The official Twitter Blog has announced that Twitter has entered into an agreement with Atebits to acquire Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter client, and that it will now be called Twitter for iPhone. The app will also now be available for free, instead of the current price of $2.99. As far as the iPad is concerned, the blog states that Tweetie creator Loren Brichter, who won the 2009 Apple Design Award, is to become a “key member” of Twitter’s mobile team, and will help them to “eventually” launch Twitter for iPad. Here’s a quote from the blog that makes interesting reading:

“As we work to provide the best possible Twitter experience on all of the major mobile platforms, momentum will increase dramatically. Millions more active, engaged, mobile users means more opportunities for all of us. Developers, services, and publishers will be able to leverage the Twitter iPhone and iPad applications to create additional innovative tools and integrations for users. We’ll have more specific information on this once Loren is officially on board.”

By Maura Sutton, iPadForums.net
[Source: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/twit...r-iphone.html]

This sounds a bit crazy, but ya never know! According to the Daily Telegraph, DigiTimes Research analyst Mingchi Kuo has said that Apple is planning to come out with a more compact version of the iPad in the first quarter of 2011. Kuo says that the “iPad mini” will have a screen somewhere between 5in and 7in long, compared to the iPad’s 9.7in screen. Kuo also says that the screen will cost less than $400, and would marketed as a highly portable reading device. Kuo says that he is making these somewhat surprising predictions based on information that has been passed on to him by his sources in the component manufacturing industry. Anything is possible I guess, but with iBooks just having been announced for iPhone OS 4, surely that means that Apple considers the iPhone and iPod touch to be their “highly portable reading devices”?

By Maura Sutton, iPadForums.net
[Source: www.telegraph.co.uk]

There’s been a lot of talk about how the iPad will be giving a whole new lease of life to the humble board game, and Label Interactive is getting in there right off the bat with its Game Table app which is available on the iTunes App Store for an introductory price of 99 cents. The app includes such classic games as Checkers, Chess, Poker, Solitaire, and lots of card games such as Poker, with a virtual deck of cards that can be dealt, flipped and shuffled just like a real deck . The game tables, boards and pieces are all photo-realistic, and the intuitive controls feature gesture recognition. The game plays with full 1024x768 resolution and simulated physics. One word of warning though, the app plays exactly like a regular board game or card game, meaning that there’s no AI to play against, and it won’t calculate scores for you or teach you how to play. The games are purely and simply no-frills board games to play with friends and family, just virtual ones rather than actual boards with actual pieces. If you bear that in mind, you won’t be disappointed when the pieces don’t move on their own!

By Maura Sutton
iPad Forum

The Washington Post has a really great article today looking at what sort of impact the iPad might have on medicine. The writer, Martha C. White, speculates on how Steve Jobs probably spent a quite a bit of time thinking about the iPad when he was lying in his hospital bed last year during his liver transplant, possibly wishing he could go online without bothering to fire up his laptop, or maybe even watch a dvd from his hospital bed. Can it be just coincidence that reading in bed, surfing the net in bed and watching movies in bed are all things that the iPad has made much easier? Possibly not. But that’s just the tip of the medical iceberg where the iPad’s impact is concerned, because, White says, the medical profession in general seems to be very excited at the iPad’s potential to revolutionise many different aspects of health care.

White says that among other things, the iPad could be responsible for massive savings within the medical world, as it could aid interconnectivity and communication between medical facilities. And as White points out, the iPad’s large, bright screen is ideal for displaying X-rays and MRI’s for example, and is of course even more portable than a laptop, therefore so much easier for doctors to carry around with them. It could even act as an interactive chart at the foot of the bed, or have special apps adapted for hospital use, and so on. The possibilities really are endless.

By Maura Sutton, iPadForums.net
[Source: www.washingtonpost.com]

I have to confess I’ve been caught napping a bit by the arrival of Mirror’s Edge on the iPad. The long-awaited iPhone version keeps getting put back further and further and still hasn’t got a firm release date, so imagine my surprise to see that the iPad version has leap-frogged its way over the iPhone version, straight into the iTunes App Store charts. Great news for iPad owners, not so great for iPhone/iPod touch owners who will now have to wait even longer to play the iPhone game (or get an iPad). The iPad screenshots look even better than the iPhone screenshots that we’d previously all been drooling over, and the early customer reviews are almost all raves (66 five-star ratings out of 91 so far). Exclusive features listed for the iPad include HD visuals, face-to-face multiplayer action, and iPad optimized race environments. It certainly looks amazing, and there are a lot of gamers out there who’ve been patiently waiting for Mirror’s Edge to arrive on iPhone who might not even realise it’s already out on the iPad!

By Maura Sutton
[Source: www.iPadForums.net]

Lots of people have been wondering about how easy it is to print from the iPad, and PCMag.com has come up with this really handy little guide that explains exactly how you can do just that. It’s all laid out for you in the link below, but basically, they’ve tried out several third-party iPad printing apps.

It seems that many of the iPad printing apps that PCMag tried were virtually useless, except for Canon’s free Easy Photo Print for iPhone, which they say worked well with the iPad, although it only prints photos and screenshots that are saved on the iPad. They also had some success with HP’s free iPrint Photo, which managed to locate the PCMag Mac and then print to a Laserjet being shared on the network, although it wasn’t able to find and print to a Wi-Fi enabled printer directly when they tried that. Again, that app only applies when you want to print photos though.

As far as general printing goes, PCMag says that Air Sharing HD ($9.99) is the best of the bunch. The app searches your Wi-Fi network for Macs with shared printers and then uses them to print. It sounds a little complicated though, as it can’t access local files on your iPad, so you have to do a bit of a workaround, and if you’ve got a PC rather than a Mac, you’re out of luck. As the article says, right now there’s a huge hole in the market for an iPad printing app that works seamless right out of the box.

By Maura Sutton, iPadForums.net
[Source: http://www.pcmag.com]

Apple of course made the announcement of the iPhone OS 4.0 - but the most interesting aspect wasn't a technical feature or upgrade, but policy changes on Apple's part.

I've been keeping an eye out for opinions on Apple's decisions and I must say that 99% of the people who seem to be commenting feel anywhere from betrayal to fury over Apple's "tight grip" which continues to get even tighter over the development platform and decisions that Apple controls.

Anandtech sums it up nicely at the following URL: Apple takes aim at Adobe... or Android?

And the most telling aspect, this screenshot from Hacker News with some of the venom directed at Apple:

Anger at Apple over flash: screenshot speaks for itself..

The crux of the problem is that the tighter Apple tries to grip what they've created, the more and more developers and good will, will slip through their grasp. Sometimes you need to create an API and platform and let it be free, not some walled garden.

Will more and more developers flock away from Apple, or will they embrace Apple's mantra: Do as we say, or else.

PopCap Games has just released an HD iPad version of its massively popular and multi-award winning iPhone game Plants vs. Zombies, and it looks like it’s proving to be just as big a hit on the iPad as it was on the iPhone, with many customer reviews citing it as a must-have purchase and one of the best games on the iPad so far.

Since the game first appeared for the iPhone/iPod touch back in February of this year, it has sold more than 650,000 units, and justifiably so. If you love Tower Defense games with a botanical twist, this is the app for you!
The Plants vs. Zombies HD app for iPad includes all 50 levels of Adventure and QuickPlay modes, as well as Survival mode from the original Apple Macintosh and Windows PC game. Four new achievements and 18 new mini-games have been added to the iPad version, including the Buttered Popcorn mini-game which is completely exclusive to the iPad, in which you attack zombies by first “buttering” them up, then fire corn-cob cannons at them. The iPad’s Multi-Touch user interface enables players to select up to eleven zombies at a time as targets for buttering. And all of that beautiful buttering action can be seen in full 1040x768 resolution of course!

By Maura Sutton, iPad Forum

Social gaming company Jirbo has today said that its daily iPad downloads are already equal to its daily iPhone downloads, with users having downloaded over 100,000 iPad apps from Jirba since launch day. Jirba usually reckons to sell over one million iPhone/iPod touch app downloads per months, and the company is reporting that iPad-specific apps such as Doons, Paper Football, Break, Slider, Jirbo Says and Marble Mash are flying out of the iPad App Store. Here’s Jonathan Zweig, CEO of Jirbo, Inc, talking about Jirbo and the iPad:

“Thanks in large part to our AdColony in-app video ad technology, which we will be opening up to developers this month, we’ve been able to drive tremendous downloads of our applications, which users clearly love. We believe iPad is the social gaming pass-around platform of our generation and our titles are tailored to that notion.”

“iPad will revolutionize portable computing much like iPhone and iPod touch did for mobile devices,” concurred Nikao Yang EVP of Business Development at Jirbo.

By Maura Sutton, iPad Forum

The video is finally available for us lowly masses to watch.

Ironically it won't play on my iPad.

Apple - QuickTime - April 2010 Apple Special Event