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Posts tagged with "iPad"

iPad Landscape Connector [Concept]

That keyboard dock Apple sells for the iPad? It’s meant for portrait mode. There’s no way to put the tablet in there and expect the dock to hold it in landscape (which offers a broader and better view in most apps), which is kind of a bummer considering that the iPad is not the iPhone and it’s not specifically meant for portrait. Still, this is what Apple is selling.

Italian designer Federico Ciccarese came up with a neat concept of an accessory that, placed between the dock and the iPad, would allows users to use the keyboard and dock functionalities while holding the iPad in landscape mode. It looks fairly simple and clever enough to provide an alternative solution for all those who wished Apple thought of a way to hold the iPad in both orientations in the first place.

But as usual, this is just a concept and Ciccarese is looking for a producer. [via iPadevice]

Skyfire Coming To The iPad, Integrates Facebook & Twitter In The Browser

Remember Skyfire? The Flash browser for iPhone? Yes, the one that lets you watch Flash videos on the iPhone by quickly converting them to HTML5. In our review, we wrote that the app, besides Flash converting capabilities, also had a lot of neat features to bring an innovative browsing experience to the iPhone. Even if I’m sure many users bought it and quickly came back to Safari, Skyfire managed to gain quite a few followers. Skyfire is now coming to the iPad.

The iPad app, which according to Wired should be released “before Christmas” at $4.99, will come with even more functionalities than its mobile counterpart. Skyfire for iPad, thanks to the tablet’s larger screen, will integrate lots of social features such as the possibility to access your Facebook wall at any time, Twitter, Google Reader and a bunch of other websites all within popovers on screen. Skyfire for iPad will allow yo to quickly access your social profiles and check on links shared by your friends and people you follow, tap on them and open everything inside the browser, in additional tabs. The tab interface looks cool and well-animated, but I wonder why the developers went for an iPhone-like approach instead of mimicking the tabs seen in Mobile Safari for iPad.

Also, I don’t know why would I want to see my Facebook wall at any time in the browser. I can understand the Google Reader integration, but all these other social features sound like a useless overlay to me. Oh, and Skyfire for iPad will also have a universal Facebook Like button that will let you like any page without opening Facebook. This, admittedly, sounds pretty cool.

I’m not sure about all this social stuff in browsers (remember RockMelt?), but I’ll be keeping an eye on this new version of Skyfire. With Apple’s devices dominating encoded web video, clearly there’s not this huge need of a browser capable of converting Flash anymore. Perhaps all we need is a social browser for the tablet. [via MobileCrunch] Read more

Email The Cloud, Get Your Actions In OmniFocus→

Email The Cloud, Get Your Actions In OmniFocus

To try out the feature, send a message to [email protected]. Within a few minutes, you’ll receive an auto-response from us which includes a “Send to OmniFocus” link.

It’s actually within a few seconds. The actionable emails came in my inbox seconds after I forwarded my items to the OmniFocus address. This is a great idea and it shows how much the OmniGroup is committed to delivering a real cloud-based GTD solution, unlike many others. Too bad this email feature works well only with plain text right now – forwarded emails will turn into lines of weird unicode characters, as also reported by Shawn Blanc.

Still, this gives you an idea of why you have to consider OmniFocus. Truly a killer product for iOS and OS X.

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Airfoil 4 Streamlines Audio, Video Experience

Apple may have introduced AirPlay, but that doesn’t mean Rogue Amoeba is out of the game. In fact, AirPlay is rather limited unless you enjoy hacking your way out of a paper bag, and by no means can it expand its territory outside of iTunes. If you ever wanted to sit back on the couch and watch CNET TV on your 27” Cinema Display through your iPod’s headphones, you’re out of luck. But with Airfoil, streaming audio anywhere allows one to achieve a state of wireless bliss.

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The iPad: 50,000 Apps In 8 Months

The iPad was released on April 3rd in the United States. That was 257 days ago. The iPad App Store, launched on the same day, now has over 50,000 apps. It’s got 51,295 apps to be exact, at the moment of writing this. It only took 8 months for Apple to reach this milestone, but it’s been kind of an unstoppable growth.

In the past months, in fact, we have seen how the iPad App Store was growing to accommodate more apps every month. 10,000 apps in June. 20,000 apps in August. Then, more than 40,000 apps only 24 days ago, when iOS 4.2 was released to the public. We can argue that the App Store (for iPad and iPhone) is increasingly becoming a place for games, rather than standard “apps”, but still – these are the numbers. And even if using and getting a device to fit in our daily lives has really nothing to do with numbers, this is an achievement Apple is going to rely on for months to come.

50,000 apps available for the iPad isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Thinking about the Mac apps ready to go on sale in another App Store.