Gourmet Magazine for iPad Gets it Right

Looking for the best magazine experience for the iPad? Sure we have flashy titles like Times and Wired, but Gourmet Live for the iPad helps you reveal your inner cook by providing users with an incredibly clean format.

When it came to Wired’s debut, one of the biggest complaints was about the column layout. Gourmet does away with such silly jitter and flashy animations. In fact, there’s nothing completely broken or confusing about Gourmet - it captures the essence of the iPad by being linear, simple, and elegant. I’m not a cook, nor am I interested in learning how to make a great Pumpkin Pie, but Gourmet Live may at least encourage me to try.

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Aves: Web Based Game Engine, Works on iPad and iOS

Aves is a new game engine entirely based on web technologies. It will be used to build 2D / 2.5D videogames running in every browser with modern CSS, HTML and Javascript web standards. It will handle viewports automatically, and - being based on web technologies - the developers promise Aves games will run just fine on the iPad and other iOS, Android and WebOS devices.

But it doesn’t stop at building games with HTML. It’s got some great API stuff we should all look forward to:

“So again, what are action surfaces? As you know, the whole Web 2.0-Idea is actually about sharing and exchanging data using APIs. We have thousands of those in the web today and you can integrate data from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter or Google Maps on your website today by adding a few lines of code.

Guess what? Now you can integrate all those into your games with a mouse click!

If you want to display certain photos from Flickr on an object like a TV-Set you simply tell the Aves Engine that this particular object should have an action surface attached to it and that you want to fill this surface with some data.”

It’s very promising indeed. Check out the official page here, and the demo video after the break. We’ll keep you posted about this.

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Sonos iPad Controller Shows Remotes How it’s Done

While I wish Apple would update their Remote application for the iPad (Am I the only one that uses AirTunes?) – even though it would ruin their “remote” metaphor – Sonos is set to release an iPad native controller that’s incredibly well done. Though you’ll have to wait a bit before you can get your hands on it. All Engadget has obtained is a demo, and reportedly we won’t see this bad boy until August. But hey, that gives you some time to save up enough money so you can actually buy a Sonos wireless speaker system, right?

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VLC 1.1 Released, Still no Hardware Acceleration for Mac

VLC 1.1 is getting lots of love today as it rolls out on Windows, Mac, and Linux. But Mac users seem to be left behind, as Nvidia-based hardware acceleration only works on Windows and Linux systems. Though don’t let that stop you from from the open-source goodness, lots of additions and updates have been applied to the client that should improve playback and performance all around.

You know what to do - download VLC 1.1 here (direct download).

[VideoLAN via Lifehacker]

Transmission Goes 2.0

Transmission, the popular cross-platform torrent client, has been updated over the weekend to the final 2.0 version. Beta versions of 2.0 have been released in the past months for testing.

Transmission 2.0 brings very important changes such as a new compact view on Mac OS X, faster startup times and verification of data, a local peers discovery feature and optimization of downloads according to bandwidth available. Check out the full changes here, and check for updates if you’re running an old version of Transmission.

BarMax Profiting at $1000 an App

How do you sell a $1000 dollar application on the iTunes App Store? You sell it to law students of course.

Law students who are taking the bar exam in California can currently purchase BarMax CA from the iTunes app store for the measly price of $999.99. But this actually isn’t bad, considering the leading competitor BarBri charges up to $4000 for their study guides.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch made aware the purpose of such an application.

“So what do you get for your $1,000 BarMax CA app? A lot, actually. The app is over 1 gigabyte in size, which is the largest application I’ve ever seen. It includes thousands of pages of materials as well as hundreds of hours of audio lectures. It’s all the information you could ever want for the two-month course. And again, it can be done all on your iPhone.”

Now, they’re following up to see how well it’s done in the App Store. Spoiler: it’s a success.

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My Favorite iOS 4-Ready Apps and “Subtle Changes”

So you’ve got iOS 4 installed on your iPhones and iPods and you want to know which apps in the App Store are already compatible with it. There are some great roundups around about it.

I’ve decided to put together a list of my favorite apps that are already using iOS 4’s new functionalities such as state-saving and multitasking. Plus, I’ve collected some of the “subtle changes” Apple has put into iOS, those little things that make you love Apple every time. Nik Fletcher has another similar collection too, check it out here.

What are your favorite apps and changes in iOS 4? Tell us in the comments below.

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Apple Sells 3 Million iPads in 80 Days

Apple has just issued a press release announcing that they’ve sold 3 million iPad units in 80 days and more than 11000 native iPad apps are out in the App Store.

Two weeks ago we reported that 10.000 iPad apps were available in the App Store, and 78% of them were paid applications. As for iPad sales, Apple announced 1 million units sold after 28 days, and 2 million units after 60 days. Sales are growing, and the only word I can think of right now is “impressive”. It’ll be interesting to see what’s going to happen with the iPhone 4 and iPad both out by this holiday season.

Check out the press release after the break.

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