iPad apps - page 29

As New York Times reporter Kate Zernike notes in her new book “Boiling Mad,” a good portion of the Tea Party movement is composed of youthful, tech-savvy hipsters — so it really shouldn’t be surprising that the movement has its own iPhone/iPad app.

The app features top news of interest to members of the movement, polemics from 11 conservative bloggers, Tea Party videos, and wouldn’t be complete with a feature called “Outrage of the Day.”

Tweet Library by Manton Reece is something special, and I think one of a very tiny handful of Twitter clients – not just on the iPad, but on all manner of platforms – that add something genuinely new.

Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.

BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.

And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.

Another sign that Kindle should beware: iBooks is the most popular free application for the iPad and iPhone.

According to Distimo, a start-up that analyzes app stats, iBooks has made the top ten list of free apps available on iTunes from July to September. This constant hovering in the most popular category is a ranking Distimo believes may be “influenced by the fact that Apple pushes this application to iPad users.”

Games are still less popular on the iPad than the iPhone, Distimo notes. In the Q2 version of the report, half of the top ten paid iPad apps were “productivity tools” like note taker app Penultimate and presentation app Keynote. In the Q3 report, the trend continues:  there is still just one game — old school classic RealSolitaire —  among the ten most popular free applications  for iPad, compared to four in the Apple App Store for iPhone.

This is ace. This is today’s Best Thing Ever. It’s called Revinyl, and it’s a one-dollar app that turns your music collection into a quiz that you can play on your own or with friends.

In “Rediscover” mode, the app will play you short snippets from songs, and show you a selection of album art. Pick the correct album – then name the song or the artist for bonus points. All against the clock, of course.

The video above is a first look at Sonos’ brand new app for the iPad, which makes for an awesome multi-room stereo system.

Paired with a couple of Sonos’ S5 players, the iPad app makes it easy to play music from your computer’s iTunes library, as well as a ton of online sources, including thousands of Internet radio stations and streaming services like Pandora and Last.fm.

Released last night, I’ve been playing with the app all morning and I’m delighted with it. I haven’t got this much kick out of audio gear for a long time. Sonos’ S5 speakers cost $400 each and sound great.

The Sonos Controller for iPad is now available on the iTunes App Store.

The app turns the iPad into a music hub for WiFi-connected Sonos players, streaming music from a variety of online music sources.

We got a sneak peek earlier this summer and were very impressed. The slick app makes digital music very easy — especially listening to online music services like Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm and the fantastic Mog.com. Using the iPad as a big Wi-Fi remote control, you can play music from your iTunes library, thousands of online radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions, or online sources.

Sonos sells wireless music players that make it easy to get multi-room audio around your house. Plug in a player in each room and stream music to each one (or the same music to all of them). Sonos’ products have won kudos for painless setup, ease of use, relative low-cost (you can spend a lot more) and innovation — this is the home stereo of the future. The iPad app takes it to the next level.

Analyst Michael Gartenberg is a fan. “I’ve been testing for a while and it shows the power of the tablet platform perfectly,” he just tweeted.

Sonos Controller for iPad [Sonos]

Sonos controller app page [iTunes]

PlainText is the latest text app from Hog Bay Software‘s Jesse Grosjean.

Jesse, as many of you will know, is the genius behind several other apps for iOS and the desktop, including WriteRoom and TaskPaper.

PlainText is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, another of his apps called SimpleText. Where SimpleText was built to sync with a home-made service called simpletext.ws, PlainText has been built from scratch to sync with Dropbox.

PlainText is a simple text writing tool for iPhone and iPad. It will sync with Dropbox, and includes support for TextExpander snippets if you use them. It’s free, supported by adverts. If you want to switch them off, you can for a one-off payment of $4.99.

Long time readers of Cult of Mac may remember a series we carried a year or so ago, under the title WTF App Of The Week.

We’ve not had any of those apps for a while now, but I saw something today that made me reach for the old WTF-ometer, because this most certainly qualifies.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Poo Log HD. Readers of a squeamish disposition may wish to stop reading right here.

Proof that politicos are just like the rest of us: David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Barack Obama,  keeps himself entertained during meetings by playing video games.

Axelrod confessed to logging in some quality time with old-school favorite Pac Man on his iPad.

Site Real Clear Politics asked Axelrod what does with the iPad he’s been “known to sneak into meetings with.” His answer: “It depends on whether my Cubs are playing…(but) it’s really actually very useful to keep track of what’s going on….I google things all the time.”

[xrr rating=80%]

The highly rated Springpad “remember anything” service is rolling out several nifty new features — starting with mobile notifications that will alert users to events, news and special offers.

Springpad is a free lifestyle service that makes it easy to save digital content — everything from news stories to recipes, email, wine labels, restaurant reviews, travel tips and so on.

It rivals similar services such as Evernote and Backpack, but value adds by analyzing saved content and layering it with metadata like special deals, nearby retailers, and useful links. If you save recipes, for example, it can automatically generate shopping lists of ingredients. Scan the barcode from a bottle of wine, and it’ll give you info and also find a local retailer.

“Anytime, anywhere, anyhow — it makes it drop dead simple to capture stuff you want to remember,” said Springpad CEO Jeff Janer in a phone interview last week.

Saved content is synchronized across iPhone, iPad, Android and Web apps. The service was recently named one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites and favorably reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, the service is adding alerts to its mobile app — event reminders, news alerts, to-dos, price drops, coupons, and special offers, etc. If you show an interest in Apple’s iOS, for example, it will alert you if Apple issues a software update.

The company is also releasing an extension for Google’s Chrome, which will make it easy to add content without leaving the browser. An extension for Safari will follow in about 30 days, Janer said. It is also adding push notifications to Android (available today) and iOS, which will available in about a month pending Apple’s approval.

Here’s a video of the new features in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REssNBbtmjc&hd=1

Popular open-source media player VLC is now available for iPad, thanks to developer Applidium.

Offered gratis, VLC faces some competition from other universal media-playing apps already available for the iPad including paid apps  OPlayer ($2.99) and CineXPlayer ($3.99).

VLC has long been my go-to app for video viewing (can’t remember the last time I even bothered to update Quicktime), nice to know it’s available now for the iPad, too.

Britain’s best-selling Sunday National Newspaper The News of the World is the latest publication to announce plans for a subscription-based iPad app.

Dates for the iPad app haven’t been announced but are expected to be in synch with the relaunch of the website in October.

iPad users will have to pay £1.19 a week (about $1.85) to view the celebrity highs and lows, that’s slightly more than the £1 newsstand cost but less than a snail-mail subscription, which currently costs £134.00 a year or £2.57 a week.
The website will also be behind a paywall, charging readers £1 for a day’s access or £1.99 per month.

The rogue tabloid — currently embroiled in the celebrity phone hacking scandal — is the third title in under six months in the News International stable to launch digital subscriptions, following the Times and Sunday Times.

“News International is leading the industry by delivering on its commitment to develop new ways of making the business of news an economically exciting proposition,” Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, told Reuters.

If you’re a DevonThink user and an iPad owner, here’s some good news: the forthcoming DevonThink To Go app will let you take entire DT databases with you.

Just as you can with the desktop application, it’s possible to add notes into each database’s inbox while you’re out and about, and sort and categorize them later. Everything gets synced to your computer over a local wifi network when it suits you.

Although intended as a companion for the desktop, there’s no reason why you can’t use DevonThink To Go as a standalone iPad notebook and document storage box.

For a better idea of what’s to come, check out the screenshots gallery.

This new app from Epson significantly ramps up iPhone or iPad print capabilities: PrintJinni for Epson will allow users to print from an iDevice, via a web-based cloud service, to any network-connected Epson. It also comes with an impressive range of print options, even allowing the user to print attachments directly from an email — without requiring an app associated with the attachment to open it.

The range of document types the app can work with includes pdf, jpeg and most versions of Microsoft Office documents.

PrintJinni doesn’t come cheap. The app is $10 (though offered now at an intro price of $7 for an unspecified time), and continues to ding the user at what Epson says will probably be $7 each additional year for the cloud services; though they also say that these recurring fees won’t be necessary for all document types (users just wanting to print jpegs, for instance, won’t need to pop for the yearly fee), and that the yearly fee can be opted out of, should the user just wish to print on local networks  not need to print MS Office documents.

Apps are so easy — maybe too easy? — to buy on an iPad even a three-year-old can do it.

Toddler Sienna Leigh in Sydney racked up about $50 in app purchases before her mom noticed the shopping spree.

“She uses it every day for a few hours, but I didn’t think anything of it.
“She was just playing with it until, later, when she had gone to bed and I was checking my email and I saw that I had paid for a whole bunch of apps that I didn’t remember buying.”

Mother Lisa Leigh had to go to a Mac forum to figure out how her kid did it — it seems she went to a recently-purchased app and continued shopping with the saved password.

Sienna bought $17 Docs to Go app and a flight control app among others before mom managed to stop the spending spree. “But the main thing is that I’ve completely turned off the Wi-Fi on her iPad so she has no chance of accessing the app store at all now.”

Leigh decided not to ask Apple for a refund, since by the time she figured it out her other children had already opened and played with them.

Apple said it wasn’t the first time parents had contacted them about iPad purchases made by their kids.

If you have a tech-savvy toddler, here’s how Apple Fiona Martin spokesperson suggests you keep the tyke from shopping: “The restrictions preferences are located under Settings > General > Restrictions > Allowed Content (In-App Purchases) OFF. When this is activated, in-app purchases is turned off.”

Via The Age

Rockstar Games’ superb iOS entry into their infamous Grand Theft Auto series has finally hit the iPad with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD, a native port that improves the already superlative game’s lighting, polygon counts and even the games’ already impressive explosions.

The biggest advantage, though, is the controls: while an up-sampled Chinatown Wars was technically playable (if ugly) before, the control scheme really needed some tweaking for more adept thumb control. The new iPad accomplishes that quite nicely.

Ultimately, it’s a fine update… but it’s hard to recommend because it’s not a universal app. Instead, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars HD is a whole new $9.99 to spend on a game you probably already own, if you were interested at all to begin with, on the iPhone, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. If this is your first go at the title, though, Chinatown Wars is an easy recommendation: it’s one of the best games on the App Store.

The popular open-source media player VLC is headed to an iPad near you thanks to App Store developer Applidium… and while it’s currently waiting for approval, there’s every indication that this time, Apple will let it through.

That wouldn’t have been the case a few months ago: Apple had tended to reject media playing apps from the App Store for “duplicating functionality.” This was an extraordinary headache for individuals who wanted to watch media on their iOS devices without first undergoing the cumbersome conversion process to QuickTime compatible MP4.

Recently, though, that’s started to change, with Apple approving more universal media-playing apps like OPlayer and CineXPlayer. If the new VLC is subject to the same standards, it should have no problem getting through the approval process.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it does. VLC has long obviated QuickTime on my Mac. I’m ready to let it do the same for my iPad as well.

A new app launched today should go a long way to eliminating iDevice storage limitations. ZumoCast is a free app that lets users stream content — videos, music or images — from their computer to their iPad, iPhone or iPod.

I’ve spent the last few days playing around with an advance copy, and I’m pretty stunned with how well this app is put together. Streamed movies are transcoded seamlessly on the fly in the background, and streamed music sounds fantastic — even over 3G. The whole thing is also incredibly user-friendly, works with a minimum amount of fuss and does things like automatically import your iTunes playlists. Content can even be downloaded from your computer to your iDevice, and it also allows browsing, viewing and downloading documents.

And surprisingly, it’s completely free.

What is it?

SplashShopper is an app that allows you to make shopping lists of all kinds on your iOS device or Mac (and Windows to if you are so inclined).  The lists can be managed and synced across platforms with the Mac OS X or Windows companion software. If you are Santa Klaus or someone who cannot live without lengthy complex shopping lists in your life you’ll find SplashShopper to be very useful.

The lack of an official, native version of the Twitter client for the iPad has been a puzzling omission, but now the big blue bird has set things right, having pushed their native iPad app to iTunes.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it, but it seems that a big part of the native client’s delay was because Twitter had big ideas for the app, grafting a truly unique (and, perhaps, a bit quirky) interface on top.

Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan explains the new interface:

The interface starts out straightforward, like a simple cross between the Tweetie for Mac and the iPhone app. But Twitter for iPad is actually a bit more complicated than it lets on—it’s the most complex of the three. Rather than sticking with the iPad’s standard split-pane views, like in Mail, Twitter is kind of like its own desktop environment, with overlapping, stacked panes that move from left to right. So, on the far left, you’ve got the main control panel, like Tweetie for Mac, which is the bottom pane. To the right of that, and on top of it, you’ve got the tweet list—either the main feed, mentions or direct messages. Whenever you touch on a tweet, a third pane opens to the right, on top of the other two. If there’s a link in the tweet, it’ll open the browser. If not, it’ll open that person’s somebody’s profile. (And if you type a direct message, that’s layered on top of everything else via a popover, for four total layers.) You can switch back to the main tweet list or control pane by touching it, and it’ll load browser pages in the background while you browse through other tweets. It can get cluttered quickly if you’re opening sub-menus and other things—at the same time, it gives you a lot of flexibility.

Buchanan ultimately finds the new interface bold, but quirky, but Techcrunch’s MC Siegler declares it a triumph, announcing that it completely and totally obviates not only any other Twitter app out there, but Twitter’s own website. Then again, I thought pretty much any Twitter client had killed the need to visit Twitter.com over a year ago.

Twitter for iPad is a free download, and it’s available now on iTunes

iPad-slash-Pogoplug users, quit yer whining that your iPad doesn’t print, find an iPad-sans-Pogoplug user and launch into an obnoxious victory dance in their immediate vicinity.

That’s right, Pogoplug has just begun rolling out a firmware update that’ll enable printing from any iDevice (so iPhone/iPt users get to shake a little booty also) to any 2005-or-newer vintage Epson or HP printer. The release says the rollout will stretch out over a week, so be patient.

All-business, pink-hating Pogopluggers and ‘Pluggers with their ‘Plugs way over on the other side of the room from their routers will be happy to hear that the $300 Pogoplug Biz (which ditches the hot pink highlights for stark grey and comes with a whole bunch of enterprise upgrades) and the $30 Wireless Extender (a USB dongle that obviously obviates the need for an ethernet cable connection) ship today. More good news: Current Pogoplug owners get the Wireless Extender for free.

In the wake of work produced by the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the many people worldwide using Smule applications on the iPhone, you knew this was coming: Four creative youngsters calling themselves the iPad Orchestra perform a nice piece of modern orchestral music here, using Seline HD, a new live performance and improvisation app optimized for the iPad.

Seline HD features an ergonomically designed playing surface called ioGrid, suitable for players of all hand sizes. It’s intended to support the playing of melodies with two hands, while keeping the iPad on the knees or on a table. A fully adjustable 16-note scale is divided into 2 parts (odd and even), which are then mapped to the left and right grids.

The app is capable of playing any melody but produces its own character and sound. A player can choose from 20 built-in factory voices (flutes, bowed strings, reeds, synth leads and more) and 9 drone voices. Drones (chorded synth pads) are generated on-the-fly, based on a complex analysis of the player’s melody line, courtesy of the app’s CrystalClarity HD sound engine, and provides an excellent background layer for melodies.

Seline HD player is also equipped with a full range of recording possibilities, including direct recording to .wav files, deleting, and doubling tracks. Overdubbing (layering tracks) is possible and encouraged as an excellent way to create complex orchestrations. Two available onboard effects – grand stereo reverb and dub delay – provide finishing touches to any composition.

Seline HD is available now in the iPad AppStore at the introductory price of $5.99.

This week’s must-have iOS games features plenty of zombies, addictive games galore and some fantastic bargains guaranteed to keep you entertained this weekend. There’s also two retro classics thrown in for good measure. Check out Cult of Mac’s favorite games from the past week after the break!