Link to Dropbox. Write Markdown-formatted text. Use your favorite TextExpander snippets. Do quick research to find reference materials. Lookup or substitute words from Terminology app. Insert quotes and links into your documents. Upload images to CloudApp. Export your writings as Markdown or HTML files. Send them to Evernote, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr and Twitter. Or use the generated HTML for your blog post. Your choice.

Thing is, designing an iPad app shouldn’t be “just like designing a print product.” It’s not the same design you want to bring to new platforms, it’s the content. Issue-based publishing puts a straitjacket on digital content, freezing it into a big arbitrary block of pages and articles, sealed with print metaphors. This approach privileges print and its design conventions, imposing them on new platforms. And why should that be the case? Looking out five or ten years, will print be the winner among these platforms? Nope. So why should we rely on print’s design conventions and workflows now?

Apple touts its GarageBand for iPad application as a great way to play and record music without the need to learn scales or time signatures. Musical newbies aren’t the only ones interested in using the $5 app, however. GarageBand for iPad appeals to seasoned musicians, too. And those with significant investments in recording equipment may be wondering which, if any, of their existing gear will work with the portable version of GarageBand. I decided to grab my trusty iPad, my iPad camera connection kit, and powered USB hub and plug in whatever I had around to see what would work.

Learning the subtleties of Helvetica and Garamond used to be a pain—but a sleek new app has made the process easier

Final Draft uses a file format called .fdx. If you've ever attempted to open one of these files on the iPad, you know it's not pretty. You get raw XML. You get brackets and code.

iCab Mobile isn’t terribly one thing well-ish—it has umpteen niche features and an overwhelming number of preference settings—but it’s become my browser of choice on the iPad.

So, here’s my guess at Apple’s iPad plans for 2011:<br />
An iPad 2, fairly soon. Say, a March announcement, shipping in the first week of April. Faster, more RAM, maybe more storage, thinner and lighter, a front-facing camera.1 Running iOS 4.3.<br />
iOS 5, announced at a developer event in March, shipping in June.<br />
iPad 3, shipping in September, announced at the annual iPod event. Running iOS 5.1, same as the next-generation iPod Touch.

After a few seconds it struck me that what we'll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them "mobile devices" is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn't think of the iPhone as a phone; we'd think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.

Delicious (backed up locally and in Pinboard) has assumed a different role in my life. No longer the bank of preference for instant notes, it’s where I’m putting things that I’ve generally sifted or gone back to (sometimes a number of times). (Of course, some things still seem worth bookmarking at once, but the reason for that can itself turn out to be depressingly ephemeral.) I’m much more interested now, much more able now, to use Delicious as a repository for things which I’ve had the time, and the perspective, to weigh.

There’s more than one way for developers to access fonts. This list is based on cycling through UIFont. However, there are a few more fonts available via Core Text. I’m debating on a design for displaying Core Text fonts in a meaningful way.

PCalc is ideal for scientists, engineers, students, programmers, or indeed anybody looking for a feature-rich calculator for the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.

The $60 Dodocase appears, from most angles, to be a delightfully analog Moleskine-style notebook. But when you remove the elastic band that holds it closed and flip open the faux leather cover, be prepared for gasps from people when they see that there’s an iPad inside.

My favorite thing about the 37signals office are the 4 team rooms. Team rooms are where people can work together uninterrupted without disturbing anyone else. These team rooms are equipped with big chalkboards. You can sketch something quickly, erase it, and draw in more detail. Sketching on a chalkboard isn’t just a solo effort either. It’s collaborative. Anyone can add to your sketch to enhance your idea.

Jason Schwartzman introduces the New Yorker iPad App. Great video: http://bit.ly/94Pvwt

The key to good writing is not that magical glass of Bordeaux, the right kind of tobacco or that groovy background music. The key is focus. What you need to write well is a spartan setting that allows you to fully concentrate on your text and nothing but your text. Many professional writers use SimpleText or Textedit because these are the only writing programs that are totally distraction free. But text editors are not perfect. That’s why we made Writer.

Please either add the ability to retain fonts (and all their settings) when importing Keynote, Pages, and Numbers documents from computer to iPad, or else please create a simple font management tool for the iPad that allows us to import a reasonable subset of our fonts to the device.

This really isn’t meant to be a contentious post. It really only came about because I got a new toy, something I’ve been wanting to get for a while – a USB microsope! Here’s the model I got:

Last month I compiled an overview of why software designers were turning to Apple's presentation software, Keynote, to design application interfaces. Several of you asked for more so... here's additional reasons to design in Keynote and lots of tips for getting the most out of it.

Recently, an increasing number of designers (myself included) are turning to Apple's presentation making software, Keynote, to design and prototype software applications. Here's a few reasons why and some tips learned along the way.

Someday, when they tell the story of how digital magazines saved Conde Nast, it will begin in San Francisco's Caffé Centro sometime in May 2009.

It was there that Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked Wired editor Chris Anderson to meet him to discuss the creation of a prototype for a new digital tablet. Mr. Dadich knew the iPhone screen was far too small to re-create the magazine experience, but it got him thinking about a Minority Report-like touchscreen that could work. Mr. Dadich took out a cocktail napkin and drew an illustration of what Wired could look like on a 13-inch tablet screen.

Hopefully that won’t happen. The furor around Flipboard, even in its limited infancy, demonstrates the demand for a social news application that offers both 1) a superior reading experience and 2) relevant news curated by our many online communities. Flipboard has already achieved the first--if they can nail the second, and prevail over server issues, Facebook lock-in policies, and regressive old media attitudes, they may have something paradigm-changing on their hands.

RT @tcarmody: From Book to App: Terrific post by if:book's Bob Stein on "the future of the app" as emergent dominant media form: http:// ...

My friends at @Flipboard made an astoundingly good iPad app, and here's a video I made to show it to you: http://j.mp/9RoUMT
– Adam Lisagor (lonelysandwich) http://twitter.com/lonelysandwich/statuses/19086005712

All the iOS icons required: "Let’s say you’re working on an icon for an iOS app. The app is universal, so it should run on all iPhones (and iPod touches), and on the iPad. As a designer, you’re used to drawing icons at various sizes; this is a big part of what “icon design” is (as opposed to other types of illustration)."

Apple has made some puzzling decisions over the last few years that leave one wondering if they really care about typography as much as they did in the 1980s when the Mac launched the desktop publishing revolution. As recently as 2005, Steve Jobs made typography a central theme of his commencement address to Stanford grads, but his actions as the almighty head of Apple haven’t followed suit.

Apple has a typography desk. It is not exactly crowded with developers vying for every square centimetre, but it really exists. Have you ever heard of it? Could you tell me who runs it? Can you point to any publicly available resources about it?

So my proposition is this: :hover as an web interface design tool going forward is going to be less and less important.

Are complex gestural user interfaces a throwback to the command line? http://bit.ly/cKp4l2 #ipad #gesture #ui

"These inspectors (for Keynote and Microsoft Word on the Mac) are difficult to use because they show all possible editing controls at once, disabling those which don’t apply to whatever is selected. It’s not easy to find which options apply to what you’re editing at the time, and the density of controls requires the pixel-precision of a mouse pointer and considerable screen space to display.

On the iPad, any globally-positioned inspectors should nonetheless be contextual in terms of what editing UI they show. Don’t overload the user with irrelevant options; hide anything that doesn’t apply. [...] The guideline is simple, and it’s good advice even for the desktop:

*Inspectors should present context-relevant UI.
*Hide controls which don’t apply to the selection or focus.

The concept of context is key to iPad software design."

Lovely article on definite content vs. formless content and the potential of Apple's new device. "The iPad changes the experience formula. It brings the excellent text readability of the iPhone/Kindle to a larger canvas. It combines the intimacy and comfort of reading on those devices with a canvas both large enough and versatile enough to allow for well considered layouts."