For almost the first year I owned an iPad, my browser of choice was not Safari, but Atomic Web Browser; I find the tabbed browsing much better than the scheme used by Safari – especially the ease with which links can be opened “background”. But now, Atomic is off my iPad, replaced with iCab Mobile! [...]
I’ve never been too satisfied with news Apps on the iPad. Early, the various news Apps were too buggy so I stayed with Google News – which normally works quite well and learns to deliver interesting-to-me news, which makes it better than any App. However, recently I started using Zite, which is very impressive – [...]
City Of Secrets is a fabulous new iPad game, absolutely worth the $5 fee; very entertaining dialog and artwork, interesting puzzles and an ongoing background plot to keep you interested. You play sometimes as Moley (a Mole!) and sometimes as his friend Rex (a dog); after an early sequence “up top” you descend to a [...]
The iPad is an amazing computer, easy to use and accessible to almost everyone – but of course it’s not the first, and one of the most popular early computers in England where I grew up was the ZX Spectrum. When I bought one, it was specifically to play two games: Atic Atac, and Manic [...]
Maxjournal was the “dark horse” of journal Apps; when I first tried it, it had very limited capabilities but a major update in October brought it to the point where it was very close to exactly what I wanted! The user interface is clean but very informative and useable: The main part of the screen [...]
Finally! Space Inversion is a good Space Invaders game for the iPad, semi-retro graphics, good sounds, and nice improvements like optional turbo play mode letting you fire more than one shot at a time! Good value too – get it!
Unlike disappointing Dreamscape, the Giana Sisters HD game is fabulous and totally deserving a “Best” rating! The game has multiple levels to challenge you, laid out on a map which requires progress level-by-level, but happily once you’ve completed a level even if you lose your lives, you can start with more lives and full access [...]
Since I got my iPad, one thing I’ve really wanted to do is track my car MPG; I’ve been doing it since I owned a car, but using a spreadsheet on my home computer – and by now it’s clear that I should be able to do it on a portable device! I checked out [...]
I like this version of Klondike Solitaire, it animates nicely and has a few nice touches like optional “auto card placement”; a good card game to while away a few minutes (though it doesn’t seem that great at shuffling – like me!): I had bought Solitaire Favorites a few months ago, but it just didn’t [...]
If you’re interested in current and recent movies, check out the excellent Flixster; this App provides easy access to recent movie info including synposis, trailer, reviews, still pictures, and quick links to external review sites like Rotten Tomatoes! Of course all the movie info is quite easily available online, but Flixster pulls it all together [...]
Well, sort of … There’s a few Apps available that allow use of your iPhone to take a photo and then transfer it to the iPad: CAMERA-A, Wireless Camera, Coolibah CoolCam, etc. While CAMERA-A seems top-rated, CoolCam is free so that’s a big incentive to try it out! This type of App can be complicated; [...]
After trying Google Maps on the way to work on my iPad yesterday, I looked around for any other iPad ready navigation Apps, and discovered there aren’t very many. But I did find MotionX GPS Drive HD (from MotionX), and at the price of just $2.99 I decided to try it – and wow am [...]
I found another excellent fun game to play on my iPad: Marblenauts which recently appeared at a perfectly reasonable $0.99 and runs on both the iPhone and iPad! In the game, from Crescent Flare, you simply have to destroy blocks so that the Marblenauts can get to their appropriate colored exit squares – easy, no?! [...]
A quick reminder about Atomic Web Browser. My habit when web-surfing is to visit a site (TUAW, Google News, whatever), and open all interesting links in a new tab, while reading the main page; then I can go to those other tabs to follow the links I opened. This works fine in Safari on my [...]
Finally, we get to see the iPad version of WIRED, at an unpleasant $4.99 (especially as I already pay for the print version). So far, it’s good – but not perfect. The whole App works nicely in both portrait and landscape mode; it’s been properly created with layout altering subtly so that it views sensibly [...]
Even if you don’t own a BMW, you should check out the BMW magazine App. Unlike other magazine Apps I’ve tried, this one has a really quite good user interface and behaves much closer to what I was hoping for when I got my iPad. The App works best in portrait mode; load it up [...]
I’ve found a way to save money on my iPad! Tap “spin” lots of times, instead of dumping coins into a real slot machine Fruity Slots Deluxe from Mobile Amusements is an attractive slot machine simulator that offers lots of chances to win! As well as being a fun way to waste a bit of [...]
I’m thrilled that my favorite iPhone puzzle game, Marple, has been updated for the iPad with full size crisp graphics and the same challenging game play (the iPhone version was 2x playable, but this is much better!) The game has a good descriptive help section, but it’s best really to play a level while using [...]
Just now, I almost had to use my desktop machine to post a weblog entry on GBMINI.net; I needed to “right-click” to get the address of an image, but no way to do that on my iPad! But a quick App search gave me IHTMLplus which easily displayed the raw HTML from my Gallery page, [...]
I tried out Photopad a few weeks ago, but now ZAGG has released a new version of Photo Pad and it’s quite significantly improved! My original review mentioned the odd way to control cropping, as well as a general lack of features. While the odd cropping control is still there (but I guess you’d get [...]
My new favourite “quick reference” weather App is Weather Station Pro from Toopia; it’s so attractive and easy to use, it’s perfect! No, it doesn’t have animated maps showing radar heading for you, or any maps at all – but it does have a pristine display of all the weather data you need to know, [...]
WordPress is the weblog system I use to create iPadThoughts, and I love it – so do many other people! When I started ‘blogging, I used Blogger, but after a while I wanted my own hosting – the ability to handle photos better than Blogger could, for example (back in early 2003 when things didn’t [...]
Yes, it’s another iPad game – and once again it’s a game that looks gorgeous and doesn’t require too much thinking! My type of game, and I find such games to be a perfect alignment on the iPad, where I want to pick up and play for a while – but not too long (for [...]
Having mentioned a few Mahjong Apps for the iPad, I’ll now mention my current favorite, Mahjong Artifacts: Chapter 2 HD from G5 Entertainment; the game starts nicely with well designed tiles and a different layout for each level: But this game offers a little more than traditional Mahjong, playing the “quest” version gives a little [...]
Soosiz is another wonderful iPad game – and my preferred “platformer” game style. Hardly much like an old-school platform game, but still of the “run around, collect things” genre. Much cuter though! In the game, you control the main character as he(?) travels through lands collecting friends and coins, and largely disobeying the traditional laws [...]
Even before getting my iPad, I’d been thinking about developing a better browser than Safari – and especially once I got my iPad, since switching from one “tab” page to another in Safari is much too inefficient. I was thinking that it would be great to be able to swipe left/right, maybe with two fingers, [...]
One thing I really found my iPhone too small for, was playing games; the iPad is perfect for this, with a bigger screen but all the ease of use of the iPhone … a favourite game in my first week of iPad ownership is Cash Cow Deluxe: The simple object of the game is to [...]
The iTunes store classifies this under “photography”, but it’s a fine line whether it belongs there or in “news”; either way, it’s a very nice App that offers beautiful photographs from around the world: The App opens with a full screen photo; at the bottom left is a caption which can be removed (tap the [...]
When I got my iPad, I expected to be able to use it instead of my Macbook Pro for most quick tasks – accessing mail and websites from a comfy chair, etc. But one thing that’s frustrated me is RSS feeds! I’ve set up Google Reader to track RSS feeds from various forums and websites [...]
I think Reuters News Pro for iPad might be my News App winner; it looks good and offers loads of news stories and pictures, with seemingly no adverts! On the “front page” you scroll vertically to access all the different news topics (which includes top news, business, US and World news, technology, science … as [...]
When I started writing up weather Apps tonight, The Weather Channel App was my preferred – mostly because of the nice “local” screen with clear weather forecasts for the day, and the next 10 days too: Tap on the map, and it opens to a full scrollable display offering display of radar history for the [...]
