The AirStash is a $100 USB card reader with a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. It is used to stream media to other devices, which means broadcasting movies, music, and video to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and other gadgets with limited amounts of memory.
If only it worked.
Hot on the heels of the iOS 4.0.1 bug fix update, Apple has released a 3.2.1 update for the iPad.
The update fixes several issues, including Wi-Fi connectivity problems. It also adds Microsoft’s Bing to Safari’s search box.
– Improved Wi-Fi connectivity
– Fixed an issue that could prevent copy and paste of single-page PDF attachments in Mail
– Addressed an issue that could cause video playback to freeze
– Improved reliability of video-out when using iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter
– Added Bing as an option for Safari’s search field
The update is available through iTunes (plug in your iPad via USB) or can be downloaded here: iPad iOS 3.2.1.
Apple iPhone Configuration Utility hits version 3.0. The new version was released today and includes enhanced support for iOS 4 and bug fixes. I highly recommend this often under utilized tool as something to have in your arsenal of tools for advanced iOS troubleshooting.
Way too little, way too late: speaking at the opening keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told his audience that we should expect Windows 7 tablet computers “sometime before the end of this year.”
“We know you really want to know what’s coming,” said Ballmer. “[Tablets] will come from the people you would expect. From Asus, from Dell, from Samsung, from Toshiba, from Sony.”
Microsoft just doesn’t get it. Their business is software, so it’s understandable they are focusing on selling a tablet operating system instead of a single iPad-challenging tablet themselves (even if that business model is so stagnant that it has directly contributed to the death of possibly revolutionary products).
The problem is: Windows 7, as an operating system, isn’t capable of taking on iOS. One was built from the ground-up to support multitouch; the other is a bad hackjob rlaid on top of a desktop operating system.
HP knows full well that Windows 7 isn’t up to the job of taking on iOS: that’s why they killed the Windows 7 Slate and purchased Palm’s mobile, multitouch operating system, webOS. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft’s other hardware partners get the same memo.
At the end of the day, Microsoft is going to enter the slate arena several years late, just like they did with Windows Phone 7. How can a company this hopelessly entrenched in the business models of the past hope to survive when the likes of Google and Apple are swimming in the same waters, faster, stronger and smarter?
There’s no point debating exactly what collective aneurysm in Apple’s generally unassailable design hive mind has led to Cupertino’s corporate blind spot when it comes to their cross-platform Notes application and its inexplicable reliance on the hideous Marker Felt font.
The good news is, there’s no reason to use it: the App Store is filled with better and more attractive note-taking apps. The newest on the scene is HelvetiNote, a gorgeous note-taking app for the iPad that is as minimalist, muted and beautiful as another Cult of Mac favorite, Reeder.
It certainly looks gorgeous and functional. My only complaint would be the lack of syncing with other note-taking services… namely the likes of SimplenoteApp. If you’re looking for an alternative to the eye sore of the iPad’s default Note.app, HelvetiNote is three bucks well spent.
Animated Knots by Grog is a great app that teaches you to tie all kinds of handy knots. This is the first app we’ve reviewed to earn five Black Turtlenecks using our rating system!
With outstanding 3D visuals and impressive gameplay, Glu’s best-selling Deer Hunter 3D is recognized as the greatest hunting game available for the iPhone & iPod Touch. Now Deer Hunter 3D for iPad has hit the App Store and gives fans the opportunity to enjoy this highly popular game on the iPad’s high-resolution screen.
Globe-trotting IT executive Steve Shantz wrote a short post comparing the battery life of his Windows 7-running Dell XT2 tablet with that of his colleague’s 3G iPad.
Flying from Chicago to Singapore on business, Steve’s Dell battery gives out on him after just 2.5 hours of work. There are many more hours to go. His iPad-toting colleague, meanwhile, lands in Hong Kong and still has plenty of juice left.
Again, in the conference the two of them attend, Steve is left running around looking for power points, while his friend happily cruises through the day without them.
A growing number of large US businesses are arming their employees with the iPad, proving that the tablet computer’s usefulness goes way beyond keeping the kids quiet.
Recent corporate converts to the iPad include Wells Fargo, SAP and Telllabs.
“This iPad thing has taken the world by storm,” Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. told Bloomberg. “It came in as a consumer product and very quickly the people who actually bought them were business people.”
By many people’s estimations, the iPad is missing anywhere from between one and two cameras, and Apple’s curious choice to eschew adding at least one web cam to their tablet when they already had their video-conferencing standard FaceTime in the wings is often cynically described as a move to encourage customers to quickly upgrade to the second-gen unit once it pops out of Cupertino’s manufacturing shops.
Why wait until then, though? This iPad Cam-Case design by Chet Rosales adds a swiveling camera to the enclosure. Of course, without proper support from Apple (and a port of FaceTime to iPad), a case like this would be pretty useless… but we’re hopeful, if not optimistic, that Apple might choose to sell something like this themselves when the camera-equipped, second-gen iPad comes out sometime in the next year. Let’s not leave the early adopters behind.
This is the iPad version of the quickie, DIY iPhone stand made from office supplies. This one isn’t made from the usual yellow No. 2 pencils but a handful of Faber-Castells — the fittingly cultish 2001 Grip model with a triangle shape.
The makers over at Geeky Gadgets suggest using pencils with erasers to avoid scratching but note that you should extend the two pencils until there is plenty of wood to rest your device on or wrap a little tape around the metal on each to protect the edge of your iPad.
Would you use one of these to prop up your iPad in a pinch?
Via Geeky Gadgets
We have laptops and desktops but what do we call the iPad, which is neither? It’s been suggested we call it a “kneetop” because it rests on our knees. But what about thightop, tummytop, or crotchtop? Vote below, or leave new suggestions in the comments.
[polldaddy poll=3437482]
Apple has issued an update to its MobileMe iDisk application today and version 1.2 brings some welcome improvements. As well as support for multitasking and fast app switching, iDisk is now a universal application and works natively on the iPad.
What’s more, iPad users can now export documents from iDisk in to iBooks or office applications like Apple’s own Pages, Numbers & Keynote offerings.
Another big improvement is the ability to listen to music from within the iDisk application – this means you can save space on your device by uploading your tracks to an iDisk folder and then listening to them from there. Obviously this will require a data connection to your iDisk, however.
The full list of improvements is as follows:
iDisk is the last of Apple’s MobileMe apps to be updated for multitasking and iOS 4. All we’re waiting on now is the MobileMe Gallery app improvements and iPad support!
Download MobileMe iDisk for your device from the App Store here.
Two of the most popular sporting games for iPad have gone on sale today for a limited time only courtesy of Gameloft, who have slashed the prices of Real Soccer HD (previously $6.99) and NFL 2010 HD (previously $4.99) to just $0.99.
I’ve found both games to be a great buy, in fact, Real Soccer is one of my favorite soccer games for the iPad, so if you’ve been considering either of them, now is a great time to snap them up!
Gameloft also has a sale currently running on two of their other games including Hero of Sparta HD and Brain Challenge HD, both of which have also been reduced to $0.99.
The savings don’t stop there, though – as well as their sales, Gameloft have permanently cut the prices of both Modern Combat: Sandstorm HD and Gangsta: West Coast Hustle HD from $6.99 to $4.99.
Machine-carved unibody aluminum is fine and all, but sometimes I miss the less austere Apple aesthetic: the cheery white plastic, the GLBT-friendliness of the rainbow logo. For just $3.50, you can retro your iPad up with this wonderful retro logo decal for the iPad.
As Charlie Sorrel over at Wired notes: “If Apple was in any way nostalgia-minded, it should include these stickers in the boxes of its products instead of those awful, thin white stickers that we throw away by their thousands every day.” Amen to that.
I cannot think of another iPad app that makes me want to take out the velcro and stick my iPad on the wall as much as Emerald Observatory does. This gorgeous app is simply stunning to look at and it is a useful astronomy tool too. Once you have it running on your iPad you won’t hesitate to display it for everyone to see and it will become a striking conversation piece.
UK artist Kyle Lambert demonstrates the viability of creating art on the iPad, painting an impressive portrait of singer Beyoncé using the Brushes app, 1 finger and 6 hours of work. Very nice job. Even better, Kyle’s posted a time lapse video documenting the whole process.
Thanks to MacWorld for the tip.
Superficially, the iPad’s incredible multi-touch screen has a lot of potential for graphic artists, but in reality, the lack of a stylus and the tablet’s own inability to distinguish applied user pressure gimps the iPad’s ability to challenge the venerable Wacom tablet.
To show us what could easily be, the guys at Ten One Design have put together this video in which they demonstrate an iPad capable of sensing the pressure applied to a Pogo Stylus.
It’s an impressive video, but there’s a rub: Ten One Design has to use a private API call to make the pressure function work, which means that it’s nothing we can expect to see on the iPad unless Apple rolls it into their UIKit framework.
Get on it, Apple. Through the dark times, it was artists and graphic designers who supported your brand; now it’s time to give them the drawing tablet they’ve always wanted.
Comex, the creator of the wonderfully painless iOS 3.1.3 jailbreak solution Spirit, is still tirelessly plugging away at his Flash for iOS project, Frash.
Porting Adobe’s official Flash app from Android to the iPhone, Comex has demonstrated Frash working on the iPhone before, but now he’s showing it running on the iPad to boot with support for the iPhone 3GS and iOS 4 promised soon.
Interested in helping? Comex has put out a call for developers to help him move the project along. If you’ve got the skills, help Comex out, if only so we can get to the bottom of Apple’s claims that Flash will destroy the iPhone’s battery life once and for all.
A poll of iPad users — 6,000 of them — found they are overwhelmingly pleased with the device.
Technologizer asked iPad owners in May how they were getting on with their new device, they were overwhelmingly pleased with battery life, speed and reliability and some 59 percent were satisfied with speed and reliability of the 3G network.
Despite claims that the iPad was nothing more than a kiddie pacifier, about 93 percent of owners surveyed said they either “frequently” (73 percent) or “occasionally” (over 20) use it instead of a traditional computer.
Some are also using it in place of smartphones, too. Over 80 percent of iPad owners surveyed are also iPhone owners, about 60 percent of respondents said they “frequently” use the iPad instead of their smartphones, another circa 25 percent “occasionally” use their iPad instead of the phone.
Does this reflect how you’re using your iPad or not?
The MyWi app by Intelliborn has been one of the biggest reasons to jailbreak an iOS based device. With the latest 4.0 release, creating a wireless hotspot has never been easier. For a one-time fee of $19.99 you can turn your stingy 3G iPad into a wireless hotspot capable of sharing your 3G connection with as many devices as you wish. I’ll show you how after the break.
Apple released an update today to its MobileMe Gallery application for the iPhone & iPod Touch which brings it up to version 1.1.1.
The update features “various bug fixes” as well as the ability to download your photos in a higher resolution when using the iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi.
Despite these improvements, this little app still leaves much to be desired. Apple are yet to develop a way in which you can manage your photo galleries from your iPhone & iPod Touch. Currently you can only view or upload to galleries you have already created on you computer, and you cannot create or delete galleries from within the app.
As well as this, MobileMe Gallery is still not a universal application, so although it will run on the iPad as most iPhone apps will, it’s not yet been built for the iPad’s larger screen.
I purchased my first iPad with Wi-Fi and later upgraded to one with 3G when they were available. I am using it more than I am using my MacBook Pro especially for quick and dirty tasks that it is perfectly suitable for like e-mail, internet surfing, chatting, Twitter, reading, shopping, research, etc. My iPad became very useful very quickly and now it has become a very important part of my life at work and at home. Therefore I’m constantly seeking something new, innovative, or productive to do with it and now that I am armed with a VGA video adapter I’ve discovered that my iPad makes a great whiteboard.
Cult of Mac reader Ryan proves that Trix are not just for kids with this quick iPad stand made from an empty cereal box.
“I got the idea when i first got my iPhone 3G two years ago… At the time I made a stand out of a paper Starbucks cup for my iPhone. I was reminded of that this morning after scouring the Internet for a practical and affordable stand. My cousin finished a box of Trix and as she was making her way to the recycling bin, I decided to do a little recycling of my own.”
The finished stand should support your iPad in either portrait or landscape, plugged in or running on battery.
He’s reckons the project took about 10 minutes — here’s a complete how-to on his blog — and if you’ve got on how to improve his design, let him know.
If you haven’t already played Giana Sisters, you’re missing out! It’s one of the best platform games on the iPhone & iPod Touch and I highly recommend you try it. If you share my love of Giana Sisters, you too will be pleased to hear that a HD version is making its way to the iPad soon, according to Touch Arcade.
Originally released in 1987, The Great Giana Sisters was first developed for the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64 and other consoles of the era. It was quickly pulled, however, after running in to legal trouble with Nintendo due to its similarity with Super Mario Bros. The game was reborn in 2005 when it was renamed simply Giana Sisters, and made its way on to mobile phones, and a few years later, the Nintendo DS.
Today, 5 years on, Giana Sisters is one of the best platform games in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Touch Arcade have reported today that its developers, Bad Monkey, have sent them a bunch of screenshots for their upcoming HD version of the game. You can check them out and find out more info here, or read Touch Arcade’s review of the current game here.
If you can’t wait until the iPad release on 9th July, you can find the iPhone & iPod Touch version in the App Store here.