Posts tagged with "iPad"

The Ottawa Hospital Orders 1,800 iPads

We’ve seen Apple show off medical applications for the iPad in keynotes and commercials, and now we have some news about implementation into large public health facilities.

CBC News is reporting that the Ottawa Hospital in Canada recently ordered 1,800 iPads in addition to the 500 that are already being used by health-care providers. The iPads will replace traditional paper medical charts.

Staff at the hospital are saying that the shift to iPad usage instead of paper charts is putting the Ottawa Hospital at the forefront of all hospitals in North America. Doctors will be able to examine and show X-rays, make notes and prescribe treatments all with the iPad. Read more

iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet Now Available, But Backordered

What began as an April Fools’ joke based off the concept of enabling iPad users to turn their device into an old-style arcade cabinet – the iCade – eventually became a real product with Atari’s official backing and a slew of games built specifically for the cabinet’s Bluetooth-based controls. When the product was “unveiled”, many thought that, in spite of the actual quality of the joke, it would never see the light of day. However, as we saw in January, ThinkGeek announced that the iCade made it after the design and pre-production stage and was set to go on sale this Spring.

And indeed, the iCade became available at $100 earlier today, only to be backordered until May within a few hours of online sales. If you were looking to buy an iCade before Easter: I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait. But of course, there’s always the DIY way to come to the rescue. [ThinkGeek via Engadget]

News.me iPad App Launches To Take On Social Magazines

News.me, a new social reading experience for the iPad developed by technology incubator Betaworks and The New York Times, launched on the App Store a few minutes ago after much anticipation and speculation on whether or not the service could take on well-established “social magazines” like Flipboard and Zite. There’s no doubt the iPad has created a new market for this kind of applications: rather than presenting a series of links pulled from the top Google News or Techmeme, apps like Flipboard aim at showcasing content being shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook. But while Flipboard simply collects all content shared in your timelines without applying any sort of filter for relevance and popularity, News.me wants to change the rules of tablet-based social reading experiences by offering a “smart” system that, thanks to data provided by popular URL shortener bit.ly, can filter out the most relevant items appearing in your Twitter timeline – and in someone else’s as well.

That’s the key point of News.me, the feature that will need to be tested in the long term to see if the experiment has a chance to survive in this crowded digital and social newsstand. Not only does News.me enable you to see what your friends are sharing (through tweets), it also lets you see what they are reading. And from this standpoint, logging into Twitter within News.me gives the app a whole new meaning when it comes to “Twitter integration.” It’s a huge bet for Betaworks and The New York Times: can the bit.ly-backed algorithm provide an efficient way to distribute personalized news to iPad users? More importantly, is it enough to convince people to pay $0.99 a week, or $34.99 a year? Read more

Turn an Old iBook into an iPad Case

Many people with broken computers either throw them away, or send them to a recycling program. Why not keep your old iBook and use its shell to make a one-of-a-kind iPad case? Sounds difficult, right? Gary Katz, who created things such as the Personal Shoebox Apple Store and The Apple Museum - 30 Years in 2 Minutes, shows you how and it’s not that difficult. All you need is an old iBook, a Dremel tool and some free time.

Demo video after the break. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Wednesday

We’ll tweet the daily deals at @MacStoriesDeals as well as exclusive weekend deals too, so please follow! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

We’ll tweet the daily deals at @MacStoriesDeals as well as exclusive weekend deals too, so please follow! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

Writings 1.2 Adds Workspaces and Custom Keyboard [Giveaway]

Since I reviewed the first version of Writings for iPad back in December, I haven’t switched to any other text editor for iOS. I don’t write much on my iPhone, so an iPad application is all I’m looking for when it comes to writing long pieces that will eventually end up on my Mac or into an app like Blogsy. Writings, beautiful user interface aside, has the features I need from an iPad text editor: Dropbox support with plain text editing so I can keep writing on my Mac (or anywhere) if I want to; unobtrusive word counter; a readable default font; a handy margin feature that won’t scroll the document when I’m holding the iPad or resting my thumbs at its sides.

Writings 1.2, released today in the App Store, builds on the excellent feature set of versions 1.0 and 1.1 (the latter brought a list view to easily navigate between dozen of documents) by introducing two new functionalities that I’ve been testing in the beta and greatly improved my workflow: Writings 1.2 adds support for Workspaces – you can decide to sync certain documents to different Dropbox folders, even on different accounts. Whilst the feature sounded a little to complex to me at first, I’ve seen that being able to create a “MacStories” workspace alongside a “Personal” one with notes syncing to multiple Dropbox folders at once helps me getting my notes and articles better organized. You can create as many workspaces as you want, and each one will retain its specific settings. On top of this, you can now manually trigger sync within a document without going back to the main screen.

Last, Writings 1.2 comes with an optional extra row of most used punctuation keys above the standard keyboard. This extra row sure makes the keyboard bigger and will let you see less text on screen, but it can dramatically speed up your typing if you think the iOS keyboard could use some customization options for writers. The tab key and quick “-” access sure help me get my writing done quicker.

Writings 1.2 is still propagating in iTunes and it’s available at $4.99. We have 5 codes to give away thanks to the Ice Cream Studios developers, so follow along past the break for a chance to win a copy of Writings 1.2 for iPad.

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#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

We’ll tweet the daily deals at @MacStoriesDeals as well as exclusive weekend deals too, so please follow! Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more