When it comes to news aggregators, iPad apps suffer from an embarrassment of riches.  There are several truly excellent aggregators, each with its own take on algorithmically generated news for you.  In this post I will take a look at the leaders and you can decide for yourself which, if any, you might wish to install.  I will not be covering stand-alone publishing enterprises, like the New York Times or Time Magazine apps, but rather meta-tools that aggregate articles from these and many other news sources.  I have stretched my definition to include Reuters and AP, which technically are news sources,...

The most creative publisher of apps for iPad today is Touch Press, responsible for such works as The Waste Land, X is for X-Ray, Barefoot World Atlas, Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy, and Theodore Gray’s remarkable The Elements.  Their latest triumph is The Orchestra, a rich, expansive exposition on symphonic classical music featuring the principal conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra Esa-Pekka Salonen and the musicians of the orchestra.  The work features the performance by the orchestra of 8 great works of symphonic music, not entire compositions, which would make it expansive indeed,...

If you are the organized type, and you use your iPad a lot, you will want to own Scanner Pro by Readdle.  It turns your iPad’s camera into a document/object scanner with built-in algorithms to remove shadows, sharpen images, correct perspective and improve, as much as possible readability.  That’s what makes it better than just taking a photo of a document or object with your iPad.  What really makes it useful is its ability to convert the picture to PDF (a document image, not a searchable PDF with a text layer) and upload it to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or any WebDAV service, like...

On plenary day I had the opportunity to present to full-time faculty on some of the apps for iPad that do an exceptionally good job at delivering educational content across various disciplines.  Naturally, my ambition far exceeded the limited time we had, and the conversation got sidetracked on using the iPad with a projector, so I didn’t have a chance to make it through the list I wanted to demo.  Afterwards I was asked by a couple of faculty members about the list, so here it is. iPad screen display and capture Here’s the scenario: you have connected the iPad to your classroom projector,...

We are always on the lookout for apps that do a great job of using the iPad platform to teach, and the iPad excels indeed at displaying art works.  artCircles, from art.com, does both very well.  In using it you will be exposed to images of great (and in some cases not-so-great) art, get to meet some of today’s most interesting artists and designers, and consider just what makes great art great.  Though the app has commercial tie-ins to art.com, they are subtle and unobtrusive.  It also does not work flawlessly, but works well enough to make it a must have app.  Best if all, it’s free. The...