Tag: ipad

Categories
SciFi and Fantasy

Have Some Free SciFi For iPad or iPhone!

Rolled Up Dimensionality CoverEveryone likes free stuff! Yeah, don’t deny it, ya do. From now until the end of the year, you can get a free copy of Rolled Up Dimensionality: Short stories from a forgotten life from the Apple iBookstore readable on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch!

This eBook is also available on the Kindle and Nook, but I can’t set the price to free there unless enough readers tell Amazon and Barnes & Noble that the eBook is now free on the iPad. So if you want it free on Kindle and Nook, please let them know!

Enjoy!

Categories
Tech

iPad myPad

My quiet Father’s Day was punctuated by the news that I was getting an iPad from my wife. It came on Thursday and since that time I’ve been playing with testing it out. So far I’m finding it to be even better suited to the uses I’ve had in mind than I had thought while writing about it on Learncrest.

I’ve been doing many of the obvious things like web surfing and book reading. But the things I’m looking forward to are the new use cases the form factor of a tablet lends itself to. One hint of this is the way the iPad has changed my typing. The virtual keyboard is big enough that using fingers of both hands to type is pretty easy. Still, shifting for characters like apostrophes is a pain. Auto-correct to the rescue! To avoid the unwanted shifting, I just keep typing and let the auto-correct fix the errors. This lazy man’s approach yields a lot more speed than one would initially imagine.

I’m looking forward to learning some more tricks with my new toy tool!

Categories
Anime, Manga, Etc

Anime Aftershocks Now On The iPad

My first eBook, Anime Aftershocks, is now on the iPad! I think the iPad is going to be an important place to be, so I’m pretty happy that the book is finally on sale in iBooks. It took some effort,which I wrote about in Publishing eBooks On The iPad, but I think will make it easier for me to publish future eBooks.

After playing around with digital comics on iPads as last weekend’s C2E2, I definitely want to get my own iPad as soon as I can. Despite issues with glare when reading in sunlight, I think the iPad is going to become the eBook and comic reader of choice. So it’s good to have my stuff there.

Categories
Tech

Cage Match: Facebook, Flash, and the iPad!

In the run up to the Christmas holiday, I got the distinct impression that my spouse wanted to get me an Apple iPad as a gift. It’s no secret that I’d love to have one and now that I’m actively developing iPhone applications, it might even become a business necessity. But the lack of Adobe Flash support on the iPad continues to dampen my enthusiasm for the device.

I don’t really have any immediate need for an iPad, but I began to think that my wife might actually make better use of one than I. The way she works with her MacBook around the house makes her more of a candidate for an iPad than an ebook reader like a Nook or Kindle. She’d been asking me which ereader she should get. I lean towards the Nook since I already have one and like the hackability that its Android OS basis provides. But my wife likes being able to do a lot of things at once. She’s a big multitasker and I’m sure I see her lugging about her laptop and the ereader before too long.

So I began to make plans for an iPad for her. An iPad would allow her to do many of the things she does with her MacBook, casually at least. Some light word processing, web browsing, and of course reading ebooks using the Kindle or Nook reader apps. But my plans came to a screeching halt once I remembered that Facebook and Facebook games are a big part of her computing use around the house too. So I started to dig.

It turns out that the iPad Facebook Experience is not too great. Follow the link for more details, but in a nutshell she won’t be able to play Wordscraper on an iPad. That’s  a total deal breaker here. And if even a fraction of the 600 million account holders on Facebook play the Flash based games on the site regularly, that’s a lot of lost iPad sales. At this point I think Apple is leaving a giant hole open for Android based tablets that do support Flash to waltz right in and take a big chunk of a market Apple deserves a lot of credit for creating.

I think that 2011 is going to be the year that Apple finally allows Flash support in iOS. Android is catching up and in the tablet market in no small part due to the popularity of Facebook games, I can see the Flash issue being a big market stick to beat Apple with. We’re already starting to see this in ads for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and some of the Android smartphones that support Flash. Whatever the technical merits of Apple’s arguments against Flash, I can’t believe they are willing to leave money on the table.