iPad Apps

See. Touch. Learn. is a hugely impressive looking iPad app from Brain Parade, a publisher dedicated to creating solutions for children with autism and other developmental challenges. The app is described as a picture learning system for the iPad that brings picture cards into the 21st Century – and is designed specifically for those with autism and other special needs.

Here’s a slice of its App Store page including some of its most notable features

Parents and professionals use See.Touch.Learn.™ to build custom picture card lessons and automatically track their child’s responses. Includes a starter set of stunning, high-quality images and 60 exercises created by a certified assistant behavior analyst! Additional libraries of images and lessons are available for purchase from within the app.

✔ Build, save, copy and reuse your custom lessons
✔ No more organizing and reorganizing cards for each student
✔ Create unlimited scenarios and prompts
✔ Thousands of gorgeous picture cards to choose from
✔ Your entire collection is portable – take it with you everywhere
✔ Never misplace a card – Images are automatically backed up
✔ Save hundreds of dollars – only a fraction of the cost of physical cards
✔ No cards to wear out
✔ No cards to lose

With all the myriad use-cases for the iPad, this is still one of the areas that makes you recall Steve Jobs’ initial description of it as a ‘magical and revolutionary’ device – and makes you feel as if the device is living up to those words.

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The Monster at the End of This Book is a an iPad storybook that’s a big favorite of mine and my daughter’s. It’s a fun and funny title even if your kids are a bit older than Sesame Street sort of ages. And it’s currently on sale at 75% off – down from $3.99 to just $0.99.

The sale is listed as for a limited time only – so if you’re after another good iPad eBook app to share with your young kids you may want to give this one a look this weekend.

Here’s an App Store link for The Monster at the End of This Book.

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Pocket for iPad, the app formerly know as Read It Later, was updated yesterday – the same day as its closest rival, Instapaper. The new version number is 4.1 and it’s a substantial update for Pocket.

Here’s the full change list:

New Article View Features:
- Swipe left or right to enable Page Flipping to read one page at a time
- Improved Dark theme and new Sepia theme with a focus on contrast and readability
- Increased maximum font size
Plus:
- Dark Theme throughout the app so you can use it comfortably at night
- Automatic detection of URLs copied to the clipboard so they can be added directly to Pocket
- Support for additional video sites, including TED and Devour
Fixes:
- Fixed a case where items in the list would become untappable
- Fixed a case where only partial lists would load
- Fixed a number of crashes and other minor bugs

I’ve been using both Pocket and Instapaper – and I have to say I’m very impressed with this update for Pocket. In particular, I like the way that switching between scrolling mode and page flipping mode is a little more seamless in Pocket. It changes as soon as you make either a swipe (left or right) or a scrolling gesture.

Pocket and Instapaper are both superb offline reading app – this is one of those categories where we are spoiled for choice on the iPad – and it’s great to see the developers of both apps continuously improving  them.

Here’s an App Store link for Pocket; it’s a free app.

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The Google+ iPhone app got an update this week (to another stupidly long version number) and a major overhaul to its UI. Here’s the brief change list for this latest update:

- New stream and navigation experience
- Various bugfixes and performance improvements

The app’s interface is radically different – it now has a predominantly very dark theme, a heavy emphasis on images and a much slicker feel all the way round. I tend to agree with +Robert Scoble that although the new look is quite attractive it really needs a text-mode option or similar for quicker scanning of the streams.

And of course, there’s still no sign of an iPad app for Google+, nearly a year now since it hit the App Store. At least now we have a decent alternative in iShare+ for Google+ for iPad – a proper Google+ client app for the iPad.

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