Monthly Archives: October 2011

What do you mean – you want to use an iPad Mouse?

30/10/2011 by WZ_NoStylus · 4 Comments

An iPad and an iPad Mouse – What sort of insanity is this?

There are one or two people that get themselves an iPad, perhaps not so much those people that get an iPhone or iPod Touch, that can’t get away from the traditional ways of using a computer. And that is quite strange, when you think about it, using the word traditional, in a computer orientated sentence. Ever since personal computing got the mouse, and everybody got completely used to using a computer in that way, it has become Traditional – despite the relatively small number of years. But then computer users that are coming to the iPad from using a PC, also get stuck into the notion that they should also be using Microsoft office. New iPad users do have to get used to the idea that the iPad is a new way of doing things. So when using one of these newfangled touchscreen devices, not only do you not need a stylus, you also do not need an iPad mouse.

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

Do I have to Jailbreak to use an iPad Mouse

There may be ways that you can do a jailbreak of your iPad and have the cursor pointer travelling across your screen, guided by an iPad mouse. Perhaps you can even get the Apple Magic Mouse working with the iPad. Seems a bit silly to me, when we have the joy and usefulness of being able to touch the screen and select what we have underneath our fingers, to think that a mouse is going to be really useful or necessary with a touch screen device.

If you are thinking that you need an iPad mouse then probably you would have been better to buy yourself the MacBook Air. You would lose all of the touchscreen features, but you would have a trackpad that you could touch and you would also have the use of Bluetooth to connect the Apple Magic Mouse.

iPad Mouse

Connecting a keyboard to your iPad

The Apple Bluetooth keyboard is a lovely keyboard to type on, if I have a lots of words to type, as I might do, if I am taking part in NaNoWriMo, then it will be a better option than using the on-screen keyboard of the iPad. In fact it is also possible to use the Apple Bluetooth keyboard to connect to an iPhone. Now that would be really good in terms of not having many devices to carry around when travelling and computing. I have heard that using a Bluetooth keyboard in combination with the iPhone, actually works very well when travelling by aeroplane. Personally I would still prefer to use the iPad for that though, it is just a question of eyesight and my need for spectacles.

iPad mouse – Like Steering without wheels on a car

In one of these complaints that I read in the Apple support forums about the non-implementation of an iPad mouse a user said – that an iPad connecting to a keyboard but not to a mouse or a trackpad, is like a car with a steering but no wheels. I would say that this iPad user just does not get it. Why have an iPad and not want to touch the interface device which is the touchscreen?

What do you think?

Can you imagine a situation where you would like to have an iPad mouse? Do you get these irrational urges to connect a mouse to your iPad? As I have already stated on this website I do believe that there are occasions when a stylus would be very useful. Such as drawing or handwriting applications in particular. Please leave your comments below to let us know what you have to say about this rodent-based iPad issue.

Posted in iPad.

Which Are the Best Free apps for iPhone

29/10/2011 by WZ_NoStylus · Leave a comment

Best free apps for iPhone

There is a shocking abundance of free apps to use with the iPhone and it is possible to go into the iTunes Store and grab a bundle of applications to play with and try out. Like always, when talking about the best free apps for iPhone, we have to take into consideration what is that you wish to do with your iPhone. It would be quite easy to create a complete post or article talking about free applications for photography, for example. And in the same way you could talk about which are the best free iPhone apps for Twitter. In this first of a series of best free apps, let’s have a look at general iPhone applications that although the free, are incredibly useful.

Where to get the best free apps for iPhone or iPad

The first port of call in a search for the best free apps for iPhone, is to go and have a look in the iTunes Store. You will see in there that there is a list of free iPhone apps and you can start by downloading a few of them. The first app that you have to put onto your iPhone is going to have to be Dropbox. The Dropbox application is going to be invaluable for moving files to the iPhone or copying files to the iPhone.

Best free apps for iPhone

Being sociable with the iPhone

Seeing as we are all social animals these days on the Internet, then among the best free apps for iPhone has to be Facebook Messenger and also the official Twitter application. The official Twitter app is basic, or you might say simple in terms of facilities for tweeting and so on, but sometimes simple is best and you can send tweets no problem. You can see what’s happening in the Twitter world in your Twitter stream and be able to do the direct messages and replies that you need to do. Often for the basic Twitter user, that is all you need.

Free Facebook Apps

With regards Facebook there are two applications, one is called Facebook and the other is Facebook Messenger. Both of these are new official applications for Facebook and will give you a better experience for dealing with Facebook, than by trying to deal with it in a browser window. Facebook Messenger gives you a faster way to be able to send messages when you are mobile. So you would use this Facebook Messenger application when you’re more interested in sending messages instantly to other friends that are also using Facebook messenger, rather than seeing what is written on your wall. It could be one way to save money by not using up your SMS allowance that is part of your phone plan. You can get free push notifications when there are incoming messages and you can add a location and photos to the messages that you send out. If there are a bunch of you that are having a conversation, then you can use Facebook Messenger to do your plans for whatever it is that you are going to do, while you are out and about.

Talking Tom and Ben

Now for a silly and fun application – Talking Tom and Ben News

For some time now I have been a great fan of talking Tom, not so much of Ben. As the tomcat will tell you, Ben the dog tends to suffer from rather too much flatulence. In this application the tomcat and the dog had become famous TV newsreaders. When you talk to them they will repeat back what you have just said, taking it in turns to speak. You can easily make some extremely funny conversations between the two talking animals and record those conversations. Whenever I am using the Talking Tom application, I am often in stitches splitting my sides laughing. You can do other things to the animals to create amusement, such as poking them, so that they fall off their chairs. If you swipe either of them, then their chair will swivel around. You can have them annoy each other during their conversation, just for fun. I highly recommend that you get this application, record some of their conversations and share those videos to YouTube or Facebook. I’m sure your friends will thank you for your funny videos.

QR Code

QR Reader for iPhone

Just in case you don’t know what a QR code is – it is one of those square barcodes that you see in some places these days. I saw one stuck onto a lamppost today and I have recently seen QR codes used within a museum setting. When you point your iPhone camera at one of these QR codes and scan it, you will get either a message or more commonly you will get a URL to a webpage. This is particularly useful if you have a particularly long web address. In fact if you use bit.ly.com, then you get a new QR code when you create a short URL. With QR reader for iPhone you can create your own QR codes. What you could do is to have your QR code printed onto your T-shirt or onto a business card. It may seem to be a little bit of a gimmick but what it does do, is to encourage people that you meet to go and have a look at your website. It does save time having to remember exactly what the URL is. That is useful whether you are looking at is a long URL that you have to get perfectly right or a short URL, which can be difficult to remember even though it is shorter. There are other QR reader applications and a popular one is called Red Laser. Some of the code reader applications will read other types of barcodes for you also.

Find my friends

Posted in iPhone.

Top ten iPod apps – What you have to have on your iOS iDevice

28/10/2011 by WZ_NoStylus · 2 Comments

The NoStylus top ten iPod apps

If you’re one of those people that don’t have the iPhone because you don’t make many phone calls, you probably still want to have the benefits of the latest IOS software, which at the moment is iOS five. I know some people that have successfully used an iPod in conjunction with a MiFi to be able to have the iOS mobile platform, while out and about. Sometimes it is much handier to carry a small device such as the iPod rather than to be carrying around the larger iPad. This is despite the fact that the iPad 2 is much lighter than the iPad 1. It is also despite the fact that if your eyesight is such that you need something bigger to look at, then the iPad is going to be better to carry around for your mobile iOS computing. Obviously there are going to be occasions when you need to travel light and to put the iPod into the bag along with a pair of spectacles, is what you have to do.

Top ten iPod apps

The top ten iPod apps that are iOS must have applications.

1Password Touch

It is inevitable that when you are using your iPod Touch, you’re going to be doing some website surfing. In these days there is an urgent need for having good passwords on all of your websites, and those passwords each have to be different. To cover your safety with passwords, you have to have the app 1Password. You can have it so that 1Password is available on your Mac computer and have the passwords that you create on the desktop to be synchronised with the passwords that you will use with 1Password touch.

The way that it works is that you have one good password, that you can remember easily as your gateway into the 1Password system that creates good, but hard to remember passwords for all of your different websites.1Password and 1Password Touch makes it so that you don’t have to remember any of those difficult passwords. Best of all it will create passwords for you that will have high security and no one will be gaining access to your bank account, unless you do something stupid. I suggest the best thing to do is to buy the 1Password Touch version that works both on the iPad and also the iPod and iPhone, the universal 1Password.

GoodReader for iPad for iPad on the iTunes App Store

GoodReader

You can use the iPod touch, the iPad and also the iPhone even though the smaller devices are a little bit short on screen space, retinal display notwithstanding, for creating and working on documents. This means that you will need to have access to your files and GoodReader is a great way to get files onto your iOS devices. Using GoodReader you can get your PDF files onto your IOS device then use it for actually reading the document. You can also annotate your PDF files in GoodReader. Of course it is quite likely that you want to do some editing of some of your documents and with GoodReader you can send documents to other applications. You may for instance, decide to send a PDF through to the iBooks application where you may have better settings for it to be read easily. Although within GoodReader, it is not too bad and you can even have a text auto scroll and set the speed of the text as it moves across the touchscreen. Although I have to admit that I’m looking at a PDF at the moment and I haven’t worked out how to make the text scroll. Oh! Wait a minute, it has just started doing it, the reason it wasn’t scrawling before is because when it gets to the end of the page it stops. There is much more that can be said about GoodReader so look out for a full article detailing all the best things about GoodReader.

Games | Plants vs Zombies™ Download Games

Angry Birds, We Rule, Flight Control HD and Plants Versus Zombies

I have gone for a three in one recommendation for games that you can use while you are waiting in a queue. These are games that are easy and you won’t mind putting down, when you finally do get to the head of the queue. Yes, they are entertaining enough that you’re not going to be completely bored. You could also include Bejewelled and a number of other games within this list. With some of these games it is quite likely that when you are standing in the queue, someone might tap you on the shoulder and ask you to move forward a few paces. It could even be that you have left big enough gaps that you lose your space in the queue and end up waiting for longer. Warning, some of these games are quite addictive.

Evernote

Evernote – The best note taking application

Taking notes while you are computing on the run, is inevitable. With Evernote you can insert all sorts of notes into the application and it is particularly useful the fact that you can include photographic notes. You can take a photo from your camera or put a photo note in from the camera roll. Evernote is particularly clever in that it will perform OCR on the text within an image, but just so that the notes can be searched. Evernote also takes audio notes, this can be very useful when you’re using one of the small screen iOS devices as it saves typing on a dinky wee keyboard. Audio is not so good if you need a note that it is possible to search.

Simplenote

SimpleNote for the quick one-off note taking

SimpleNote on the other hand is a text only note taking application which synchronises with a web application, which then synchronises with a notes application on your desktop computer. The one that I use on the desktop is called NvAlt. It is a good combination of applications and I can recommend it as it works very well indeed. I tend to have this for the quick short notes that are perhaps more short term.

Modem orange 3Gwifi E5 p

Skype the telephone app

If you are using a MiFi with the iPod Touch so that you have 3G connectivity, then Skype will think that it is on Wi-Fi and you will be able to make telephone calls using Skype. You will need to have a paid account with Skype if you want to call landlines and mobile phones, although the Skype to Skype calls will be free. On account of many of my contacts are also Skype users, I will quite often use Skype as an IM chat client, just for sending a quick message.

Dropbox – Copying and moving files to iOS Devices

Dropbox is an excellent synchronisation tool. When you are working on your desktop computer, save your files into your Dropbox folder and they are automatically uploaded to the cloud. Work on any files that you create on your IOS device and often there will be a facility within the application, that will allow you to save them to your Dropbox account. Once the files are in your Dropbox folder those files are then also available wherever else you want to use them. Dropbox is not just one of those top ten iPod apps, it is the number one of the must have apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

You will probably need a To-Do application

Again it is difficult to single out a get things done, GTD type of application because there are so many of them. My favourite lately is an application called Wunderlist, it is simple and it does the job for me. Another GTD application that is worth looking at, is called Orchestra, there is Remember the Milk, and Omni focus. There are not big differences between these applications, after all what it really comes down to is you are making lists. It is quite likely though, that you will find one that suits you better than another, so be prepared to try out a couple of them. I recommend that you start with the free ones first of all and work your way through to the expensive ones like Omni focus.

Stitcher Radio

Stitcher Smart Radio

Even though one of the functionalities of the iOS devices is the iPod functionality, the MP3 player, there are times when you may want to listen to something different. Stitcher smart radio gives you another route to podcasts and music channels and is well worth having on your IOS device.

Getting social with iOS

Within iOS 5 Twitter is included so that you can share what you are looking at, to your Twitter account, very handy indeed. But there is not just Twitter to consider, you also have Google plus, Facebook and LinkedIn to think about. There are a number of Twitter clients that you can use on an iOS device, I like Twittelator much better than the official Twitter application. Twitter Bird Pro is not bad either.

Twittelator Pro

There is now an official Facebook application which works very well, and is especially good on the smaller iOS devices, the iPhone and the iPod touch. Particularly good now, is the fact that it is a universal application which also works well on the iPad.

Top ten iPod apps

That is the first round of top ten iPad iPod apps and you can expect to see more posts like these. Keep looking out for the posts in which there will be more detailed information about using these various iOS apps.

Posted in iPod Touch.

Welcome to No Stylus – It’s All about Touchscreen Computing

27/10/2011 by WZ_NoStylus · Leave a comment

NoStylus – All about iOS Devices

Hello and welcome to the NoStylus website, this is a website all about the iPad, the iPhone and of course the iPod too. I am an owner of an Amazing iPad one and I would like to think that when the iPad three comes out, I will be able to get one of those. Presently I am using the iPhone 3G and I am sure that I am due an upgrade imminently. I don’t actually make money phone calls, so I am wondering if maybe I would be better off having an iPad touch that is running IOS five. The only problem with that of course is that with the iPod Touch you don’t get the 3G mobile connectivity. Well actually it is not the only problem because the camera on the iPhone 4S is one hell of a lot better than the camera on the iPod Touch. But then that might not be such a problem because I am more of an SLR type of guy. I have my eye on the Canon T2i or the T3i. I could get one of those instead of the phone and still have cash left over for a good 50mm lens. It is amazing how much we are willing to spend on iPhones, though.

 

Touchscreen Computing

Articles coming on the NoStylus Website Touchscreen Computing

We will have articles here on this No Stylus website such as – Top ten iPad apps. There could be one or two articles that would be similar to that because my top ten iPod apps tend to change on a weekly basis. There is a possibility that I will discuss the use of a stylus, even though Steve Jobs made derogatory comments about the stylus when introducing the iPhone. There is a case for using a stylus if you are using an art application and also if you are using an app which turns handwriting into text. Without a doubt you do get better quality hand writing or drawing, when you are using a stylus. Even so, this website is all about touchscreen technology and the apps running on the devices. There will be a heavy Apple bias, though you never know there might be other touch screen iPad killers that attempt to challenge the head start that Apple has. So there may be one or two articles in which other touchscreen devices are talked about, although I expect it will be in relation to how they compare with the iPad, iPod Touch and the iPhone.

Keep coming Back for the Latest Articles

This is a new website and it is going to take some time to get all of the content on here, that I would like to see on this website, so keep coming back as I will be posting new articles frequently. I do not intend to have articles on this site that are solely based upon the rumours, that the fan boys love to talk about. I have no interest in trying to second-guess what Apple are going to produce for us. I would prefer to write articles detailing how to use the devices. You can expect us to be getting into details regards how to get the best from the applications and also from the hardware.

iOS Business and Productivity – A bit of fun too

Touchscreen Computing with NoStylus will be looking at apps that are to do with productivity and doing business. We’ll see how these touchscreen devices can be integrated into our working lives. I am especially interested with looking into how they integrate with each other and also with our desktop computers. But there is nothing stopping us having a look at the fun apps for the touch screen computers too. As you might expect I am a Mac user, I have an iMac on my desk in the office. I will be willing to accept well written articles from Windows users that are connecting up through iTunes to the iOS devices.

 

iPod Nano - NoStylus

Posted in iPad.

Can you get Garageband for Windows? – What about Garageband for PC can it be done?

27/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

Yes you can do a Garageband download – No to Garageband for PC

It may seem a little bit strange to us Mac users, or to us iPad users that have legitimate use of the application Garageband, but large numbers of people online do a search looking for Garageband for PC or Garageband for Windows. There must be a a ton of people that have heard about the great fun you can have and the excellent music that you can create by using Garageband. You have the possibilities of using the Magic Garageband which assists you in a lot of ways to help you make your bit of music. You can take the next approach which will be to use the loops that come with Garageband for the Mac and for the iPad and craft your own piece of music. Then of course if you are a proper musician and you just need to do a quick recording of yourself with your guitar or your keyboard that you play yourself and add a number of tracks together to do something that’s a little bit or professional, then Garageband is just the job. I love the way that you get the image of a stage with some instruments on to waiting to be played, you choose what you want and build your song. Great for kids to start making music, Garageband Digital Audio Recorder might even get them on the path of learning a musical instrument.


 

The Amazing iPad

Garageband download – where do you get it?

When you buy a new Mac it comes with some excellent pieces of software that you do want to use. Not like when you buy a crappy PC and you get a bucket load of what can only be described as rubbish software, that is really only fit for the bin. With the Mac you get the iLife suite of software and included within that is Garageband. Without a doubt a new user to the Mac, in the first few days will have many hours of fun making music tracks. It’s all part of being a Mac user. Apple knows this, which is why we are given such a good selection of software with the computer when we buy it. It is to encourage new users to the platform.

Garageband for PC

Share your Garageband music

Naturally once you have created your musical masterpiece you’re going to want to share it out, so that other people can listen to it. It is easy to do that by exporting the song out into your iTunes library, you even have the choice of going for the CD quality format or saving out as an MP3. You can even take your song and turn it into a custom ringtone for your iPhone. How good is that? You will hear your song every time your friends call you.

Despite the fact that Garageband for Mac is so good and much better than anything that you would get on a PC, there may come a time when you want to upgrade to the professional musicians software Logic Pro. It is easy to bring in songs from Garageband into the Logic Pro software.

garageband for windows

Garageband will also give you basic music lessons

You won’t get music lessons on an equivalent Garageband for PC. With the Garageband format you will get 40 lessons to choose from. With Garageband for iPad, you can use the iRig MIDI to plug in a keyboard, there is also a device, Amplitube for iPad, you can use to allow you to connect a guitar to your iPad. Then you can have Sting teach you how to play Roxanne. You can also use the iRig microphone to sing along to your newly learned song. Using Garageband is a great way to learn the chords and finger positions for the guitar. With the lessons you can also play along with the band as well as hear some of the stories behind the song, directly from the musician that created it in the first place.

Stop dreaming about Garageband for Windows

So if you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll hero and you can’t afford a Mac, don’t waste your time wondering about Garageband for Windows, just go and grab yourself an iPad. Garageband for iPad only costs $4.99 and you are in business to start creating some music.

The Amazing iPad

Posted in iPad Creativity.

There are so Many Apps for the iPad – How do you find the good ones to use

26/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

Finding the Best Apps to use on the iPad – Good iPad apps

We all like to have new applications on our iPad and it has long been known that finding good apps can sometimes be a little difficult. You have to kind of, go by the top apps list in the iTunes Store for apps for your iPad. But all that gives you is a fairly short list of applications that have been popular with other people. What we need is to have some way to be able to find applications based upon a specific need that we have or have the option to browse and search for interesting apps among the thousands that inhabit the store.


The Amazing iPad

Other places to get good iPad apps

There have been apps created such as App Shopper, which is another way of getting some recommendations for apps that we might like to try. One way and I have found to be good for getting interesting applications for my iPad, is to listen to some of the iPad and Mac podcasts. Quite often at the end of these podcasts the presenters will give recommendations for applications that they have tried and either just enjoyed using or have found useful. I found out about Phatpad this way and also ThinkBook. good ipad apps - AppZapp HD

Using AppZap HD or AppZappPush

Another thing that is going to be useful for us for finding applications, especially if we are looking for a bargain is to use an application such as apps zap. At the moment I am trying out an application called AppZapp HD which gives me recommendations for iPad applications and the best part about it is that it gives alerts when an application that was previously one price has now lowered its price and is cheaper. It also has a section where it will tell you where apps were paid for apps and now free. you can set up this AppZap HD To push notifications to you for things such as the now free applications.

AppZap HD An Example of using it - good iPad apps

I am looking at the AppZap HD application now and just as an example, I can see that there is an application called Clean Energy Hawaii STEM HD which used to be £1.49 and now it’s free. If I tap on the button in AppZap HD, it takes me through to the App Store on the iPad, where I can use the install app functionality and have the application downloaded to my iPad. You can also use AppZap to get more information about the applications it shows you, when you tap on the list of applications in the main screen, a panel slides out with more information about the app. Getting good ipad apps is easy with AppZap HD. You can tap to see the thumbnails that the developers have put up to exhibit their application, or you can check out the description, application information, what’s new in this version information, as well as recommendations for other apps you may like. I can also tap on the button which gives me other applications by the same developer. If I decide I don’t want to see more by this developer, then I can block this seller if I wish.

Mind your Language – AppZap HD

You can set up some filters within AppZap HD so that you can have it just show you applications in the English language or you may choose to have all languages. You may select to show just two or five languages, maybe you want to see applications in English, Japanese, Norwegian and Korean. It is also possible to filter by the categories. I can choose to look at all categories for example, or I may just choose to watch for applications in books, educational apps, and photography. AppZap HD will also show Mac applications, as well as applications for IOS devices. I have no interest in seeing any good ipad apps from Asia, as I can’t read Chinese or any other Asian language, so it is quite nice I can specifically tell it to hide Asian apps. The Amazing iPad

Posted in iPad Apps.

Actually Using the Book Creator and Does it Offer Enough

23/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

Did you know that you can make ebooks right on your iPad? You can open up an application bring images and text in from other applications on your iPad, arrange them how you want them to be and the end result will be an e-book that you publish into the iBook store. You can make iBooks that you can sell or you can make iBooks that you can give away, whatever you prefer.

Testing an iPad Application to make an actual eBook

I’ve been testing out some of these applications for making eBooks and the one that I have downloaded and paid for is called Book Creator. It has a simple interface which makes it easy to use. The other side of that of course is that it is a little bit too simple and it doesn’t do enough, considering the price of it. There are other e-book creators out there and I may have to check them out to see if they are better in terms of what they can do.

The Amazing iPad

The e-book ePub format is quite strict, for example it is difficult to set up text to flow around an image, images have to be inline. Alignment of text and images is something that you can do quite easily if you’re using Pages. With Book Creator what you have to do is to split your text into smaller text boxes, so that you can have one text box which will go to the side of your image. Then you put the rest of the text so that it flows on downwards after the image has been inserted. So it is possible, but completely manual.

Getting your text onto the pages of your eBook

When you put text into Book Creator, if it is a large piece of text, it will flow right off the bottom of the screen and you will be wondering how on earth, you are going to get it to fit onto your page. What you have to do is to scroll down until you find the blue dots which are the markers for the middle of the vertical sides of the text, so that you can change the shape of the text box. Another possibility to set up your text so that you can have it fit on the page, is to change the size of the text to something really small. When the text is really small you are able to see all of your text box and can shape it to fit the space where you want it. There should be a way to put the numbers in to set the size of the text box manually, but there isn’t.

Overflowing text has to be split into sections

Another thing that makes putting text into this application a little bit more difficult than using a standard word processor, is the fact that you do have to split the text into sections that will fit to the length of the page. In Book Creator I found that the way to do this was, to set the width of the text box and just see how much of the text I could keep in that particular text box. Then I would double tap to enter the text editing part of the application to select the text that would be overflowing, to cut it out of that box. The next step is to create another text box and paste in the text I had just cut out. Then I would have to do the same until all of the text was added to my document.

e book creator

Formatting only possible per text box in Book Creator

Something else with the text editing that I don’t particularly like, is that I am not able to apply formatting to text areas that I have put in. Perhaps I want to have a line of text as a level 3 header, or I want it to be in bold so that it stands out as a header. The problem is, is that with this application it is not possible to format just one part of a text area. To be able to make titles for parts of the text, I had to separate the text out into a text box of its own. Then I was able to apply the formatting to that text box.

It really shouldn’t be that difficult to be able to apply formatting to certain parts of the text, as the underlying technology of the e-book format is HTML. Although adding text is something that needs to be improved upon, adding images to an e-book with Book Creator is much easier. Take the images from the Photo Roll of your iPad and resize them as you see fit once they are in. You can’t do any rotating of an image, which is a bit of a shame, but you can make images bigger or smaller, no problem at all.


Putting the assets of your book in order on the page

With the items that you have included in your e-book, when you have selected something, you can tap on the Inspector icon in the menu bar at the top. Within the inspector in Book Creator you can change the size of text, make it bold, italicised or underlined. You can change the font and the colour of the font. If you want to have a background colour for just that text box, then you can do that to. You can move items to the front or the back and generally that would be used to put an image behind some text.

Setting up the formatting of the eBook in Book Creator

Also within the inspector you can set the formatting for the page. You can set a background colour for the left side and also for the right side of the page separately. Then you have the editor settings set up, to show guides, snap to guides and snap to grid. Mind you I couldn’t see how to turn on the grid in order to be able to see it. Get the book creator app for the iPad

The Amazing iPad

Posted in iBooks.

Photographs on The iPad Photo Roll or There is Photo Folder

22/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

Using the Photo App that comes with the iPad

The application that comes with the iPad to let you look at your photographs gives the ability to look at all your photographs on your iPad. Also in there since iOS 5 you can look at what you have in the Photo Stream. These are the photos that get taken and pushed out to your other IOS devices and also to iPhoto or Aperture on your Mac, if you have that setup in those desktop apps. From Photo Stream you can save a photo so that you have it saved and kept in your Photo Roll. From the same menu you can do other things such as assign the photograph to a contact, use as wallpaper, tweet it or send it to a printer.

The Amazing iPad

You can then organise photos into albums in the standard application. In your Photo folder You just tap on the edit button and you can create a new album, there is the button for that in the top left-hand corner. Then it is a fairly simple mechanism to choose from all of your photos and put them into a your album. You also have your photographs divided up into events and faces. To have photos sorted by faces you will have to organise that in iPhoto.

The standard application that comes with your iPad is not too bad at organising your photos, visitors and doesn’t do much more than that. And this is why you may be interested in finding something that will give you a way to sort photos by a filter, give you the ability to rotate photographs and also get access to the meta data. There are times, when a photographer will really need to have more information about the photograph, you will find useful information in the meta data of the your photos.

Using Photo Folder to Get More Functionality

Photo folder

Filtering will get it sorted

There is a button on the lower menubar, the third from the right which is your filtering a button. To be able to view the photos that have been tagged, then you do need to be inside a folder where the photos are. It doesn’t seem to be possible to search for photos that are tucked away inside sub folders. It would be very handy if it would be possible to search through all photos, otherwise you have to remember which folder that you should start looking in, before you can start your search.

Boolean searches – AND – OR

The filtering search is quite good in that you can do a Boolean search, where you might look for photos that are tagged with two different tags. With an AND search then you will just see photos that are tagged with both of the tags. With an OR search you will see all of the photos even if one of the photos only has one other tags applied to it.



You can also do a search in your photo folder that is based on favourites. If you have identified a photo as being a favourite then you can have that as one of your search criteria as well as looking at the tags. Photos can also be given ratings from 1 to 5 stars and again this can be one of your search criteria. You might want to look for all of the photos in a folder that have the tag of Catalonia and the tag of Clouds and has a five-star rating. That is how specific you can be with your photo search and to a certain extent, how well it work depends upon how good you are at tagging your photos.

Metadata is there but what can you do with it?

Being able to see the meta data can be handy, if you need to see things like the pixel height or width of the image, the shutter speed value, the exposure time or any of the other data that is stored within the exif data. The only thing that you are able to change in this data is the name of the file. It is not possible to change any of the other data while looking at the Meta data after tapping on the information button. The tags are stored in this area too, but you can only change them from the tagging dialogue box. To do any tagging you have to be looking at the thumbnails within the folder. You can’t tag an individual photo when you are looking at the photo full-screen.

Doing things to the photo when looking at a single photo

When you have the photo full-screen you are able to rate a photo with one to five stars, in the bottom right-hand corner. With the icon to the left of that, you can see all of the data associated with that photo. With the next icon you can choose to send the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Picasso, Flickr, e-mail and to print. If you have brought the photo in via the Wi-Fi and the photo is not in your photo library on your iPad then you can hit the Save to Library button.

If the photo has been geo-tagged then the icon in the middle will take you to a map to show you where the photo was taken. I was not able to test that as none of the photos I have available have been geo-tagged. From the fullscreen mode you can also start a slideshow. You may choose how long the slide is to show for, whether you want to have music playing during the slideshow and the type of transition that you would like to use. You can even have the slideshow repeat or do a little bit of a shuffle as it plays. When you are in the full-screen view, looking at your photos, you can tap on the dustbin icon if you want to get rid of a photo from that album.

The Verdict on Photo Folder

I found the Photo Folder application to be quite useful, there are number of facilities within the application that are quite handy. This app would be very good if you have a large number of photographs that you need to sort through to find the one that you want for specific purposes. For me, the tagging and filtering of the photos makes the application worth having. It would be nice to have a way to find files even when they are tucked away inside folders or subfolders. Without that application wide searching for photos then a solution would be just to throw all photos into one folder and make sure that you do the tagging diligently.

The Amazing iPad

Posted in Photography.

SteamPunk Novel Published using iBook app for Ebook Creation

21/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

Getting your novel published and into the iBook store with iBook App

Smashwords Ebooks from independent authors and publishers

It is not that difficult to make an e-book in the e-book format to get it into the iBook store. If you are prepared to go out and buy your ISBN numbers, then you can deal with Apple direct. What may be a better thing to do for your first two or three books that you write, would be to use a service of one of the e-book aggregators such as Lulu or Smashwords. I know that Lulu will give you an ISBN number for free and they are able to recoup the cost of the ISBN numbers by taking a percentage of the sales. Apple take 30% of sales anyway and Lulu will take 20% of that which is left. Lulu has a calculator for working out how much you will get paid from each sale of your e-book. One example is that if you sell a book for $4.99 then you can expect to earn €3.14 from each sale. When you consider what your earnings would be from the dead tree versions of books after the publishers off taken their cut, then the Lulu self publishing method actually looks quite attractive.



The Amazing iPad

Getting published and making electronic books with your iPad and iBook app

The first thing to do of course is to write your book, as I have suggested before when you’re using the Mac, Scrivener is the way to go. In fact the developers of Scrivener have recently brought out a Windows version, which I think is now out of beta. Of course as I am a Mac guy I’m going to recommend that you are better off with a Mac and an iPad. One of the good things for users of Scrivener, is that you can export directly from it to the e-book format. I have tried this out, tested it a number of times and have found that the format is just right to convert your writing and be accepted by the Apple iBook store.

iBook app Demi Books COmposer

The iBook App application looks to be very good for creative types, to design and make books that are not just text. For instance, in the example book in there, called ‘A Is for Aardvark’, on page 2 there is a button which will when tapped, play a sound. Within the settings at the top of the application there is a preview button. I am trying out that book at the moment and when I tap the button for the sound I get to hear the sound of the Buffalo. On the next page there is a similar button that plays the sound of a cheetah. It is all quite impressive really, I like it.

In the top menu bar, there is a book icon and this is where you set the details of the book. You have the title, icon title, store description and other settings that relate to how the book will be in the Apple Store for books. There are also settings in there for the page navigation and transitions. You can choose from curl left to vortex or have the pages fade into each other when you tap to change your page. At the bottom of this set of book details settings, you will find your button to export out to iTunes or Dropbox.

E-Booking to the Bitter End!

This application, Demi Books Composer is free and looks very accomplished. I plan to create a book with this and take it all away through to the finished product, to see how it all works. I will update this post with more information when I have done that. In the following posts about creating a books I will also be looking at Book Creator, Creative Book Builder, e-Book Creator and also e-Book Magic. I have already bought the application, Book Creator and I am looking forward to trying out that iBook app, which I will also to bring a fully formed book into fruition.

The Amazing iPad

Posted in iBooks.

NaNoWriMo for iPad owners writers and Authors using dictation software

21/10/2011 by admin · Leave a comment

National Novel Writing Month

Taking Part in the NaNoWriMo Contest – A Novel in 30 days using dictation software

Now it is the time of the year for writers and authors to start thinking about the National novel writing month otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. This is where totally crazy writers join in a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in the space of one month. You have 30 days to just get stuck in and create your novel, it works out at around about 1700 words per day. I have never attempted the challenge before but I think that this November, I will give it a go. While I’m using the Dragon dictation software I find it very easy to actually get the words written for the articles that I write. Just looking at my stats for so far this month in October, I can see that I have had an average of 2200 words per day. I expect that it will be more difficult to write around about the same number of words per day, writing prose for a novel, but I am going to give it a try.

Starting with writing an outline for the novel in iThoughtsHD

The first thing to do to get started with this, will be to use the 10 days between now and the end of the month to use the iPad mind mapping software I have, to work on an outline. The mind mapping software that I plan to use will be iThoughtsHD and it is within the rules to have an outline, you can even have some back stories written for your characters if you wish, just so long as you don’t actually start writing the novel itself until 1st of November.

I feel challenged by NaNoWriMo even with using dictation software for faster writing.

I have seen that the organisers do try and help you keep to the program as it were, by giving you challenges on a daily basis. For example they might say in a tweet -okay you have 30 minutes now to do non-stop writing, don’t think about it just do it. Then there might be suggestions such as have your character go into a Starbucks and meet somebody. It will be little things like this, that the NaNoWriMo organisers will be sending out, in order to make sure that there are no writers blocks being formed.

Kindle for iPad

Buying books for the Kindle and free books for the Kindle

I have the Kindle app on my iPad and I have downloaded a few free books that are available. It is nice to know that there are free books for the Kindle for the iPad. There are also free books that you can get to use in the iBooks application on the iPad too. I actually bought a book from Amazon called No Plot No Problem! Which is by the author Chris Baty, who was the person that instigated the NaNoWriMo idea in the first place. Aside from the outline of the Story of how the NaNoWriMo came into existence, there are lots of tips and tricks for the authors and writers that take part in the exercise can use to help them be a winner in the contest.

The risk of bragging about being able to take on the task

Chris talks about how to find time to do the writing. He says that is a good idea to brag to all of your friends before you get started, that you are taking part in NaNoWriMo, so that you are obliged to start it and finish it. The ignominy of being teased rotten and the lambasted by your peers for not being able to finish what you started, is a good motivation to keep your nose to the grindstone with writing your novel.

Will not make a reader vomit

One of the things that is also necessary for completing the NaNoWriMo and being a winner is to first of all lower your expectations of your novel. Even the best writers will tell you that the first draft of any novel is complete shit. All of the work that you do in the rewriting is what turns it into something that is readable. We should not expect to have something brilliant, a 50,000 word masterpiece after one month of writing, but we should aim for something that would not make somebody vomit.

Week by Week plan for NaNoWriMo

After gathering up a stockpile of incentives to make sure that the novel gets written, Chris goes on to talk about how to work out some of your characters and plots. He also moves on to suggest a week by week overview of how you might attack the writing process of bashing out your book. He suggests that the first week might be easy enough with the first flush of excitement and fun of making the characters come to life and actually do something. Then the second week will hit and reality will hit even harder. The allure of various tasks around the house will be almost impossible to resist in a flurry of procrastination. It may well be that at the end of the day around about 11 PM and no writing has been done yet, that you have to dive into throwing out some words just in order to keep up with the word count.

The deadlines and the intense pressure that you put upon yourself to do the 50,000 words within 30 days, is really what it is all about. Without having something like this, it will be a case of always saying – I will do it tomorrow. As we all know tomorrow never comes, the book never gets written and you never have your bestseller.



dictation software

Using Dragon Dictation software and Scrivener with iPad

I would like to say that I would use the iPad to write my 50,000 words, but that may be a little bit unrealistic. What I plan to do is to use DragonDictate to write my novel. I could use the free Dragon Dictation software that is on the iPad, which is actually very accurate, but I think I will get more done if I use the Mac version of the software. I will be using Scrivener of course to organise the novel. Unfortunately there is not a Scrivener for iPad, though many people have suggested to the developer that he should create an iPad version. There are other writers software out there and I think it is true that Storyist does have an iPad application that you can work with. I must check that out, even though I am unlikely to change, because I do very much like the way that I can work within Scrivener and iPad.

Scrivener for iPadSimpleNote for the iPad, will automatically go into Scrivener. What I can see happening is that I will have a day or two, where getting out of the office and writing somewhere else will get the creative juices flowing. Taking the iPad out and going off to do some writing elsewhere of a couple of thousand words could be just what I need.

Getting the novel published and into the iBook store helped by Dragon Dictate iPad dictation software. The writers software for mobile computing,  dragon dictation for ipad means that I can also work at NaNoWriMo away from home.  iPad dictation is not as fast or as accurate as using the Mac version but fairly good all the same.   The iPad for authors is invaluable as you can use it as a place to write every bit of a note or part of a story that would otherwise end up on a piece of papre that would get lost easily.  I took part in NaNoWriMo 2011 and I am not sure if I will do NaNoWriMo 2012.  I also used the Scrivener software which is a tool for the professionals. My writer for iPad could be one of a number of iPad apps  for writers. Textastic is my favourite at the moment.

Leave a comment below if you have made an eBook already.

Posted in iPad Apps.
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