If you are wondering what should you do with regards to the question, should I get an iPad? The only answer is yes of course you should buy an iPad. If you don’t have a lot of money then you could wait until you see an iPad for sale cheap. There is also the possibility that you could get lucky and find a good deal to buy an iPad. Do you have any friends that have the iPad original that are upgrading to the latest version? You could buy the iPad from them for a good price and enjoy a bit of top-quality iPad computing.
Should I get an iPad original or a new iPad?
I am at present still using the original iPad on a daily basis and enjoying the experience. For the most part I don’t think I need to get the latest new and shiny version of the iPad. They specifically made for me with the iPad would be the ability to record the screen as video and unfortunately I can’t do that with the iPad original version. That really is the only reason why I would present consider making the upgrade move. If you don’t have an iPad at all rights now, and you are thinking, what should you do, what are you waiting for? Start doing a search for the best prices for iPad and saving the cash so that you can get the iPad that you desire.
Should I get an iPad 2 or the new iPad
I was looking at the prices of the iPad on the Apple website and there is not a huge difference in price between the iPad two and the new iPad. For the version that I was looking at the difference was only about €80. For such a small difference in price I would be better to wait until I had the extra €80 so that I could enjoy the higher resolution screen and the faster processor. Only if I was desperate to have a new iPad right now and I couldn’t wait until I had the extra cash, would I get the iPad two. The iPad two is still a worthy tablet computer to buy and considering how much I enjoy my original iPad, I would be even happier.
Which iPad 2 should I buy – Choices Choices.
Whichever version of the iPad you decide to go for you may still be wondering what should you do. So when looking at which iPad 2 should I buy, basically you have to think about whether you need to have 3G connectivity first of all. Then you can decide on how much memory you need. If you are buying from the Apple website there is not a lot of choice for a new iPad of this iPad model. 16 GB is the only available memory capacity for the iPad two. Then again, if you are buying second-hand you could still get one that is 32 GB or 64 GB.
So should I get an iPad?
Did you ever wonder – what do iPads do? Stop messing about and a bite the bullet. Head off now to your nearest Apple store and stop thinking about what should you do. You know that you want one and possibly even need one. It doesn’t matter if you buy the iPad original, an iPad 2 all the latest iPad, just so long as you can join in the fun. You can get some awesome iPad apps to work and play with and most will also work on the iPad original model. So should I get an iPad? There is only one answer of course and that is – You betcha!
I was looking at the website by Brett Terpstra after listening to a podcast called the Mac Power Users, because they were talking about a page on which Brett has an interactive table all about text editors for the iPad. There are dozens of text editors for the iPad and some are more full featured than others. Already, I have a soft spot for text editors and have tried out a number of them including Notarize, SimpleNote, Magical Pad, ThinkBook, Nebulous Notes, PlainText and Textkraft, plus a few others. The interactive part of the page that Brett has, allows you to click on features that you require or absolutely must have and then you have a highlighted set of text editors which have what it is that you are looking for. The page is a very useful resource if you are looking for a plain text editor.
Lots of features to choose from in an iPad text editor
First of all you can see whether it is a good price for the application and whether it is for iPhone, iPad or both. Then you have a section on syncing abilities, export features and then a number of other features to choose from. So at the top of the table you can click on the feature headers so that you can filter down the list. The features that I would be looking for, would be that it would not be too expensive and would be an iPad application, to start with. Then I would be looking for Dropbox and iCloud synchronisation. So by choosing those three options it filters the list down from nearly 60 applications to 8. After that I chose Markdown preview and Markdown editing features and that filtered it had down further to nothing. So I started again and used Markdown as my initial choice. Then I clicked on iPad, because that is where I would need to use such an application. Dropbox is also one of the vital needs for an iPad note taking application for me. When you are using a text editor on the iPad for Markdown you really do need to have an extra row of keys on the keyboard, so that you can do speedy entry of your text in proper Markdown syntax. After using this tool on Brett’s website, I consistently found that Textastic was one of the iPad text editors that was left on the table. Obviously, this is to do with the fact that it has the largest set of features of all of the applications on the list. A good fast edit tool and yet simple text editor.
An iPad text editor with extra features for the programmer
Textastic is an iPad code editor which will allow you to do programming on iPad. Depending on the sort of programming that you want to do, there is a certain amount of work that can be done within this text editor. For this type of coding work it certainly helps to have numbered lines and to have syntax highlighting. In Textastic, the code editor iPad tool, you can see the code more clearly because of the colours used in the syntax highlighting. Personally, I don’t do much coding, but it is helpful in any case to see what is happening with my text when I’m writing in Markdown, or when I am looking at HTML text. In any case within Textastic the iPad code editor, you also have syntax highlighting for Objective-C, C++, C#, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, shell scripts and some others too. In fact, Textastic is better than that, as it also gives you code completion for HTML and CSS and also for PHP functions. Without a doubt, it is the best programming text editor or iPad code editor that I have seen available for the iPad.
The best iPad text editor
For the ordinary user, i.e. somebody who is not a programmer, Textastic is still a great tool for editing text on the iPad. There are a number of features which allow you to work quickly with text to produce your text documents. Textastic is great for writing in Markdown, what makes it particularly useful is the extra row of keys which are particularly innovative. The extra row of keyboard keys on the iPad each have five symbols on them which give you quick access to characters that you would otherwise have to press a lot of keys to get out.
For the Markdown I can easily get to the hash tag, the asterisk and also the square brackets and round brackets. I tend to use the square bracketing and use the reference type links, as it makes it better for reading the Markdown more clearly. The way that the extra set of keys works, is that you put your finger on to the key and swipe towards the character you require. Or if you only require the one of the characters that are in the middle of the set of five, then you only need to just tap instead of doing a swipe. When I first saw this method of character choosing I expected it to not work too well. After using the application for some time to write Markdown, I can say that not once has the special keyboard messed up. I like it!
What is text editor
Brett Terpstra’s site for iOS Text Editors. He also has some TextExpander snippetseditor text that you may also find useful. Textastic programming iPad tool – an app editor. When you are asking what is a text editor you will find that Textastic will answer lots of questions.
I just started a new job in a school in Banyoles and there is very little of Apple within the school. I carried my iPad around with me and the plan was that for as much as possible, I would be using the iPad in the classroom. To start with, I have all of my documents that I thought I might need in Evernote. These were documents that were sent to me by e-mail by the other teachers that I would be working with in the languages department. To a certain extent it worked fairly well, as I was able to gain access to images and text that I needed from Evernote during the day.
Using iPad in the classroom
Mostly I spent my time using the iPad to access the documents, but I also used the iPad to show video to my students. I had uploaded a couple of videos using iTunes which is a good way to move files to the iPad. It is really handy when using the iPad in the classroom to have the iPad pointing towards me when I set it up, and then just flip it over to show to the students. I like the way that the iPad spins the image around, so that it works right whichever way the iPad is up.
Problems I had using iPads in the classroom
On account of the school being completely Windows-based, I was unable to print from my iPad. Not much change of anyone in this school using iBooks for iPad. There was a document I had received by e-mail that was in Evernote that I needed to print. If I had more time to work it out I probably could have worked out a way to connect to the network and access the printer. That will be something I can try on the next day I am working in the school.
I couldn’t get to the document through e-mail because the e-mail address was the iCloud.me account. For some strange reason on the Windows computer, I was unable to access iCloud in order to see the e-mail. I did try a couple of different web browsers, one didn’t work with iCloud and the other told me that the username and password was incorrect. Again that is something I will have to try to sort out on my next workday.
Using the iPad in the classroom – Other solutions
What I should do instead, is to put any documents that I might need into Dropbox, as I know I will be able to access Dropbox through whatever platform is available. The problems that I had within the school were more to do with working out access to the hardware facilities on the network, than having anything to do with using iPads in the classroom.
Using Evernote was okay, but I am wondering if I might have better used a different stand-alone note taking application such as SimpleNote. The problem with SimpleNote is that it is just for text and not for pictures. I did have the pictures that I needed for the lessons tucked away in iPhoto for iPad. Getting access to those photos was therefore going to be very easy indeed. With the children scattered around the classroom, perhaps I should rearrange them, so that they would be able to see the photos better. You know how it is, there are always those that like to sit at the back of the class.
A teacher using an iPad in school
Having the iPad as a device which does everything for me is what I am looking for. I want to have it there so that I can do the register for the day – Mark whether the students are present or not. I want to have the ability for using iPad in the classroom for making my own notes. I did use the iPad for this purpose. While the children were completing a task and busy writing, I wrote a few notes about them. I am also keen to use the iPad for keeping records about what was done with the class. Maybe Evernote is the best solution for this as I can have a notebook within it, that I can search through using the name of the class, that can be applied to tags attached to the note. I may have to do some testing to find out which works best for me.
An ideal solution would be something like the school in Scotland where all of the students each have an iPad. In this situation everybody including the teachers are using iPads in the classroom and getting the best benefit from the Apple technology. I will report back on how it is going with this iPad in classroom experiment. It would be lovely to have an iPad school classroom where all the students had the iPad classroom experience. There are some places like that and there will be more schools using iPads in the future.
It looks like March 7th is that day that the iPad makes its debut. Finally we will be able to have concrete information about what is inside the device and the rumour mongers will be able to start blowing hot air about some other Apple product. Most likely the next device to push the rumour mill will be the iPhone 5. Then again there are people that are saying that the Apple TV that really has a screen and is a television will emerge sometime this year and that could be before the iPhone5.
So have you decided which of the rumours that are circulating about the iPad 3 on the run up to the iPad 3 release date are going to be true. Which rumours do you want to be true? There could well be faster graphics and faster processor. In fact I think we can take that as a given. The Retina display for the iPad is probably a good bet too. I don’t expect the iPad to be able to make tea or coffee but it might get the Siri functionality so that we will be able to talk to it.
The new iPad or iPad 3 release date
Going by the way things are going regards the desire for long battery life then the iPad 3 will come with a bigger battery and or power saving functions that will make the battery last as long or longer than the present iPad. Can they make it any lighter and still make it better? has the iPad already achieved the optimal size? I am looking forward to the iPad 3 release date which we now have been informed is March 7th 2012. Will you be breaking out the camping gear so that you can wait in line for a new iPad 3? Have you started to write the advertising copy in order to sell you granny so that you have the money ready for when the iPad 3 hits the Apple store Barcelona or the Apple Store Orlando or Apple Store Baton Rouge.
There are going to be some excited people around that will be waiting both baited breath for the new and exciting bit of kit coming out or being announced Apple iPad 3 release date of March 7th. You should have a look at the time that the announcement is due to take place and see if you need to book time off work, so that you get the news live as it happens.
There is an application which you may be interested in if you are a movie buff. You can test yourself on your knowledge of the cinema going right back to the 1920’s. What this application does is to present itself as a game and it is basically a multiple choice quiz. There are categories available to choose from – The twenties to the fifties, sixties and seventies, the eighties until present day, or you could choose either actors or actresses to be tested on.
The developer has dropped the price for the Movie Awards Trivia HD app to 99 cents until the 26th of February, 2012 in view of the 84th Academy Awards as a special offer.
As an example, if you choose to be quizzed upon actors, an example question would be – Which three of these were nominated for best actor in 1965? Underneath the question I have four pictures, all in black-and-white which is surprising seeing as some of these must have been colour films. The nominees I can choose from are Laurence Olivier in Othello, Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Lee Marvin in Ship of Fools or Sidney Poitier in A Patch of Blue. I made a guess and chose three of them, the one that I left out was Sidney Poitier and what do you know? I was completely right. The application put on screen a U R Right and that does bug me a little bit, because they could of used the word correct rather than going for the teenagers idiom of using a letter to signify a word. Maybe the designer of the application was a teenager. After you have made your choice to answer the question you also get a icon to tap on, to allow you to see the image full-screen. You can’t actually do anything with it, you just get a larger version of the image that was the thumbnail image in the question.
Interactivity in the Movie Awards Trivia application
When you hit the home button while you are on the question screens, you get the opportunity to put your name in for a high score. I would have thought that there would be some sort of online connection to be able to compare your scores with other people’s scores, maybe that will come in a later version. When you get back to the homepage you can choose to see a slideshow, there is a dial where you choose a decade or a specific year. You might for instance, choose 1970’s best actors. The slides show for a couple of seconds per image and you get just the image without any information to go with it. It could have been handy to see the name of the film or the name of the actor pictured in the movie. In the slideshow and I chose to look at, it didn’t take long for the set of images to get to the end and start over again, the images played rather quickly. There was no option to change the amount of time each image showed, you just get a big button to close, which takes you back to the photo gallery.
Points for the right answers
At bottom of that home screen all you get is the invitation to visit the website for Movie Trivia Apps and underneath that, you have a play button, a scores button, how to play information and the slideshow. On looking at the information about how to play the game, it tells me that there are 1000 questions divided into groups of 20 per session. The points that you get per question depends upon how fast you answer the question and there are no penalties for getting the wrong answer. This makes the game very good for just guessing.
Overview of Movie Awards Trivia
This application would suit the person that was a complete movie buff that had already studied all of the movie awards. It seems that it is about the Oscars, although there are other movie industry backslapping events where awards are given. The application doesn’t really inform and educate you about the movie business or filmmaking in general, just as the Oscars is to a large extent just an opportunity for the movie industry to sell more movie theatre seats. I like applications that are in some way useful and this seems to be more a trivial game to play, the hint is in the title name of the application. Unless your knowledge of the awards given to actors and movies is really extensive, then much of the time while playing this game you will be making an educated guesses or even just tapping and hoping for the best. At least you may be learning something along the way, even if it is only just the names of the actors that were nominated or were winners of an award for a specific year. The design of the application is nothing special and there is room for improvement in terms of social networking connections facilities and I would recommend that you try the free version of the application before spending the cash to buy the paid for version.
In January 2012 Apple had their Apple iBooks author and textbook event in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was a small event, but I think in some ways it has the possibility of far reaching consequences for the publishing industry. When you consider the destructive force that Apple have been able to exert, to change the music industry and start to have an effect upon the movie industry, then it is surprising that books and the publishing of textbooks have not been looked at sooner. We now have Apple iBooks which will allow students and in fact also many non-students to read all sorts of books, including textbooks on the iPad 2. If the iPad 3 gets the high-resolution retina display, then these multimedia textbooks will be even more amazing. At the moment we have no idea about when will the iPad 3 be announced or available, but the rumour mill is turning over a storm of hot air. These rumours will be flying left, right and centre right up until the day before the iPad 3 will be released. It looks like we will see a lot of iPads in schools.
The large textbook publishing companies ready to sell through the Apple iBook store
At the Guggenheim Museum, Apple launched iBooks author and a new version of iBooks on the iPad along with announcements concerning iTunes U. This announcement could be a iPad game changer for education. While the textbooks with the interactive technology, that are going to be available from some of the large publishing houses such as, McGraw-Hill Pearson and DK Publishing there are many people getting quite excited about some of the possibilities for self publishing with the iBooks author application, which was made available for free. Directly from the event the iBooks author Apple application became available for anyone to download and start making some amazing interactive iPad textbooks. I downloaded the Apple iBooks author application as soon as I could myself, and I have already created a couple of iBooks. I have even created an account for myself to be able to publish those iBooks that I create. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions of the licence, I am only able to make the iBooks available for free. I will have to set up a different account if I want to be able to sell my iBooks through the Apple iBooks store.
Demo textbooks and Apple iBooks textbooks available for sale already
On the day of the event there was the new iBooks application available for the iPad. This new iBooks application works on the iPad 1 and iPad 2 and of course Apple will have a view to seeing this application being used heavily on the new iPad 3. There was a demo textbook available called ‘Life on Earth’ which I have downloaded, but have yet to properly explore. Also the way it works with the Apple iBook store, is that the publishers are required to put up a sample which could be perhaps a chapter. I will be downloading some of these to get ideas to use in the iBooks that I will be creating myself. It will be interesting to see the techniques that are used in these books to best show off the content of the book.
Comics getting in on the act
A producer of comics has made a sample iBook in which he shows off a selection of comic strops that he has produced. The other way to get these works out to your readers and fans is to put the iBook in a place where it can be downloaded. This fits in okay with the fact that these books can only be given away and not be sold, unless they go through the iBook store. So this comic which is called ‘Waking up with the Diesel Sweeties’ have been downloaded a ton of times in just a few day. The book contains all of the comics from the month of December of 2011 and has been put up in order that the author might try out the application from Apple, iBooks Author and also so that his fans can read his comics and give feedback. All of the comics are fitted into the book in one single chapter and you can scroll through the chapter using the scroll bar at the bottom of the book. When you tap on a page, it opens up to full screen and to go from full-screen to the chapter view, you do the pinch gesture.
What would be good would be the ability to zoom into areas, if this comic was of the type of comic that had areas of the drawing with small details images or text. That is not available in this particular comic, although I think that it could be possible to have this facility using HTML 5. It does seem a very good format for viewing comics and I’m sure that’s the comics fans will take to this way of viewing these graphic novels and picture stories like a duck to water. As with any of these iBooks textbooks it is possible for readers to add notes and to highlight certain areas of text. You just touch and hold with your finger to run across the text that you want to highlight and hey presto it’s done. On the front page of this comic book for iBooks there is an e-mail address, which when you click on it opens up a new e-mail ready to accept whatever text you want to put into it and send. There is also a live link in there to the website of the author. I tapped on the link and it took me directly to the website using iOS Safari.
When iBooks of this type are distributed in this way, it is a very simple drag-and-drop to take the book from wherever you have downloaded it to on your computer. You then drop it into iTunes, where it will be synchronised with your iPad the next time you do the synchronisation. It wasn’t difficult to move files to the iPad in this way. These new iBooks only work on the iPad although there is plenty of Apple commentators that are calling for the iBooks to also be available on the iPhone. If they are on the iPhone also, then some studying could be done, or a text or a comic could be enjoyed while out and about without your iPad. After all we always do carry our iPhones with us.
Learn how to get started and see an overview of iBooks Author
I have posted on the Wizardgold / Mac20Q YouTube channel, three videos showing how to get started creating iBooks using the Apple iBooks Author application. In the first of the videos on YouTube, I have demonstrated how to create a cover page within the application. The second video I am demonstrating creating an iBook showing how to get text from your other applications on your computer into your new iBook. The third video shows how to add a gallery which is one of the widgets that you can put into your iBook to show off a number of photos.
Wicked widgets in Apple’s iBooks Author application
Within the Apple electronic textbook creation application, you can add widgets which will give you a gallery, media widgets, review, Keynote, interactive image, 3-D widget and HTML. The widgets for the gallery, the media and the keynote are self-explanatory and to a certain extent the same goes also with the 3-D widget, if you have access to 3-D objects to put into your iBooks. The review widget is a special widget that goes into the book for you to create a question or a poll. This is most useful in a textbook where you want to use this questioning widget in order to reinforce the learning of a part of your text.
The interactive widgets, as yet, I don’t have any experience of these, but it could be something like where you have a map and you touch on one area to show a graphic that makes a particular point and touch on another area of the map which gives other information. The HTML widget basically is something that you will create using Dashcode, which is something that comes as part of Xcode that the developers use to create Mac applications. Following instructions on the Apple website for Dashcode, I was able to create a simple Dashcode widget which was a countdown to a specific date. It wasn’t terribly difficult and I would like to experiment more by creating other Dashcode objects.
Conclusion of this iBook’s Author overview
This new technology that has been made available for free by Apple to create iBooks etextbooks for iPad has amazing possibilities to be used for so many more things. It could easily be used to create anything from a cookbook, a manual for a camera, a user handbook for a car or even for instructions, using images and diagrams, showing how to put furniture together. We can be reading these eBooks on the iPad.
Without a doubt it is quite possible that this could spur on the creation of a whole new industry for creative types, to be the person in charge of the authorship of these types of books, for small and large companies. This is mainly because the application requires somebody, singular at the controls, putting the iBook together. It does require someone with a creative bent and could quite easily be a revitalisation of the desktop publishing industry. I can see this being very good for graphic designers.
Education and the Apple text books in iBooks
At the Apple event for iBooks iPad textbooks, obviously the emphasis was on education and creating books for use by students in schools and colleges. For this to really have credibility, there does have to be the large textbook publishing houses on board ready to sell textbooks through the Apple iBook store and it seems that this is actually the case, at least in America. About 90% of the textbooks produced are published by the publishers that have said they are involved with this initiative.
It doesn’t necessarily though have to be just from the top down with regards the publishing of iBooks textbooks. Teachers that are Mac users and even slightly technically savvy, will be able to produce textbooks for their classroom with ease. It will be extremely easy for the files to be distributed to the students through the school network. The best thing about this is that the textbooks will be totally customised to the school district, teacher, classroom and could even be tailored to specific groups of students. I expect we will see a world history textbook or even a plethora of world history textbooks along with a bunch of medical textbooks hitting the iBooks Store. Where can I buy textbooks for iPad? will be the question on the lips of students all over the place.
While I have been trying out this new application from Apple I have found that there are some bugs still in the application. The difficulties I have had, have not stopped me from creating iBook textbooks and I wouldn’t complain about this anyway, seeing as the application was free. In any case as a version 1 of a new software it certainly would seem a little churlish to complain. Apples’ iBooks textbook business looks like it will have a bright future in front of it as one the most useful educational apps for the iPad.
If you are doing any sort of business, then you can be fairly sure that at some point in time, business cards will be involved and you might want to use a business card app. Even if you are fully up-to-date with the latest technology and have your business card details within a mobile application that you can bump across to somebody else’s mobile phone, you are for sure going to meet people that will hand you a paper or card old-fashioned business card. It will be this way for many years to come, that businessmen and women will be using these little pieces of card to pass on their information to other business people in their industries and of course to clients and customers. So there is for sure, a definite need for applications like WorldCard HD to capture quickly, easily and accurately the details on the business cards that are handed to us. You can use your mobile device as a high speed scanner. You may well find the WorldCard HD app for the iPad coming up in business card scanner reviews.
The problem to be solved – Is that it takes time to enter data, so it can be boring and tedious, as well as there is always the possibility of adding errors while inputting the data that you are reading off the card. Also it is very easy to tuck away the business cards collected during a business meeting and put into a pocket, meaning to input the data later and then forgetting to do so. It is genius really to use our mobile phones as business card scanners using a business card scanner app. In fact because you always have the cell phone with you on your person it is the best business card scanner you could have. yes it is true, you can use the iPad in business.
Penpower WorldCard HD scanner app
Penpower WorldCard HD which is a scanner app, solves these problems for us by allowing us to photograph the card with our camera on our mobile phone or iPad 2 and have their system use optical character recognition, OCR, to do the work for us. All we need to do, is to check that the details have been recognised correctly and most of the job is already done. Then all that is necessary is to perhaps take a photograph of your business card giver and add that to the data that has already been recognised with the card. Then if you wish, you can add further information. There are the standard fields for adding extra data about your business person, customer or client and you can also add your own custom fields. Anything else can be put into a free-form notes field within the data record in this worldcards ipad 3 2012 for reading text and images for business cards. You can also use this app on ipad 2 hd and use this as a business scanner of business cards.
Extra editing of the business card image
When I took the photos of the business cards I was able to do a good job of taking the photograph. The camera was pointed directly at the business card, no weird angles and the lighting was just right. I understand from the help file that it is possible to straighten an image if necessary and it is also possible to rotate the image through 90°. In this business card scanner software on the page for looking at the details of the contact, you see the image of the business card. All of the recognised text is underneath it, all laid out very nicely. At the top you have some icons which will let you do things with the text and also the image. The first icon to the left is the edit button, that when tapped will let you get in to edit the data to your hearts content. You also do the editing of the image if needed in that section of the app.
Business card scanner - Cropping the business card image
When you tap on the button to let you crop the image, you get your rectangle with four squares on each corner. You align each of the squares with the corners of the business card, tap on preview for the software to process the image. From this part of the application you can also re-do the OCR, I suppose there may be occasions where it may be necessary to do that. When you use the button for More Functions, you may also add the back side of a photo from an album, replace front side photo from an album or delete the front side photo. So once you have checked all of the data is correct then you could swap out the image of the business card for a photo of the person instead. You get an picture of the person that is visible in more places in the app, and is larger than the picture in the space specifically for the person. So you get to see the face of your contact in the Photo View and not just in the list view.
iTunes will accept a number of different video codecs and there are also quite a few that it will not take. The video codecs that are not accepted tend to be from the Windows universe such as the .avi and the .wmv file types The easiest way to add a movie to iTunes is to do the drag-and-drop from your finder. Just have iTunes in one half of your desktop available to drop into and in the other half have your Finder. In iTunes if you have the movies tab open you can drop the file directly into your collection of movies. If you don’t have your movies section open in your library then you can drop the file into the area in the left hand column into the list underneath the word Library. Just the same as if you were bringing in some music and the music gets put into your music collection, the movie file is put into the correct place with the rest of your movies. It is as simple as that with your files that are .mov or .m4v type of files, but what do you do with one of those weird Windows movie codecs. Don’t worry, you will find a free way to convert video to iPad or iPod, you will be able to add movies to iTunes easily.
How to add movies to iTunes that are .AVI
What you have to do is to convert those movies to a format that is acceptable for iTunes. Basically this will mean that the file will have to be converted to H.264 and if you want to have your movie also put onto your iPod, then you may need to make sure it is of a certain pixel size and also may need to take care of the audio. There are a large number of applications or programs available for use on all platforms, be that Windows, Linux or Mac and the level of complexity for use of these applications varies considerably to use with your iTunes videos. See what you can do with iTunes video to add movies to iTunes or add video to iTunes.
iBooks for Mac doesn’t actually exist what you need is the iBooks for iPad, so that you can read your electronic books. It is time to give up on turning pages on the dead tree versions of books and go in to the world of electronic books. There are plenty of books that you can buy from the iTunes store in the books section, but to get you started as there are also plenty of free iBooks. You can even download books from Google books for free. Google have a huge project on, where they are digitising a very large number of books and there are quite a few other sites to where you can get free iBooks. If you still really need to have iBooks for Mac then there are applications that you can get that will allow you to read the books on your desktop or laptop computer. There is Stanza, there is a Sony digital reader, Adobe Editions, also there is one more that I’ve tried for reading e-book’s on my Mac, it is open source and so ugly that I’m not even going to mention the name of it here.
Free iBooks for iPad
If you want to get into reading iBooks on the iPad and you don’t want to spend any money, then there are number of places you might look to get your free iBooks for your iPad. One such place is called Manybooks.net and it is very easy to download what they call, the best books at the best price, as in they are free. You may search through the site by browsing through the titles which are most popular. There are recent reviews that you can use to help you decide which books you want to download and read. These reviews are made by other visitors to the site to help you decide on books for Reading on the iPad .
Collections of free iBooks
On the ManyBooks website you will find some user generated bookshelves, books to read before you die, science fiction after 1950 and you can even find stories about fairies. If you look in the section for the 1950 science-fiction it does seem to be just some books from 1950 through to 1956. Obviously there seems to be more work to do on this particular list and you needn’t expect to find the latest bestsellers in there either. This doesn’t mean that the books aren’t any good. For example Philip K Dick is one of the authors in the list with a book called ‘Piper in the Woods’ and he is the author that is famous for the book that became the Blade Runner movie with Harrison Ford.
One of the best lists on the ManyBooks website is the list of the books that became movies. In this list you will find fantastic stories, drama, horror, westerns and adventure stories. So if you like reading books and you want to read them on your iPad using iBooks for iPad, then you will surely find plenty of free iBooks there. This site claims to have more than 29,000 books to choose from, that you will be able to read on the Kindle
, the Sony e-reader, the Nook and also the iPad.
iBooks download for iOS
The iBooks application which includes the iBook store will also let you download the latest bestsellers as well as the top classics. The view you have is of a wooden bookshelf and it is easy to tap on a book to open it. Then you are easily able to flip or swipe, to move from one page to the next to have a very nice reading experience. If you add a bookmark while reading a book on your iPhone when you go to the iPad copy of the book, to read some more, you’ll find that the book mark is there also. If you are a student, then you will like the ability to add notes to sections of text.
It is very handy indeed that the iBook store allows you to get a free sample of any book, to help you decide if you want to spend the money on buying the book. That seems to work in just the same way as in the music store where you are able to listen to 30 seconds of a song. As well as being able to read the ePub format books you may also have PDF documents in your personal collections. If you download books from Google books you can add them to your collection and read them on your iPad.
Reading your free books for iPad in bed
I have read a few books using iBooks on the iPad, I like the fact that we get an animation when we are moving from page to page. It is extremely useful being able to adjust the brightness of the page and you can even change the styling so that it is easier to read. One other really good thing about reading on the iPad is when you are in a low light situation – which could be on an aeroplane when the lights go out or it could be in the bedroom and your partner is asleep and you want to continue reading, you can continue reading even when the Kindle e-Ink becomes useless. There are number of fonts to choose from and you can give the page a sepia colour which also makes it easier on the eyes for reading.
Below is a list of some sites were you can go to get your free books. If you are content creator yourself then you may also want to produce your own e-book’s. You will be delighted to hear that there are applications available that will let you do just that. Scrivener on the Mac will allow you to output to the e-book format, it is a shame there is no Scrivener for iPad. You can also create your books on your iPad, the apps are quite simple in terms of the facilities that they offer, but you will get properly formatted the books from applications such as Book Creator, EBook Magic or Demi Books Composer.
Reading novels has to be one of my favourite uses of my iPad. Sometimes I might be reading pdf on iPad but that is more for when I am learning something, or it is for business. It is really good when you are reading a book and you can just open the app and continue reading from where you left off. With some apps you will find that the position you are at in the book will synchronise across devices. So you might be reading ebooks on ipad and then change to the iPhone and pick up right where you left off. When you are reading pdfs on ipad as opposed to reading novels it is just as comfortable as an experience. I like ibook for iPad but mostly I use Kindle
for iPad. The Kindle app is a great way to get at your reading material. It is pretty easy to get the reading material into the right format too.
Apple complete reading experience needs an iBooks for Mac
The iPad for reading ebooks is one way to go, but I think we also need iBooks for Mac. To have iBooks Mac it would cover all bases as far as the Apple reading experience is concerned.
There isn’t an iPhoto application on the iPad and while it might be nice to have iPhoto for iPad, we have to ask do we really need it. There are available a number of iPad applications that do allow you to edit and adjust your photos, you don’t necessarily need to look for a free photo editing online application. For a start off, the cameras on the iPad to are not particularly good, so it is not likely that you’re going to take many photographs with your iPad. Consequently the photos that you do have on there will be adequately served by the use of the Photo Roll and you will be able to use applications such as ArtStudio or PS Express to do some photo editing for free.
What is so bad about the Photos App
The photos app in iOS5 is actually not that bad. I can see all of the photos in my Photo Stream. I have the ability to use faces and places and any of the settings that I have made in my iPhoto app on my Mac are reflected in the photo app on the iPad. So if you have spent a good deal of time to name all of the faces in your photos, then you will be able to use that information also within the iPad application. I can see all of the albums that I have created in the iPhoto app on my iMac. It is even possible to have a slideshow with transitions and you can have it play music.
Photo editing for free on the iPad
When I first looked at the app that is pictured above I had to look a few times to work out what it was supposed to be. I think that I am not so keen on the idea of having it look like there is a photo in the bottom of a developing tray. I would expect that the younger crowd would have no idea what a developing tray would look like in the first place. What we need is an app to edit photos on iPad or even inexpensive iPad apps for photographers that does the business and looks good and doesn’t look stupid. What do you think? Should you pay for an app or can you get good results photo editing for free?
