iPad - page 169

The Washington Post’s WP Politics app for the iPad is an excellent resource for anyone interested in United States politics. I spent a few days with this free app and found it to be an excellent tool for tracking and understanding the 2012 election season. While not without its flaws, this app does two critical things exceedingly well. First, it aggregates media and information from a broad range of sources into one tool. Whether you’re looking for the latest news about a particular candidate or economic data from years ago, it’s all here. Second, it organizes and contextualizes the information in a way that helps the casual user to understand it. It classifies news articles by genre, organizes Twitter feeds by source, and breaks candidates down by their stances on the issues.  If you’re looking for an app to help you follow the upcoming election, or politics in general, look no further.

There’s been plenty of debate over whether or not Microsoft will ever bring its Office productivity suite to Android and iOS devices. Many reports have claimed it will, while Microsoft itself has denied the rumors. But now product manager Petr Bobek has confirmed that it will happen next year.

The Nomad Brush Flex is the latest in Nomad’s line of capacitive touchscreen brushes. That’s right — brushes. When you’re painting into an app like Brushes or Procreate on the iPad, then you really do want to use a stylus os some kind. And if you’re going to go to the trouble of using a stylus, why not make it a brush?

Reliving your childhood with retro games on iOS is, I find, one of the best ways to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon — until you get frustrated with the virtual controls that keep getting you killed and you threaten to throw your iPad out of the window. But thanks to the iCade 8-Bitty, a new Bluetooth control pad for iOS, you can now play your favorite titles with real controls.

LifeProof has definitely made an impact with the digital outdoors; seems I run into their sleek, modular, waterproof iPhone cases everywhere (we love them, btw). Now, the company is focusing on their new Nüüd iPad case, and the second available accessory for the case is the LifeJacket, a flotation device that fits around the waterproof Nüüd case and keeps the iPad from sinking into the murky depths after you’ve, say, calculated your dive profile.

Sega has announced that arcade classic Crazy Taxi is coming to iOS devices this month. It hasn’t given us a whole lot of information on the game — none at all, in fact — but it’s expected that the title will be a complete port of the original Dreamcast hit, with the original (and awesome!) Offspring soundtrack.

Apple has reportedly placed an order for 10 million iPad mini units ahead of its much-anticipated launch this fall, according to component suppliers in Asia speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The figure indicates that Apple expects the device to be a big seller this holiday season, despite strong competition from the likes of Amazon and Google.

As a gadget reviewer, I go through a lot of shipped packages. Which means I have to deal with a logistical nightmare second only to the Allied supply lines following the D-Day landings (except my packages tend to be, for the most part, somewhat less liable to explode or cause diarrhea). But that’s OK — I have a secret weapon to help keep everything straight.

Junecloud‘s Deliveries Status ($5) tracks shipments in a wonderfully simple, easy-to-read, straightforward manner; and like many of Apple’s own products, it just works.

It’s beginning to look a lot like an iPad Mini Christmas. Credible reports say over-worked factory employees in China are already churning out small iTablets in large iQuantities, and that Apple will summon fawning journalists Wednesday to participate in an October 17 iPad Mini infomercial — I mean product launch.

I predict that the iPad Mini will dominate holiday sales, take over the education market and destroy three current products on the market. 

So, until iOS 6, in order to email photos, you had to drop into the Photos app, open one photo at a time, and tap the Share via email button. You can still do this, or you can tap the Edit button in Photos and share multiple photos to email or other services like Facebook or Twitter.

In addition, however, you can insert pictures into an email right inside of Mail app, without ever having to leave the app to get your images, which is much more Mac-like, to be honest. I mean, if you’re sending an email, you want to be able to add photos right there. Right? Right.

Here’s how to do just that.

Microsoft is gearing up to launch Windows 8 really soon along with Windows 8 Phone and the Microsoft Surface to compete with the iPad. The Surface might even be released around the same times as Apple’s iPad Mini, which could make the tablet wars pretty interesting.

Getting a jump start on their Surface ad campaigns, Microsoft has littered urban areas with guerrilla Surface ads and the lastest ones have been placed near a highly trafficked Apple Store in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago.

PadPivot is one of those gadgets which at first appears completely absurd, but then grows on you as you see what it can do. It starts off looking like an over-engineered solution for an non- problem: putting an iPad on your lap. But then you see it stick, prop, and fold, and it all starts to look rather compelling.

Steve Jobs was passionate about a lot of things: simplicity, challenging the status quo, creating products that people loved, etc. He was a man of many shining strengths and deep personality flaws. As one of the most dynamic titans to ever grace the tech industry, one can only imagine what Jobs would think of Apple in 2012. How would he have handled Mapgate? We’ll never know.

Based on what we do know about the late CEO, there are several things Jobs would have definitely been proud of at Apple in 2012.

Plug in your iPhone or iPad and charge it up, and you’ll notice that while the first 80% or so will go by pretty fast, they actually kind of suck at charging up that last 20%, taking a lot more time to do so than it feels like they should.

There’s a reason for this. Charging batteries up to “full” is a complicated process. There’s no real way to tell if a battery is completely “full” so all you can do is measure the voltage, which (and this is a vast simplification) tells you how much resistance is being met when you try to put more electricity into the battery.

That’s why it takes so long for an iPhone to charge that last 20%. It charges full blast until it measures a certain voltage, then goes into what’s called “trickle mode” to slowly allow small sips of electricity into the battery until it thinks, based upon some software calculations, that the battery is more or less full. But a new algotihm could make the time it takes to charge your iPhone or iPad go by a lot faster.

You wait for ages for a calculator, then two come along at once. Following on from Sums which we reviewed the other day, here’s Calculator LCD, a smart-looking one dollar desktop-style calculator for iPad.

I like to be notified when email comes in, but I sure do get a lot of email. Prior to iOS 6, I was relegated to just dealing with it, and setting the type of notification–Badges, Banners, and Sounds–for eMail in general. It got a bit tedious, to say the least, with the four main accounts I check on my iPhone.

You know now that you can set up a different signature for each email account you check on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 6. But did you know you could also set up a different Notification style for each account, as well?

Here’s how.

Camera Awesome, the iPhone camera app that actually is pretty awesome, has been update to support the iPad. Better, it’s now a Universal app, which means that if you already own the iPhone version, this one now works on your iPad, too, for no extra charge. Actually, even for new customers the app is free.

Eye-Fi has updated its top-of-the-range Pro X2 SD card from 8GB to 16GB, upped the speed to Class and kept the price at the same ridiculous $99. The X2 is the card to buy if you need everything Eye-Fi has to offer: geotagging, direct transfer to your iDevice and RAW file support. But it might not necessarily be the one you want.

Back in early September, we reported that Acclaim’s classic radio-controller car racer, Re-Volt, was coming to iOS, and today it has landed in the App Store. The title is an exact port of the original game released on the PC and Sega Dreamcast back in 1999, only it’s been visually optimized to look great on Retina display devices, and adapted for the touchscreen.

Re-Volt boasts “fast paced, exciting driving, with explosive weapons and unique track designs [that] deliver a larger than life racing experience like no other.

Apple’s much-anticipated iPad mini is expected to make its debut in mid-October, but it may be a little more difficult to get hold of than other iOS devices. According to sources in the Cupertino company’s Taiwanese supply chain, iPad mini shipments are already stumbling due to the low yield rates of the tablet’s aluminum chassis.

Pelican made a name for itself making tough cases for the military, firemen and other hazardous sorts who generally place their delicate gadgets in harm’s way. Now they’ve taken their extreme-environment case technology and built four new backpacks around it — two of which have crushproof/waterproof compartments.

I’m kind of obsessed with wallpapers for my Apple devices. That’s why I got excited when the guys at 2048pixels contacted me about their site’s 2.0 launch. I wrote about 2048pixels back in May, and it’s been cool to watch the site evolve with more and more awesome wallpapers over the last several months.

In case you didn’t know, 2048pixels is a website that offers free wallpapers for the third-gen iPad’s Retina display. You can discover and download them right from the site on your iPad, and version 2.0 brings a number of improvements, including the ability to edit wallpapers on the iPad before you download.

Cult of Mac reader, Scott, asks this week:

“I would like to find out how to create a hyperlink in my Sig using my iPad. Example: Find me on twitter ( with twitter being a hyperlink taking them to my home page.”

I’ve shown you how to use Emoji in your signature, taking advantage of the rich text abilities of iOS 5 and up, but iOS 6 adds HTML support for signatures. Now you can put any rendered HTML into your signature on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Here’s how.

Apple’s Universal Dock is anything but universal. It won’t work with any iPads, it won’t work with the iPhone 5, and it sure as hell won’t fit a Motorola Xoom. And unless you’re using it two-handed, and you’re wide awake, it doesn’t even work very well with the iPhone or iPod Touch.

The Complete Dock, on the other hand, works with almost anything. Hell, if you wanted to dock your cruise ship in it you probably could.

My sense of proportion has been hopelessly corrupted by a lifetime of telling girls that six centimeters is actually six inches, so I’m very excited by the prospect of an app that can tell me the size of something just by taking a photo of it.

That app is called CamRuler, and it works by comparing the size of an unknown object to that of a known object. If you ever put a coin or a small model dinosaur into a photo to help show scale, then you already know how it works.