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.

iPad 2 Launch brings App Sale for Limited Time

There is a limited time sale this weekend for many titles to celebrate the launch of iPad 2.

iPad 2 (or iPad 1.5 as some say) Announcement

The iPad 2 was announced last Wednesday in a surprise appearance by Steve Jobs, who is on medical leave from Apple.

There is a good summary and commentary  by Richard Gaywood.

The iPad 2 is what the first iPad should have been-- a light, sleek device with dual cameras and FaceTime video conferencing (not necessarily with dual CPUs as the iPad 2). I won't be buying the iPad 2 for myself. I will be getting one as a birthday gift for my sister, whose kids have been in love with my parent's iPad.

I have held-off upgrading the iPad to iOS4 but will definitely will upgrade to iOS 4.3 as it provides a performance boost to the Safari Javascript engine.

Reverting to an Older App

If you upgraded an App and found that you preferred the older version, you can revert to the older app (as long as you have a copy of it via TimeMachine, etc.).