Dragon Dictation Lets you Naturally Speak to your iPad.

For those with symptoms of signs of RSI and arthritis, typing on the iPad’s virtual keyboard is a less than stellar experience. Even Apple’s own keyboard dock isn’t the most ergonomic solution for those who prefer curved or split keyboards. Many of those with aching hands on the Mac have turned to MacSpeech Dictate, and on the iPhone, Dragon Dictation for their computing needs. It’s a blessing to have such amazing speech software that allows you to create documents, send email, and on the Mac, control the machine with nothing but your voice. For those familiar with the iPhone client, you may want to take notice of Dragon’s latest iteration on the iPad. It’s smart, simple, and of great benefit to those who want the portability of the iPad, but are unable to type for extended periods of time. Read more


Egretlist Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Egretlist giveaway.We also want to thank the Minds Momentum developers for the promo codes they offered to MacStories readers.

Here are the winners:

Windsix

Josh

Roxanna

Eric

Arsen

Olive

You’ll receive the promo codes in your inbox in a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

You can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet or Federico as @viticci




Taska for iPad: Beautiful, Feature Rich GTD Application

The iPad is the perfect productivity device, at least for me: I read articles, catch up with the news, write posts, do email and browsing with it. I’m starting to realize that 70% of the activities I used to do on a Macbook can easily be done on the iPad, without compromises of any sort. Sure the iPad App Store still lacks a good WordPress app and a decent FTP client for uploading pictures, but I’m moving my overall daily tasks to this new device. It’s smaller, more focused yet powerful enough to allow me to do stuff without losing the ability to do it well.

Of course I needed a good task manager to manage my todos on the iPad: after the Twitter client quest and the search for a great feeds reading app I decided it was time to install a GTD application to organize, sort and process tasks. As you can guess, the first choice was Things from Cultured Code, an already excellent app for Mac and iPhone which has been ported with a complete interface revamp to the iPad and was also available on day one. I installed Things, but I still have to try it because I’m testing another application now, Taska for iPad from BitAlpha.

Read more


Apple Updates MobileMe Backup to 3.2

Macworld:

“The update is about par for the course, including reliability improvements, but it introduces one interesting new feature apparently borrowed from Time Machine: automatically recycling old backups to conserve space.

Detailed in this Apple support document, Backup 3.2 for MobileMe users will now “recycle” backups (read: delete them to recover space) after a certain time period, depending on the original schedule used to back up that data, as well as the destination.”

Was about time. Still using Arq and Dropbox though.


Every Time Zone: Beautiful, iPad Compatible Web App

Living in Italy and writing MacStories, I have to keep up with what happens in the rest of the world, which in most cases means “catch up with the news from the US”. As you can guess, I had some problems with time zone at the beginning, but I’ve gotten used to it. Coffee also helps a lot, if you ask me.

But for those of you who still have problems with timezones, there’s an app for that. It’s a webapp actually, and it works pretty great on both Safari for Mac and iPad. It’s called Every Time Zone and through a beautiful, mouse and touch compatible interface allows you to quickly check what’s the time on the most important timezones around the world. All you have to do is move with either your mouse or finger that little tab which is your local time and see the changes in the other timezones. It works great on the iPad.

Check out the screenshot after the break.

Read more


Video Shows Jailbroken iPhone 3G With OS 4.0 and Multitasking

Last week we reported that some developers found out you can enable multitasking on the iPhone 3G by simply changing a string in a .plist file from “false” to “true”. Today a video has been released, and it shows an iPhone 3G, running OS 4.0, jailbroken and with multitasking.

The jailbreak has probably been done with the iH8sn0w tool, whose developers has announced they are working on the iPhone OS 4.0 version. You can easily spot that it’s an iPhone 3G by how slow (compared to the 3GS) it opens Settings and Clock. Check out the video after the break.

Read more


Apple Delays International iPad Launch By One Month

Bad news: Apple has officially confirmed what we were fearing the most, a delayed international launch for the iPad.

Press release:

“Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad™. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April.

Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason—the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far.”

In the meantime, you can either wait or try Bundlebox. It works great.