If you’re buying an iPad, will you be able to leave your notebook computer at home? Apple’s iWork apps suite for the iPad — featuring Pages and Numbers, certainly makes that possible.
If you’re an MS Office user however, there’s no news about MS Office suite apps for the iPad yet.
“Pages, Apple’s word processing program, seems to fare better than the other two iWork apps on the iPad and is the only one that Apple is describing as capable not only of importing Word documents, but also exporting documents as Word files (in addition to Pages for Mac files and PDFs). That makes a certain amount of sense: Word-processing documents of any stripe mostly stick to styled text and images, not things like tables, formulas and animations.”
The lack of MS Office apps won’t make any difference to me. I like the iWork suite. If MS Office is a must for you, as the article reports, there are many apps already which will no doubt be updated to make full use of the iPad’s real estate.
“iBooks’ very sweet price points are not the only surprise Apple kept for the iPad launch. Indeed, while we already knew the iPad can read and import eBooks in the ePub format, it probably won’t be as necessary as we thought; as the iBookstore already features the Gutenberg Project catalog for free.”
Eagerly awaiting the new Apple tablet? Me too. With dozens of stories on newspaper sites and in blogs every day however, the wait is becoming tiresome. You’ve got hand it to Apple for marketing smarts.
So, before it exists anywhere outside of our collective imagination, step into Tablet Sutra, the at-times-awkward position-by-position walkthrough of tablet handling…
That’s a legitimate point. How are we going to handle the tablet? If it’s around ten inches in size, that’s tiny to rest comfortably on your lap, as the image above shows.
I think we’re about to see the launch of an entire new industry, in Apple tablet accessories, like trays. No doubt the tray will double as a hard case for the tablet. Gimme one in purple, with a silver Apple logo, please…
If you pre-ordered Snow Leopard, the big day has arrived. I pre-ordered, and at 9.10 AM on Friday August 28, the courier arrived. Snow Leopard was installed, and working great so far, at 11.10 AM.
The install (I used the default installation option) took one hour, and didn’t require any intervention from me at all.
Preparations I made for the big install
In the week leading up to “Install Day” I tidied up my hard drive, and checked for Snow Leopard-ready versions of the software I use every day.
Two of my favourite programs, 1Password and RapidWeaver had beta versions, so I downloaded those and installed them. (I installed 1Password after I installed Snow Leopard, because it’s SL-only.)
Just before I ran the installation, I ran Time Machine to back up, and Super Duper as well, so that I had a bootable copy of my hard drive.
Am I happy? Yes! I’m pleased I’ve done it. I can now relax. Happy installation to you, too.
“The newest release of Curio (5.4) now has seamless integration with Evernote. All of your Evernote items appear within the Curio sidebar, where they can easily be dragged into your Curio workspace. The two programs complement each other well…Evernote is excellent for collecting information and ideas, while Curio is suited to engage and develop those ideas.”
Here’s what makes the Curio/ Evernote combo sizzle — when you use the Evernote iPhone app. You can take photos in the iPhone Evernote app, and then use them in Curio as soon as Evernote syncs. I use this to take photos of bibliographies in books at the library, in the supermarket to photograph labels (a family member has allergies), as well as in stores to take quick snaps of products I want to tell friends about.
“‘I look at it like Apple paid me $10 million to show my application on every single major network, every major television show — no, I can’t even put a figure on it,’ Mr. Waite said.”
It’s a lovely story: instant stardom, and of course, instant money.
“Siri is a virtual assistant that is focused on helping consumers complete tasks in their online lives, particularly in the mobile context. The version I looked at runs on the iPhone.
Typical use cases are booking dinner reservations, buying movie tickets, getting local information, or finding things to do in your local area.”
If you’re like me, you think visually, and create lots of mind maps.
I rely on mind maps for just about everything, and although I have all the major commercial mind mapping applications like MindManager and NovaMind Pro, I nevertheless like to use index cards for real-time mind maps that no one else sees.
I’ll record my index card creations by snapping a photo with iSight, from the indispensable EverNote application — this is free if you use the basic service; I’ve opted for the Premium.
Now there’s another way to mind map casually — on your iPhone. I’ve just started using iBlueSky, which is fun, because it sends my creations to any email address.
“iBlueSky (iTunes link) takes things a small step further (and costs a little more at $7.99USD). While the basic interface is the same, there are multiple benefits to this one. First, it adds landscape mode, which is an improvement for both editing and viewing.”
