Let’s step into the world of audiobooks often promoted by great figures like Leo Laporte to understand why such things are so good. One might wonder, “Why would I want to listen to a book when I can just read it?” Of course, don’t knock it until you try it. Being able to crank out MacStories rants and reviews often comes with aid of podcasts like The 404, or recently the mellifluous tones of AudioBookShelf (App Store link). If you’ve ever wanted to step into the realm of audiobooks, this is where you start.
Posts tagged with "iPad"
AudioBookShelf, Bringing ‘AudioClassics’ to Life. Review & Giveaway!
Wired iPad App Sells 24.000 Copies in 24 Hours
The Wired iPad application has sold very well in the first 24 hours of availability in the App Store. Executives of Wired have announced that the app has sold 24.000 copies, for around $80.000 of revenue in just one day.
Also from Wired.com:
“In press briefings before they released their app, Wired and Condé Nast executives emphasized that more and better features would be rolled out in the immediate coming months — including the leveraging of iPad functionality not tapped in the June issue — as part of a continuing R&D process.”
We can’t wait.
GotProject, iPad-compatible Webapp To Save Any Kind of Content from the Web
If you think about it, there’s no way to easily share content between a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad. I’m not talking about documents and songs - you can use iTunes for that - I’m talking about web content, the stuff you stumble upon every single day on the internet. Articles, images, videos, quotes - where are they when you change your device? They are tied to each machine’s local storage and browser, and there’s no way to keep everything in sync. When you change your machine, content is lost.
So one would think the cloud is the perfect solution to this, and indeed it is. If I could manage to browse the web on my Mac, close the browser and find the same links, the same videos, the same anything again on the iPad screen - I’d be a happy man. I want to be able to browse and save content, have it organized and backed up, then synced to all my other devices.
GotProject is a new web application developed by a University of Colorado student that, through a clipper bookmarklet, allows you to save any kind of web content you like and access it later no matter the device you’re using. Cool thing is, it works excpetionally well on the iPad - touch gestures included.
Time Warner and NBC Won’t Adopt HTML5 For iPad
According to the New York Post, several media companies including Time Warner and NBC Universal told Apple that they won’t adopt HTML5 for iPad playback and that they will stick with Flash. As sources report, “such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.”
The New York Post goes even further and reports:
“In addition, one media executive pointed out that Apple’s ability to dictate terms to the media giants will be weakened further by Google TV, a software product that enables viewers to watch online video on their big-screen TVs.”
I’d wait until this fall season to see what’s going to happen with media companies and their playback offers. If the iPad will turn out to be a bigger success than the iPhone, of course they will jump on the HTML5 wagon.
With Help from Adobe, Wired Releases Its First iPad App
Wired has released its first magazine app for the iPad. Available at $4.99 in the App Store, the application is very nice, has a lot of interactive content and enables users to jump back and forth between the different sections of the magazines. There are some great touches like animated 360 images, vertical stacks to organize content and music to enhance the reading experience. Overall, it’s a great app.
TypeSaver for iPad: When Typography Meets Famous Words
We’ve been talking a lot about the iPad as a digital frame for your photos, music, news and tweets. It could be a frame for anything, if you want. What about words? Yeah, like those cool slideshows of words from popular people that say shit about life. Got the idea?
Now, think about an iPad app that mixes words, great typography and Sh*t My Dad Says together with Obama and you get the hang of this awesome thing called TypeSaver.
Snes HD, An iPhone Controlled Real Snes for iPad
Snes HD is a new Super Nintendo emulator available in Cydia that is based on ZodTTD’s snes4iphone but it’s optimized for the iPad. The app allows you to browse games in split view mode and shows a “real” US Snes on the right, where you can even see the cartridge and the name of the connected player.
Indeed you can connect to the emulator by using the My ControlPad app for iPhone (also available in Cydia) which lets you use the iPhone as a remote Snes controller. It’s one of the coolest thing you could ever have with a jailbroken iPad.
The emulation is smooth and fast, you can trigger autosaving features and smooth scaling, even though I found the non-scaled version absolutely enjoyable. All this goodness is available in Cydia at this repo: http://wherethewoozlewasnt.com/cydia.
Check out the screenshots after the break.
Google TV and iPad Share The Same Graphics Processor
Seth Weintraub over at Fortune:
“GoogleTV is manufactured by Logitech and Sony and contains a System on Chip (SoC) designed by Intel. The iPad’s SoC is an ARM design made by Apple (though manufacturing is outsourced to Samsung). However, both of these SoCs use a PowerVR graphics processor from a small UK-based company called Imagination.
Not surprisingly, Apple (9.5%) and Intel (16.02%) both own significant stakes in Imagination.”
And that’s it for Google TV coverage on MacStories.
The Motorized iPad Lego Stand
My good friend @toxinide has built something great: a motorized iPad stand made of Lego.
It’s awesome, check out the video after the break. And be careful when you let it wander around.