When IM+ for iPad was announced and the first screenshots started coming out, I had some serious doubts regarding the interface and what the developers seemed to focus on at the time: overcrowding the iPad’s larger screen with tons of buttons and menus. It didn’t feel right, even if we didn’t have an actual device to test it on.
Fortunately, AIM for iPad was announced too, and after some weeks of testing, I can say this is the best IM client you can have on the iPad right now.
There are some iPhone apps you just know Apple’s going to reject, and in the best case you’re not going to be too much disappointed about it - you just know. This is exactly what is going to happen to Wi-Fi Sync, an app from developer Greg Hughes who’s managed to build a tool that lets you wirelessly sync your Mac and iPhone. What we’ve been waiting for years now, and Apple never delivered.
But we know this is not going to happen. There are a million of reasons why Apple doesn’t want something like this to be available in the App Store, and at this point I hope Greg will get over it and release the app in the Cydia Store. At least he’ll make some good bucks out of it.
Check out the demo preview of Wi-Fi Sync after the break.
[via Engadget]
It seems like popular hacker George Hotz is already working on the next version of his popular jailbreak tool for iPhone and iPod Touch, currently called “Blackra1n”. According to Redmond Pie, the next iteration should be called “Limera1n” and it turns out that a website is already online and the Whois record points to the same credentials Hotz used for Blackra1n. We’re embedding it after the break.
I think Hotz is indeed working on this Limera1n tool, but it’s the one that will jailbreak OS 4.0 devices, so it’s not going to be available soon, like next week. As for the jailbreak of the current iPad, we heard that it’s near completion - so I guess that should come anytime now. Hopefully, we’ll be here in two weeks discussing Cydia for iPad.
Another week’s starting, and Steve’s on a roll again. Today we’ve reported an email from his Steveness regarding the “Mac App Store” and now 9to5mac has received an email from a reader, where Steve confirms that the iPad Wifi + 3G will be available at Best Buy on April 30th, this Friday.
Good news.
I’m still looking for a really useful stand for my iPad, but this one is possibly one of the coolest “implementations” I’ve seen so far. Corey Marion (co-founder of the Iconfactory) has spent his Sunday afternoon coming up with something creative for his iPad, and here’s the result.
I mean, an iPad stand made of Lego? Count me in.
Check out the photos after the break.
Checking the weather is one of the things I’ve rediscovered thanks to the iPhone. I’ve always been that kind of guy that is interested in knowing weather conditions and forecasts, but it was quite a pain to go to different websites everytime and buy standalone weather stations to get accurate data about my location. Thanks to the iPhone, and thanks to the App Store, I’ve managed to rediscover my old interested using applications like Outisde from Robocat (which I reviewed here) and Apple’s weather widget.These apps provide a simple and great looking way to see what the weather is like and even what I need to wear based on the temperature. It’s a wether geek’s dreams come true.
Some weeks ago I heard that there was a new weather app, called Climate, which was pretty good and worth trying out. How could I miss a good new weather app?
We heard a rumor last week about Apple making some big changes to the Mac OS X platform, let’s say to 10.7, in order to make it similar to iPhone OS and introduce an App Store for Mac applications that should be approved by Apple first. People started complaining about it, and I guess this would be the worst thing that could happen to a Mac developer, indeed. There are entire business built on top of the open nature of Mac OS X, and Apple just can’t change it anymore.
Fortunately, Steve handled the situation himself and finally ended those rumors.
We all know Apple’s stock is now worth like never before. It’s been a terrific year for Apple, and so it’s been for those who bought stock years ago and now have a huge amount of money in their hands. I wish I had bought some Apple stock instead of that damn vacation in Switzerland. But what about Apple products? Have you ever wondered how much money you spent on those iPods and could have invested in stock instead?
One of the most popular arguments against the iPad is that the device doesn’t support multitasking. I’ve discussed this subject many times before, and after Apple introduced its version of multitasking at the latest iPhone OS 4.0 event, we all know that what we’re going to get is much more like a system-wide persistent state feature rather than actual multitasking. If by multitasking you meant to be able to have multitple windows on screen at the same time, you won’t have that. You won’t be able to see more than one app at a time, and I’m definitely fine with that. If I’m writing something in Pages I don’t need to keep an eye on Twitterrific, and when I browse websites with Safari I don’t edit spreadsheets in Numbers.
There are some cases though where you’d want to work with an app and have another one open, running on its side, to take a quick glimpse at it every few minutes. When I’m on my Mac, it happens that I read stuff in DEVONthink and take a very quick look at the newest tweets in Tweetie. Maybe this it’s no exactly multitasking (I keep thinking that we humans cannot multitask), so I’ll just say it’s fast app switching which benefits from the larger real screen estate of a Mac. But would you imagine this on the iPad? Having Pages and a small widget on screen at the same time? Wouldn’t it become a mess, even with this beautiful 10 inches display?
Maybe. Maybe we just don’t need widgets at all, and screw you if you want a damn Dashboard running on the iPad. Let’s take a different approach: basing on the iPad UI guidelines, the implementation of split views and popovers is highly recommended. You know, the same stuff Mail, Instapaper and all the other apps do. And when you have a split view in front of you, isn’t that a very raw kind of multitasking? You basically have two views running at the same time, so I guess it’s quite fair to call it in this way. No let’s apply this to a browser, and here comes Multitasking Browser for iPad.
