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Technology has always gone hand-in-hand with education, and Apple has been a fervent supporter of the role of technology in the future of education. Apple has focused very hard to make it easy for educational staff to get Macs in the classroom.
Up until recently college students partook in a common practice known as the “get a laptop and a printer before going off to school” ritual. Students would then use their laptops to take notes, write papers, create presentations, and do research on the web. Now that the iPad has gone through its third revision and has become a popular device among all age groups, students are beginning to break from the common trend and buy iPads either along with a Mac, or as their main machine.
Is the iPad ready for this task? Can a student take notes sufficiently without being limited in any way? Let’s find out!
Check. Check. Is this thing on? Hello everyone. If you’re a developer of iPad applications, then today, I’m talking to you. More specifically, the one’s who shouldn’t snooze through today’s address are the iPad game developers, but what I want to talk about applies to a wide range of apps.
I come to you today with a problem that I’ve been putting a great deal of thought into over the last few months. You see, I’m what the tech world might call a “dinosaur.” I got my iPad (the original iPad) around Christmas time the year it came out. This was, if you don’t recall, only months before the iPad 2 was released. I’ve watched as the new iPads and the apps developed for them have gotten better, and I can’t help but feel like I’m being left in the dust – specifically, regarding graphics.
March 7th was a bit of a milestone for me – it was the first time in my life that I had reserved and bought an Apple product straight after it was launched. Normally I am a bit dubious when it comes to technology, and before investing in a new gadget, I like to read countless reviews about it to really ascertain whether I’m getting the best value for money. But when the new iPad was announced I was certain that I could trust my instinct, took the plunge, and bought it outright without even reading one single review.
The features were certainly worth shouting about – that all-new, highly anticipated retina display and a beefed-up A5X processor with more powerful capabilities. All sounding good so far, I thought to myself. Then, the bombshell dropped – the new iPad will have 4G support (LTE), allowing blisteringly fast download speeds that makes 3G look ancient and sluggish.
To appropriately mark the downloading of the 25 billionth app, I think it’s important to take a fresh look at the App Store itself. Some of you might argue that I should tone down my approach, surely it’s a grave misnomer to use such strong language in reference to an imaginary (or at least virtual) shop. Much like the way it’s slightly creepy and weird to refer to the iPad, or any other technology for that matter, as sexy…
Love and hate are strong emotions, but I’m feeling opinionated so I’ll stick with them for sheer simplicity. Today I want to look at the App Store, a place we’re all abundantly familiar with, and why I think it’s a brilliant nightmare, a terrible masterpiece.
Apple today sent out invites to journalists for their annual iPad event. This year, the event will take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on March 7th at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Accompanying the invitations, Apple included the traditional image, which reads “We have something you really have to see. And touch.”
While there has been a great deal of speculation regarding this device in the past few months, there are a few things that have remained the same in most of them. Hit the break to see some detailed information on what Apple’s next-generation tablet may include.
What’s the latest iPad rumor? Well there are a ton of them going around nowadays, what with a rumored event happening March 7th and all that, but one of the hot tickets is that Microsoft Office is coming to the iPad. Don’t believe it? Well there’s a picture, a story on The Daily and a journalist who’s fighting pretty hard to prove that he’s right. And, as they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
But what does this mean for the iPad? Do we really need Office or is it just a crutch for people who think they need it? Talk it out after the jump.
Three services dominate the read later category. They are Instapaper, Read It Later, and Readability. Instapaper and Read It Later have been around the longest but Readability has been gaining a lot of transaction ever since the service was released last year and re-branded with a free service this year. I have mostly been an Instapaper user over the last couple of years but have looked at Read It Later every so often, and I wanted to take a look at all three services to determine if I still am happy with Instapaper as my read it later app of choice!
Read later services take articles, content, and websites, and let you save items in a queue for you to read later. The services will strip out all of the ads and weird formatting to leave you with just text. Instapaper and Read It Later download these articles to your iPad so you can read them offline as well.
There’s been quite a bit of debate recently about the next version of the iPad, including all of the usual stuff: Retina display, quad-core chips, yada, yada, yada. But the interesting note lately that came straight from the Wall Street Journal is that Apple is testing out an 8-inch version of the iPad, and it just might be the new release that’s coming (per the rumors, anyways) in the first week of March.
Now we can play the speculation game on “will they or won’t they” all day long, but as usual, we’re not going to know the truth until our next iPad announcement. But what if there really is an 8-inch version of the iPad in testing? I think that it could be a reality, and I’ve got a few different reasons why.
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As much as I love my iPad, there are a few things about it that feel like a blast from the past. I’ve harked on about the iOS interface before, but right now I’m talking about the inability to set a default application for a certain task. We’ve been looking at alternative browsers lately, and there are plenty of other applications that I’m sure everyone wished they could set as a default to avoid Apple’s offering.
Will Apple ever loosen up? Here’s how they should, and whether they will.
If the past is any indicator we’re coming up on the iPad’s next refresh. While we didn’t get a so-called Retina Display with the iPad 2, my gut (and other’s brains) lead me to believe that we’ll get something this year that can fill that hole in many people’s hearts.
Instead of discussing how this might affect users or developers, I want to take a look at how this will affect everyone, through one simple factor: price.
