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Posts tagged with "iPad"

Fast PDF Is What iBooks for PDFs Should Be

There’s a huge market in the iPad App Store right now, and that’s for PDF readers. Here’s what’s going on: the iPad came out without a dedicated PDF app developed by Apple and so GoodReader (our review) quickly became the most popular paid app. Months later, Apple announced that a PDF-capable version of iBooks was coming out, and we all started wondering whether iBooks for PDFs could kill any other similar app out there.

Reading PDFs in iBooks feels good, but it’s not the perfect experience many predicted. The interface design is beautiful and elegant as Apple’s tradition, but the app doesn’t hold up well to large documents and, in my tests, I found that opening a 14MB file required even 10 seconds (or more) for the app to start up, load the document and let you swipe through it. Unlike Apple said weeks ago, there’s no page curl effect, and TUAW exposed the problem. Ultimately, I’m deeply disappointed by the poor performances of iBooks with large PDFs. Perhaps another update is on its way, but who knows.

I’ve been using another application to read documents on my iPad, Fast PDF. It’s indeed the best 3rd party software to read PDF files currently available in the App Store.

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The Most Impressive Brushes Speed Painting Video You’ve Ever Seen

The following video was streamed live worldwide from Brooklyn on Monday, June 21 2010. It features finger painting with the Brushes iPad app by artist David Jon Kassan, and the original session was approximately 3 hours long. The speed painting video is just 8 minutes.

Really, you haven’t seen anything like this. This is the finest example of how Apple’s tablet is indeed meant for content production, not only consumption.

Impressive, indeed.

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Aves: Web Based Game Engine, Works on iPad and iOS

Aves is a new game engine entirely based on web technologies. It will be used to build 2D / 2.5D videogames running in every browser with modern CSS, HTML and Javascript web standards. It will handle viewports automatically, and - being based on web technologies - the developers promise Aves games will run just fine on the iPad and other iOS, Android and WebOS devices.

But it doesn’t stop at building games with HTML. It’s got some great API stuff we should all look forward to:

“So again, what are action surfaces? As you know, the whole Web 2.0-Idea is actually about sharing and exchanging data using APIs. We have thousands of those in the web today and you can integrate data from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter or Google Maps on your website today by adding a few lines of code.

Guess what? Now you can integrate all those into your games with a mouse click!

If you want to display certain photos from Flickr on an object like a TV-Set you simply tell the Aves Engine that this particular object should have an action surface attached to it and that you want to fill this surface with some data.”

It’s very promising indeed. Check out the official page here, and the demo video after the break. We’ll keep you posted about this.

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Apple Sells 3 Million iPads in 80 Days

Apple has just issued a press release announcing that they’ve sold 3 million iPad units in 80 days and more than 11000 native iPad apps are out in the App Store.

Two weeks ago we reported that 10.000 iPad apps were available in the App Store, and 78% of them were paid applications. As for iPad sales, Apple announced 1 million units sold after 28 days, and 2 million units after 60 days. Sales are growing, and the only word I can think of right now is “impressive”. It’ll be interesting to see what’s going to happen with the iPhone 4 and iPad both out by this holiday season.

Check out the press release after the break.

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Google Updates Gmail for iPad, Adds Fullscreen Compose Window

Google has rolled out some nice improvements for Gmail on the iPad, introducing a fullscreen compose window and several scrolling bug fixes.

“Today we’re happy to announce an improved experience for writing emails on Gmail web interface for iPad. When you write an email you’ll now get a big full screen compose window instead of splitting the screen between your inbox and the compose view. More text is visible at once and there are no more distractions with messages on the side. We’ve also fixed problems that prevented scrolling on long messages. Thanks to everyone who reported the issue via the ‘Send feedback’ feature at the bottom of the screen.”

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