The iPad Paradox

Macworld

“Technical people always complain about being buttonholed at every family get-together by relatives who want “free tech support.” But why do they want this? Why do they need it? The answer is that consumer technology is overly complex.

And whose fault is it?

Unfortunately, it’s my fault. And possibly your fault. It’s the fault of everyone, including marketers, who relentlessly call for more, more and ever more features. Combine this with our calls for backward compatibility, and the result is systems that do everything. They’re so feature-rich, so complex, that some people can’t get them to do anything.”

Sponge: Feeds Aggregator for iPhone. One App to Rule Them All?

Trying to pack all the websites you’re subscribed to in a single application isn’t a new concept at all. Apps like Socialite for Mac and Ego for iPhone have successfully managed to integrate the most popular social networks in one single and easily accessible place, thus making really simple for people to take a look at what’s going on, what they missed and, overall, what’s new.

Sponge by Oobah Studios is a new application for iPhone which aims at collecting all your internet feeds in one screen, enabling you to catch up with the latest happenings on your various accounts. It’s very good, but it might use some adjustment and fixes. Read on to find out what.

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FML for iPhone, Delight in Misfortune. Review and Giveaway.

Life has no mercy sometimes, but I really don’t care much about it. As long as I can keep doing what I love and not doing what I can’t stand, I won’t give a shit about what could happen to me if I do something. That’s how I live everyday. But on the other hand, I can’t help but laughing at listening to other people’s tragedies, bad happenings and FAILs . If you ever lol’ed for someone falling down the stairs, you know what I’m talking about - let’s face it. But what about telling the world your own everyday life stories,and let people laugh at them?

Meet F* My Life, unofficial FML client for iPhone.

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Opera Mini for iPhone, First Impressions

Technologizer

“Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices. It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.

On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.”

Radar Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Radar giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Madewithbits developers for the licenses they gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

x0r

David

oykun.yilmaz

Thibaut Ninove

ralph

Davide85

Michael

Martin Král

Dennis

Knox

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few days. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.

SpringBoard Rotator Brings Landscape Mode To The iPhone Home Screen

If you ever wished to use your iPhone in landscape mode even when playing around with the home screen, soon you’ll be able to do it. iPhoneHellas has just published an exclusive preview of SpringBoard Rotator, a soon to be released in Cydia tool that will allow you to rotate your iPhone and enjoy a landscape-enabled springboard.

As you can see it doesn’t stop at rotating icons or other similar tricks, a landscape statusbar and wallpaper are injected into the iPhone, icons are stretched and same happens to the dock. Sure it needs more stability and more space between the icons (I’m not a huge fan of pages cluttered with 30+ icons) but it’s really promising. Check out the embedded video below.