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Radiohead releasing new downloadable album, MC Hammer releases new iPad single
You may remember, about four years ago, Radiohead raising a stink over the digital release of its album In Rainbows. The band decided to "sell" the album on its website, asking fans to pay whatever they wanted, while at the same time shunning Apple's iTunes service, claiming they wanted to sell the album rather than individual songs. Back then, Radiohead's statement was pretty amazing, if only because there weren't a lot of other digital channels besides Apple's store. Now, of course, there are a few more ways to buy your music online. Radiohead's gone iTunes anyway, and more artists have decided to sell music themselves. But Radiohead is back at it -- they've announced that a new album will be sold a little more traditionally, but at a US$9 download for an MP3 version, as well as physically starting at $48. I doubt it'll be quite as disruptive a model as In Rainbows was, but figured it was worth a mention. And speaking of releasing new music, MC Hammer released a brand new single on the Flipboard iPad app this month. You'll know Flipboard as a social aggregator, but apparently the company took a musical turn the other week when it premiered the brand new single "See Her Face" on the pages of its app alone. There's no word on how the release went over, but you can listen to the song itself, even if you don't have the iPad app, on Flipboard's site.
Yahoo! announces Livestand for iPad, available first half 2011
If you've been following TUAW's reports about The Daily, you're aware that many of the TUAW bloggers are so fed up with the buggy, crashing newspaper app that they've removed it from their iPads while the app is still free. For me, the crashes and slow loading weren't as much of an irritant as the lack of customizable and local content. I just don't want to pay for horoscopes, fashion news and entertainment gossip that I can't turn off, and the fact that I can't read any local news on the app killed it for me. Yahoo! has apparently been listening, as the struggling internet giant has announced -- but hasn't shipped -- its solution to the problem that is The Daily. It has announced Livestand for iPad, a customizable news app that will be available "in the first half of 2011." There's no word on whether Yahoo! plans to offer the app for free or, as in the case of The Daily, it will be using subscriptions to refill its coffers. Yahoo! wants to capitalize on the huge volume of content that it has available from multiple publishers, the billions of photos available from Flickr and the many advertising agreements it already has in place. The company says that Livestand will be a digital newsstand that is "continuously programmed by a person's interests and contexts." Some of the screenshots (obviously mockups since the app isn't yet available) show local content boxes with top stories, weather and more, all wrapped in a very visual package that is reminiscent of the Flipboard content page. That makes me wonder if it might not just be a better, and more timely, solution to just load Flipboard with RSS feeds of local news from Yahoo! That solution would also make it less likely for me to have to put up with ads that are "data-rich, actionable, even location aware." I'll let you know how my Yahoo! feeds + Flipboard = Local Newspaper experiment works. Perhaps I'll get my own version of Livestand for iPad well before July rolls around. [via MacStories]
The best iOS apps I used in 2010
After looking back over Mac and Mac/iOS hybrid apps, it's time to look at the best iOS apps of 2010. As before, this list comes from my particular experience over the past year with these apps. 1) iCab Mobile (US$1.99, universal) is a replacement for mobile Safari. While it is hindered by the fact that iOS doesn't have anywhere to set a "default browser," and therefore most URLs that you open from the Springboard or email/Twitter/etc... will open in Safari, iCab offers plenty of features that make it worth the effort. It is the first app on my dock, and I much prefer it over Safari. Although it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it comes with a host of features that Safari doesn't have. iCab Mobile will let you download files, which you can either offload to your computer later or upload to Dropbox from right within the app. Tap and hold an image, and you can save it right to your Dropbox. iCab on the iPad also does "real" tabs, with a visible tab present (it will auto-hide when not needed, if you want). You can set it to open links in new tabs, or open only links to different domains in new tabs. It has content filtering built-in, as well as module support for things like Instapaper, viewing HTML source or even downloading videos from YouTube. It also has a forms manager and a kiosk mode, and as Mike pointed out in November it supports VGA mirroring for presentation use. Web browsing is one of the primary uses of my iPad, and iCab Mobile is well worth the minimal asking price. Find out more at iCab Mobile's website. See the rest of my choices below.
Flipboard for Mac screenshot fake, real thing still in the works
A leaked Photoshopped screenshot that was supposedly of a new Flipboard for Mac found its way into many email inboxes yesterday, and now 9 to 5 Mac has confirmation that it is indeed a fake and not from Flipboard Inc. at all. While our own Steven Sande recently wrote about the possibility of Flipboard coming to the Mac soon, in talking to 9 to 5 Mac, the company had this to say: "We definitely believe the desktop is part of our future, but it's still on the whiteboard and not something we are launching soon. The desktop requires a lot of attention to design and UI and we'd like to take the time to get it right." So if you happened to see and believe the "screenshot" of Flipboard for Mac, sorry to burst your bubble. It is still available for free on the App Store to those of you with iPads, and I recommend you check it out. It's a different way of reading news, looking at pictures and responding to updates on Facebook and Twitter, and we can only hope that the Mac version comes out soon enough. Since Apple named it the iPad App of the Year, I imagine we won't have to wait too long.
Flipboard updated, finally does Google Reader and Flickr right
When we spent some quality time with Flipboard over the summer, when the iPad was still a new and exciting thing, we liked the idea but not so much the implementation -- there just wasn't enough stuff filling the pages of our pretend magazines. Since then Flipboard of course went on to win Apple's US iTunes iPad app of the year award and is now celebrating with a major update: Google Reader support. This quite naturally means a huge boost in available content and turns this into a serious way to get your news, with much nicer presentation than your average RSS aggregator. That presentation has also been boosted by Flickr integration, meaning a treasure trove of pretty pictures to go along with that dire news about US politics you can't help but subscribe to.
New version of Flipboard adds Google Reader, Facebook Groups and more
Popular magazine-style reading app Flipboard has announced major changes to its iPad application, bringing with it support for Flickr, Facebook Groups and Google Reader. The new version also includes improved Twitter and social networking integration. Named iPad App of the Year, Flipboard has gone above and beyond with this update. It's no surprise why Sports Illustrated partnered with the company to deliver Swimsuit edition content to Flipboard users. The latest version of Flipboard lets you read and sync to your Google Reader account. All RSS feeds are displayed in magazine-style layout with the ability to jump to your starred items, shared items, folders and individual subscriptions. Flickr integration is also an excellent addition to Flipboard. The iPad's large display lends itself to images, and the new Flickr feature lets you view your favorite photos, your photostream, your contacts' photos and interesting photos of the day. Flipboard originally launched with support for Twitter and Facebook, and the app continues to build on its social networking roots. Flipboard lets you view your Facebook Groups, Friend list, and Fan pages within the app's gorgeous UI. Photos from your Facebook feed also look fantastic. Twitter integration has been expanded to support favorite tweets, mentions, and both public and private lists. You can also now use Flipboard to post a status update, share a photo, or even a Flipboard page across multiple social networks. If you use any of the above web services or social networks and have not installed Flipboard, you should do it now. The Flipboard app is available for free from the App Store and is well worth checking out. You will be hard-pressed not to fall in love with it.
Flipboard rumored to launch web app
One of the more awe-inspiring iPad apps of 2010 was Flipboard. The free app is a beautiful way to read RSS feeds, see and respond to updates from friends on Twitter and Facebook and more, displayed in a format that looks more like a well-designed magazine than a reader app. It's so good that Apple named it the iPad App of the Year. Now The Next Web is reporting that Flipboard may be coming to a much larger audience as a web app. The company has reportedly posted a job opening for a "Designer - Web Developer" for the purpose of designing a way to read content online. This move makes sense for Flipboard, particularly if they plan on offering the app in Google Chrome's Web Store. A web app that is readable from a variety of devices would give Flipboard an advantage in development, since all upgrades and changes could be made to one code base instead of requiring rewrites for many platforms. There's no word on when the web app may launch, although it's a sure bet that it will be sometime in 2011. [via MacStories]
TUAW's Daily App: Times for iPad
We posted about Times way back in April of last year. Back then, it was an RSS reader for Mac that organized your feeds into a newspaper-style page, so you could quickly and easily scan and browse a lot of information. Nowadays, of course, the iPad is one of the main devices for consumption of online content, and the team at Acrylic has finally brought that reader over to Apple's tablet (and the 2.0 Mac version is due out soon as well). It doesn't hurt, I'm sure, that apps like Flipboard have made it cool to consume RSS content in a programmatically designed form again. Times is pretty smooth, as you can see on the website. It will seamlessly bring in content from all of your feeds, as well as Facebook and Twitter, and organize them all in an easy to read newspaper/blog format. Unfortunately, it doesn't sync up with the Mac version (or any other readers that you may already have set up), so you'll probably have to rebuild whatever group of feeds you're already reading. And personally, I have the same problem with this that I have with all of these "nice" feed readers; it's cool to see your feeds all prettied up and formatted, but sometimes I just want to make sure that I see important news or hit a certain site first. But that's not the kind of reading you'd do with an app like this anyway. (Since I write for TUAW, a lot of my RSS reading is systematically combing for interesting stories and posts.) As a simple iPad reader that makes multiple feeds pretty and easy to read, Times for iPad is worth checking out if you haven't landed on a good solution yet. It's US $7.99 on the App Store right now.
Flipboard for iPad app review
Flipboard is a new, free application for the iPad which has one basic function: to take your social networking tools (read: Facebook and Twitter) and turn them into social "magazines." As you can see from the screenshots -- which are all culled from my Twitter stream -- the application is very attractive. Read on for my full impressions.
Flipboard turns social network content into a virtual magazine
The latest hotness wandering around the blogs is this iPad app called Flipboard, which turns your favorite social network content into an easy-to-read magazine-styled layout. It does look good -- the idea is that pictures and text are all pulled in from various social feeds, and then assembled together by the app to make a full-color, full-featured magazine that you can flip through instead of pulling up various feeds and/or running a bunch of different clients. We saw a similar app at WWDC this year that pulled content from RSS and styled it in a magazine fashion. Personally, I'm not entirely sold -- I have the same problem with this app as I did with RSS readers for a long time, which is that I like to see content in the format it's generated for. If someone likes something or posts a link on Facebook, I'd rather see what it looks like in the same space they created it for, not crammed into an app's magazine-style formatting. You may make the argument that information is increasingly growing context in-sensitive, and you'd be right -- I do use an RSS reader now, after many years of trying to read blog items on their own blogs, and social networks are growing more interchangeable as they fight to find their own spots in your attention. Flipboard may work well (and at the low, low price of free, it's hard to argue against at least trying it out, though word is that the servers are hammered at launch), but I think there's still something to be said for seeing your tweets in your Twitter client and your friends' pictures on Flickr. I'm not quite ready to completely separate all of my social network content from its original form quite yet.
