If you’re a fan of Flight Control HD, you’ll love Harbor Master HD for the iPad from Imangi Studios. It shares the same principles as Flight Control, although instead of planes you’ve got boats, which you must guide to their corresponding colored docks by drawing their route with your finger, ensuring the boats do not make contact with each other along the way.
The way in which Harbour Master is different to Flight Control is that once you have guided a boat to its dock, you must wait for it to unload its cargo before you can guide it back off to sea. This adds just enough complexity and challenge to the game to prevent it being too simple and boring.
Holly Golightly probably wouldn’t wear her iPad in a front pocket pouch, but in a pinch it may be better than a toting a bulky bag.
As much as we’re crazy about the iPad, carrying it around is still kinda awkward — remember the condom case? — but an Australian company has come up with an intriguing solution.
The iDress positions itself as kind of a chic, kangaroo iPad pouch, a cute to-the-knee number in black cotton sateen, perfect for when it comes time to put down your mouse and pick up a glass of prosecco, if their marketing speak is to be believed.
I have been enamored with Urban Tool ever since I stumbled upon their booth at Macworld. The Austrian company sells a range of super-hip gadget bags, slings and holsters that are as unique as they are hip. Their bags have a modern and sleek look to them.
The company recently released a pair of carriers just for the iPad, the PocketBar and the SlotBar. They are not to be missed. Go ahead, release your inner hipster.
Raise your hand if, like me, you think iPad apps like Netflix are far too blithe about letting users indulge their every movie-viewing whim, allowing access to videos whenever they damn-well please.
Put your hands down. You’re not like me at all. But I know there are movie purists out there for whom cinema is an experience, rather than just two hours spent killing time while waiting for a significant other’s root canal to finish.
For the purists, then: Cinema for iPad, a $3 app that screens movies on its own schedule, with a virtual “theatre lobby” that lets users discuss the movie they’ve just experienced. Once the app is purchased, the movies are free, but we’ve no clue what the developer‘s tastes are like, or how frequently the movies are rotated.
Ayman Shamma’s iPad steel drum just might revolutionize music on street corners and subway stops.
Shamma made a pair of drum sticks out of conductive material, then wrote an iPad app that mimics the sound of a steel drum, without any heavy equipment to lug around.
You can whip up a pair of drumsticks in about half an hour following his tutorial and start annoying the neighbor’s immediately with Shamma’s preferred apps, Magic Piano or iDaft.
First revealed back in January at CES, the L5 Remote is a useful little dongle that supplements the iPhone or iPod Touch’s already incredible remote abilities by turning your iDevice into a fully functional infrared universal remotes.
All you do is slap the infrared sensor into your iPhone and load the free L5 remote app. The app comes with presets for many popular devices, but failing that, it’s easy to program your iPhone with your existing remote by bumping them nose to nose and pushing the button on your existing remote you want to program in.
Conceptually, I love the idea of using my iPhone as a truly universal remote, but if you think losing a remote is an irritatingly commonplace occurrence, imagine losing a tiny dongle between the couch cushions. Worse, the L5 remote costs $50: way too expensive when a cheap universal remote can be picked up at Best Buy for half the price.
Until iPhones and iPod Touches come with a built-in IR receiver, I don’t really see the iPhone to squeeze existing universal remotes out of the market.
Although the iPad won’t be released internationally until tomorrow, Apple has already gotten ready for the flood of new devices by flicking the ON switch for the International iPad App Store. For right now, this will only be useful to you if you have imported an iPad from the States but want to use a local iTunes account; wait until next week, though, and you’ll be able to slurp up iPad ads as soon as your local mail constabulary delivers your iPad to your door.
The iPad Smart Case is the latest iPad case from Waterfield, a San Francisco-based Company. The Smart Case provides maximum protection of the iPad in the thinnest of cases. Available in six colors, the $59.00 sleeve is sleek and stylish.
In just a few weeks of iPad ownership, I’ve all but retired my MacBook. I thought I needed a laptop for work, but really, I don’t. I have not looked back since.
I own an Apple consulting company here in Florida, Max Your Macs. As members of the Apple Consultants Network, we support a wide range of clients all over the state ranging from individual home users with basic needs right up through corporate, medical, legal and creative environments with much more demanding settings.
Before iPad was released, I had been plotting and planning how to use this amazing machine onsite. I was longing for the day when I could slim down from carrying a large Swiss Gear pack with my MacBook Pro or MacBook Air to a small, light sling pack – but I was skeptical the iPad could fill the requirements.
And it does. Here’s how I use the iPad in the field:
Until the iPad has wide availability outside the U.S., Apple’s taking even more paranoid precautions than typical. Notably, everyone is still limited to buying no more than two of the devices, and, until today, no one was allowed to buy an iPad with cash. That policy was allegedly in place to prevent exporting by creating a credit card trail for each device.
But the policy’s silliness was revealed rather dramatically when Diane Campbell, a disabled woman living in Silicon Valley on a fixed income, attempted to use $600 cash to buy herself an iPad. She was turned down at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and went home, dejected, ultimately writing Steve Jobs a rather delightfully pointed e-mail.
“Come on Mr. Jobs, give a sister a break, okay. I’m not going to go sell my iPad.”
That message quickly hit, and earlier this evening, Apple reversed the policy, and Diane went home as a proud iPad owner. She intends to fill it with guitar song instructions. One thing that’s unclear is if the policy reversal also applies to iPhones, which similarly require a credit or debit card to purchase. I would assume not, as they require two-year service contracts, and a line of credit is usually required to secure that.
Nice to see Apple step up on what’s just a ridiculously common sense decision. And this makes me want to roll up to the Apple Store in the middle of next week with a big bag of penny rolls. Who’s with me?
Just days after crowing about giving people “Freedom from porn,” Steve Jobs must be cursing the gods of prurience with the news that YouPorn (NSFW) is busily encoding its entire library of films into HTML5 format.
Soon iPad owners the world over will be able to view vids of hairless young things in flagrante delicto to their hearts’ content.
And while YouPorn may be leading the pack, who can doubt the rest of the Adult Entertainment industry can be far behind in adopting HTML5’s video codec? In many things web-related, purveyors of porn have long been in the vanguard of trends that eventually go mainstream.
Steve Jobs may be wrong about Apple’s ability to “give” people freedom from porn, but it looks like he may be backing the right horse in the Flash vs. HTML5 showdown.
I’m not sure this vinyl Joker sticker could possibly work better, especially for just $16. After all, who needs a glasgow smile when they have an iPad? Why so serious?
The crew over at BreakfastNY created a helium filled blimp controlled by an iPad’s accelerometer and demoed it at a crowded party that I wasn’t invited to. Thanks, guys.
So the Blimp was cool and everything but they were able to stream live video feed from the blimp to a big screen while guests took turns taking iPad Blimp for a spin. Here’s a description from BreakfastNY:
This year’s Design Week after-party featured a silent auction of 23 KidRobot Munny characters created by the world’s top industrial designers. To show off these creations to the thousand guests, we flew a 52″ camera-enabled blimp over their heads. The blimp (a modified BlimpDuino) was controlled by an iPad which was receiving the live video-feed from the cockpit. When guests looked up, they watched as their faces were transformed into those of the Munny characters up for auction. The feed also went up on a big screen at the event and the event’s site allowing everyone to get in on the action.
Over at Gadget Lab, our favorite yoga-practicing nicotine golem of a gadget blogger, the pseudonymous Charlie Sorrel, has posted a fantastic guide on how to transfer your existing Stanza e-book library into iBooks.
The process is tricky, but as Charlie points out, since Stanza was purchased by Amazon last year, the likelihood of a native iPad port is in question as Amazon focuses on Kindle for iPad. Right now, then, this is the only way to transfer your existing library, along with cover art and keywords, to the iPad’s native e-book reading format. For guys like me, with an extensive Stanza library, this is a must read tutorial.
Software makers Avataron are now ready to turn your iPad into a functional mini-monitor for your Mac with their latest app, Air Display.
The app uses your iPad’s WiFi connection to transmit video data between it and your Mac (although you’ll first have to install a System Preference pane on your desktop or laptop machine). The app even allows the iPad’s touchscreen to be used as a mouse, so you can “click” icons with your fingers on your iPad’s extended desktop.
Pretty neat. Air Display isn’t out yet, but it will be submitted to the App Store next week, and if there aren’t any hiccups, you should be able to download it soon for the price of $9.99… significantly cheaper than even the cheapest of secondary displays.
In theory, the iPad can use the same 30-pin dock donnector to interface with any existing iPhone or iPod accessory, the practicality is that there’s simply no way you’re going to smash it into an existing speaker dock’s iPod port.
The Cerulean RX Stereo Bluetooth Receiver can help with that: it’s a simple wireless adapter that is small enough to fit in any iPod dock and, once connected to your iPad (or any other iPod product), it will happily stream music from across the room over A2DP, no batteries required. And if you’re using it with an iPhone, it’ll even pause and resume music during a call.
A cool accessory that would go a long way to making an iPad work well with a high-end speaker dock, but unfortunately, it’s not cheap: expect to pay $89.99.
The Todo app for the iPad was released recently, and to celebrate Appigo is offering this gorgeous little piece of productivity for $4.99; 50% off of its everyday $9.99 price tag.
About Todo:
Todo is a powerful set of tools that makes task management simple and fun. Use Todo on your iPad or iPhone alone or synchronize your tasks to your desktop (iCal or Outlook) using Appigo Sync (free download) or to the web using the popular online todo list Toodledo. Todo helps you focus on what matters most and allows you to integrate the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology or your own.
Appigo has noted that future updates to Todo for iPad are free.
Quickerteck has done it again! First they brought us a charge monitor for the iPad that indicates if you’re getting enough juice to charge your pad. Now they’ve brought us a 10 watt foldable solar panel for the iPad that comes with the aforementioned charge monitor.
Quickerteck states that the panels will charge your iPad as fast as using a wall charger and they can be yours for a cool $250.
The name of the product is the best part: Apple Juicz.
My questions to you: Would you use this? Is it reasonably priced?
It looks like in-flight entertainment will become a little less annoying in July 2010.
Bluebox Avionics has announced its Ai IFE which “leverages the power, flexibility and quality of the most advanced consumer device ever produced” (apprently that’s the iPad). Flight attendants would either pass out iPads or chain them to your tray tables and you could enjoy a Airline specific iPad experience thanks to Bluebox’s proprietary security solution and custom apps.
I’m not sure how practical this is, but it would be nice to move away from the seat-back touchscreens with the hidden credit card swiper.
It’s common knowledge that plugging a regular SIM into the iPad is as simple as cleaving it down to microSIM dimensions… but what if you want to use the unlimited AT&T iPad data plan on your iPhone? Over at HiJinks Inc, they’ve posted a great guide to doing just that.
Steve Jobs and Gawker haven’t seen eye-to-eye lately, so it’s somewhat surprising to see the Apple CEO engage in a lengthy email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate over the App Store’s walled garden ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing feud with Adobe and other intermediary APIs.
Less surprising is the fact that Gawker’s Tate, in response to Jobs’ polite, reasonable and clear-headed replies, quickly resorted to disrespectful dickhead mode (partly fueled, it seems, by one too many cocktails.
The exchange begins with a simple question by Tate: how does Jobs think Bob Dylan would feel about Apple if he were still 20 today? “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about feedom.”
Jobs’ response is to say that the iPad is about freedom: freedom from spyware, freedom from poor performance and (lamely) “freedom from porn.”
“Some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is,” Jobs wrote.
Gradaddy’s song “Jed’s Other Poem” off of their album The Sopftware Slump has to be one of the most sweet and lonely ballads ever ostensibly written by a sentient robot, but Stewart Smith’s retroactively official “music” video for it — which prominently features an Apple IIe running a hand coded AppleSoft II program illustrating the lyrics — is probably what has made the song so famous.
Now, that music video has come, in a round about way, to the iPad. Smith, the original video’s programmer, happened to notice that the guys from Panic Software had an old Apple IIe sitting around, so he asked if they could run his animation on it. They didn’t have the old cassette drive to help Smith out, but they did have an iPad… and that worked just fine.
The iPad is a perfect accessory for the living room table, and Comcast’s forthcoming remote control app, the Xfinity Remote, capitalizes on that by pairing your iPad to your cable box through Bluetooth, allowing you to easily search listings and access movies on demand through an extremely attractive interface.
Additionally, Xfinity comes with some powerful social and sharing features, which allows you to share television or movies that you’re watching with other friends, even if they’re not in front of the same television.
You can find more information about Xfinity Remote here. It looks great, but at the end of the day, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the app is that it’s for Comcast instead of a better cable provider.
iPads don’t charge through USB ports that aren’t 10 watts, which is a bummer, especially if you’ve got a laptop that won’t juice your tablet. Enter Quickertek’s iPad Charge Monitor, perhaps the most useless accessory of all time. It’s a $29.95 dongle that tells you if your iPad isn’t getting enough juice to charge… a function already provided by your non-charging iPad. Who can put a price on confirmation of the obvious, though?
