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Friday giveaway: Get your calculator back on with Digits for iPad
If you divvy up the universe of iPad hands-on coverage over the past month, there's a reasonable midline with "Here's all I was able to do with it" on one side, and "Here are the things it doesn't do, isn't that ludicrous?" on the other. Michael Gartenberg's post at Slashgear about a two-week road experiment with just his iPad falls in the first bucket, and Kate Bevan's What's Wrong With the iPad? at the Guardian's web site clearly goes in the second. Among Bevan's several pain points with her iPad, she focuses on the absence of a few core apps that helped make the iPhone experience complete: Clock, Voice Memos, Weather, and Calculator. While not all of them have full-featured third party replacements (the Apple-only backgrounding rule in OS 3.2 means that other alarm clocks don't allow you to switch apps and still get your wakeup call), there's certainly ample coverage on Calculator. In particular, Shift's Digits provides a fullscreen, history-tape enabled, email capable, snazzy calculator that should address most number-crunching needs. Digits is a whopping 99 cents in the US store, but we've got ten promo codes to give away to US readers (sorry, rest of world, promo codes are country-specific) -- just leave a comment below to enter, telling us your favorite 'replacement' app for the ones Apple forgot to put on the first-generation iPad. Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post with your suggested 'replacement' app. The comment must be left before Sunday May 16 at 12:00pm noon, Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. 10 winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: One promo code for Digits for iPad (ARV US$0.99) Complete rules here.
The iPhone and vestigial Widgets
Yesterday, I posted about Widget.app, a utility to run OS X widgets on your iPhone. Widgets and the iPhone share a closer relationship than that post suggests. When you create a folder at the root of your tree called /Widgets and populate it, the widgets actually show up in Springboard--the iPhone home screen. When you tap widgets, the iPhone attempts (and fails) to run /System/Library/CoreServices/Dashboard.app. This application does not actually exist or, at least, did not ship with the iPhone. It's clear that Apple designed expandable Widget support for iPhone but cut it out at some stage of the design/delivery process. Thanks to BloomFilter
