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Ego for iPad: With More Pixels, You’re More Important

You have a blog, and you know that keeping an eye on stats is important. You track visits and unique visitors, but you’ve gotten used to monitor outbound links, referrers and landing pages, because you also know that details are important. You track your Twitter followers, RSS subscribers and Vimeo play counts. Sometimes you wish you could track who follows and unfollows you every day, oh wait - you’ve installed Birdbrain on your iPhone for that. You’re a web analytics junkie. You can’t wait to wake up in the morning to see if someone on the Internet is talking about you, just to see if your latest post has turned out to be that success you expected.

Your most loved iPhone application is Ego. And now you can have it on the iPad as well.

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Magical Device: The First iPad Marriage Proposal

Steve Jobs told us the iPad was magical, and it turns out that many people took that words really seriously. TechCrunch reader Zach Iniguez used his new iPad to ask her girlfriend to marry him, in the same spot he asker her out 2 years ago. We’ve heard of many other “Apple-related” marriage proposals before, but this is one stands out for the “implementation”.

Really, take a look at the original email from Zach below.

“Hi TechCrunch,

I’m a huge fan of your blog and read it every day, and I thought you might be interested in this. This weekend I brought my girlfriend to a local ice cream shop where we had our first date. I also brought along my iPad, since I wanted to “field test” it, as I told her. We sat outside on the same bench we had 2 1/2 years ago, and I asked her to put on earphones. I then handed her the iPad and played a slideshow with music and photos of the two of us together, with a message at the end: “will you marry me?” I got down on one knee and proposed, and fortunately she said yes. Maybe Steve Jobs was right–the iPad is magical!

Thanks for providing me with years of news and entertainment.

Zach”

Oh by the way, she said yes.

MacBook Pro 15″ Core i5 iFixit Teardown

iFixit has announced that they’ve finally completed the teardown of the new MacBook Pro 15” Core i5 released earlier this week, and they’ve found some surprising and subtle changes.

The Airport and Bluetooth card has been redesigned and repositioned to allow a better signal reception in the Macbook internal case. Other tweaks include a redesign to the speaker casing and an increased capacity of the battery.

Issuu Updated for HTML5 iPad Reading

Issuu, the popular website that allows you to upload any kind of document and make a magazine out of it, has been updated for the iPad.

Instead of displaying content in Flash, now there’s a fallback in HTML5 for Apple’s new device, together with a nice interface that fits the iPad screen. Take a look at the screenshot beyond the break.

Read more

Jailbreak for iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 1 Available

Dev Team’s Musclenerd has just announced the first public jailbreak of the iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 1. Aimed only at developers of jailbroken apps, this jailbreak is done using RedSnow (Mac-only) 0.9.5 beta, available here.

The jailbreak doesn’t work on the iPad and, again, is still very broken and unstable. Still, it seems to be working.

Also, iPhone 3G only for now. More to come in the next days.

Omnifocus for iPad, Coming This June

With a post on the official company blog, the Omnigroup has announced the roadmap for all their other Mac applications which are being ported to the iPad.

Omnifocus, surely one of the most popular apps from the Omni guys, is coming in less than two months:

“We’re currently working on OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in parallel. OmniFocus has a bit of a head start, thanks to the work we’d already done in bringing it to iPhone, so we anticipate its iPad app will be ready in June. OmniOutliner is a little further out, and our current projection is that it will ship this summer. Finally, after we’ve shipped those four apps, we’ll round out the set with OmniPlan for iPad which we’re currently anticipating will ship sometime this fall.”

Great news. We’ll take a look at it as soon as possible.

CourseNotes, The Student’s iPad Companion. Review and Giveaway!

The idea of using the iPad as a tool in school is an interesting prospect. On one had the tablet form factor of the iPad allows it to be used like an open notebook - the screen is suitable for writing text and taking notes. However, Apple has nearly killed that idea without the option for a stylus, and unless you happen to love sausage or ill-reviewed Pogo Stylus, it ain’t happenin’. While we have a keyboard, what student wants to type on a virtual keyboard? My whole success to taking notes via Evernote on my laptop is because I can furiously type on my Macbook’s keyboard without ere - eyes fixated on the instructor and not on the screen. But the idea is still intriguing: how well does the iPad fair as a note taking device? For this review, I’ll be using an application called CourseNotes. Read more

Apple and Piracy

Very difficult subject, and a simple and clear take about it over at Parollo’s blog.

Link.

“Now I have many friends who actually buy application and games for their iPod Touches or iPhone, and I almost see it as a half miracle. Mainly, because it is easy to get apps.

If you want to sell things, make sure that it is easy to buy them.”