Tag Archives | Apple iPad

The WWDC Keynote is a Go–and It’s About Software

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 31, 2011 at 11:04 am

We pretty much knew this already, but now it’s official: Apple’s WWDC event next week will begin with a keynote on Monday. The big news at the keynote will be OS X 10.7 Lion. And the next version of iOS. “And iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering.” Steve Jobs will host the keynote. (Okay, that part we didn’t know.)

Last week, one site said that it had learned that Apple’s UK PR team was urging journalists over there to make the trek to San Francisco for the event. That site came to the “obvious conclusion” that Apple must have been planning to announce the next iPhone at the keynote. I never understood what was so obvious about that conclusion. New hardware is neat, but the biggest opportunity for any phone or tablet platform to make great leaps forward lies in in its software and services. So WWDC has the opportunity to be a huge deal even if not a single new device is announced.

I’ll have more thoughts between now and Monday morning, but in the meantime: What features would you like to see in Lion, the next iOS, and/or iCloud?

One comment

iChromy: An Alternative iPad Browser With Chrome Envy

Posted by Jared Newman on May 26, 2011 at 10:17 am

Google’s not bringing the Chrome web browser to the iPad anytime soon, if ever, so app maker Diigo is trying to fill the void with iChromy.

The free alternative iPad browser, which launches in the App Store today, mimics the Chrome aesthetic. Tabs appear at the top of the screen, and a single bar handles web addresses and searches, just like Chrome’s omnibar. There’s even a star-shaped bookmark button to the right of the URL bar, just like Chrome.

Chrome flattery aside, iChromy’s greatest asset is stability. When tab overload threatens to crash the browser, iChromy quietly shifts memory away from background tabs that you haven’t opened in a while. These pages reload when you access them again, but it’s a small price to pay for having lots of open tabs with minimal crashes. I’ve been playing with a preview version of iChromy on an original iPad for a few days, and it’s far better at avoiding crashes than my previous iPad browser of choice, Atomic Web Browser.

Continue Reading →

11 comments

The Truth About Square

Posted by Ed Oswald on May 23, 2011 at 9:40 pm

There’s lots of talk today on mobile payment processor Square’s outstanding results. 500,000 readers shipped, 1 million transactions so far this month, $3 million in transactions per day.

That’s impressive. There really is a real need out there for the everyday consumer to have a method to accept good old plastic. I can tell you personally that I rarely carry cash anymore: it’s just so much simpler to swipe.

Square’s rates aren’t horrible (although not great either): 2.75% for each swiped card, or 3.5% plus 15 cents for manually entered ones. So its not surprising they’re doing well.

Continue Reading →

36 comments

WordPress for iOS Gets a Big Update; Basics Still Missing

Posted by Jared Newman on May 18, 2011 at 5:00 pm

In the past, I’ve said some nasty things about the WordPress iPad app. For the tasks I needed to do here and on other blogs — add and resize images, format text and link like crazy — the app’s barebones approach was simply inadequate. The app was also pretty buggy.

Today, WordPress released a big update to the app for all iOS devices. Most of the bugs are apparently gone, and there are some new features, including a quick photo button for camera-equipped devices, access to stats and support for 10 new languages.

Unfortunately, WordPress’ latest app update is still missing major features that no blogging tool should be without. That means I can’t use it for anything but rough drafts.
Continue Reading →

6 comments

At Last, Slacker Gets On-Demand Music (and a Neat iPad App)

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 17, 2011 at 2:13 am

Way back in March of 2010, nifty Internet radio service Slacker began demoing features for on-demand listening, putting it more squarely in competition with Rhapsody, Napster, and other all-you-can-eat subscription services. Today, it’s finally launching the service. It’s available in its browser-based version and iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and BlackBerry versions–and also in a new iPad version.

Continue Reading →

No comments

SketchBook Pro 2.0: Art on the iPad, Done Even Better

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 9, 2011 at 12:28 am

The iPad is blessed with several excellent apps for drawing and painting using tools that mimic the look of real art supplies. Of the ones I’ve tried, my favorite is Autodesk’s SketchBook Pro–and it just got an extremely meaty upgrade to version 2.0.

The user interface is much improved over the original version that shipped the same day as the first iPad–for instance, you can pin toolbars to the sides of the screen. On the iPad 2, it supports a high-resolution 2048-by-1536 canvas. You can shuttle files back and forth using Dropbox. And while I haven’t tried this yet, Autodesk says the app is better at sharing images with the Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android versions of the program.

There’s also a SketchBook Store that lets you download and install additional drawing tools, such as fancy pencils. (So far, all its offerings are free.)

The iPad isn’t my dream digital art device, mostly because its technology doesn’t allow for anyone to build a pointy, pressure-sensitive stylus of the sort you can use with a Wacom tablet. Even so, once you get the hang of drawing with one of the blunt, non-pressure-sensitive styluses that are available–I like this one–it’s addictive. And SketchBook Pro, like many iPad apps, is a bizarrely good value–it’s $4.99, vs. $79.99 for the Windows/Mac desktop version. If you like to draw and have an iPad, you need this software.

4 comments

FileMaker’s iOS Databases Get Printing, Charting, and Signatures

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2011 at 11:11 pm

FileMaker Inc.’s FileMaker Go–which brings databases created with the Windows and OS X versions of FileMaker to iOS devices–just got a bit more powerful.

As before, the new 1.2 versions for iPhone and iPad aren’t fully standalone apps: You use it to view and edit databases created with full-blown Filemaker Pro, and can access databases both by syncing them onto the device and by connecting remotely. (That’s a different approach from FileMaker’s more consumery Bento database apps for iPhone and iPad, which can be used in conjunction with the Mac version or on their own.)

You can now use Apple’s AirPrint to print wirelessly to recent HP printers. Charts–a feature introduced in last year’s FileMaker Pro 11–can be viewed, updated, and edited. And you can capture signatures into FileMaker Go on an iPhone or iPad, and then transfer them back into a FileMaker Pro database. (The FileMaker folks say that Go is often used to automate processes that would otherwise be handled with paper and pen.)

Continue Reading →

2 comments

Your iPhone Logs Where You’ve Been. Why?

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 20, 2011 at 8:43 am

Where have you been lately? If you’ve got an iPhone or a 3G iPad, it knows. And two researchers have discovered that these devices store a record of your locations in an unencrypted file that gets backed up to your computer.

The researchers says that the information seems to be based on cell-phone tower triangulation, not GPS. They’re going to discuss what they’ve found at today’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. They’ve also released an open-source Mac application that maps out information from the file. That’s data for the iPad 2 I’ve been using at right, correctly showing that it’s been all around the Bay Area and also visited Austin, Texas.

Continue Reading →

8 comments