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WWDC 2010: iBooks update includes PDF viewer
iBooks, Apple's native e-book reader on the iPad, is getting some updates, as announced today by Steve Jobs at the WWDC keynote. Among those updates are (better) support for bookmarks and the fulfillment of one of the most common requests: native PDF viewing. With the update, users will be able to navigate their own PDF's in the same fashion as the EPUB-format books that iBooks uses. This is great news for me, and -- judging from the applause -- quite a few iPad users. It means not having to convert all of my PDF books to EPUB in Calibre (which has done a great job thus far, by the way). Hopefully the new functionality, which is due out later this month, will be as useful as some of the existing iPad apps, and provide the extra polish and simplicity that Apple's so good at.
iPad corners 22 percent of ebook market, iBooks gets iPhone version and PDF reader
Apple has just announced that the iPad has collected 22 percent of ebook sales since its launch and is about to get new features too. A PDF viewer is going to be thrown into the iBooks app later this month, and will be accompanied by new bookmarking and note-taking functionality. Yeah, they're basic enhancements at best, but we're still trying to wrap our minds around this idea that Apple is already responsible for nearly a quarter of all ebook sales. Then again, as Steve points out, a cool five million of the darn things have been downloaded in the first 65 days of the iPad's availability. Update: Seems like even five mill ain't gonna be enough for Apple, which is set to massively expand its iBooks user base by bringing the app to iPhone and iPod touch users. You'll be getting the same note-taking, same bookmarking -- same everything -- just on a smaller screen, and at no extra charge. Users will be able to purchase a book on one device and then consume it across the full range of iDevices, with bookmarks and progress getting synced across the ether.%Gallery-94570%%Gallery-94595% Check out more from WWDC 2010 in our liveblog!
Hands-on with PaperDesk for iPad 1.2
Call me fickle. Back on April 19th, I was pretty happy with Penultimate, a digital notepad for iPad. I mentioned in my review that I'd like to be able to type into the notebooks instead of just writing handwritten notes, but I was happy with the ability to have different notebooks. All in all, Penultimate seemed to be a pretty good notetaking app. That was before I found PaperDesk for iPad from WebSpinner, LLC in the App Store. The app comes in a free Lite version or a $1.99 full edition, the only difference between the two being that in the Lite version, each of your notebooks is limited to a maximum of 3 pages. I started by downloading and installing the Lite version, and quickly found myself spending the two bucks to upgrade to the full edition. PaperDesk can be a bit surprising the first time you launch it. Instead of seeing a notebook or a sheet of paper, there's a blank wooden desk. Fortunately, there's a fairly obvious "new document" icon (the ubiquitous plus sign) in the upper right corner of the desk, and a tap on that brings up a dialog for creating a new notebook. Read on for additional details and screenshots of PaperDesk in action. %Gallery-92479%
Bookeen's upgraded, colorful Cybook Opus to debut on May 7
We were promised a color-loving version of the diminutive Cybook Opus and here's the delivery of said pledge. Coming in seven new shades to match its May 7 release date, the newly revised Cybook Opus boasts instant-on functionality, a new Boo Reader software that helps to optimize battery life, and a category-best 12 font sizes. It's still a monochrome E Ink display -- 800 x 600 pixels -- and memory hasn't budged up from the 1GB on its predecessor, but at least the opening price has dipped down to a £149 ($199 in USA) RRP. When you consider 150 books come preloaded on the device, it's almost like Bookeen is giving the hardware away for free. It's not, but that's as good a rationalization as any other. Full PR after the break.%Gallery-92018%
Kindle version 2.5 update gets Facebooked and Twitterized
Amazon just announced a 2.5 software update for its Kindle and Kindle DX readers. At the moment, it's rolling out the update to a "limited group" of Kindle users with a general release coming at the end of May. Enhancements include the ability to organize books and documents into "collections," pan and zoom within PDFs, Kindle password protection, larger and sharper fonts, and just what you've always wanted: the ability to "share book passages with friends on Facebook and Twitter." Somebody pinch us.
TUAW Review: Write and organize handwritten notes on your iPad with Penultimate
To look at my office, you wouldn't know right away that I'm a digital kind of guy. Rather than pull up a text editor on any one of the digital devices that surround me, I'd rather grab a pen and scrawl a note on a Post-it™ note. Eventually, the notes are either trashed or fall under some piece of equipment, so they're definitely not for long-term use. Over the years, I've also accumulated a pile of loose-leaf binders, Moleskines, and other notebooks containing the detritus from my brain. Now that I am iPad-equipped, I finally want to move my note-taking over to the digital age. I've looked at a number of iPad apps, and most of them didn't fit my main requirement of being able to make multiple notebooks for different tasks. When I saw Penultimate from Cocoa Box Design (US$2.99 for early adopters), i finally pulled the trigger on buying a notebook app for the iPad. While it's not perfect (I'll explain why in my review), Penultimate is the closest to what I'm looking for in an iPad note-taking app. Read the rest of this short review and check out the gallery to see what Penultimate is all about. %Gallery-91168%
iPad 101: User Guides and other helpful resources
You've bought your iPad. Congratulations! So are you ready to learn all the ways you can get the most from your new purchase? Here's a quick run-down of some indispensable resources as you're getting up to speed with your new purchase. Read the manuals: The iPad User Guide (pdf) provides an in-depth review. This user manual is not included in the iPad packaging. Instead, Apple hosts it on its support site. This 154-page long (!) guide covers all the basics for using the iPad and understanding how it works. If you'd like to convert this PDF-formatted guide into a format (called "ePub") that you can use to read on your iPad, there's a handy website called epub2go that will handle the conversion for you. After transforming the file to epub, just drop it onto your iTunes library and sync it to your iPad. You'll be able to read the book using Apple's free iBooks application. It won't look as nice as a standard ePub document, but you'll have it in mobile form. Take a guided video tour: Apple has posted videos that introduce many of the iPad's new features, including Safari, Mail, Photos, iPod, and more. You can watch these videos to get an idea of how each of these features work, and pick up a few pointers along the way. These aren't really meant as tutorials; they are marketing videos, but they can also work to introduce the iPad to you. Read our iPad 101 series: TUAW regularly posts tips and tricks for new users via our 101 posting series. In addition to the iPad, we often post Mac 101 and iPhone 101 hints, suitable for those just getting started with a new platform. These write-ups help introduce new concepts and don't assume that you're already an expert.
Dear Aunt TUAW: How can I convert my pdfs to ePub?
Dear Aunt TUAW, With the release of the iPad and as a grad student with a stock pile of PDF's of review books, whats the best, free-est option for converting them into ePub format for the iPad. Kisses & Snuggles, Your nephew Will
Scanner Pro updated, still powerful, still complex
Scanner Pro is a US$6.99 iPhone app by Readdle which will let you easily take a picture with your iPhone. We've looked at Scanner Pro before and now a new 2.0 version has been released with page edge detection, image stabilization, and German, Spanish, French, and Italian localizations. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to address the UI issues that Erica pointed out in her original review. The UI is complicated, and it took me several attempts to even figure out how to take a picture. The screen shot at the right shows the "workflow" for creating a new document (tap the icons at the bottom, working left-to-right, to step through the process). After I took a picture of a page of text, another menu offered to let me "crop" the scan down to particular sizes. it took a bit of effort to get the margins lined up, and eventually I just hit the "Select All" button instead. Scanner Pro does offer a few advanced features such as the ability to create PDF files with passwords, landscape orientation, manual light/contrast adjustments, Dropbox support, and integration with Print n Share to print your scans. It also supports iDisk (or other WebDAV servers) and Evernote. I tested the Dropbox support and it worked very quickly and smoothly. However when you initially save a document, you are only offered the option to send the file to Evernote, your photo library, or Google Docs. Dropbox is inexplicably missing from the "Send to" menu, which means that you have to step back out of the process and go to another menu to upload it. Frankly I think the whole idea of using your iPhone as a scanner is flawed in the first place, akin to using a wrench as a hammer. If you don't have a hammer but need to whack something, a wrench will do in a pinch, but no one with any serious hammering to do would ever choose a wrench for the job. Likewise, the ability to use your iPhone to capture a piece of paper and send it to someone else or yourself could come in handy in an "emergency" but I wouldn't do it very often. For occasional, light use I still don't see any reason not to use something like Evernote which is free, or just take a picture from the iPhone camera app and email it to yourself later. If you find yourself wishing that you could print and password protect PDF scans from your iPhone, you're much more of a power user than I am, and may find Scanner Pro worth the price. I still wish that the App Store supported time-limited demos so that people could download an app and test it for themselves before buying. I suspect that there are plenty of power users who would be willing to learn Scanner Pro's UI and benefit from what it has to offer. For the average iPhone user, $7 is probably more than they are likely to spend on an app they'll seldom use.
Panic's free ShrinkIt turns humongous Illustrator PDFs into tiny ones
The brilliant minds at Panic noticed that something interesting was happening with PDF files created by Adobe Illustrator. Like many developers, Panic uses Adobe Illustrator to create icons and other image resources for their applications. The resulting PDF files, which were relatively "big-boned" (a politically-correct way of saying "fat"), would magically shrink in size when they were run through Apple's Mac OS X PDF processing. Apple's method is used when you save a PDF from Preview, which explains why most of the time those files are fairly small in size. Being the intelligent chaps that they are, the Panic engineers decided to look into the cause of this. What did they find? "Will started digging into the files and brother, you won't believe what he found. Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we'd specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc." Apparently just opening the obese PDFs in Preview and then saving them would shrink the file sizes dramatically. Rather than force their staff to go through this process each time they found a large Illustrator PDF, Panic did what most developers would do and wrote an application to automate the process. Devs can simply take a big batch of files, like the contents of an application's Resources folder, drop 'em onto ShrinkIt (download link), and watch the file sizes magically shrink. According to Panic, ShrinkIt can reduce an app bundle size by 4 megabytes. While ShrinkIt is a Panic-internal utility, the company has made it available to the world for free. Please note that ShrinkIt is primarily made for shrinking simple vector-resource PDFs, and probably won't work well on press-ready PDFs.
Acrobat.com Mobile now available on the iPhone; free, but expensive
Adobe's Acrobat.com website is not only an online collaboration center, but also provides a way to convert files to PDF, meet live over the web, or store and share files. Now some of that Acrobat.com goodness has found its way into your iPhone. Adobe has released Acrobat.com Mobile by scanR [Free, iTunes Link], which works with an existing Acrobat.com account to give users a way to share and view documents. Users can also fax documents from the app, and iPhone 3GS owners can take photos of documents for addition to their Acrobat.com account. While the app is free, Acrobat.com Mobile users should be aware that using the app comes with a price tag. While you can scan up to 5 pages or fax 2 pages for free, all additional scanning or faxes must be purchased separately through in-app purchase. Many early reviews are stating that the app is rather slow and can be expensive once you begin creating or faxing your PDFs, so potential buyers should be aware of those facts. In addition, the app does not support the Web conferencing or online office applications that make the full Acrobat.com so useful to groups. Acrobat.com appears to be a fair first step towards integrating the iPhone and Acrobat's namesake service, but much more needs to be done before this app reaches its potential. [via The Mac Observer]
RCA Lexi e-reader sports Barnes and Noble software, Audiovox hardware
Quite frankly, readers, it looks like Audiovox is out of control. It's already deluged us with RCA branded camcorders, digiframes, and iPod soundsystems, and now it looks like the company is entering the e-book game. The RCA-branded Lexi e-reader sports a 6-inch (800 x 600) 16-level grayscale display, 2GB storage, and a battery life of some 7,000 page turns. Other features include ezTurn functionality (for the south paw in your life) and something called Auto-Magic content synchronization. As for content, this bad boy ships with Barnes & Nobles Desktop Reader for purchasing, managing, and, yes, reading the latest Dan Brown bestseller (some sort of sinister conspiracy, we believe). But that ain't all! Adobe Reader Mobile is also included, making it interoperable and fully compatible with PDF and ePub formats. Look for it in May for $229.99. PR after the break.
iriver Story reviewed, incites rebellion over price
If you didn't feel you got the whole Story yesterday, here's a pleasing helping of seconds, this time in the form of a full-on review. The PC Pro team rates iriver's Kindle emulator as a "serious contender," and places its readability on par with Sony's touch-less Readers. While congratulations are also meted out for a decent integrated MP3 player, 3.5mm headphone jack, and the wide variety of supported formats, two issues stood out for the reviewers. One was that the support for Word, Excel and Powerpoint files was somewhat hit-and-miss, with zooming sometimes not working and rendering some files unreadable. But the major gripe related to the asking price of £230 including taxes (around $380), which the Story was not considered capable of justifying. Hit the link below for more -- even if your interest is purely academic.
First Look: JotNot Scanner for iPhone updated to version 2.0
There's certainly no shortage when it comes to iPhone apps that turn your device into a pocket-sized scanner. At various times, TUAW bloggers have reviewed or discussed Readdle ScannerPro [US$6.99 (currently on sale for US$4.99), iTunes Link], DocScanner [US$8.99, iTunes Link], and JotNot [US$4.99, iTunes Link]. Of course, there is also a flock of business card scanners, but what I'm discussing in this post are the apps that say that they'll replace that flatbed scanner on your desk with a device you already have in your pocket or purse. MobiTech 3000 just released version 2.0 of the JotNot scanner app, and the update appears to be quite useful. I've owned the app for a while and have successfully used it to capture documents for posterity. The update provides a few additional features that I had been hoping for: Multipage support Automatic edge detection WebDAV/iDisk support Camera stabilization (requires OS 3.1) Automated backup of scans Reordering pages An extensive web-based help In app support Of the new features, I am most happy about two of them; multipage support and camera stabilization. Multipage support means exactly what it implies; you can scan multiple page documents and have them saved into one PDF document. Previously, JotNot would create one PDF file for each and every document you scanned. That meant that combining PDFs required that you export the files to a Mac or PC, then use something like Adobe Acrobat Pro to merge the files.
Kindle 2.3 software update available, generation 1 owners need not apply
We gadget nerds have to endure unspeakable atrocities in order to slake that early adoption jones: first-run gear shipped DOA, buggy pre-release software, and months of waiting after a product leaks only to be greeted by a jacked-up price premium at launch. So we feel your pain, original Kindle owners, after Amazon announced a major firmware update that brings native PDF support to the 6-inch Kindle 2 and DX readers with the promise of a staggering 85% increase in battery life to all Kindle 2 devices -- if you haven't already received it OTA, the 2.3 software update is now available for download and installation via USB tethering. At least owners of "some earlier versions of Kindle" (quote from the press release) will receive native PDF support whenever the 1st generation firmware update (currently at version 1.2) is released. It's worth noting that Amazon's PDF reader lacks a zoom function which makes many PDFs entirely unreadable on the device. Good thing Amazon's store is chock full of easily zoomable books in a proprietary format then, huh?
iWork secret life as ZIP file revealed, includes PDF preview
Former TUAW colleague David Chartier over at Finer Things in Mac has noted something interesting about the innocuous iWork '09 file format. What he found may surprise you. An iWork '09 file created from Pages, Numbers, or Keynote actually lives a secret life as a ZIP archive. This trick isn't a new one; the most common example of archive trickery by Apple is probably the iPod/iPhone software bundle which uses ZIP as a container format. Previous iWork versions actually created folder-like bundle files by default, which made them tricky to upload to cloud storage or email to collaborators. In the case of the new iWork files, changing the file extension to .zip and expanding the archive reveals the as-expected XML document and plist files (for the document and its formatting) as well as a little PDF surprise -- a preview version of the file. What this means for you is that you can send an iWork file to a friend or co-worker and regardless of their operating system choice or installed software base, they can "view" your document by unzipping it and opening the PDF. On Windows, you would simply change the extension to .zip and open with your favorite un-archiving utility. Given the kludgy-ness of this process, it doesn't surprise me that Apple isn't promoting it. However, it would be interesting to see the folks in Cupertino release an iWork viewer for the Windows users in our lives (other than the extant iwork.com sharing service). [Via Download Squad]
Champions delivers manual labor
When it comes to the manual that we've seen so far for Champions Online, probably the last word that comes to mind is 'super' – neither super-long, nor super-informative, especially since launch day has come and gone. Clearly not a heroic effort. However, Cryptic's furnished us with an actual manual at long-last! While not what you would call cosmically complete, it does have the honor of being the largest collection of Champions Online information published in a single document, and sheds a bit more light on some of the more obscure mechanics that are frequently debated on zone-chat. There's a whole lot more it could cover – it is perhaps only half as long as we think it should be, but if you're curious and sifting through forums doesn't appeal, the new PDF manual may just have the answers that you're looking for.
Linden Lab's Tom Hale announces Second Life support for media plug-ins
As a part of his keynote presentation today at this year's Second Life Community Convention, Linden Lab's Tom Hale has unveiled a new plug-in framework for the Second Life viewer. The Second Life viewer has hitherto been restricted to rendering media content that was supported either by its browser component or by the use of Apple's Quicktime. Quicktime is certainly quite workable, but only provides a subset of the extensive range of potentially viewable media that's out there. The introduction of the LLMedia API looks to change all that, by allowing a straightforward plug-in system to extend the viewer's ability to render various arbitrary kinds of parcel media.
Astak's $199 EZ Reader Pocket PRO wants to give Kindle 'a run for its money'
Last we heard from Astak, it was quietly peddling some off-the-wall Mentor e-book reader based on a drab OEM model that every other no-name reader manufacturer uses. Now, however, it seems the company has a bit more pep in its step (though it's still copying others, this time the BeBook), as it has proudly proclaimed that the new 5-inch EZ Reader Pocket PRO is primed to "give Amazon's Kindle a run for its money." With Adobe's blessing, the device is able to support over 20 open file formats along with DRM-laced PDF files; also of note, a sure-to-be-controversial text-to-speech feature can read back documents aloud. The six-ounce device will be available in a half dozen hues, and within you'll find a 400MHz processor, 512MB of memory, an SD expansion slot, 8-level grayscale E-ink screen, a replaceable battery good for 8,000 page turns per charge and an MP3 player that can operate in the background. Sadly, no wireless connectivity is baked in, but the $199 price point is definitely tantalizing. Anyone looking to get in on a pre-order before it ships later this month?
Video: Bookeen Cybook Opus ebook reader gets handled and adored
The guys and gals at MobileRead have scored hands-on time with the Cybook Opus and early impressions are good. They were smitten with the ergonomics of the device and its "gorgeous" 5-inch e-ink display, but oddly neglected to point out any weaknesses. Equipped with an accelerometer, 1GB of storage, microSD expansion slot, and a user-replaceable battery, the Opus is able to read PDF and ePUB files -- with or without DRM -- and organize them into folders. There are rumors of a €250 ($349) asking price, but the exact details of when and where it will be available remain unknown. Click through for a video of the reader doing its thing or hit the read links for more extensive coverage.[Via Slashgear]Read - MobileRead exclusive : sneak preview of the Bookeen OpusRead - Cybook Opus: Discovering the reader, video
