiates itself from the others by offering what it calls LendMe technology. The feature enables people to let other people borrow e-books for up to 14 days. During that time, the lender cannot access the book.Other features in eReader, include the ability to choose text and page colors based on pre-designed themes and to move quickly between portrait and landscape views. Other options include the "millions of colors" for text, pages, highlights and links; eight typefaces and five text sizes; and a variety of customizable margins and spacing options, B&N said.
"We believe our customers will appreciate the book-centric touches we've incorporated into our iPad app experience -- including some extra large text sizes, ample margins, and line lengths and spacing inspired by classic book design conventions -- along with the opportunity to fully personalize that experience to enjoy reading books whichever ways they like best," Douglas Gottlieb, VP of digital products for B&N, said in a statement.
Like applications from competitors, B&N's software synchronizes the last page read, highlights, notes and bookmarks across devices that have the application. However, feature is only available on the iPad and PC, with the iPhone and iPod Touch scheduled to be added early summer. Besides software, B&N sells its own e-reader hardware, called the Nook, which competes with the iPad and Amazon Kindle. In addition, B&N plans to sell in its stores this summer Plastic Logic's QUE, which is a larger e-reader than the Nook and targeted at businesspeople and other professionals. B&N also announced this week a partnership with digital photo-frame maker Pandigital, which plans to launch an e-reader in June. B&N has agreed to embed its e-reader software in Pandigital's Novel, giving users access to B&N's online e-book store. Primarily a bookseller, B&N is pursuing an e-book strategy that involves have its own hardware, while also partnering to give as many devices as possible access to its online store. Rivals Amazon and Borders are pursuing the same strategy.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Whistle - Makes your iPad more like a BIG iPhone than a BIG iPod Touch
Whistle is an easy-to-use phone service that you can use anywhere on your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Mac and Windows PC. Make FREE phone calls to anyone in the US, plus save on your international phone calls with our low calling rates. All you need is internet access through a wired, wifi or 3G connection! Whistle allows you to make and receive crystal-clear phone calls, whether you're at home or on the go. Download it now and start experiencing next generation phone service!
Who uses Whistle ?
Whistle doesn't quite make your iPad like a Big iPhone because it still doesn't have a camera. Without Whistle, it is still not like a big iPod Touch because the iPod Touch doesn't have Bluetooth. Face it, the iPad holds it's own as a unique handheld computer that anyone is holds it loves it.
More info to follow.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Japan Prepares for the Launch of the iPad
It's not easy to get gadget-friendly Japanese customers especially enthused about a new gizmo. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal points out, anticipation for the iPad's release in the land of the rising sun is high. As customers line up outside a Ginza Apple Store days in advance, more than a half-dozen Japanese business and technology magazines feature the iPad on their cover. What accounts for the frenzy? Daisuke Wakabayashi, writing for the Journal, names several factors.
First is the Japanese electronics industry itself. Facing infiltration by new and less expensive gadgets from the likes of Apple and Amazon, as well as the large bank roll of South Korean competitor Samsung Electronics Co., many Japanese companies have focused on improving existing devices, and less so on creating something new, so innovation like the iPad makes a big splash.
Another factor, Wakabayashi notes, is the sheer pleasure of owning a name-brand device. In Japan (and so many other parts of the world), Apple products are fun to own and show off. College student Kazuto Ishimura told the Journal, "Japanese products are very capable and powerful, but they don't have the same charm as ones made by Apple." Note that Ishimura conducted his interview while waiting in line outside that Ginza Apple Store.
There's more to Wakabayashi's article, and we suggest reading the whole thing. In the meantime, we anticipate sales reports from Japan and elsewhere as the iPad goes on sale internationally throughout the day today.
[Via MacDailyNews - http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/japans_remarkable_apple_ipad_frenzy_signals_a_sea_change/ ]
NBC & Time Warner Sticks with Flash instead of Moving to HTML5
Sources said several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won't retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
My Thoughts on the new Wired Magazine for the iiPad
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Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition Goes Live
Wired Magazine's iPad Edition Goes Live
- By Chris Anderson
- May 26, 2010 |
- 2:00 am |
- Wired June 2010
The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us. Let's just say the medium is not always the message.
Except that now it is. I'm delighted to announce that Wired's first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.
The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor's recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar crafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3.
To deliver this rich reading environment, we're using new digital publishing technology developed by Adobe. The yearlong effort, spearheaded by Wired creative director Scott Dadich, will allow us to simultaneously create both the print magazine and the enhanced digital version with the same set of authoring and design tools.
The arrival of the tablet represents a grand experiment in the future of media. Over the next few months, we'll integrate social media and offer a variety of versions and ways to subscribe in digital form. We'll learn through experimentation, and we will watch closely as our readers teach us how they want to use tablets.
There is no finish line. Wired magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.
Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief
FEATURES
Innovative features of the Wired App include:
- Every page in the issue is individually designed for optimal viewing on the iPad screen in both portrait or landscape orientation.
- Navigations from the cover, which allows readers to touch cover lines to go directly to stories giving direct access to editorial content.
- Content organized in vertical stacks rather than magazine-like spreads.
- Design cues throughout to lead reader through the issue, augmenting the scroll bar with subtle indications of more content and additional features to explore.
- Drop down Table of Contents (TOC) and Browse view (zoomed out view of stacks of content) make for easy navigation and sense of place within the issue.
- Orientation-appropriate photography offers different images taking advantage of layout changes whether in portrait or landscape mode.
- Animated 360° images show readers every side of Iron Man and let them explore the history of Mars landings.
- Unique slide shows take readers through multiple views using touch for image progression.
- Four editorial videos including an exclusive clip from Toy Story 3. All video is embedded into the app allowing for automatic load, display in HD and access without a connection.
- Music to enhance story telling, including an exclusive listen inside Trent Reznor's recording studio.
Advertising in the issue is also enhanced. Nine advertisers took advantage of premium sponsorships inWired's June digital edition, allowing them to incorporate interactivity and enhancements including 360º images, slide shows and videos. The premium advertisers include:
- GE displays a rotatable 360º image from the world's first CT scanner in HD
- An Olympus slide show highlights the advanced photo capabilities of its new PEN E-PL1
- Fidelity Investments showcases its 10 Innovations for Investors in a slide show
- HBO includes a True Blood season two recap slide show promoting the new season's June 13 premiere
- Intel, Infiniti, Nissan, Mercedes Benz, GE, and Pepsi all feature embedded HD video
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) has approved the app as a replica digital edition of the magazine. The Wired app is available now for $4.99 from the iPad App Store or athttp://www.wired.com/app. This is the third ABC-approved digital edition from Condé Nast, following GQand Vanity Fair, which are available for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.
Apple Passes Microsoft as World’s Largest Tech Company
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Apple's market capitalization officially passed Microsoft's Wednesday afternoon, making the Cupertino company, for the first time, the largest technology company in the world.
With a market cap of $241.5 billion versus Microsoft's $239.5 billion, Apple also became the second-largest company on the S&P 500, according to Standard & Poor's analyst Howard Silverblatt. At the moment, only Exxon Mobil is bigger.
Market cap is a measure of the total value of all the outstanding shares of a company, and it's a proxy for what investors think the company is worth, taking into account future earnings and future growth. As such, it's a measure of expectations, not reality: Apple's annual revenue was $42.9 billion in the most recent fiscal year, versus Microsoft's $58.4 billion. Both look puny next to Exxon Mobil's $301.5 billion in annual revenue.
Market cap is also a fickle mistress, and fluctuates wildly depending on stock price, so Apple's position as the king of the hill may be short lived.
But it's a significant milestone for a company that looked like a has-been just one decade ago.
Ten years ago, Apple was all but written off by most expert commentators. An also-ran computer company that once dominated geeks' hearts and minds with the Apple II and the Macintosh, Apple made serious missteps in the 1990s that relegated it to a tiny niche of the overall computer market, with market share in the low single digits. It was all but certain that its share would continue dwindling until the company faded away entirely, like Commodore, Atari, Tandy and dozens of other computer makers before it.
What the commentators didn't count on was the string of hits Apple would deliver over the next 10 years. Founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and removed then-CEO Gil Amelio in 1997, making himself interim CEO (and then eventually dropping the interim title).
Jobs then instituted what can now clearly been seen as a far-reaching strategy to consolidate and simplify Apple's product line, while gradually leveraging the company's strengths (ease of use, consumer-friendly branding, attractive design, and high margins) to expand into new areas of consumer technology.
Jobs also carefully created a new company culture, one that's centered on innovation, control and secrecy. That approach has alienated many people — and runs counter to Silicon Valley received wisdom about the value of openness and sharing — but the proof is in the pudding. With a CEO of Jobs' caliber, at least, that kind of top-down control works.
This list of product rollouts tells the story:
- iMac (Bondi Blue) – 1998
- iBook (clamshell) – 1999
- iPod with scroll wheel – 2001
- Mac OS X – 2001
- iTunes Store – 2003
- MacBook (switch to Intel) – 2006
- iPhone – 2007
- App Store + iPhone SDK – 2008
- iPad – 2010
By 2010, Apple had firmly established its dominance (in mindshare and innovation, if not in absolute numbers) in three areas: computers, MP3 players and smartphones; the company also controls an increasingly large marketplace for music, video and applications with iTunes, which counts its users in the hundreds of millions and has served more than 10 billion songs, 200 million TV shows, 2 million films and 3 billion apps. Apple's now the largest distributor of music in the United States with 26.7 percent market share, according to a Billboard analysis.
The recent introduction of the iPad — Apple claims over a million have been sold so far — may not move the needle much in terms of revenue, but it's probably what pushed the company's stock over the top. Early numbers of 200,000 sales per week suggest that Apple's iPad is on track to outsell the Mac.
The iPad's launch epitomized the Apple way: It's a beautifully designed, precisely engineered piece of hardware, based on a software and apps platform largely controlled by Apple, and introduced through a carefully orchestrated marketing program that encompassed every detail of public relations, advertising and even retail presentation.
As a result, the iPad captured the imagination of the press and of investors worldwide, and has surely helped propel the company's stock price to its current heights.
The stuff of business school case studies, to be sure. But it's a feat that few companies have been able to pull off.
By Dylan F. Tweney
How Apple could slay Google at WWDC 2010
May 26th, 2010
Daniel Eran Dilger
Apple is a company with thick skin. It takes an awful lot of prodding to rile the company or even provoke a response from its executives. Those jerking the company's chain better hope this resilience to their attacks continues, because a single response from Apple at WWDC could wipe out Google and the bloggers that support it. Here's how.
.When Steve Jobs talks, people listen
On the rare occasions that Apple does respond to an issue, it does so in a brutally open and devastating way, such as when Jobs lambasted the idiot chatter about music and DRM with clear cut reality, or his more recent donkey punch delivered to Adobe's Flash.
Jobs is also famous for succinctly explaining what he thinks about technologies or specific approaches to design, such as his castigation of the mini keyboards covering a third of the face of smartphones or mouse or stylus-based interfaces in the modern era of mobile multitouch devices.
Pundits and competitors, from John Dvorak to the CEOs of Palm and RIM, spent years explaining why Jobs was wrong about all this until meekly changing their collective tunes once they realized that it was them, and not Jobs, who had all the trouble seeing plain reality.
Thoughts on Music
Thoughts on Flash
Better wrong than in the way
The only thing worse that doubting Jobs is competing directly against him. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer was probably a little embarrassed to have been so wrong about smartphones back in 2007, but he's no doubt far more upset that his company was completely run out of the smartphone business by Jobs' iPhone, even as it ineffectually tried to counter the iPod with its Zune, and after having been emasculated in the area of media formats by Jobs' iTunes+QuickTime and Apple's support for open codecs like the ISO's MPEG AAC and H.264 in opposition to Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio/Video.
Similarly, while it was certainly humbling in retrospect for Palm's former CEO to have said Apple was "not going to walk in" and immediately succeed in the competitive smartphone market back in 2007, it's far more humbling for him to have to watch as Palm's decade of experience that he touted be erased as irrelevant by Apple's first strike into the smartphone business.
I'll also bet that Verizon's VP Jim Gerace, who told the media "we said no" to the iPhone back in 2007 because Jobs wanted too much control over hardware and service support and software bundling and branding (among other issues) is now wishing his team had stuck it out on the negotiating table three years and billions of dollars ago.
Myth 8: iPhone will lose out to Steve Ballmer's Windows Mobile 7 in 2010
Why Apple's Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre
How Apple could tear bloggers and Google a new one
These days, Apple's primary competitors have all fallen down on their knees while clutching their gutted bellies. Nobody is talking about Microsoft anymore, apart from stories about how the company is letting go of its most poorly performing star executives for doing so poorly against Apple in the area of consumer electronics.
Other big competitors from Sony to Nokia, once considered the major powers in consumer electronics and mobile devices, are in a similar state of panic as they work, not to make a comeback against Apple, but to simply survive as entities. Even Nintendo is worried about losing its game to Apple, something that nobody has really rivaled before. Apple has outgrown both HP and Dell in terms of value and growth.
Who is left? Google, the paid search giant that backers hope will beat Apple in hardware and software platforms… despite Google being neither a hardware vendor (nor marketer nor retailer nor support provider) nor having any real experience in managing a software platform for consumers. Fans of Google suggest that the company will take on Apple by acquiring a competing version of everything Apple has built over the last decade: iTunes, a mobile platform, hardware expertise, user interface design savvy, development tools, and a user base.
The problem is, they don't also foresee that Apple could compete against Google in its own home territory of ads. When Apple entered the mobile ad network business by acquiring Quattro, it was taking a page right out of Google's vaunted playbook: buy your way into a market. But Apple didn't just make a speculative purchase; it had a plan.
Apple's iAd program appears set to bring far more interesting (for users) and valuable (for developers) and rewarding (for advertisers) advertising to the mobile arena. That's a novel strategy Google didn't happen upon on its own. Google is still using 1990s style ad-click banners that induce or force users to leave developers' apps and take them to external web ads. That doesn't even work very well on the web; its far more annoying on a mobile device.
Reality Check: Nokia's iPad patent infringement headlines
iPhone 2.0 SDK: Video Games to Rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
iAd: Is Apple taking mobile ads in a new direction?
Oh but wait, there's more
While Apple's iAd strategy shows that the company can and will take on competitors and can potentially take far more than it gives up, there's also another potential strike Apple could unleash upon Google and its blogger advocate groupies. Apple could kill web ads.
Apple has over 50% of the mobile web market, and people have already postulated that the new iPhone OS 4 SDK's restrictions on forwarding private user data to third parties could deliver a devastating blow to the current mobile ad market. However, the current ad market for mobile devices is rather small.
Imagine what could happen if Apple introduced Safari 5 at WWDC with support for a plugin API (as sort of postulated, teased, hinted or simply hoped for by John Gruber this week), and then demonstrated this new plugin architecture with a free, bundled plugin that blocked web ads. This would be a bit like Tivo for the web, except far easier to do in a way that web advertisers would notice.
Web blocking plugins are common on Firefox and Chrome, and already exist for Safari (using undocumented or deprecated APIs like SIMBL/InputManager). However, no major browser vendor, and certainly no major platform vendor, has ever shipped their browser with an ad-block plugin, and certainly not one that was activated by default.
One might think that it could have occurred to Microsoft that doing this in Internet Explorer could have killed off Google some time ago, back before IE's market share began dropping below the level of full critical mass. Apple's share of the desktop web browser market is a tiny sliver below 5%. But that 5% is extremely visible on the Mac, and were Apple to promote Safari as not just fast, but ad free, it would likely blaze deeper into the Windows world, just as Firefox and Chrome have.
Daring Fireball: Safari extension API suggestion
Hitting Google where it counts.
Google currently pays Apple hundreds of millions of dollars to capture the audience of Safari Mac and iPhone users performing search queries (just as it singlehandedly also supports Firefox development the same way). Apple could continue to get this revenue (because paid search ad placement is the most valuable thing to Google) while also stripping Google of its display advertising revenue via an ad-block plugin.
This would increasingly bleed Google of both ad reach and revenue in the area of display ads on the web, which are already not all that profitable. Google's only recourse would be to match this capability in Chrome and Chrome OS and Android, but this would be a painful way to try to compete with Safari's ad-free experience. If Microsoft were to realize what was going on, it could match Apple's efforts, resulting in Google's ad monopoly over the web simply being ignored to death by web users.
The casualties to this siege on Google's adware web would be the content publishers who are monetized by Google's ads. These are also the bloggers who are ripping Apple apart, so why not starve them out of business? After all, Apple now has an alternative business model to the ad supported web: native apps on the iPhone and iPad. It could also launch desktop, web-based apps within Safari that allow companies to develop HTML5 content monetized by subscription or by App Store purchase.
This would rid the web of ads and turn content into a paid model much like what existed before the web destroyed print, periodicals and newspapers with low quality content framed by copious amounts of irritating, flashing ads that pay just enough to perpetuate themselves and starve out good content, but not enough to actually fund high quality writing, reporting and other content.
Web ads are a noxious weed choking the intelligence and sophistication out of our society's media, and Google is making its massive fortunes delivering this scourge. Do no evil? How ridiculous, that's Google's core competency!
Why Apple Plays God with the iPhone SDK
Apple vs Google: it's all about who pays
Other casualties of the war on ads
While content creators (a group that includes yours truly) would simply have to adapt to a paid subscriber model to survive, other casualties would find the death of Google's ad support far more destructive. This group includes "Search Engine Optimizers," who create fake websites that Google happily monetizes with its ads.
It also includes groups that scrape content from legitimate sites and plagiarize their content with either no attribution or a meaningless little link that directs people back to the original item (but doesn't). Google puts lots of ads on those pages too, so it has a financial interest in not stopping this practice. That's just part of the evil Google does without anyone ever pointing it out. Google cultivates an adware pandemic.
There's lots of other spamming and fraudulent activity that Google facilitates through its free Gmail accounts linked to ad supported websites that generate clicks through a mess of highly ranked SEO adware garbage that Google says it doesn't like but ultimately benefits from as the merchant of that adware. Erasing all those ads right at the browser would dry up not just Google's display ads but wipe out the business model supporting all those fraud sites and spamblogs.
Of course, the other big casualty of a war on web ads would be Adobe as the vendor of Flash, the preferred platform of web ads. I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind killing both birds with one stone.
Would this be Apple's biggest accomplishment?
The big question here is: does Apple have the balls to revolutionize the web and return the world's journalism and entertainment to a paid premium model (like magazines and books and newspapers and HBO) rather than an adware garbage model?
The company has already established a paid model for music, movies, TV, iPhone and iPad apps, audiobooks, and iBooks. It also supports the distribution of entirely free content such as podcasts, iTunes U, free iBooks, free apps and so on.
The next step for Apple is simply cutting the adware jugular that feeds Google's voracious appetite for acquisitions and fuels the world's SEO spammers and their fraud sites and spamblogs. If the company could get that done, Jobs' iPad would become the second most important thing the man has ever accomplished.
Apple: fix the web. Kill the ads. Everyone will follow, even the whiny bloggers.
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