Oh, Yahoo. What are you, exactly? What have you become? No one really knows for sure. Are you “the guys behind Flickr”? Are you a news website? A mail platform? Many say Yahoo! lacks an identity. Maybe they do.
But anyway, the iPad-optimized homepage they recently launched isn’t that bad. Available at yahoo.com/tablet, it displays Yahoo’s sites in a sidebar and featured articles to flick through with your fingers on top.
Not bad at all.
The iPad was meant to save the publishing industry. When Steve Jobs unveiled the device last January, no one was surprised to see the New York Times demoing an iPad-only app – we all knew that if the rumors were true, if Apple was really working on a tablet, then it must be aimed at the publishing industry. Among things.
After that, all major newspapers and publications rushed to have iPad applications out in the App Store, and now they’re carrying those same apps over to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. Most of those apps aren’t exactly “great”, some of them are well-realized and will even follow the website counterpart to adopt a subscription-based model (see the New York Times). Read more
Popular PC and console game Borderlands is coming to the Mac, The Loop reports. Feral Interactive announced its plans to bring the “Game of the Year” edition of its game to Macs in December, though it’s not clear whether the new version will be also be sold on Steam or not.
A first-person shooter spliced with the DNA of a role-playing game, Borderlands takes you to the scarred desert surface of planet Pandora. Ravaged and abandoned by mega-mining corporations, and populated by prison convicts, miscreants and bloodthirsty alien monsters, it’s a hostile land. You’re a fortune hunter determined to find and open the mythical ‘Vault’, an alien artefact of unimaginable power. Luckily for you,Borderlands’ random content generation system means you’ve got guns. Lots of guns.
The game can be pre-ordered here at £35 (around $55), but if you don’t want to wait and prefer to run the game via Boot Camp, you can buy the Game of the Year edition for PC on Amazon at $49.
Steve Wozniak is that kind of guy who has no problems in saying exactly what he thinks. He co-founded Apple, but criticizing Apple and talking about the great features of Android OS isn’t a problem for him.
That’s exactly what happened in an interview with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf: as Engadget reports, the Woz apparently revealed that Apple was collaborating with a “well-known Japanese consumer electronics company in 2004 to develop a phone that was ahead of its time”. That would be the iPhone that was released in 2007, and it’s interesting that Steve Jobs and his team had the thing ready in 2004 and decided to put it on the shelf for 3 years. Perhaps multi-touch wasn’t ready? Perhaps because of high manufacturing costs? Who knows. Read more
Today Apple announced they’re bringing their “revolutionary iAd network” to Europe. iAds will launch in December in the UK and France, Germany will follow in January. As for the partners, the rumors were correct: Apple managed to close deals with L’Orèal, Renault, Luis Vuitton, Nespresso and Perrier & Unilever.
iAds started to roll out internationally two weeks ago, and while the ads were visible to non-US users they weren’t target to specific audiences. For instance, I was able to see an AT&T iAd in Italy.
Press release follows below. Read more
The Wall Street Journal:
Meaning: it’s not up to us, we want the iPhone. I know the folks at Cupertino are testing a Verizon-compatible device, but we’ve been told to wait.
This summer, there was this friend of mine at the camping – Marco – who regularly came asking for my iPhone 4 to play one game: Zen Bound 2. He had become addicted to it since I first showed the app to him, and he turned out to be so good at covering creepy wood shapes with paint that I had to make him stop. Seriously, I uninstalled the app.
For those who of you unaware of the total awesomeness of Zen Bound 2, here’s the gist: in this game you have to wrap a rope around wood objects, the rope covers them with paint, you have to cover objects with a certain percentage of paint to complete a level. Absurd, simple. A must-have available at $2.99 for iPhone and iPad with Game Center support and Retina graphics. Read more
Award-winning game Real Racing (well, at least the iPhone version) received a major update today: owners of the iPad version are now able to start online multiplayer sessions thanks to Game Center built into the update. Multiplayer supports up to 4 players, and you can invite friends to play also via Game Center.
As many other apps these days, Real Racing HD has also been updated to support iOS 4.2: it basically supports persistent state now, so you’ll be able to quickly pause and resume when switching between apps.
Real Racing HD is available at $9.99 here. Check out the full changelog below. Read more
HootSuite, the online service to manage multiple social networks in one single place, released its first official iPad app a few minutes ago in the App Store. The app is free and available here.
HootSuite for iPad features all the options and functionalities iPhone users have been able to enjoy for almost a year now, but it sports a native interface for the tablet that takes advantage of the larger screen to display multiple “columns” at once, so you can keep track of your Twitter messages and mentions without having to switch between different views, for example.
The app currently supports Twitter accounts (lists and searches are included), Facebook profiles and pages, Foursquare checkins and, of course, HootSuite’s own URL shortening and analytics system ow.ly. Read more
