Multieducator Inc

JFK Historymaker (US$4.99) from MultiEducator, Inc. is an extensive and comprehensive multimedia biography app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The amount of information is massive and includes 250 photos, 200 full text documents and 25 videos chronicling the life of John F. Kennedy, the United States' 35th president. In structure, it's very similar to an earlier app from the same company about the Civil War. Both apps have many positive attributes, but also quite a few nagging problems. The design of the app lets you easily get to and keep track of information. With its larger screen, viewing it on an iPad is far more satisfying since, in landscape mode, there is always a menu on the left side of the screen that shows the categories and sub-categories of information. On the right of the screen is the content. The menu isn't there in portrait mode, but tapping on a menu button makes it appear. In the iPhone version, all you see is the menu; tapping on an item brings up the content, making things more difficult to navigate. The menu items contain distinctive icons that let you know if the item contains a video, photo, audio file or text. A list of Recent places is kept, and anything can be marked as a Favorite so that you can build your own list of interests. Everything but videos can be sent to email as well. Text and photos can be pinched or stretched, which really comes in handy on a small screen. Organization is important in this type of app, since there are around 35 topic-oriented categories that range from JFK's early life to his assassination. Within each category is a sub-menu that lists the content. Tapping on an item brings up the text, photo, video or audio. It sounds complicated, but after a few minutes of using it, I could easily get anywhere quite quickly, and saving Recents and Favorites made it even easier. There is a button letting you go back to the last category; in the unlikely event you did get lost, there is a Contents button that will bring you back to the main menu. On the iPad there is also a search box to get you to the right place. Categories are grouped well and break everything down to bite-sized topics, such as Civil Rights, Bay of Pigs, The Navy and so on. Many Read More

New York City-based historian and publisher Marc Schulman is about to launch a new iOS app dedicated to John F Kennedy. The application will hit the AppStore today on January 20th, 50 years after JFK’s inauguration as America’s 34th President. JFK History Maker – a Fifty Year Retrospective builds on top of the JFK HistoryMaker CD-ROM that was released back in 1992. The new mobile version comes with tons of content included in that release, plus new data that has been declassified in the meantime. Included are many of JFK’s key speeches (over 200 major addresses and news conferences), more than 250 high-resolution photos, 36 chronologically ordered chapters, 60+ pages of biographical information and over 35 video clips. However, they (press release) emphasize that while the material in comprehensive, it is “extremely readable” and organized for easy reference. Unsurprisingly, accessing the content on the iPad is said to provide the best possible experience. Finally, in addition to the iOS app, JFK History Maker – a Fifty Year Retrospective will also be published as a book and an ebook in multiple formats. JFK History Maker – a Fifty Year Retrospective ($4.99) [iTunes link] Dusan has been using smartphones since their introduction and is now following the latest trends in the industry. The "convergence" is what he's most excited about, and writing about it is the next logical thing to do. He thinks that using a smartphone is what everyone who cares about their time should do. In addition to his interests in mobile phones, Dusan also loves to experiment with the latest web and mobile 2.0 services. The idea of accessing and managing your information from any device no matter where you are simply amazes him. Whether it's an online to-do list, note taking service or a video sharing social network, he's there to try it out. He admits though, he's still searching for the ultimate web-based organizational tool, which "sings" perfectly with the mobile PIM application. Dusan used to run SymbianWatch.com which later became part of IntoMobile. He lives in Serbia, South-East Europe, from where he edits the site on a daily basis. Read More

Civil War: America's Epic Struggle (US$4.99) from MultiEducator Inc. is a full history course in an iPad and iPhone app. It contains at least as much information as most textbooks on the Civil War at a fraction of the cost, while adding elements that no textbook can. There are 24 multimedia presentations, some as long as nine minutes, a nice selection of music popular during the Civil War, and a wonderful navigation system that just makes sense. When starting the app, information can be sorted 18 ways, from a changing Categories bar including Battles (sorted either chronologically or alphabetically), Multimedia Presentations, Statistics and topics like Navy, Economics, Railroads, Music, etc. Depending upon where you are in the app, tapping on Categories brings up a contextual listing of what you can see. For example, tapping on Major Battles Chronologically changes the bar to a listing of battles grouped by year. Tapping on a battle such as Bull Run, brings choices of a text summary of the battle, a five minute multimedia summary, seven text articles on aspects of the battle, 20 photos or drawings, most of them taken from the Matthew Brady Archives, and full color maps. Depending upon the battle there is more or less information available, but this is done for 26 battles in total; clearly, there's a phenomenal amount of information in the app, plenty for even a Civil War buff to peruse. Dozens of biographies of Union and Confederate Generals can be found and the majority of them have photos included. The Timeline contains a button for each year, which brings up a listing of what happened each month along with a button for each month affording a more detailed listing of events. Choosing Americans brings up articles on Native, German, Irish, Jewish, Spanish and Chinese Americans. If you tap on Washington, you get a chronology of what happened by year, 18 text articles, and 49 photos. The amount of information is staggering. To contain this much information, the app has to be huge and it is, weighing in at 248 MB. With many hundreds of items, it might be easy to get lost, but Marc Shulman, the major developer of a team of 4.5 (his kid did the icons), came up with a number of ways to inform you of where you are. A Recents button offers up a listing of the last few dozen places you've Read More

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge Published: Friday, April 9, 2010 Category: iPod, iPhone, and iPad Gems: Apps, Games + More Welcome to our first non-gaming edition of iPad Gems! As with our earlier game-focused version, we’re looking at a huge collection of different iPad apps today—20, actually—giving each a relatively brief overview. Unlike the prior column, we’re looking here at apps that either didn’t exist on the iPhone and iPod touch, or never previously received attention in one of our Gems pieces before. They’re unrated for the time being, but our descriptions make clear whether they’re worthy of your time and attention. ABC Player Apart from the app’s unfortunately vertical-only browser design, ABC Player (Free) from ABC Digital is an exciting piece of software—arguably the single biggest step forward in media consumption on an Apple device in a long time. ABC Player is a full-fledged browser and streaming video player for the ABC television network’s TV programs, enabling you to watch complete episodes of 24 different shows, including present and prior seasons. Not surprisingly, ABC presents the videos with commercial interruptions and gives you only limited control over fast-forwarding and rewinding, but the commercials aren’t horribly long, and links are provided to buy the commercial-free episodes from iTunes. The crystal clear, high-definition videos can be viewed in vertical or wide format, but the browser to search the network’s content is only available when the iPad is vertical. Overall, this player strikes a very good balance between offering on-demand access to a great library of content and advertising support for that content. American Dreams Multieducator’s American Dreams - Speeches and Documents in US History HD ($3) is not going to win any awards for interface design—between the background textures, fonts, and utterly plain presentations of text documents, sometimes without proper formatting, it feels somewhat slopped together. But the concept is an exceptionally powerful demonstration of the iPad’s potential as a learning tool: you can read, hear, and sometimes see the full inaugural addresses of every U.S. President, read the Constitution, key pieces of legislation and Supreme Court decisions, and watch videos from critical moments in American history. To the extent that it’s built on publicly available content, American Dreams mightn’t seem like a big step forward, but there’s something far more compelling about being able to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak or watch John Kennedy’s Cuban Missile Crisis address than merely reading about them. A superior Read More

My name is Steve, and I'm a recovering engineer. Although I'm no longer a practicing engineer, I still hold a Professional Engineer license and I'm still interested in most things dealing with engineering. That's why I perked up when I received an email from MultiEducator, Inc., a software development firm known previously for multimedia history CDs and their Historycentral.com website. Their new Formulator Series of specialized iPhone calculators for engineers, architects, plumbers, and construction professionals features 22 individual apps priced between US$0.99 and US$17.99. Since my background is in Civil Engineering, I requested a review copy of Civil Engineering Formulator [US$4.99, iTunes Link] to get a feel for the depth and breadth of a typical Formulator Series app. A look at the web page for Civil Engineering Formulator shows that the app began with 75 formulas in the Civil Engineering areas of beams, bridges, columns, elevators, piles, plates, roads, soil, and structural steel. Over the next few months, the app is to grow to more than 200 formulas, at which time the price will increase for new buyers. Civil Engineering Formulator also includes almost 100 conversion formulas, as well as 50 area calculations. There are a lot of calculations in the Civil Engineering app. Like many other iPhone apps, you can call up recent calculators by tapping a Recents button, or define certain calculators as Favorites. There's even a Saved button for saving calculations that you've performed for future use. Upon launching the Civil Engineering Formulator, a list of the major types of calculations is displayed. Tapping one of the types in the table of contents displays a set of calculations, often sub-categorized by sub-type. As an example, if I want to perform a calculation on a column, I first tap on Column, and then choose the type of calculation. In the list of column calculations, there's a sub-type of Area of Foundation, and one calculation listed beneath that for Minimum Base Size. Each of the calculations has fields for the parameters and a field for the calculated result. One major concern I had was that while some of the parameter fields asked for a specific unit (e.g., weight in pounds or kilograms), others did not, which could produce a bad result. In Civil Engineering, a bad calculation can cause a building or bridge to collapse. I see this as a critical issue for this app and something that the developers Read More