ipad

The New York Times
image from
The screen struggle is real. I'm trying to find this line with my kids and with myself and this article is more fuel for the less-is-more fire.
  • Wired's take on the best gadgets. Just in time for gadget season.
  • Application recommendations for iOS and OSX. Just in time for app season.
  • Beautiful giant photo essays. Like Medium for pictures.
  • "Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!
  • A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.
  • "Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!
  • "...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]
  • Interesting take on Montessori-inspired apps: "In a Montessori classroom, children work from the concrete to the abstract. I fear that exposing young children to virtual Montessori materials may hamper this important developmental process."
  • Tax patriotism is on the rise!

Reeder for iPad

A couple months ago I posted that I wanted an Image Reader for the iPad. I've found the next best thing that meets almost everything on my wish list: Reeder for iPad. It is the best $5 I've spent on the iPad so far. Here's a look:

reeder on an ipad

As you can see: minimal interface with a few buttons along the side and top. You tap those arrows to go forward/back, and there's seamless integration with Google Reader for favoriting and sharing. I also use the iPhone version of Reeder and the iPad version is even better. There's less reporting on what Reeder is doing in the background, so I think more about what I'm reading and less about what I'm using to read.

I'd still like a way to strip away even text and interact with the images on their own at full screen, but this is so close to perfect that I won't complain.

Lazyweb Request: iPad Image Reader

I want an image/feed reader for the iPad. I love seeing a picture every day in the Guardian Eyewitness application which looks like this:

guardian eyewitness screenshot

Simple, minimalist interface with a few buttons to favorite, share, and browse thumbnails in the upper-right. You swipe to go forward/back, and you tap to show and hide the caption. The high quality pictures look fantastic on the screen.

Obviously I'd like to see this for The Big Picture, but instead of hundreds of disconnected picture-viewing applications distributed by content producers, I want to be able to subscribe to any feed with images and browse them this way. I'd like to mix these pictures with Flickr feeds, Tumblr feeds, and anything else with images.

I've wanted this feature for Google Reader forever, and Google Reader Play comes close, but I can't control what shows up there. I have a folder at Google Reader called Gallery (probably nsfw) filled with image-centric blogs like Shorpy, A Journey Round My Skull, today and tomorrow and I'd love to browse them exactly this way. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like this app to integrate seamlessly with Google Reader to share, star, and mark posts as read.

Don't make me learn Objective C, Lazyweb.