QD Ideas, LLC

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