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Microsoft’s My Documents Folder Makes Triumphant Return – On iPad

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Earlier today, I was reading Infoworld’s article, The iPad questions Apple won’t answer. The first question they listed was “Can you save and transfer documents to the iPad?”, and their assumed answer was “No”; they suggested that the only way to do this would be to open a document from an email message.
I read that [...]

Top 5 Things To Check Out at Macworld 2010

Macworld 2010 opens today. It is the 25th annual gathering of Mac users. That’s right, 25 years!
But thanks to the absence of Apple this year, this “Mecca for Mac Heads” may be the last. So check it out while you can.

The show runs for 5 days. The Expo showfloor opens on Thursday at noon.
For the [...]

Opinion: MacBook, or iMac + iPad?

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The announcement of the iPad has done a lot of things: it’s stoked up excitement in the Mac using community, it’s got a bunch of developers feverishly coding exciting new stuff, and it’s got retailers and cell phone companies the world over drooling over the money they can make from it.
And it’s also somewhat upset [...]

In Depth: 30 Days with the Nexus One

It’s been a month since my review of Google’s “SuperPhone”, the Nexus One. Since that time, we’ve surfed, updated facebook, navigated, called, played endless hands of cribbage and even tried to freeze it to death on a trip to Dayton Ohio. Follow me after the jump to find out does the “SuperPhone” stand the [...]

Review: Simple, Sorta-Augmented Reality Planetarium App Has Me Seeing Stars

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There’s nothing better than gazing up at the stars on a night out. For $3, Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy, using sorta-augmented reality, lets the astronomically impaired among us impress our dates.

The app uses the iPhone’s accelerometer, compass and level — just not the camera (which means it works on an iPod Touch too) — to superimpose a starmap over an illustrated backdrop of the sky. Move the iPhone slowly in any direction, and the screen displays what you should be looking at. Sometimes it works smoothly, sometimes the screen takes a while to respond; moving more slowly seems to help. This mode is also searchable, making it easy to find, say, the North Star.

But besides the above-mentioned planetarium mode, the app is packed with other tools. There’s a detailed, emailable “Tonight’s Sky” page that tells you what you might see — without which we would have missed an amazing fireball during the recent Leonid shower; a moon-phases calendar; an astronomical-events news feed, a diagram of the planet’s current positions, and more.

All this presented in a theme that looks vaguely Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are a bunch of virtual-planetarium type apps out, but this certainly one of the prettiest and easiest to use. And at thee bucks, it’s a steal.

★★★★☆ 


Company: Craic Design

List Price: $2.99

Compatible: iPhone/iPod Touch; full movement supported on 3GS, other models support up-down motion only

Verdict: Scaled-down and easy-to-use, this is a sky-watching app for those of us without PhDs in astronomy.

Buy Now: Rated 4+; App Store

About the author

Eli Milchman When he was eight, Eli Milchman came home from frolicking in the Veld one day and was given an Atari 400. Since then, his fascination with technology has made him an intrepid early adopter of whatever charming new contraption crosses his path. He calls San Francisco home, where he works as a journalist and photographer. Eli has contributed to the pages of Wired.com and BIKE Magazine, among others.

Email the author | Read more posts by Eli Milchman.

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