When giving the App Store a browse, I often like to mix up the way I search for new and exciting apps. Maybe giving Top Charts a miss and heading straight for the New & Noteworthy section, or browsing in a category I haven’t explored in a while.
This week I’d love to know what your favourite section of the App Store is for finding new apps? Are you a fan of Apple’s Staff Favourites? Are you all about the Top Free iPad apps?
While we’re on this topic, why is it that the Genius tab rarely lives up to its name? Even after spending time trying to hone its suggestions I hardly ever find an app that I really like suggested by Genius, do you?
Which section of the App Store turns up the best app results for you?
Feel free to post a comment if you’d like, especially if you think I’ve missed a key section for finding apps in the App Store!
With GarageBand installed, an iPad is a powerful and portable tool for musicians. However, just like its desktop version, GarageBand for iPad can also be employed by non-musicians too, as I’ll highlight with a step by step guide to making a podcast on your iPad, complete with accompanying music.
This How-To will be aimed towards those who have a basic understanding of GarageBand, or at least the principles behind music software in general, but I will endeavour to keep each step as beginner friendly as possible. If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments and I’ll attempt to help you through it.
Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The printed word was a rare and valuable commodity in his world, and few people could read the few books there were. Books were painstakingly copied by hand, and represented years of work in making each volume. Now, in a day, Gutenberg could print more than you could write by hand in a year.
Fast forward 440 years. The motion picture was just becoming a reality, before most people had even had their own photograph taken. Before long, the world’s favorite pastime took us away from books, keeping us instead glued to our screens. First movies, then broadcast TV, and now iTunes rentals on your iPad, all bringing the magic of videos into more of our lives.
Last year, Steve Jobs announced the iPad as the eBook reader that would stand on the shoulders of the Kindle, and push eBooks to the next level. While both iBooks and the Kindle apps have made reading a great experience on the iPad, most eBooks to date are either plain text without even the formatting we’d expect from a paper book, or huge image or PDF files that don’t scale well. Neither make the book substantially better than it has been for centuries.
Then Moonbot Studios came, and showed the world how the future of books and movies had changed.
Winners Announced
Thanks to everyone who took part in the giveaway this week and special thanks to Navanit Arakeri, the developer of Palimpsest! I’m excited to let you know that the winners have now been chosen. Congratulations are in order to:
@QTmose
@dleegrooms
@carmeriera
@stefgonzaga
@blainecross
Well done to the lucky winners, and we’ll be in touch soon. Sorry to those who missed out, be sure to check back for more great competitions!
Old Competition Post
On Monday we reviewed the excellent Palimpsest for iPad, a great app for getting stuck into some long reads. To quote myself:
Palimpsest is a great way to engage with fascinating longer articles on your iPad. The curated sources and personalisation providing a stream of engrossing reads!
If you like to discover new ad interesting things to read, and love your iPad, then Palimpsest may be the perfect app for you – look out below for how to enter.
I’ll admit it. I suffer from a little thing I like to call recipe book hoarding disorder (RBHD). But I don’t think I’m alone.
If you look in your kitchen cabinet, bookshelf or wherever you keep your recipe books, you’ll find one common theme amongst them: you only like a handful of recipes in each book. And yet the hoarder in all of us just keeps adding to our collection and bookmarking the recipes we like the best.
Well, we can happily kiss those days goodbye thanks to the Paprika.
It should be simple, shouldn’t it, to print from the iPad? I don’t mean simple as in “I’ve bought every Apple device known to man” kind of simple, I mean out-of-the box with what you have. Or at least maybe with a little tinkering, but not too much..
I just want to print anything – easily – through my home Wi-Fi network, to my Epson Stylus printer which is currently connected to my Windows 7 laptop.
Is it possible? Is it easy? Read on to find out…
Viewing photographs on the iPad is a surprisingly immersive experience, the simple ability to zoom and move between them using finger gestures somehow brings them to life in a new way. That’s not to say the iPad is necessarily the premiere way to engage with true photography, just that the experience brings something dramatically different.
The same could be said about the power of editing photos on the iPad. At first thought it may seem clumsy or awkward to try and adjust details such as contrast and hue using only your fingers for guidance, but in reality it works rather well. In addition to this the gorgeous screen of the iPad is the perfect theatre in which to edit and manipulate photos you’ve taken, or even new ones taken using the iPad 2′s cameras.
In this spirit I’ve complied a short roundup of photography apps to whet your appetite with, including a couple of classics and, hopefully, a couple you won’t have seen before.
While it may surprise some, it certainly surprised me, since acquiring an iPad I have actually found myself reading more. Not simply more articles and short newsflashes, although I tend to read a lot of both of these, but more long-form articles and essays; pieces of writing that engage with you on a deeper level and challenge your perceptions.
One of the iPad apps that has had a dramatic influence on this trend is the wonderful Instapaper, which is synonymous with reading longer articles offline. Another, more recent, influencer of my reading habits has been Palimpsest, which presents you with a personalized stream of interesting articles from renowned sources.
Read on to find out whether Palimpsest could be the perfect app to augment reading on your iPad, and a way to break free from the incessant brevity that’s prevalent on the web.
I’m not ashamed to say that I love apps. In particular, I love searching for new and exciting apps and giving them a try – weighing up whether they deserve a spot on my beloved home screen.
Even so, I probably only actively search for new apps three or four times a week – in a moment of downtime my finger hovers over the App Store, what new gem might I find? I look at the most popular apps of the moment, maybe browse a category I fancy by popularity, take a look at the staff picks and hot new apps.
If I’m really in the mood for some digging, I might even browse a category by the most recent apps – a search which requires patience and consistently good judgement to find any items of worth.
What I’m really intrigued to find out is how often you search for apps? Do you tend to just follow up recommendations, or do you look for new and exciting releases every day?
Are you a casual browser on the odd occasion you’re lured to the App Store by the updates badge, or do you search with purpose, finely tuning your genius recommendations?
Ever since the introduction of GarageBand for iPad back in February, many iPad users have really immersed themselves into music creation because of how easy it is with the app. Today I’m going to teach you an easy way to create a guitar song using the built-in Smart Guitar instrument. To add to this, you can even learn a little bit more about the app in general.
Please note that this will require a little knowledge of how to use the iPad, some music terminology, and common sense on the side. Keep reading for the full guide.
