I just caught a tweet from Inglorious Apps. They developed the late and unlamented TouchPad’s killer app, and they are in the process of porting it to the iPad.

Lookee:

That is Glimpse running on an iPad, and you should be very excited. Glimpse gave the Touchpad the one thing that almost all tablets lacked: the ability to have multiple windows open and running at once.

Now, this only let you run several widgets at a time, not other apps. But this is still a wantful app. Just think. You’ll be able to watch a Youtube video while checking your tweets. And no more having to leave an app to read an email; just change windows.

I don’t usually invest in iPad apps; it’s not my main platform. But I will get this app once it is available. And I will buy it  second time for Android. It fills a void.

On a related note, does anyone know of a similar app already available for iOS or Android?

Glimpse

Glimpse (Killer TouchPad App) Coming Soon to the iPad

A trio of researchers at the KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence have put together demo reading app for the iPad. It doesn’t support any new ebook features, but it does have a number of innovations in how you interface with the ebook you’re reading. The researchers have studied some of the ways that we are all used to using paper books and tried to adapt them to touchscreen based tablet like the iPad.

As you can see from the screenshot above, they’ve found  way to duplicate the way you might use your fingers s bookmarks. They also managed to invent a few new ways to manipulate an ebook, including a multi-finger swipe to turn several pages at once.

It’s  fascinating concept, but I’m not getting excited until I can use it.

Ebooks Finally Get Page Flips, Finger Bookmarks, and More

I’ve only been using it today, and I plan to take a deeper look sometime soon. This post is really just  heads up because I wanted to bring Mobstac to everyone’s attention.

This Indian startup is only a few months old, and it is just now beginning to get the attention it deserves. It offers similar features to Onswipe and could potentially blow Onswipe out of the water. I’m looking at the demo site that Mobstac made for me, and while I don’t like some of the design elements there are  number of subtle details that are nice. I like it enough that I’m willing to let you see what my site looks like:

http://the-digital-reader.mobstac.com/

There’s an iPad and an iPhone version, and if you visit from a desktop browser you will see the iPhone version. You can also see the iPhone version from any Android tablet; Mobstac is repeating OnSwipe’s mistake in ignoring Android. This is a paid service, not free, but “you get what you pay for”. I was set up with  free account, so that does bias me. But this is definitely worth  deeper look.

MobStac

OnSwipe Has All The Hype, But Mobstac Has the Engineers

Coliloquy is joining a growing number of ebook app developers who are adapting existing stories and creating interactive reading experiences. These apps are the latest incarnation of an old genre of books.

If you’re old enough you might recall the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. This series, which originally launched in 1976, let readers choose the direction of the story. Every few pages the reader would come to  decision, and the outcome could men either success or doom.

Each of Coliloquy’s 4 titles cost between $5 and $7. They’re only available on the Kindle hardware, but Coliloquy does have plans to release apps for the Kindle Fire. That could be interesting; it might indicate that Coliloquy is planning Android apps or it might mean that Amazon will expand the Kindle’s app support beyond the devices to include the Kindle apps as well (apps running apps – who woulda thunk it). Coliloquy is also planning to release 3 new titles this year.

• Witch’s Brew
• Arcania
• Getting Dumped
• Dead Letter Office

I loved this genre as a kid, and I’m pleased to see it making a transition to digital form. But don’t get too much caught up in the hype; the buzz today is all due to marketing, not the technology and content on display. This launch is interesting but it’s not that innovative.

Anyone who follows ebook news will know that there already were interactive ebook apps on the Kindle, and that some titles have been available for over a year now. For example, Wizard’s Choice was released last month, and the developer Choice of Games has been releasing these type of ebook apps since at least December 2010.

That being said, I’m about to go get a couple of Coliloquy books; I’m curious about how well they were adapted from the original linear novels.

Coliloquy Launches Ebook Apps for the Kindle

We have some great news to share: we’ve removed the limits on free Readability accounts. All users—free and paying—now get unlimited access to their Reading List, Favorites, Archives, and all our other features.

One detail that had set Readability apart from Instapaper and ReadItLater was that Readability offered a premium subscription service.  Users could pay to remove the limitations imposed on the free service. Those funds were used to pay the developers as well as the publishers, bloggers, and authors who signed up with the service.

In fact, that whole subscription deal set Readability apart from just about everyone. None of the app-based aggregators (Flipboard, Zite) charged a fee, nor did any of the reading services (aside from Instapaper and the apps they sold). That always struck me as a little weird; I didn’t see how anyone else was going to make a living at it.

But now the free service will be as functional as the paid and that means that there is little to differentiate Readability in terms of cost. Now they’ll need to continue to work on offering the best features.

To be honest, I’ve never used Readability much. For what I needed, Instapaper and dotEpub worked just fine. Both already were free. One supported a bookmarked list of content that I could send to my ereader, and the other let me clean up an article so I could read it locally.

Readability Goes Free

Since it’s a weekly update, I don’t usually post about it. But today’s update caught my eye because it adds support for a couple devices that aren’t on the market yet.

Calibre is the leading ebook and e-reader management tool. It supports conversion from and to a wide variety of eBook formats. It will also assist you in organizing your ebook library and transferring them to your ebook reader (almost all are supported).

Along with the usual bug fixes, tweaks, and other improvements, calibre also added support for the PocketBook 611 and the Onyx Boox i62. What’s rather curious about this new support is that neither device has been released yet. Of course, Kovid has managed to pull this off several times now, so it’s no longer a surprise.

But that’s not the only news today.

You might recall that earlier this week Amazon released the tools to make their new Kindle ebook format. Those tools aren’t for everyone, and in fact they aren’t intended for the end user at all.  Luckily for us, Kovid has been working on adding KF8 support to calibre. (Somehow he managed to get an early copy of the guidelines and tools.) It’s still a work in progress, but it is coming.

And once calibre supports KF8, it won’t really mean much right away. But it will give you an extra option for converting your ebooks. And in the long run we’re going to see more complex ebooks on the Kindle, including fixed layout ebooks as well as other layouts that the Kindle doesn’t yet support.

Calibre

Calibre Update Adds PocketBook 611, Onyx Boox i62 Support – Kindle Format 8 Coming Soon

SendToKindle  acts something like a printer driver, and it lets you select print docs as a PDF and automatically email them to your Kindle account on Amazon.com. You can also right-click on a file while looking at it in a folder and send it to your Kindle account.

This app sends the files to a specific email for a particular Kindle, not your general Kindle email address. It will also archive the files in your Kindle Cloud Library so you can download them later. And what’s even better is that you can select DRM-free AZW and Mobi files and send them as is.

Now, this isn’t an amazing new conversion tool. Yes, it makes it easier to send files via email, but it only supports the files that Amazon already converted for you (DOC, txt, PDF, RTF, and so on).  But it does cut out a couple steps out of the process, which is nice.

And since it works as a printer driver, you can use it to send webpages to your Kindle. But I’m not sure that is worth doing; there are better options, including dotEpub (it now supports AZW) and Instapaper. Those 2 services remove all the ads and extra formatting that you don’t want.

But still, it’s a cool toy.

SendToKindle

Amazon Releases SendToKindle

image by Paul Biba

I got an email earlier today from a contact with Kindle PR. She wanted to bring my attention to the new Kindle Store interface.  Amazon just brought it online this week, and it was made specifically for the iPad. You can find it here: www.amazon.com/iPadKindleStore.

From the store you can choose to start reading the book immediately in your web browser with Kindle Cloud Reader, or you can choose to open the book with your Kindle for iPad app.

In case you were wondering, it doesn’t work with Android browsers (unless you first change the user agent). I checked.

BTW, did you know that you can add a link to the iPad Kindle Store to your iPad’s desktop? Click on the icon in the upper left corner that is the 4th from the left. You’ll see the option in the menu that drops down.

So first Amazon released the Cloud Reader, and now the iPad has its own Kindle Store. yep, it really does look like Amazon is trying to get around Apple. That would be good, except that Amazon is almost as much of a control freak. And to be honest, Amazon did this for their own benefit, not yours.

Amazon Launches iPad Optimized Kindle Store

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. What he did was hack the browser so it would run on Cyanogen Mod, the open source Android firmware.  There’s a version of CM for the KF, and now Silk will run on it. And it will run on other Android devices, too.

It’s already been tested on a number of different tablets and smartphones, including the ATRIX, Droid X, Galaxy Tab, but not the Galaxy Nexus (probably because it runs Android v4.0). You can find complete instructions over at the XDA Forums.

Now, some gadget bloggers are thrilled about the news but I don’t see the value.  While I do find this interesting on a technical level, Silk isn’t a very good browser. And that is especially true even when you’re using Amazon’s servers to compress the content. I’ve read any number of complaints about this browser, and there are better options out there. Opera, for example, offers the same compression support as Silk. Actually, it’s better. Did you know that you can get faster browsing on Silk if you turn off the compression?

it would actually be a little hard to list all the better alternatives, but I happen to like Dolphin and Firefox. Both are loads better than Silk.

via XDA Forums

Silk Browser Ported to Other Tablets

This is the cheaper, junky, 7″ tablet that is running Android v1.5. I really don’t think this tablet is worth buying; there isn’t much you can do with it due to the outdated version of Android. But lots of people keep buying it so I figure that I might as well point you in the right direction.

Before I continue, let me add that I still see some value in this model as an ebook reader.  It does read Epub and you can buy ebooks. It’s just that there aren’t very many apps that you can install, so I don’t think it’s a very good tablet. But if you already have this tablet then by all means install this update. It adds value.

I went looking over at SlateDroid and found a bunch of firmwares for this tablet.  I picked one which looked to be recently updated and installed it on my tablet. It works fine.

This update comes with:

• Android Market
• Youtube
• SlideMe Appstore
• and other apps

HowTo

Installing this update is simple. You’ll need a charged tablet and an SD card.

1. Download this DAT file.
2. Copy it over to the SD card in your Novel, and rename it to polaris_update.dat
3. Copy it over to your Novel a second time and rename it to S64N_SLST_KOBO_PD_20110602.dat.
4. Turn off your tablet.
5. Start the update cycle by pressing the up volume button and the power button at the same time.

I’m having you copy the file twice because some Novels will want one name and some will want the other. That’s weird, I know, but just go with it.

BTW, this tablet also comes with a number of apps that are included but not installed. The hacker wanted to give you an option, I guess.

• Kobo
• B&N
• SpareParts
• Titanium Backup

You can find these apps using the file manager. Launch it, then click the “/” button. Select the PD_Novel folder, then select the Download folder. Double click on the files to install them.

via SlateDroid

New Update for Pandigital Novel (Black 7″) Adds Android Market