April 2011 Apps

I have been remiss in keeping track of new Apps I have downloaded which were mostly games...

I found out about Terra, a tabbed browser, just yesterday. Do I trust that if I type in my passwords, they are not being sent off to third parties? No. It's nice for surfing though.

Having deleted Flipboard because of boring content, I have been using Zite instead and find it has a lot of interesting articles. Recommended.

The Google App's most impressive feature is voice-search. Recommended for demo purposes.

Shredder Lite (iPhone) is a chess program that uses the Shredder engine.

Pop-out Peter Rabbit ($3.99) is an interactive book which reads itself or by tapping on a specific word. There is a lite version you can try out. Recommended if you have kids or as a demo app.

G-Form iPad Case

The G-Form case is a reactive armour case for the iPad that stiffens whenever a sharp force is applied to the normal looking fabric.

In the video, an iPad encased in the G-Form case survives the impact of a bowling ball dropped from a height of 3 feet on to the glass face.

People spend more time with tablets (iPads, really)

According to a recent survey by Google, people spend more time with tablets (iPads, really) than other content delivery systems like TVs, and books.

"The Secret Garden" Illustrated EPub at Project Gutenberg

Frances Hodgson-Burnett's classic, The Secret Garden, (with illustrations and without) is available at Project Gutenberg as an EPub edition for iBooks.

I was going through the list of 50 books every child should read.

YKYBUTiTLW...

You Know You've Been Using the iPad Too Long When... you're reading the newspaper (the NY Sunday Times in this case) and you look up at the top of the newspaper page to check the time.

I expected to find a status-bar with the clock right next to the date.

A Review of the NY Times for the iPad App

The experience of reading the NY Times on the iPad is similar to eating at an a la carte restaurant. The news is segregated into separate compartments that begin and end abruptly with visits to the main menu. I would prefer a more continuous experience of reading the entire newspaper at a single sitting with the ability to bookmark the place if I am interrupted. The App also lacks the social aspects (as found on nytimes.com) of being able to publicly comment on an article.

The experience also lacks features that are possible with a real newspaper:
  - clipping and saving an article for reference later
  - hilighting (or copying and pasting) a small section of an article
  - "starring" a particularly well written article
  - after the newspaper is delivered to my house, it is "instantly on"; the App however, takes some time to get started and after it does, it starts with the articles from the last time I was reading. One would think that it would be downloading new content while I stare at a white screen with the NY Times logo.