The very popular folder sync service Dropbox is giving every Pro member a big surprise today by doubling the amount of space of their Dropbox account. Pro accounts will now get double the space they had before. Their new blog post says, “Today we’re happy to announce that our upgrades are getting a huge upgrade! Dropbox Pro now comes in flavors of 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 and 100 GB plans. For those of you who need even more space, a brand new 500 GB plan is also joining the posse! If you’re already a Dropbox Pro subscriber, just take a seat and enjoy the fireworks — your Dropbox will supersize itself automatically tonight.” Check out the Pricing page this evening to see the all new plans.

In May, Dropbox gave users some new options to increase space by adding the option to auto-upload media from your desktop or iOS device and in April, Dropbox doubled referral credits from 250 MB to 500 MB per link.

In a world of every-increasing asset file sizes, retina displays, and computer hard drive space, Dropbox is doing a fantastic service to all of its Pro customers by doubling the space they give to us. There’s no link to click or web page to activate, they’re simply updating themselves tonight.

• Dropbox Pro is now 100 and 200 GB, but at the price of the original 50 ($9.99/month or $99.00/year) and 100 GB plans ($19.99/month or $199.00/year )
• A brand new 500 GB plan will also be available (yet to be announced)
• Dropbox is giving existing Pro users a three month Pro 100 trial to share with friends or family
• Free accounts are not receiving the upgrade but with referrals and auto-uploads your 2 GB account can be up to 18 GB

It’s not just your normal Wednesday morning folks. Nope — coinciding with the launch of Lion that was only confirmed yesterday during Apple’s Q3 conference call, Apple has released a handful of new products including updated MacBook Airs, updated Mac Minis, and new Apple Thunderbolt Displays (a step up from the Apple Cinema Displays). In the chaos of four press releases and an updating Apple Store, there’s lots of new items to note alongside our major morning launches, so let’s run through the list!

(more…)

Times, the visual news reader for Mac that came to the iPad last year, received a major update earlier today which sees the application becoming Pulp for Mac 2.0 following the re-branding on the iPad version, and the introduction of a new cloud sync service to keep settings, articles and sources in sync across the Mac client and the tablet counterpart. I’ve been testing the new Pulp for Mac for a few months, and I’m positively impressed with the quality of cloud sync and reading experience the Acrylic Apps developers have built into this latest version. First off, the new Mac app looks just like Pulp for iPad, only running on a Mac: if you followed the development of Times / Pulp with our previous coverage, you know what to expect: you can create pages to organize content sources by topic, organize feeds and articles with different layouts, as well as import websites from Google Reader if you don’t feel like entering a website’s name manually (which takes seconds, by the way). More importantly, the release of Pulp for iPad brought the possibility of reading articles with the Magic Reader, a feature that strips away all the clutter from webpages and displays truncated RSS articles in their entirety without any manual fiddling. Pulp for Mac does everything the iPad version did, it’s got the shelf to save articles for later and syncs everything via the cloud.

The cloud service is free, and can sync ”your pages, feeds, read articles, and other settings in sync on all of your Macs and iPads”. It’s that simple: every change that’s either made on the iPad or Mac is pushed to the cloud instantly, and received on the second device in seconds. I have tested this with articles, pages and the shelf interface and it worked really well. The cloud sync can be enabled or disabled in the Settings.

I don’t particularly appreciate the page-curling effect on the Mac as I believe it wastes too much real screen estate, but the rest of the interface is really minimal, elegant, and easy to scan through. Pulp can’t be compared to other news readers like Flipboard that plug into your social streams to deliver a magazine-like experience — instead, Pulp is more focused on single websites and RSS, and on letting you build a personalized newspaper that’s now in sync with the iPad, which also received a Pulp updated today to version 1.3. If you’re already a Pulp for iPad user, you should check out the free trial for Mac and see how cloud sync and the new app work for you. If you don’t own Pulp, I still recommend you start off with the iPad version, and later consider an upgrade to the desktop application which, by the way, is an excellent port of the iPad app.

Pulp for Mac is available at $9.99 in the Mac App Store.

When the iPad went on sale just over a year ago, many were unsure of what people would use it for and the uncertainty has largely continued to today, where it is still a little vague as to how a tablet fits into people’s lives. Yesterday however, Business Insider published some fascinating data on a whole range of questions that surround the iPad and how it is used. The data was collated after Business Insider issued an extensive survey, on a wide variety of issues and questions, to more than 850 people.

Their survey revealed that for about 70% of respondents, there was only 1 iPad in their household and only about 23% has 2 in the one household – less than 7% had 3 or more iPads in their household. Nearly 40% had downloaded between 20 and 50 apps, whilst 30% had downloaded more than 50 apps – with few paying for more than 20 of those apps and only 6% paying for none. Below are some of the other more interesting results but jump over to The Atlantic for all the results.

• 87.4% did not even consider an Android tablet before buying an iPad and 90% would not consider a BlackBerry PlayBook or HP TouchPad
• The number of people with WiFi-only or the 3G iPad is fairly evenly split (52% to 48%)
• Only 49% subscribe to a monthly 3G data plan (of those who have a 3G iPad)
• 40% use the iPad as their primary computer
• The most cited reasons for use of the iPad are; web browsing (35%), using social or communication apps (22%), watching video (12%), playing games (12%) and using all other apps (20%)
• For consuming news, 38% would use the iPad’s web browser, 34% would use a news site’s app and 28% would use an aggregator like Reeder or Flipboard.
• 72% read e-books on the iPad, mostly on iBooks but Kindle is a close second

Following a trend that sees publishers and companies struggling to deliver personalized content to iPad owners who want to filter news and articles out of their Twitter and Facebook social feeds, AOL is planning on releasing a Flipboard-like magazine for iPad this summer called Editions, BusinessInsider reports. Editions, currently teased on the web with an official landing page, appears to be a much more complex solution than Flipboard though: whilst the iPad app of the year 2010 pulls any link shared on your Twitter or Facebook account, not applying any sort of filtering or smart recognition algorithm, Editions will try to be intelligent enough to only display content that’s relevant to you, related to your location, in a way that reminds of a daily newspaper delivered to you once a day. Call it a mix between Flipboard and News Corp.’s The Daily, AOL’s Editions will even go as far as creating a cover for the top story in your social feed, as well as aggregating all content from AOL-owned publications like TechCrunch and Engadget.

To pick these stories, Editions will look at what your social networks are recommending and the general topics they seem to be interested in, as well as your location (to deliver local news). Then, it will look at which stories you click on and how long you spend reading them, and adjust over time.

Editions is also not meant to replace Web surfing — instead, it will be delivered once a day, just like a newspaper. Temkin noted that AOL’s usage statistics show that people don’t use an iPad like a mobile phone, checking it constantly throughout the day. Instead, usage peaks at morning and night, when people are home and have some time to sit back and read.

Editions will launch this summer (before September 20th, they say) only on the iPad, as AOL doesn’t believe Android tablets will gain much “traction.” The idea sounds interesting — as every concept revolving around automatic news personalization does — but it’ll have to face fierce competition from the likes of News.me (which relies on a similar concept and is developed by the folks behind URL shortening service bit.ly), Yahoo’s upcoming Livestand and the next version of Flipboard, which is rumored to be heavily based on a new algorithm for better news filtering as the result of the acquisition of Ellerdale Project last year. Flipboard recently announced they tripled the app’s usage and doubled the userbase in just over two months.

There are mostly three ways to read articles coming from the web on the iPad nowadays: with an RSS reader; with social aggregators like Flipboard or News.me; with Instapaper or Read It Later. While aggregators and read later services are actually ways to plug into a social stream or a website, respectively, to fetch content to consume on an iPad, RSS is the most direct way to interact with a website: you log in with your Google Reader credentials, and you get the most recent feeds from your saved sources in chronological order. There are several great RSS apps for iOS out there, but the biggest problem of RSS is that articles lose their original “feel” — the way they look on a website as the author intended. Percolater, a $4.99 news reader for the iPad, wants to be an alternative that’s entirely based on the opposite concept: getting articles the way they would look in a web browser.

As the developers write in the app’s iTunes page, Percolater gives you the Internet “unprocessed” and “unfiltered.” Articles aren’t fetched in the form of textual excerpts or brief summaries with accompanying images: rather, the app loads a thumbnail preview for each article of your favorite sources, and allows you to swipe through these visual previews as if you were scrolling through the pages of a magazine — only the magazine is made of pages that look exactly the way they’re rendered in a web browser. Indeed, everything’s unfiltered. Including images, video, and ads.

Percolater can get content from your Twitter and Google Reader accounts. On the top section of the main page (which has a wooden background), the app also displays “popular” content it found on the web on a specific day, but I’m not sure how this section works. Maybe it gets the most popular articles from your Twitter account, or maybe it just runs a Google News search. You can import all your sources from Google Reader (and edit them later in the Settings), but you can’t add specific Twitter streams like users, favorite tweets, or lists. I wish Twitter integration went to a deeper level — as it stands now, Percolater only gets links from your timeline and renders them as browser previews in-app. So what happens when you tap on a thumbnail? You’re brought to another view that displays these “images” of articles stacked on top of each other, and you navigate between them with a vertical swipe. Alternatively, you can go back to the main screen with a horizontal swipe. The original tweet is displayed below the preview, and the quality of images is generally acceptable — obviously they’re not saved in super high-resolution, but it’s enough to get a glimpse of an article without reading it. If you do want to have a broader view of a post, however, you can tap on the preview to see the full-sized image Percolater saved. Tap the browser icon and, boom, Percolater loads the original link in a real browser window — meaning it will let you select text and do all the stuff a regular browser allows you to do. You can also share articles on Twitter or send them to Instapaper.

Percolater isn’t a product for everyone and it’s not perfect either. The app could use some speed optimizations and more Twitter functionalities, as well as a few fixes to reduce crashes on heavy load when the app is refreshing multiple sources at once. Still, Percolater is an interesting app in the way it puts the focus on the real web you see with a web browser. The app is available here at $4.99, and I’m looking forward to future updates. (more…)

Zite, one of those ‘personal iPad magazines’ like Flipboard or the newer News.me, received an update yesterday that adds an in-app browser, better clipboard support and some much appreciated performance improvements.

TUAW spoke to the new Zite CEO, Mark Johnson, who used to work at Microsoft. He said that they were pleased with the success of the app, with positive reviews and over 100,000 downloads since launching. Customization, he says, is an oft-cited request by users and he said they are working towards adding more options and flexibility to the news sections. Interestingly, the Zite team is also working on a web version, improving the offline reading abilities and reducing the incidence of duplicate articles in the news stream.

In its initial launch, Zite received some cease and desists from various publishers around the web because of Zite’s ad removal. They have since accommodated the publishers concerns by adding a direct link and Johnson has said that this has quelled publisher’s concerns. You can download Zite from the iPad App Store for free.

[Via TUAW]