A few people have asked me recently “What are the good apps on an iPad”. So I have waded through all the apps I have bought, and come up with a list of the best, most fun and most useful that I have.

Consuming & Discovering

Pulse – $3.99

An RSS reader that is customisable with all your owen feeds or if you use google reader you can also subscribe to that. Pulse displays the feeds as a series of rows with the articles from each feed along them. Really easy to find some interesting stuff and especially good for content with lots of images.

Flipboard – FREE

Similar to Pulse but  you can only choose from selected sources, which there are many, but not ideal for anyone with lots of random smaller news feeds. The layour is more magazine like with a contents section laying out all your subscribed feeds. The content is displayed as articles which makes it really nice to browse for stories. Also lets you subscribe to Twitter and facebook feeds which are displayed in the same way.

iBooks – FREE (Classics are free, most are same as the retail stores)

This is one of my favorite apps. I have bought many books as the convenience is brilliant. The books display clearly and the ability to dim/ brighten the screen easily is ideal for reading in different light such as a dark room or a bright garden. The app is linked to the iTunes book store which needs a few improvements such as the Genius feature of the music and app stores. It’s still pretty early on so I’m sure they will be coming later down the line. The ability to read PDF’s makes it ideal for downloaded brochures and magazines. The app can also sync your progress and bookmarks to other synced devices such as the iPhone which is great if you find yourself with nothing to do when out with your phone as you are up to date with where you were on your iPad.

Marvel – FREE (Some Free comics, but most are paid)

Comics on a handheld device are usually pretty awkward to read but on the iPad screen the comics stand out fantastically. Double tap to go into guided mode and just swipe right and the app will guide you through the story, focusing on the key elements and text. Of double tap again and you can spend time admiring the beautifully drawn work. Just be warned that it’s an addictive app and the bills can rack up quickly when reading a series of comics.

Wired – FREE (Content is paid)

This really is the tech demo of what magazines of the future could be like. The interactive features and videos along side the normal magazine content just make reading a joy. The only niggle, in my opinion, is the navigation of longer articles isn’t 100% easy to detect but that could just be me. Still the content is worth a look, just to see and show off to people,  what the iPad can do.

IMDB – FREE

It’s IMDB on a handy sized device, that’s always by your side on the sofa. Useful for finding out those pointless facts in films and finding those random actors you are sure you saw somewhere else before.

epicurious – FREE

Food and cocktail recipies, with a shopping list feature. Ideal for planning a nice meal, or a boozy night in with your mates.

Stumbleupon – FREE

Bumble around the net finding random content based on the things you like and have given the “thumbs up” to before. Useful for finding something random when your not in the mood for much else!

Creating & Editing

Brushes – $7.99

Finger painting with a powerful, and fun app. While not Photoshop, the ability to have layers, blending and a rainbow of colors lets you use your imagination to create whatever you want in a pretty intuitive way. Results can vary! Brushes is at just about the right sweet spot for power to usability that is ideal for most people. Here is a shameless plug for an image I drew in Brushes while on a car journey: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlosthedesigner/4818216060/

Sketchbook Pro – $7.99

Similar to Brushes but with more power and control over most elements. The only problem with Sketchbook Pro is that it suffers with being to complex for most elements which makes it less fun. I would class it more as a tool than Brushes which has the fun element. That said, with some decent time put in to beat the learning curve, I think that Sketchbook has the edge for the hardcore user.

Pages – $9.99

Like MS word/publisher (in a good way) but on the iPad. Simple to use with just enough power to do the everyday things that most people need in a document editor. For any long document it’s not ideal but for editing existing documents or knocking up a covering letter for something it is more than perfect.

Gusto – $6.99

A website editor that can connect to your site though ftp and download the site to the iPad for offline editing. The editor has a quick list of common code shortcuts so you don’t need to dig down into the keyboard to get the < and >. Always useful.

KORG iElectribe – $9.99 until July 31st 2010, then $19.99

Cheaper than a real sequencer, but just as fun. I didn’t really know what I was doing with this app, but it was fun to have a go making some tunes and beats. There are a whole load of presets that you can use wand modify. One for the experts, quick learners and musicly minded.

Music

Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD – FREE

A piano to play on. That’s it, but it’s free!

Magic Piano – $0.99

Another piano. Has a few fun piano modes and a simple mode for “following and learning” a song. For a quick play it’s fun and the video of the cat on youtube persuaded me to get it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9NP-AeKX40

Social

Gowalla – FREE

The official client for Gowalla. Gowalla is about discovering, capturing and sharing places and events with your friends.

Tweetdeck – FREE

The best twitter client on the iPad so far, assuming tweetie (the official Twitter app) doesn’t come over from the iPhone.

Playing

Harbour master HD – FREE (Extra levels $)

Guide your boats into port and make sure they don’t crash. A charming little game which will give you a new respect for real harbour masters once you realise how complex it can get. Enjoyable and if you like it there are more maps to download for a small price.

Flight Controller HD – $4.99

Like Harbour master but with planes. If you have some [red/blue] 3D glasses  you can even play in with a 3D effect! Cool eh! The difference with Flight Controller is that once a plane lands, that is it. With Harbor master you have to get the boat out again once it’s cargo has been processed. Easier in some respects but it gets pretty chaotic pretty quickly. You can play multiplayer on the same iPad too.

Angry Birds HD – $4.99

Fling angry birds from a catapult into pigs hidden in fortresses made from destructable blocks. Some birds flock, some explode and some dive into the blocks and pigs with an almighty force. There is a reason this game has topped the charts for so long… It’s brilliant.

Plants Vs. Zombies HD – $9.99

When attacked by zombies, what do you need? If this game is anything to go by then it is a garden of plants with different skill sets which can defend your homestead. It’s tower defence with an undead twist. Build sunflowers to get “money” from the sun to buy some defensive plants. Just make sure you get that balance right. Customise your starting loadout of plants on each level so it’s upto you to decide what plants are going to help you every level. Another briliant game.

iCopter HD – FREE with ads

Fly the helecopter down the tunnel and don’t hit the edges. An easy game to get the hang of, but far harder to master.

Utilities

Weather Pro HD – $3.99

The most stat filled weather app there is. If you like data and graphs and as much info as possible then this is the app for you. It also has infrared and satellite images. If you just want a smily sunshine images then this isn’t for you.

Day Tides – FREE

Not useful to anyone, except sailors, fishermen and anyone who needs to be somewhere by the sea and know the tides. It’s free an accurate which is good enough for me.

Things – $19.99

Wow expensive, especially if you already have the iPhone app and the mac app. Come on CC, give us some kind of discount for them all in a bundle! Mind you it is the best designed and most thought through interface of them all. Syncing of the apps occurs via the mac on a shared network. Once there is online updates to the sharing this app will be perfect for keeping your to-do’s all upto date via the “cloud”. I have found this and it’s sister apps perfect for keeping projects organised, chores and other things I need to do all moving along nicely.

Dropbox – FREE

Keep files synced up online and access them from other devices with dropbox apps/accounts on. Brilliant for keeping stuff you might need anywhere on, and great for putting files to sync across multiple devices.

Good reader – $0.99

Reads almost any document and can sync with dropbox. The fact it can open up a zip file and you can then browse the content make it almost essential when someone sends you a zipped file in an email.

Final Note…

There are also some apps that I have on my iPhone but don’t want to pay $5 or more for a slightly shinier version for my iPad. Civilisation is the one that springs to mind here.

I am sure there are many apps that I don’t have on this list, so feel free to contribute your own favourites.

A bug for anyone needing ie7 compatible forms using a min-width on the buttons. This also affects ie8 running in compatibility mode.

input.submitbutton
{
min-width: 100px;
}

If you are using a min-width for your form submit buttons then sadly ie7 will align button text to the right of the button. It is un-fixable with just css and the only pure solution is to remove the min-width and either use width:auto; or use width:123px;

input.submitbutton
{
width: 100px;
}

If however you don’t mind using javascript you can try using the ie7-js which uses javascript to bring any ie browser less than ie8/ie9 to work as the latest one. You can read more about ie7-js on google code: http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

As a bonus this can also fix any transparent png issues found in ie6!

For those of you who want to know what’s been going on around carl-topham.com lately then here is a quick update.

After moving my hosting over to mediatemple.com I have now also moved my databases. This was part of my original strategy which was brought forward due to a few technical problems that needed to be solved. While fixing one problem I decided to use the downtime to good use. 2 birds one stone etc…

carl-topham.com and related sites all now sit under a much more structured infrastructure which means better service all round. From now on normal service resumes (fingers crossed).

There have been a few other things, but they will follow in further posts.

Over the weekend you may have noticed my site being down, then up, then down again and now finally back up.

There was a hosting issue with my old hosts that was thankfully resolved by moving to the wonderful Media Temple. I have been using Media Temple for a few other sites for a while now and I was planning on moving this site over in the next month or two but the hosting issues forced my hand. Apart from being really flexible & customisable, they also offer more features than my last hosts so it’s all good. If you are interested in having your hosting with Media Temple then please check them out via my referral link http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=thehipshooter.com

The referral site thehipshooter.com, is a photography site I am in the process of designing and building between other work. Watch this space for more info.

Links:
http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=thehipshooter.com

Another month has passed and last Thursday saw another fantastic doodle planet. Doodle planet is all about chilling out, with a beer or two and having a bit of a doodle. It takes place the last Thursday of most months in Telford’s warehouse, Chester.

The setup this month was great as usual, but with an extra addition… light painting. Having never had a go of light painting before I was of course rubbish at it but it was great to have a go. If you happen to be in the area for the next event, and fancy having a relaxing & creative evening, then I really suggest coming along and joining in.

You can see the photos and video I took of the whole event over on Flickr [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlosthedesigner/sets/72157624261645611/ ]

More info:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=27022412230
http://www.compulsivesart.com/
http://www.telfordswarehousechester.com/

If you haven’t noticed already, a site re-design has happened to the main site carl-topham.com. Don’t worry readers, the blog is next on the list. If you have any feedback on the design of either the main site or the blog then now is the time to let me know.

Look forward to hearing from you all.

Carl

I have been struggling to find out how to get the RSS address of a Facebook fan page for some work that I was doing and it’s been a real pain to find the info on how…. But I finally figured it out so I decided to share the method that ended up working the best (It’s beautiful in it’s simplicity)

1. Head on over to www.google.com/reader.
2. Click on the add a subscription (top of menu on the left).
3. paste the fan page link (http://www.facebook.com/thefanpagename) in the search box and click “Add”.
4. Once it’s found it click on the settings tab > reader settings (top right).
5. Click on the subscriptions tab and you should see the full address that you can use in any RSS reader, parser or whatever you need.

There may be an easier way so I would love to find out but this seems pretty simple to me.

Have you ever had a page that needed styles applying to certain elements again and again (and again) in some sort of pattern. The finished page could have no js either. I just had a long page of tables that the 3rd column had to be formatted differently and it was a pain so I needed a way around the problem.

Write a quick bit of jQuery to apply to to the page and preview it in the browser. Then using firebug (firefox plugin), cmd/right click the document root element and click “copy HTML”. Just paste that into a new file and you now have the static HTML which the jQuery applied the styles to. Just remember to delete the jQuery code from the new doc and you are done.

This example adds the class “value” to all the third “td” elements in the document:

$(document).ready(function() {

var str = “:nth-child(3n)”;
$(“tr td” + str).addClass(‘value’);
        
});

Resources:
http://api.jquery.com/nth-child-selector/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2184862/saving-the-manipulated-dom-html-after-editing-it-with-firebug

This is a quick post about how I managed to get data from an word doc that was separated with tabs and into a html table. I will clean up this tutorial once I have finished the work I needed to do with the data. This is so I can remember what I did.

1) select data in the .doc file
2) click the table button and the data should be put into a table that is probably messed up.
3) select the table and open a new spreadsheet doc and paste in.
4) save as CSV
5) in Dreamweaver select “File > Import > Tabular data” and let it do the magic
6) Clean up all the extra columns and rows etc

I am currently developing a quick and easy checklist for making sure that all webpages/ sites that get designed follow a sort of quality control and minimum standard. You can see the draft version(s) of this list over on Flickr

Please give feedback on anything that I have missed or is wrong so that I can improve future versions.

Website Preflight Checklist