reading

I love magazines. I subscribe to around a dozen of them and even started one of my own many years ago. (PalmPilot users may remember it: Tap, which later became Handheld Computing.)

Unfortunately, most of the magazine content I've seen on my iPhone has been mediocre at best. Usually it's poorly formatted, incomplete, out of date, and/or not of particular interest.

So imagine my delight upon discovering TapTilt, a monthly magazine about the iPhone you read on your iPhone. It's smartly designed, stocked with original content, and decidedly interesting reading for the everyday iPhone user.

The May, 2010, debut issue kicks off with three features, one each on baseball apps, gardening apps, and iPhone-created art. They're formatted not only to fit the screen, but also to resemble traditional magazine spreads. Thus you see unique headline fonts, topic-specific artwork and color schemes, screenshots, and overall attention to design detail.

Unlike a typical print rag, however, TapTilt adds multimedia to the mix: links, videos, Facebook/Twitter integration, and even some interactive goodies. The baseball-app feature, for example, includes extras like a baseball calendar and a nationwide map of stadiums.

After the features, TapTilt serves up weekly game and music reviews--both in video format. I'm not sure why the editors insist on doling these out one week at a time; it's a bit frustrating to know that there's a review of the game Drift Sumi available, but I have to wait until the fourth week of May to get it.

At least what's there is good. The video review of All-in-1 Gamebox, for instance, is one of the most polished and entertaining app reviews I've ever seen. The Diner Dash review seemed a bit amateurish by comparison, but I still found it preferable to reading a static all-text review.

TapTilt also serves up a variety of expected-to-be-recurring columns, including iPhoneography (the art of taking photos on your iPhone), Travel, Tips and Tricks, Wallpaper of the Week, and iMazing (stories of "amazing uses and strange apps"). It's all good stuff.… Read more

The e-book revolution is upon us, and I, for one, am delighted. It's not that I don't love bookstores and real, bound books that you can hold in your hands--I do. But for years I've been smitten by the convenience and environmental-friendliness of books "printed" in digital ink.

Ah, but which e-book reader should you get? I'll save the Kindle versus iPad versus iPod versus smartphone debate for another day. Today, Buy.com has the Sony Reader Pocket Edition PRS-300 for $139.95 with free shipping.

Chip in with your siblings and you have … Read more

When Barnes & Noble launched the Nook e-book reader late last year, the company said it would offer unique features such as e-book lending, free in-store streaming of many titles, and Android apps that would run on the color touch screen at the bottom of the device. Well, after releasing two smaller firmware updates that mainly focused on fixing bugs, improving performance, and tweaking the user interface, Barnes & Noble has finally rolled out a more substantial update that includes the extra features it originally promised would set the Nook apart from Amazon's Kindle.

While the lending feature has been available for several months, one of the key additions is the Read in Store wireless streaming feature. Once the new firmware is installed (version 1.3 should be automatically pushed to your device once you connect to a Wi-Fi network and check for new content in your library), you'll be able to read certain books from the company's e-book catalog free of charge on your Nook when you're in a Barnes & Noble store (free Wi-Fi is offered in stores). As previously reported, you can only access a title for up to an hour per day, but you could return on subsequent days to continue reading. Alternatively, you could also just sit in a store and read a hard copy of the book at your leisure, but that's so old-school.

Barnes & Noble didn't specify just how many books would be available for free streaming, but company reps said that at launch content would be available from all the major publishers and that some bestsellers would be on the list. (We'll be checking just how much content is actually available in the next few days).

Additionally, Barnes & Noble has added two Android games to the Nook--chess and sudoku--along with a Web browser that's labeled with the "beta" tag.

It's also important to note that because the device can now access the Web, you can log in to Wi-Fi networks that require authentication via a Web page. Nook owners have been asking for the ability to access more public Wi-Fi hot spots since the e-reader's launch. The firmware is also supposed to fix some outstanding bugs, including a freezing problem that affected certain units, and to speed up page turns (yes, they do seem faster).

Here's the quick rundown of what's new in v1.3:

In advance of the update, we got a demo of the Read in Store feature at a Barnes & Noble in Manhattan, and the streaming appeared to work just fine. While only e-books will be available for launch, company reps said the ability to stream periodicals would be added in the near future.

The demo was conducted in an in-store Barnes & Noble Cafe, and a couple of tables away from us, a patron was flipping through a few magazines he'd borrowed from the nearby magazine rack as he sipped coffee. At another table, a customer was using B&N's free Wi-Fi to surf the Web on his iPad, which begged the question, when would we see a new B&N eReader iPad app? … Read more

Microsoft Word documents are susceptible to corruption and loss from a variety of causes, including viruses and other attacks, system crashes, software incompatibility, and even media read errors and other inexplicable events. Stellar Information Systems' Phoenix Word Recovery Software can help users recover and repair damaged Word documents. It doesn't promise to recover every lost document, but it can undo a wide range of damage.

This program's job is to find Word docs gone on walkabout in your system and, if they're damaged or corrupted, restore them to a previous state, including all links, OLE objects, and … Read more

Today only, Graveyard Mall is offering 50 assorted comics for $9.99 (plus around $6 for shipping). The selection includes titles from Dark Horse, DC, Epic Comics, Marvel, and more--but "most will be Marvel," according to the order page.

If memory serves, these days the average comic book sells for around $3.99. Needless to say, a stack … Read more

PageFocus Pro is an enterprise-capable form-creation, management, and publishing application development package with an integrated database engine. PageFocus Reader is a free tool that you can use to view, navigate, print, and otherwise manage the software's proprietary files as well as PageFocus and PageFocus Pro Forms. It supports electronic data transfer and can be used to distribute e-catalogs, registration and order forms, and documents, as well as for data collection.

This program contains two separate executables, the PageFocus Editor, for creating and editing documents and forms, and the runtime Expo application, which handles the database end. Each uses the … Read more

There's always something bracing when a pillar of the Web decides it should advertise itself on TV.

So there I was the other night, bathing in the fantasy of reality television--was it "Dancing with the Stars"? was it "American Idol?"--when music from what I presumed could only be a new iPad ad yanked me by my ears and demanded attention.

There was the indie music. There was the whimsical air of a summer's evening watching Shakespeare in the park. So I looked up and saw that the visuals were channeling Peter Gabriel from … Read more

We read so that we can experience something true. You remember true--it's the thing you see so little of during a day at work.

So why do so many believe that books, publishing, and even reading are dead? Steve Jobs, after all, made books a considerable feature of his iPad launch presentation a few weeks ago.

Still, the management at U.K. educational publisher Dorling Kindersley asked a production company called the Khaki Group to create a film that showed what publishing would be like in the future, if anything.

The filmmakers came up with an enchanting piece that … Read more

Read It Later's new trick is one that long-time users with little time to waste are likely to enjoy. The bookmarking service, which was designed to help people organize and view bookmarks from multiple computers, is launching (in beta) a "digest" that will convert a person's bookmarks into a news page that's sorted by category.

A few years ago this could have been considered a simple exercise in machine tagging. Where Digest does things a bit differently is to automatically create these categories based on what people are saving, so say you never bookmarked stories … Read more