On friday i got my new iPad device and it’s been a fun weekend.
At home i also have Asus EEE and a MacBook Air laptops, small computers that is light and easy to use while surfing from the couch. The EEE is running Windows XP, and I must say that for my liking its too small. With a screen resolution of 1024 x 600 i just find it sad to browse most sites. It get marginally better when you run either Firefox or IE in fullscreen mode and set zoom level to 80% but using it has never been something I’ve considered fun. Up until now, my choice has been to use the Air. It’s thin, quite small (13,3″) and works like a charm. But it’s damn hot… For some reason the fan keeps spinning at full speed.
I’ve read a lot about iPad’s and one of the key issues seems to be that it’s got no apparent use.. What’s it for and how useful can an iPad be in your digital life.
I mostly read news sources from around the world, use Facebook and Twitter mostly, and for this the iPad just makes it easy.
The first application I installed on it was Flipboard for iPad. This is the BEST news aggregation software I’ve ever used. Flipboard makes my Facebook wall fun to read, It makes my Twitter timeline fun to read and it makes news RSS feeds fun to read. What it does is that it transforms everything to look like a digital magazine. Flipboard reads the content of your twitter timeline, or facebook wall and then lay it out in a design with headlines of status updates, it fetches content of links shared and display photos shared and you flip through the pages backward in twitter/facebook time.
Flipboard also has a predefined sett of news sources besides facebook and twitter. My favorites here is Engadget, Wired, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch and you get the same redesign and nice UI on all news sources.
Flipboard is out in version 1.0.1 and it’s quite a new release so here is some bugs and features that could be added that would have made this the only news aggregator you’ll ever need. The most annoying bug i’ve found is that you cannot play shared youtube videos. The just don’t play. Not in “magazine” mode or when you choose “view on web” and use a web controller inside the application… it works when you (in the web controller) choose to open the url in Safari.
A feature I am hoping they’ll add later is the possibility to add my own custom RSS feeds, but all in all, this is well worth a download and hopefully they’ll update and fix the Youtube bug pretty soon.
