Stephen Coles over at Fontfeed gives us a great overview about what the iPad’s really missing in terms of typography:

“Yet it’s exactly that part of media consumption, reading, that reveals what’s missing on the iPad: good typography.

Signs that type took a backseat in the iPad’s development were clear back in January when Steve Jobs demoed the device, revealing just four uninspired and uninformed font options in iBooks. Apple also went with full justification without hyphenation, learning nothing from the Kindle’s spacing woes. These decisions were small or unnoticeable to the millions of future iPad buyers watching the announcement. But they stuck out like a sore thumb to typographers, whose job it is to make small, unnoticeable decisions that make text easier and more enjoyable to read”

Jim Hoskins over at Done21 has found out something very interesting about the iPad and web applications: a framework Apple hasn’t told us anything about yet, labelled “AdLib” which should garantuee native-like performances for webapps. [Link]

From the post:

“With the iPad comes a special Safari bookmark labeled “iPad User Guide.” The page it links to behaves almost exactly like a native application, but in the web browser. It has a split-view with all of the UI flare in UIKit. The crazy part is, it’s done completely in HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

What’s particularly interesting is that it does something that shouldn’t really be possible in Mobile Safari: It includes scrolling panes that can be manipulated with a single finger, complete with the signature iPhone OS “scroll bars” and elastic transitions. If you have ever worked with Safari on the iPhone, you know that having scrolling boxes of content is sort of possible, but requires a special two-finger gesture to scroll.”

Whether this might turn out to be a revolution for developers willing to approach Apple’s devices, I have many doubts regarding Apple freeing webapps like this. It sorta seems too easy and unexpected to me. Perhaps we’ll know something more tomorrow.

I’m no painter, but Layers for iPad really made me feel like one. Layers let’s users create beautiful paintings with just their fingers. You can use some of the many available brushes to paint, smudge, and erase. You can even have more Layers to create even more complex paintings.

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AppleInsider reports:

“Scott Sykora and Eugene Kaneko are the creators of Web Albums HD, an iPad application that accesses photos saved to Google’s Picasa Web albums. The software was initially rejected from the App Store, Sykora said, because it employed the pinch to expand gesture to “peek” at photo albums, in the same manner as Apple’s own native Photos application for the iPad.

When the application was initially rejected from the App Store, Apple sent a letter to the developers noting that the pinch to expand feature is “associated solely with Apple applications.” The form letter-like e-mail also mistakenly named another application, leading Sykora to assume that Web Albums HD is not the only software that has been rejected for its use of pinch to expand.”

I can see many other stories like this coming, which isn’t exactly good for Apple. They need to fix it.