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Donate To Red Cross for Japan Through iTunes

As noted by 9to5mac, Apple has enabled an option in the iTunes Store to donate to the American Red Cross for the Japan relief fund. If you want to make your donation to the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, you can by visiting this page and choosing to donate $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 or $200. Everything happens through the iTunes account you already have – a clever move to make donations easy and just a click away for iTunes users.

100% of your donation will go to the American Red Cross, which is set to provide food, shelter and assistance to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami.

Latest Reeder for iPhone Update Now Sends To Readability

If you take pride in supporting the writers and content creators that add thoughtful and insightful information about the topics you read about daily, you may already be a subscriber of Readability. Readability support was added in January, but now Reeder allows you to send articles to your read later queue so may share your public articles with followers or to read them in the new web app. Reeder has also addressed bugs and usability issues, fixing shared articles that didn’t sync, eliminating crashes, and overall improving the syncing experience. You can download the latest update for Reeder in iTunes, through the App Store app, or by visiting this link (App Store link).

iPad 2: Thoughts, Questions & Answers

Short of a full review, I wanted to go over some of the sporadic thoughts I’ve had while using the iPad 2. I want this to be a place where you can leave questions in the comments, and where I’ll update this post as ideas come to mind. These aren’t quite initial reactions, but more of an unfolding conversation in response to a new discovery or comment. Many of the initial reviews left me a little unsatisfied, and I want to fill that gap with burning questions about what’s on your mind. I can’t answer app compatibility questions, but feel free to plug away about the iPad 2.

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Will The iPad 1 Keyboard Dock Work With The iPad 2? [Update: Yes]

A notable lack on Apple’s accessory page for the iPad 2 is the Keyboard Dock the company used to sell last year for the original iPad which allowed you to dock the device, charge it, and type with a physical keyboard at the same time. I own a 2010 Keyboard Dock and, in spite of its portrait-only functionality, it is a well-made piece of tech that I used a lot last summer when I needed to write my articles on the go.

Keyboard Dock is no more. Apple isn’t selling such an accessory for the iPad 2 (they only have a new dock for sale), and AppAdvice reports the dock you bought last year won’t work with the iPad 2: it doesn’t fit well and doesn’t charge the device.

The decision doesn’t come as a surprise considering Apple’s rapid move to touch interfaces instead of physical keyboard input. Clearly, Apple thinks the iPad’s virtual keyboard is great for most of the typing you’ll need to do, and if you really want a physical keyboard you can still get one of the third-party ones that will come out in the next weeks – or just buy an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard that works perfectly with the iPad. But that is, no native option for the iPad 2.

Update: we’re hearing from some of our readers that the Keyboard Dock typing works, but the iPad 2 doesn’t indeed fit very well and charging is rather random. Works for some, doesn’t do anything for others. We’ll look into this. Read more

Video Comparison Shows Safari on iPad 2 Is Incredibly Fast

When Apple announced the iPad 2 would get a new dual-core processor with improved performances, we all guessed that the device would also get at least double the RAM for much better app management and fast switching. In the days following the announcement and after the plethora of hands-on videos that were uploaded from San Francisco, it was still unclear whether or not the iPad 2’s Safari browser (undoubtedly one of the most-used apps by iPad owners) would be faster and snappier than its iPad 1 counterpart. Many had the feeling that, combining the improved iOS 4.3 with a new processor and more RAM, Safari would highly benefit to reach great performances and stability. This, however, remained a theory even after the reviews posted last week that failed at really showcasing the capabilities of the new Safari.

With the iPad 2 now out and available for everyone, the guys at TiPB posted a video last night a few hours after they got their iPad 2 to (finally) compare Safari on the iPad 2 with Safari on the original iPad. The results are impressive: with 9 tabs loaded and open on each browser, not only does the iPad 2 keep every tab loaded in memory, it also doesn’t display any “checkerboard effect” when scrolling. A major annoyance on Safari for iPad 1, in fact, was that with multiple tabs open the browser was usually forced to reload a tab when you switched to it because it didn’t have enough memory to keep it in a live, fully loaded state. This changes with the iPad 2 as you can see in the video below.

Scrolling in Safari is smooth as butter, and gone are the days when switching between tabs meant loading the entire page from scratch.

The difference in performance is quite clear, and browsing on the iPad 2 is definitely a step up from the original iPad in every way.

We’ll follow up later today with other videos showing the improved performances of the iPad 2 over the original iPad. Check out the video below. Read more

QuickShot: The First iPad 2 Camera App with Dropbox Uploading

If you just got a shiny new iPad 2 at your local Apple Store and you’d like to try out the cameras as proper photographic tools, take a look at the latest QuickShot update. We’ve already reviewed QuickShot here and it was a great and simple iPhone app that mimicked the default iOS camera app, but had Dropbox integration built-in to instantly upload photos to Dropbox.

The new version of the app comes with full iPad 2 support and we believe it’s the first iOS application to have Dropbox camera uploading for the new device.

Get the app here.

First iPad 2 Unboxing Photos and Videos

The lucky folks in the US have started getting their hands on the iPad 2 after some impressive lines we’ve tweeted all day (our editor @codyfink is currently inside the Apple Store to get our iPads) and here are coming the first unboxing photos and videos.

iPad 2 line at Apple Store at the Mall of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, LA. Wrapped around the entire courtyard. [Thanks, Brittany]

iLounge has posted a gallery full of photos of the retail box, and what’s inside.

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Twitter To Developers: Enough With The Twitter Clients

With an official announcement on the Twitter Google Group, head of platform and API at Twitter Ryan Sarver has told developers to stop building third-party Twitter clients that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience”. Basically: no more unofficial Twitter apps that look just like the official iOS, Mac, Android or BlackBerry apps and don’t add any value to the experience. Instead, focus on different areas of the whole Twitter experience. Uh oh.

The move is quickly causing a reaction among developers on Twitter that didn’t expect such a response from the company. Basically, although in a subtle way, they’re telling everyone to stop wasting time trying to emulate the official Twitter apps because 90% of users are already using Twitter through the officially provided tools. On top of that, though, it’s not only a matter of choice: it seems like Twitter is really going to force developers to stop building apps by “holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service”. Some key parts from the announcement:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.  As we talked about last April, this was our motivation for buying Tweetie and developing our own official iPhone app.  It is the reason why we have developed official apps for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone, and worked with RIM on their Twitter for Blackberry app. As a result, the top five ways that people access Twitter are official Twitter apps.

Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter.  More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.  The answer is no.

As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.

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