iPad apps - page 20

Quick! If you have any need for an iOS screen-recording app, and you don’t mind wasting $2, then go download Display Recorder right now. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.

I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.

What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.

Writing Kit, every iPad-toting bloggers’ best friend, just got a small but significant update to v3.3. In addition to bug fixes (although not all of them) and some nice interface tweaks (sharing destinations now have service icons to help identify them quickly), the app now has support for URL schemes, letting other apps interact with it.

The Kindle app has been updated to – supposedly – improve the reading experience on the iPad, and to add support for books with pictures: essentially kids books and graphic novels. And while the second is welcome the first – -to my eyes – actually looks worse.

When the iPad launched, there was an inexplicable lack of a couple of core Apple-made apps. There was no Clock, no Weather app and (thankfully) no Stocks. Now, Clocks has been added to the iPad in iOS6, and weather is also in there – kinda.

Tyype, a new ultra-simple text-editing app for the iPad, could point the way to better text manipulation in iOS 6, due to be announced today at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco. And while we don’t think for a moment that Tyype’s gestures will make actually be in the new OS, it certainly shows that not only is Apple’s way not the sole way to do things, it isn’t even the best way.

Noteshelf — the best writing and scrawling app available for the iPad — has at last gotten a Retina update for the new iPad. And boy was it worth the wait.

If the actual Alien Sky app is as good as this awesome teaser video, then it deserves to be a sell-out success. Who doesn’t love pictures of planets married to dramatic, movie-score music?

Sadly, it might end up just being a little tacky. Like a nightclub after the house lights are switched on, take away the spectacular soundtrack and all you’re left with is an app that lets you add planets, more planets, planets with rings and lens flare to your photos — it’ll get old and tawdry pretty fast.

I do like the lens-flare aspect, though. And for this, I would probably download the Alien Sky developer’s existing app, aptly named LensFlare.

Via: iPhoneography

Many of you will have read the above headline and thought “Meh. Whatever.” And yet here you are, still reading. Well, if you got this far, here’s the reward. Office2 HD, the MS Office-compatible suite for the iPad, has just gotten support for Track Changes and comments. This is big because there is no other software on the iPad that does this. Not even Apple’s own Pages.

Good news for fans of the popular Sparrow Mac/iPhone email client: the app is coming to the iPad. The makers of Sparrow have posted a new teaser page for their iPad app with the tagline, “We are preparing something bigger.”

Everyone is encouraged to enter their email and signup to know when the app will be released. No other details have been provided about the app. A jailbreak tweak

Sparrow caused quite the stir recently when it announced that it would have to charge users for push notifications on the iPhone. Sparrow is available in the Mac App Store for $10 and on the iPhone for $3.

Thanks: Matt

There are a few record player simulation apps for the iPad, but attention to detail and awesome graphics may make Vinyl Tap the best. And better still, it comes with not one but two turntables, with more promised in future updates.

Along with Instapaper, the iPad gets another big app update today. Comic Zeal — long my favorite comic-book reader — has gotten Retina support for the new iPad, along with a few interface tweaks which makes organizing your comics easier and sometimes a little less confusing.

Instapaper just got yet another update (developer Marco Arment seems to be on roll these last couple of months) and it brings a very neat new feature – when you arrive at any chosen location, Instapaper will automatically update your articles in the background. This should mean that never again will you be without your latest saved articles when you rush of to catch a bus.

If you’ve ever wanted to build apps on the iPad, then keep reading, because we’ve searched high and low for a solid iPad development course…and we’ve finally found a great match. Cult of Mac Deals is offering an informative iPad programming video course is amped up with more than 9.5 valuable hours of iPad development training.

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DC Copy is a new app that does one thing. It lets you copy your photos and videos to your iPhone’s camera roll via iTunes? "What?!" I hear you shout. "We can do that already!"

Well, yes, you kinda can, but it’s a testament to the true horror of using iTunes that this app exists at all, and that — furthermore — you’ll probably be downloading it by the end of this short post.

Echoing a report from last week, the The Daily has followed up its original scoop by saying that Microsoft will launch Office for iPad on November 10th, 2012. The Daily originally leaked images of the iPad app, but Microsoft denied the report by saying that it was “based on inaccurate rumors and speculation.”

Today The Daily gives a specific launch date for Office on the iPad. According to the report, the app is in the “hands of a usability team” at Microsoft and will be submitted to the App Store soon.

iStorage 2 in action

IStorage 2 is the coolest iPad file manager I have yet seen. It has a bunch of missing parts, and a few UI weirdnesses, but this DropBox-and-iCloud-connecting app uses the iPad’s touch interface and graphical horsepower to bring us the iPad file manager we always wanted.

Ever notice that Instapaper never seems to switch off your iPad or iPhone’s display while you’re reading, no matter how long you get distracted while reading, nor how slowly you read a page, whereas iBooks and Kindle regularly go dark if you don’t keep up a good pace? No? That’s because you’re not supposed to, even though Instapaper developer Marco Arment spend quite a lot of effort tweaking the app to do it.

Lightroom-using iPad owners, get ready for some good news: Photosmith 2 has just launched a few hours early, and is just as amazing an update as we hoped it would be.

Photosmith is a combination of iPad app and Lightroom plugin (Mac or PC) which will sync photos between the two machines, and let you edit metadata, add keywords and otherwise triage your photos on your iPad before sending them off to Lightroom for editing.

V2 adds batch tagging, two-way sync (for sending photos from your Mac to the iPad), smart groups, metadata presets and a lot more. A full review will follow, but our first impressions are below.

One of the first things about the iPad that caught people’s attention was the touch screen, and it goes without saying that some of the first apps to start taking advantage of that touch screen were handwriting/note taking apps. Apps that let you write, draw, sketch—-and sometimes type–notes on your iPad. Something that combined technology with the age-old practice of scribbling notes on paper.

Since there are so many apps to choose from, and I’ve tried virtually all of them over the past couple years, I thought I’d give you a jump start on switching to virtual paper with my top 5 favourite note taking apps.

Panic, the company behind popular Mac app Coda, has announced the second major version of its prized web development tool. Coda 2 for Mac will launch on May 24th alongside a new app for the iPad called Diet Coda. Version 2.0 of Coda is “better at everything,” according to Panic, and Diet Coda will allow you to preview your code live on the iPad as you write on the Mac. The iPad app will also let you make quick edits to your code on the go.

I write a ton on my iPad these days, which lets me work wherever I like (usually in bed) and concentrate way better than I can working on my giant-screened iMac. Thanks to our complex blogging back end here at Cult of Mac, it’s still easier to add pictures and other bits and pieces with the Mac, but the writing part is so much better on the iPad that I try to do it as often as I can.

I figured I’d show you a few of the apps I used. Below you’ll find my favorite writing apps for the iPad.

If you’re confused by iPhoto for iOS, then you’re not alone. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the cluttered and complex interface. There is light at the end of this long and painful tunnel, though, in the form of a very powerful photo cataloging and editing app. And a new book, called Hello iPhoto for iPad & iPhone, will help you get there.

Inkflow is a new handwriting and drawing app for the iPad and iPhone, and it has one standout feature: you can select, move and resize anything on the page.

Photoshop Touch aka the iPad Photoshop has just seen an update, and while it isn’t a full-on retina-ready rewrite, it does up the maximum of images to 2048 x 2048, making it a much better fit for the new iPad’s high-res screen.