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iPad To Be Used By Pilots for In-Flight Mapping Data

The iPad is a magical device and a new one is set to be announced tomorrow (hey, don’t miss our liveblog!), but that didn’t stop the Federal Aviation Administration from confirming that the current-gen tablet can now be officially used by pilots instead of paper charts while on duty. That’s right: after hundreds of hours of tests that put the iPad under “rapid decompression” and “electronic interference testing” with 55 pilots on 250 flights, Apple’s mythical slate got a thumbs-up from the FAA and can now go on board without being restricted in any way.

While electronic devices used instead of paper charts are nothing new to the FAA, the iPad and its relatively cheap price set it apart from the competition, allowing pilots to quickly open a dedicated app to receive live information and details about the flight. The device’s form factor and OS helped during the adoption as a replacement unit can easily be carried around and, apparently, the software developed by the FAA never crashed during testing. I’m pretty sure they didn’t use the buggy iOS 4.3 beta – although gestures for pilots would be awesome, in my opinion.

So there you have it. An iPad 2 may be announced tomorrow, but the iPad 1 is ready to fly. This time not just off the shelves. [via Engadget]

Evernote’s iPhone App Updated With Extensive Redesign

Evernote, the popular note taking service has just updated its iPhone and iPod Touch app with a completely redesigned user interface.  Everything aspect of the the app has been reconsidered and improved for this 4.0 update to improve functionality, speed and utility.

One of the key improvements has been the addition of a snippet view when browsing through notes. It does a great job at providing as much information as possible into a compact space so that many notes can be skimmed over at once. As the Evernote team says;

If the note only contains an image, then we’ll take a slice out of the image and present it full width. If the note has a mix of text and other forms of content, then we’ll show you the title, some text and a thumbnail.

The other fundamental redesign is present in the new note screen which is presented in a split-screen view, the top half being text entry and the bottom half for additional information or the keyboard. You can attach images, a voice recording (up to 90 minutes long!), a location, tags and assign a notebook for the note.

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Rovio CEO Thanks Apple, New Angry Birds Games This Summer→

Rovio CEO Thanks Apple, New Angry Birds Games This Summer

At the Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco, Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka spoke to a large crowd about the success of his company’s franchise, Angry Birds, and the results of going from developing games for others (they used to do work for hire) to having millions of people downloading your own mobile game. Vesterbacka thanked Apple for creating the App Store model and disrupting the Soviet-like market that was imposed by carriers years ago.

We really have Apple to thank,” said Vesterbacka – not just for helping to promote Angry Birds, but for creating the App Store to begin with.

“We got away from this carrier-dominated Soviet model,” he explained – before the App Store, the carriers were responsible for figuring out what software would run on their phones. “Other people decided on our behalf what was a good game and what was a bad game,” Vesterbacka said.

As for new entries in the Angry Birds world:

You won’t have to wait too long,” said Vesterbacka – Rovio plans to release new Angry Birds games this summer.

Angry Birds Rio is set to come out on March 22, and an update to Angry Birds Seasons was released a few weeks ago. Here’s my theory: does the fact that Vesterbacka is in San Francisco and that Apple’s iPad 2 event is tomorrow sound interesting to you?

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New Cydia App “TruPrint” Extends Apple’s AirPrint Support

With iOS 4.2 Apple introduced AirPrint, a new system-wide technology that allows iPhone and iPad users to print emails, photos and just about any kind of document wirelessly without having to worry about drivers or configurations. The problem is, while Apple initially announced that AirPrint would work with a set of “officially supported” printers from HP and any printer also shared on a Mac or PC, issues arose with the OS X 10.6.5 update and Apple was forced to pull support for shared printers. The result: AirPrint only works with a bunch of printers from HP. Okay.

TruPrint is a new Cydia hack from the Intelliborn developers (the folks behind popular tethering and hotspot app MyWi) that promises to bring AirPrint support to hundreds of printers not officially listed by Apple as “compatible with AirPrint”. The app relies on Apple’s AirPrint technology, so iOS 4.2 is still needed to run it, but the support for Canon, Brother, HP and additional printers Intelliborn has baked into TruPrint looks impressive.

TruPrint is available in the Cydia Store at $9.99 with a 3-day free trial. If you’ve been looking for a solution to print to your favorite machine and you have a jailbroken device, this should be it. Check out the cool promo video below. [via iPhoneDownloadBlog] Read more

Opera Debuts On The Mac App Store

A new release to the Mac App Store today is the Opera web browser that can be downloaded for free. The app seems to be exactly the same as the non Mac App Store version and identifies itself as version 11.01 and build 1206.

The app also includes its Presto layout engine, which would have been thought to be an infringement on Apple’s Mac App Store guidelines that state, “Apps that use non-public APIs will be rejected.” This raises the distinct possibility that browser engines may not fall under the private API category, in which case other browsers could soon be heading to the Mac App Store including Firefox that uses another layout engine called Gecko. Alternatively it is possible that an Apple reviewer has let Opera slip through without realizing, which has happened before with app reviews.

When bringing the Opera browser to the iPhone and iPad, they had run into similar guideline restrictions and were forced to only release Opera Mini that does not use their own browser engine but instead directs traffic through Opera’s servers to compress data. The more fully featured Opera Mobile which is available for Android and other mobile phones could not be released on the iPhone because of its reliance on their own APIs .

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Steve Jobs Almost Received An Honourary Knighthood

A former British MP has revealed to The Telegraph that Steve Jobs was close to being offered a knighthood in 2009 for his services to technology. According to the former MP, the proposal for his knighthood was blocked because Jobs had previously refused to speak at a British political event.

The former senior British MP told The Telegraph that he had nominated Steve Jobs for knighthood and that despite reaching the final stages of approval, was inevitably refused by Downing Street. He claims that they explained the refusal was based on Jobs’ refusal to attend an annual Labor conference, just his appearance at the event would have been a big political win for Gordon Brown.

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Unreal Engine 3 To Power Four Gameloft Games In 2011 And 2012

Gameloft has today announced that they have partnered with Epic Games to bring four games to mobile devices using Unreal Engine 3. The game engine will power two games this year and two aimed for release in 2012.

Unreal Engine 3, which was released late last year, was the game engine that powered the tech demo of Epic Citadel as well as Epic Games very succesful Infinity Blade.  The Unreal Development Kit is free for developers to download and try, but if used they must pay a $99 licensing fee and a 25% royalty fee after the first $50,000 in sales.

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Start the Clock! Speed-Up & Chronos Are In This Timely Giveaway

Podcasts and getting things done tend to go hand-in-hand at the office. For those who want to blaze through a podcast session, your iPhone offers the ability to speed up your talking heros for a quicker injection of information. Speed-up brings that same control to your Mac via the menubar, and it was reviewed a while ago as a podcast throttle for your Mac.

Chronos is also an app we recently reviewed, and continues our time theme by keeping track of various tasks and projects on your Mac. It’s very simple to use, and can accommodate a Mac user as a progress indicator from the dock or menubar.

We’re giving away four copies of each, and we recommend that you check out Speed-up and Chronos in the Mac App Store before clicking past to the giveaway after the break.

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QuickShot: A Custom Camera App That Automatically Uploads to Dropbox

A few days ago I reviewed DropPhox, an iPhone app that can upload photos and videos to Dropbox, also allowing you to set a specific size for uploads so you don’t have to worry about large files being transferred over 3G. DropPhox has some great features and, overall, works pretty well but in my review I mentioned the app could use some additional UI love and the possibility to upload media without tapping on a confirmation button.

QuickShot, a similar app I stumbled upon over the weekend, lets you upload photos to Dropbox but it does this with a polished interface and by completely working in the background. The developers achieved these results using a custom camera view that lists uploads right below the statusbar, without requiring you to confirm photos going off to Dropbox. You can, however, change this option in the settings. QuickShot also enables you to choose a Dropbox path, save pictures to the Camera Roll and set photo quality to low, medium and high. Medium works best for me.

Perhaps the best thing about QuickShot is its minimal and elegant UI that puts three buttons in the standard camera view, with one of them allowing you to pick photos from the iOS camera roll and send them to Dropbox. The app I reviewed, DropPhox, doesn’t have such a feature, or delicious interface.

QuickShot doesn’t do videos, but it’s a great solution for photos. Get it here at $0.99.