Posts tagged with "iPad"

AViiQ Portable Charging Station Powers Up Your Devices Without the Clutter

You know the feeling. You’re packing up for a two-day trip to some gadget conference and you find yourself stuffing your backpack with bulky cables and chargers so you can power the company BlackBerry, your personal iPhone and iPad. All of these different chargers are heavy, take up a lot of space, and add clutter to an already messy travel bag. What you want is a contained solution: something that can take care of all of your devices so you don’t have to remember to pack and unpack the bird’s nest of cables you’re likely to create.

AViiQ has a reputation for keeping things simple with their line of stands and cases for the MacBook and iPad, and their product design continues to shine through with the AViiQ Portable Charging Station. Complimenting their line of mobile products, the Portable Charging Station is a zip-up bag that features a charging hub which wrangles all of your cables into one small package that easily slips into a messenger bag or backpack. The charging hub, able to charge four devices when connected to a wall outlet, is smart in design. Pockets tuck away cable excess, a retractable USB cord can sync a connected device of your choice (designated with a pink label) to your computer, and the zip-up design keeps everything in its place. 3 powered + 1 power & data USB ports offers travelers plenty of choice for recharging everything from bluetooth headsets to smartphones and e-readers through a simple, unfolding base.

The AViiQ Portable Charging Station is $79.99 at AViiQ.com. Press release after the break.

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Ustream Releases iPad App with AirPlay Support

Ustream, the popular web service to broadcast and interact with live events, updated its iPhone app back in March to unify the broadcasting and chatting features in a single package that allowed users to record and engage in conversations in the chat room at the same time, providing additional social features for Facebook and Twitter sharing as well. With a new update released today and now available on the App Store, Ustream is bringing native support to iPad owners with a brand new app that’s been completely redesigned to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen. The update is universal, so you’ll need to update your existing Ustream iPhone app to get the iPad version.

Just like the iPhone app, Ustream for iPad will let you broadcast and interact with your audience from a single interface that, on the iPad, lays out video, audio, chat and social controls in a semi-circular overlay control popup similar to Grazing’s slidepad. You can flip cameras and adjust audio, or if you want to see what’s happening online, head over the social stream to hear what people are saying on Twitter and Facebook about your show, or simply pop into the chat room dedicated to your broadcast. Obviously, you can also watch live shows and participate in the chat room – Ustream’s iPad app lets you check on popular, live and featured shows right from the homepage, so if you’re a heavy Ustream user you’ll always have something to tune into. Among the new features, Ustream also touts “Airplay support for true social interactive viewing of the chat and social stream”.

Ustream already had a very solid iPhone app, and this new iPad version contributes to making the service a complete solution that works on any web browser, and now iOS devices as well. Get the app here for free.

Facebook Has A Working iPad App Hidden In The iPhone Version

As revealed by TechCrunch, it appears the official Facebook app for iPad may become available in the App Store relatively soon, as the iPad app is actually hidden away, inside the iPhone app and actually executable! It is unclear when and how Facebook will announce the availability of Facebook for iPad, however as MG Siegler explains, it is a completely re-imagined Facebook experience for the tablet that takes advantage of the iPad’s screen to lay out a different view for your photo albums, friends, profile, and more. The app does seem to use an iPad optimized web view in the main Facebook interface (just like on the iPhone), but several other UI elements are native to iOS and built specifically for the iPad.

Facebook for iPad uses a concept not too dissimilar from Twitter’s iPad app – rather than displaying all content vertically, the app heavily relies on horizontal navigation to access various Facebook sections, the news feed, chats, liked posts, and so forth. For instance, a sidebar on the left contains tabs below your main profile to open your News Feed, Messages, Events, Places, Friends, and Photos. In the same sidebar, there are links to jump to the groups you’re subscribed to – it almost appears as Facebook wants to put the focus on Groups as much as Google gave Circles, its friend-organization tool, a huge role in Google+. There are two top bars in the middle panel: one has buttons to upload photos from your iPad’s camera and library, the other two are associated with a regular status update and check-ins. In the blue toolbar, the app has a series of additional icons to open the friend requests panel, messages, and notifications – this looks very similar to Facebook on the desktop, and the design is very distant from Facebook’s implementation on the iPhone. There is also a search function in the app, though it’s been placed at the top of the sidebar, rather than the toolbar. As for the stream, judging from the screenshots it seems to be a web view optimized for the iPad’s new app UI.

Facebook for iPad includes a Chat sidebar on the right and a full interface for Messages, which look very similar to Apple’s own iMessage model – at least as far as the design goes – with recipients listed on the left and the actual message inside a larger panel on the right.

UPDATE: TechCrunch has posted an album-full of screenshots of the app here. We’ve embedded a sample of these below the break, but here’s one:

[Via TechCrunch]

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Apple Posts New iPad 2 Commercial: “We’ll Always”

We’ll never stop sharing our memories. Or getting lost in a good book. We’ll always cook dinner, and cheer for our favorite team. We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things. But how do all this, we’ll never be the same.

Apple posted a new iPad 2 commercial on its website and YouTube channel, once again highlighting how the device is changing the way people do things in their lives. With the “We’ll always” ad, Apple wants to show how the iPad has changed, and perhaps improved, the most basic tasks like cooking dinner or editing a quick video in iMovie. Just like other commercials like “Now” and “If You Asked”, Apple’s focus is on apps – the software – rather than technical specifications and hardware features. In this latest video, the iPad is seen organizing photos in the native Photos app, streaming a baseball match and flipping pages of an iBook – among other things. The built-in iOS and the apps – not the screen or the thin form factor – are the real stars in Apple’s iPad commercials.

Apple’s previous iPad 2 commercials were called “We Believe”, “If You Asked” and “Now”. Check out the new video below. [YouTube via 9to5mac]
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Due 1.6 Adds Natural Date & Time Parsing, We Celebrate With Another Giveaway

The ever popular reminder app Due has recently received another major update, 1.6. The newest version adds natural date and time parsing for reminders, much like Fantastical is doing for the Mac. This method lets you create reminders while the due date fills in automatically by typing into the title directly, i.e. “Wash the car in 20 mins”, “Leave for soccer at 3pm on Friday”, “Buy gift for Ticci’s birthday on July 30 at 1pm”, etc. Due also handles more than 64 reminders and timers as there was a limit before.

There were some tweaks and changes as well like interval on date picker now dynamically changing to accommodate due times that cannot be accurately displayed by a user’s preferred interval setting. Editing the value of a timer with an auto-generated label now updates the label to match the new countdown value. The app now hides any transient animation on quit to prevent jarring transition on next resume. Overdue and Today+Overdue badging is now faster when setting up a new repeating reminder and ‘Repeat from date’ follows the ‘Due date’ automatically.

There were a number of fixes as well and all the full change-log can be found on the Due’s blog. Read more

Stylapps, A Beautiful Showcase of Stylish iPad Apps

As a geek, I’m always excited about the next great app that may solve one of the annoyances in my workflow or provide a better solution to a problem I didn’t know I had. Whilst functionality is still king when it comes down to choosing the proper tools to administer our workflows and check things off our to-do manager, more often than not we’re also looking for beautiful software that meets our iOS expectations for elegant interfaces and intuitive navigation schemes. Stylapps, a free iPad app released in late June, aggregates “stylish iPad applications” that are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the tumultuous sea of daily App Store releases.

Stylapps starts up with an elegant grid of iPad screenshots placed against a light background that greatly contributes to enhancing the colors of the apps that are being presented on screen. The app comes with refresh and search buttons to find your way through specific releases, but more importantly there is a filter icon in the upper left corner that allows you to pick certain categories to check out new apps released on the App Store and hand-picked by Stylapps. So if you don’t want to learn about stylish new Games, but you’re in for a Productivity and Business treat, you can drill down into the aforementioned categories and start looking for new apps that may suit your needs. Screenshots in the main page are large enough to provide a quick preview of what you’re looking at, however you can also tap on a thumbnail to open a single-app view with description, iTunes screenshots, App Store button and a link back to the developer’s website. To go back to the main list, you just have to swipe your finger on screen; a two-finger swipe lets you jump 10 pages of app picks. A “star” button next to each thumbnail enables you to save an app to your favorites, a section that lives locally on your iPad to collect apps you may want to check out later.

Stylapps’ curated section of beautiful and stylish apps quite resembles my tastes, but in my tests I’ve found the app to be far from perfect as far as stability goes. I’ve experienced a few crashes when navigating between pages, and a bug with opening screenshots will sometime “freeze” the app into a lightbox overlay mode that will force you to quit and re-open.

Still, these issues occurred rarely and I was able to browse the selection of software offered by Stylapps to find some interesting new apps I hadn’t covered here on MacStories. Stylapps is free, looks very nice on the iPad, and it’ll probably help you find the next gorgeous app you didn’t know about.