I’ve been an iPad user since day one and loved my experience with Apple’s stellar product. I’d definitely say I’m qualified to talk about the iPad, owning the first-generation iPad and, more recently, the new iPad. In fact, I’ve got all three generations here at my house after making excuses not to sell them as I’ve upgraded each year.
For nearly two years I’ve been an iPad user and, with the arrival of my new iPad, I’ve been trialing it as my primary machine. In this article, I’ll be explaining a bit about my experience and discussing some of the apps I’ve been using.
We’ve come to the conclusion, as users of the iPad, that the device is second to none for content consumption. The experience of sitting back with a sleek, light tablet in hand, yet being able to access a world of content is something that Apple has touted ever since the iPad launched. There’s a good chance you might be reading this very post on your iPad (I’m writing it on mine).
While the web hosts an incredible selection of content, a lot of it is cluttered in advertising and other stuff you simply don’t care about. When I’m reading an article, the content is what I care about it. Readability is a web service with a fairly new iOS app that puts content in a clean, comfortable reading view.
I’ve never happened across Minecraft and decided to play. I like to think of myself as someone not too unfamiliar with games, regularly playing a plethora of console titles, but I’ve never been impulsed to download Minecraft before. However, since I review quite a lot mobile apps, when Minecraft – Pocket Edition launched on iOS in November last year, the urge to try it out was born.
Before we get into the main body of this article, I should stress again that I’ve never played Minecraft before so I don’t have any desktop experience to compare it to. Instead of thinking of Minecraft – Pocket Edition like a spin off game, I’m going to conduct this review like any other without any previous bias. If you’ve played Minecraft, be sure to share your own opinion on how the Pocket Edition stacks up in the comments.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by behind-the-scenes books, TV shows and other media. I always love to see the people and the methods which created the game, movie, or TV show that I’ve just played. I was very excited when I found The Final Hours of Portal 2 on the App Store, an interactive, behind-the-scenes book for my favourite product of 2011 (even ahead of the iPhone 4S!).
The Final Hours of Portal 2 is a book and, as you’ll see shortly, is actually eerily similar to the style of interactive textbooks that Apple just recently unveiled. Being on the iPad, the regular text and images are mixed with more interactive elements including the ability to modify scenes in the game and to view panoramic images. We’re not iPad.BookStorm so, rather than review the contents of the book, we’re going to take a look at the unique interactive features of the app and then investigate how the experience is so special on the iPad.
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About a week or so ago, all of a sudden, I started receiving an onslaught of people asking me “What’s your high score on Temple Run?” I’d never heard of the game, but the sheer mass of people enquiring about my standing made me think it was something significant, so I decided to download it and give it a whirl.
Temple Run is a very simple, casual game that fits into the same category as blockbuster time wasters Angry Birds and Doodle Jump. It’s an endless runner, where you’ll try to escape a team of demon monkeys by navigating a network of pathways in a state of disrepair.
As much as the iPad is touted as a great portable content creation device, it still makes a stellar video player. In fact, I watch more video content on my iPad than any other device, including my TV, and most of that comes from independent sources like YouTube channels and blogs.
Denso is a video consumption, discovery and organisation app, allowing you to watch content from more than 250 different sources from around the web, all in one place. With Denso, you can subscribe to channels of content to be watched back in a continuous, auto-playing playlist and even downloaded to be watched later. Read on to see just how good it is!
The EyeTV line is a pretty nice family of TV tuners for your Mac that allow watching, pausing/rewinding, and recording of regular TV channels. Instead of streaming over the internet, the Elgato-made products do so through an aerial connection, either on your rooftop or supplied with your device.
Few can doubt that we’ve increasingly started to watch video on devices such as personal computers, tablets and even phones in recent years, moving away from the traditional experience with a TV set. EyeTV helps to bridge the gap between these two markets, by allowing your Mac to be your TV.
Although the product is mainly Mac-focused, a complimentary (not in the sense of price, however) iOS app is also available at an additional charge, that allows you to access your tuner’s power from anywhere with an internet connection. In today’s article, we’ll show you how to get going.
With our increased use of powerful mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, we have the opportunity to keep a lot of our life stored digitally. The finance category of the App Store has always been a popular one, since the promise of an all-in-one solution to monitoring your finances – right in your pocket – is an attractive one.
BudgetBook developer, noidentity, originally released MoneyBook on the iPhone, but that always lacked an iPad app. BudgetBook is a separate app with a separate binary, but clearly draws inspiration from its iPhone brother.
Facebook has not yet seen fit to introduce a version of its official iPhone app optimised for the iPad, even though we are all waiting to hit the Install button and download. Mark Zuckerberg now famously said that the iPad isn’t mobile, suggesting that we may never get a native Facebook app.
Unless you want to use the pixel-doubled iPhone app, or browse in the somewhat-incompatible website in Safari, your only other option is one of the third-party applications available, such as Friendly.
The iPad ships with its own note-taking application that’s fine for normal use. It has an attractive notebook style interface with some limited customisability in fonts. For some fast word processing, this is an amicable solution for most users, especially those who don’t want to invest their cash in anything better after buying a $499+ device.
However, there are some of us who use notes a lot for something more than just a few words. There are also some of us who use it so much that we need a solution with a bit more organisation, say, into classes for a student. ThinkBook is one of many alternatives available on the App Store and it’s an application that we’ll be taking a look at today.
