The idea of using the iPad as a tool in school is an interesting prospect. On one had the tablet form factor of the iPad allows it to be used like an open notebook - the screen is suitable for writing text and taking notes. However, Apple has nearly killed that idea without the option for a stylus, and unless you happen to love sausage or ill-reviewed Pogo Stylus, it ain’t happenin’. While we have a keyboard, what student wants to type on a virtual keyboard? My whole success to taking notes via Evernote on my laptop is because I can furiously type on my Macbook’s keyboard without ere - eyes fixated on the instructor and not on the screen. But the idea is still intriguing: how well does the iPad fair as a note taking device? For this review, I’ll be using an application called CourseNotes. Read more

I’ve been a NetNewsWire user for a long time. It’s my default RSS app on Mac OS X, and I downloaded the iPhone one with a lot of excitement the same day it was released in the App Store. Sadly, for as much as I love the Mac iteration of NNW (seriously, there’s no better app - yet) I was very disappointed by the iPhone counterpart of Brent Simmons’ app. It was slow, sluggish and, also, it didn’t look nice as I expected. I was so disappointed it that I uninstalled and never installed back again on my iPhone.

For this reason, and because I’m always hoping things may eventually change, I approached NetNewsWire for iPad with a lot of caution. I mean, it comes at 10 bucks, and it will soon go up to 15. It’s a considerable expense, and I didn’t want to be disappointed again like it happened before.
Fortunately NetNewsWire for iPad is a good application, a great first version, which I’m sure many people out there are already loving. I’ve been testing it for over a week now, let’s see what it looks like.

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Who said books on the iPad are lame? No seriously, because after this one you’ll have to fire up your credit card and buy this book in the App Store. Perhaps you’ve already heard about it in the past few days, but we’ve had the chance to put our hands on a copy of Alice for iPad, a recently released book which runs on the iPad but it’s not available in iBooks.

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Remember myPhoneDesktop? It’s that neat utility for iPhone we reviewed here that lets you share any kind of information you want from your Mac to your iPhone, using the Cloud and push notifications.

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Imagine this: it’s 5am in the morning, your wife is sleeping. But you’re awake, and you don’t want to leave the internet as you’ve got some cool conversations going on with your Twitter followers that just can’t be interrupted now, even if your wife is sleeping and you feel a little bit guilty about it. You stayed up until 5am again. Every day, every night, with the usual excuse that you have to work on your website, you decide to avoid the bed and focus on the latest stories from John Gruber instead. You know everything about iPhone multitasking. You got pissed off when that Adobe’s employee published that post against Apple, you installed iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 1 and you watched Twitter’s Chirp live streaming while having a good cup of coffee. You’re an internet guru, but that doesn’t mean you have excuses for staying up all night again, alone in the dark with your glasses shining in the light of your Macbook.

Then one day, completely enlightened, you thought that maybe, just maybe, you should find a productivity purpose for your dirty little AM secret and do something good for yourself instead of faving tweets. Perhaps you should work? No, something more intellectual. Something that requires darkness, a comfortable chair and silence: you realized you can read in those morning hours. A calm, relaxing and stress-free read you’re usually not able to have during the day because everything is too fast, too short. Read can’t happen when writing blog posts. Definitely not.

Maybe it’s time to give Instapaper another spin.

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Laura Miller has as insightful post about the importance of metadata for books, and what Apple’s iBooks Store really lacks:

“Let’s say I recently read and enjoyed Val McDermid’s “A Place of Execution,” and I want to find more crime fiction like it. On iBooks, I can discover McDermid’s other novels easily enough, but that’s pretty much it. The only other metadata about “A Place of Execution” that the Apple store gives me to work with is that this title belongs to the “Mysteries & Thrillers” category. So does Lisa Lutz’s “The Spellmans Strike Back,” a comic mystery that’s part of a series about the misadventures of a family of wacky detectives in San Francisco. Sure, they’re both crime fiction, but Lutz’s book couldn’t be more different in flavor from McDermid’s gloomy, flinty procedurals set in Northern England and Scotland.

Eventually, iBooks might collect some reader reviews for McDermid’s book; the store is too new to have many reviews at the moment, but the software does provide for it. I might learn from those reviews that McDermid writes in a mystery subgenre sometimes called “tartan noir.” If I’m lucky, the review mentioning this fact might also list some of the other authors who work in the same vein. Then I could search iBooks for their names, seeking more bleak detective fiction to feed my newly acquired appetite. But that’s a long chain of maybes.”

And I couldn’t agree more. The iBooks Store’s (but I’d put the App Store itself on board, too) navigation and organization are flawed. Apple, fix it.

For those with symptoms of signs of RSI and arthritis, typing on the iPad’s virtual keyboard is a less than stellar experience. Even Apple’s own keyboard dock isn’t the most ergonomic solution for those who prefer curved or split keyboards. Many of those with aching hands on the Mac have turned to MacSpeech Dictate, and on the iPhone, Dragon Dictation for their computing needs. It’s a blessing to have such amazing speech software that allows you to create documents, send email, and on the Mac, control the machine with nothing but your voice. For those familiar with the iPhone client, you may want to take notice of Dragon’s latest iteration on the iPad. It’s smart, simple, and of great benefit to those who want the portability of the iPad, but are unable to type for extended periods of time. Read more

The iPad is the perfect productivity device, at least for me: I read articles, catch up with the news, write posts, do email and browsing with it. I’m starting to realize that 70% of the activities I used to do on a Macbook can easily be done on the iPad, without compromises of any sort. Sure the iPad App Store still lacks a good WordPress app and a decent FTP client for uploading pictures, but I’m moving my overall daily tasks to this new device. It’s smaller, more focused yet powerful enough to allow me to do stuff without losing the ability to do it well.

Of course I needed a good task manager to manage my todos on the iPad: after the Twitter client quest and the search for a great feeds reading app I decided it was time to install a GTD application to organize, sort and process tasks. As you can guess, the first choice was Things from Cultured Code, an already excellent app for Mac and iPhone which has been ported with a complete interface revamp to the iPad and was also available on day one. I installed Things, but I still have to try it because I’m testing another application now, Taska for iPad from BitAlpha.

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Living in Italy and writing MacStories, I have to keep up with what happens in the rest of the world, which in most cases means “catch up with the news from the US”. As you can guess, I had some problems with time zone at the beginning, but I’ve gotten used to it. Coffee also helps a lot, if you ask me.

But for those of you who still have problems with timezones, there’s an app for that. It’s a webapp actually, and it works pretty great on both Safari for Mac and iPad. It’s called Every Time Zone and through a beautiful, mouse and touch compatible interface allows you to quickly check what’s the time on the most important timezones around the world. All you have to do is move with either your mouse or finger that little tab which is your local time and see the changes in the other timezones. It works great on the iPad.

Check out the screenshot after the break.

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