Posts tagged with "iPad"

Due 1.6 Adds Natural Date & Time Parsing, We Celebrate With Another Giveaway

The ever popular reminder app Due has recently received another major update, 1.6. The newest version adds natural date and time parsing for reminders, much like Fantastical is doing for the Mac. This method lets you create reminders while the due date fills in automatically by typing into the title directly, i.e. “Wash the car in 20 mins”, “Leave for soccer at 3pm on Friday”, “Buy gift for Ticci’s birthday on July 30 at 1pm”, etc. Due also handles more than 64 reminders and timers as there was a limit before.

There were some tweaks and changes as well like interval on date picker now dynamically changing to accommodate due times that cannot be accurately displayed by a user’s preferred interval setting. Editing the value of a timer with an auto-generated label now updates the label to match the new countdown value. The app now hides any transient animation on quit to prevent jarring transition on next resume. Overdue and Today+Overdue badging is now faster when setting up a new repeating reminder and ‘Repeat from date’ follows the ‘Due date’ automatically.

There were a number of fixes as well and all the full change-log can be found on the Due’s blog. Read more

Stylapps, A Beautiful Showcase of Stylish iPad Apps

As a geek, I’m always excited about the next great app that may solve one of the annoyances in my workflow or provide a better solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. Whilst functionality is still king when it comes down to choosing the proper tools to administer our workflows and check things off our to-do manager, more often than not we’re also looking for beautiful software that meets our iOS expectations for elegant interfaces and intuitive navigation schemes. Stylapps, a free iPad app released in late June, aggregates “stylish iPad applications” that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the tumultuous sea of daily App Store releases.

Stylapps starts up with an elegant grid of iPad screenshots placed against a light background that greatly contributes to enhancing the colors of the apps that are being presented on screen. The app comes with refresh and search buttons to find your way through specific releases, but more importantly there is a filter icon in the upper left corner that allows you to pick certain categories to check out new apps released on the App Store and hand-picked by Stylapps. So if you don’t want to learn about stylish new Games, but you’re in for a Productivity and Business treat, you can drill down into the aforementioned categories and start looking for new apps that may suit your needs. Screenshots in the main page are large enough to provide a quick preview of what you’re looking at, however you can also tap on a thumbnail to open a single-app view with description, iTunes screenshots, App Store button and a link back to the developer’s website. To go back to the main list, you just have to swipe your finger on screen; a two-finger swipe lets you jump 10 pages of app picks. A “star” button next to each thumbnail enables you to save an app to your favorites, a section that lives locally on your iPad to collect apps you may want to check out later.

Stylapps’ curated section of beautiful and stylish apps quite resembles my tastes, but in my tests I’ve found the app to be far from perfect as far as stability goes. I’ve experienced a few crashes when navigating between pages, and a bug with opening screenshots will sometime “freeze” the app into a lightbox overlay mode that will force you to quit and re-open.

Still, these issues occurred rarely and I was able to browse the selection of software offered by Stylapps to find some interesting new apps I hadn’t covered here on MacStories. Stylapps is free, looks very nice on the iPad, and it’ll probably help you find the next gorgeous app you didn’t know about.

Students Can Save Big With Amazon Kindle Textbook Rentals

As companies experiment with the idea of digital textbooks (look at Inkling for a perfect example on the iPad), new and affordable models for distribution will be thought of along the way. Amazon announced this morning that students will have the opportunity to save up to 80% on textbooks by renting them from the Kindle Store. The 80% discount applies to the initial 30-day renting period, which students can adjust to fit the length of their short or long semesters (normally eight to sixteen weeks at my community college). You can rent books for up to a year, but at that point I’d just buy the book.

What’s interesting to me is how Amazon is tackling the ability to retain your notes. My biggest fear with digital textbooks is that they aren’t cheap enough to buy (I can always sell a textbook back and get up to 60% back of what I initially paid), and that any notes I’ve taken will be lost if I’ve written in the margins. This same concern is expressed by Amazon, whom have tied these features in with Whispersync. All of your notes will be kept in the Amazon Cloud, where you can pull notes back down and read related passages even after the rental period of your textbook is up. I find this intriguing (particularly so if notes are easy to take in the first place).

I’ve always purchased textbooks from Amazon, but now they raise the question of whether I should rent a digital book. Textbooks are available to read across devices from the iPad, iPhone, Mac, and the Kindle itself (along other devices that support Amazon’s Kindle app). Students who want to remove a couple of six pound textbooks from their backpacks (and save their backs) might want to invest in a slim messenger back and an iPad instead, but with the Kindle you know there will the issue of finding pages (with its weird take on page numbers), and its unclear how well graphics and margin notes will be presented. Maybe one of you dear readers would be bold enough to take the dive? Have you purchased digital textbooks in the past? Let us know in the comments!

[Kindle Textbook Rental via Amazon Media Room & TUAW]

Twitter and Google+ Polls: The iPad’s “Must-Have” & Top Productivity Apps

Over the past two months, I’ve run what I consider an interesting experiment with my Twitter and Google+ followers: I’ve asked them what their favorite iPad apps were, and noted down the results. More specifically, back in May I asked my Twitter followers what their “5 must-have” iPad apps were. That question included all the possible categories of the App Store, free and paid apps, universal and iPad-only apps – literally anything that could run natively on the iPad. I received dozens of replies, saved the results as “votes” in Evernote, and filed the note away for future usage. Then on July 13th, I asked about “top productivity apps” on Google+. This second poll was more specific: whereas the first one was just a matter of personal preference for any category and app type, the Google+ poll implied that people had to decide what they considered “productive” on the iPad. And because I was asking people, and not a computer-generated algorithm, the results of what people considered as “productive” were noteworthy. I waited a few days, saved the replies as votes, and created another note in Evernote.

The results are listed below but before you jump after the break, a disclaimer: by no means this is an official “poll” or “survey” – it’s just the results of two questions I asked with my personal accounts on Twitter and Google+. I don’t know each person that follows me on these social networks, but if I had to guess – I’d say they’re mostly geeks passionate about great apps and new software. For this reason the demographic of these polls is pretty much restricted to a certain category of App Store users – those who spend time browsing for new apps, care about the quality of design and, when possible, like solutions that are available cross-platform on the Mac and iOS.

That said, check out the Top Productivity Apps and Must-Have iPad Apps after the break. Read more

iUsers Allows User Accounts on the iPad

Everyone may not have to share Macs and iOS Devices with others, but there are many of us that do. For the Mac, it’s easy and a great idea to set up User Accounts for times when someone needs guest access or has a different OS setup than what we normally use from day to day. A common complaint for iOS users is that there are no User Account options, only parental controls and such. Dave Caolo recently posted on 52 Tiger how to child proof your iPhone, which we recommend reading. He lists many ways to child-proof your iOS device but an easier way for Apple to do this would allow User Accounts on iOS devices.

iUsers for iPad is a Cydia hack for jailbroken iPads by Pedro Franceschi that gives you something close to having OS X’s user accounts. The hack is set up inside Settings.app » Extensions » iUsers. Add a user by simply tapping “Add User”, insert a name, passcode and choose whether they have admin rights or not. This means each user can have their own set of app positioning, home screen wallpapers, settings, etc. Now this won’t save your iPad from wondering fingers or accidental App Store purchases but it does offer some deal of restriction for your personal iPad setup.

According to the video, if you want to switch accounts once they are added, simply go to the lock screen and tap the Accounts button. The iPad does a quick springboard reboot (which could bother some people) after selecting the account you want to open and it even remembers apps states for each account. Obviously this is dangerous for backups, but if you want to try something like this, it looks cool.

This isn’t Pedro’s first Cydia tweak, back in May we showed you PhySwitch, which lets you cycle through apps with the volume keys. iPad Jailbreakers, if you want to try out iUsers, add the repo: cydia.iblogeek.com to see it in your Cydia apps.

Demo video after the break. Read more