Apple is providing a multimedia ebook of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine for free. The book has audio, limited animation, and video clip components to it. It is categorized as a children’s book. But, any Beatles fan will probably get a kick out of it.
Navigation through the pages feels a lot jerkier than other iBook ebooks on my iPad 2. I do not see this kind of page turning hesitation when reading conventional iBook ebooks.
Smule’s CTO & co-founder, Ge Wang, makes it look easy in the video embedded above. But, Smule’s new Magic Guitar, presents challenges even if you know how to play a real guitar.
I found I wanted to see actual guitar strings to give an indication of where fingers should rest while waiting for song notes to appear. The app is designed for the iPhone and iPod touch. It doesn’t scale for play on an iPad.
The app has achievements, badges and leaderboards to let you compete with friends if you like. Smule says that the app’s songbook offers a huge catalog of legendary artists including The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, KISS, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sublime, Credence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Styx, Poison, Bruno Mars, Train and more. The app is free and comes with a couple of free songs. In-app purchases of song packs range from $2.99 to $9.99.
INRIX Traffic is a free app for iPhone and iPad that uses traffic information from fleet vehicles and individual app users to provide near real-time traffic information. If you take a look at the comments for the app, you’ll note what appears to be a lot of irate users because of what appears to be a battery drain caused by using the app.
INRIX’s PR firm sent out this email to explain the situation:
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Running OneNote for iPhone on an iPad results in a message telling you that an iPad version of the app is available. Unfortunately, there is no sign of it in Apple’s iTunes App Store. It might have been better if Microsoft had made the app a single universal one.
The missing iPad app will probably be resolved in a few days. However, more troubling is that the free OneNote for iPhone app now has a 500 note limitation. You have to pay $4.99 for an in-app purchase to get past the limit. I wonder if this is a wise move for Microsoft given the ability of other most established cloud notebook services and apps like Evernote and Springpad.
Microsoft Director of Programming for the Microsoft Xbox Live Larry Hyrb (aka “Major Nelson”) announced just hours ago that:
Introducing the official Xbox LIVE iOS App
So, I downloaded and installed the free app on my iPad. But, oops it is already broken. When it gets working on my iPad, it is supposed to do the following:
Flipboard is now a Universal app that runs on the iPhone as well as the iPad. I think people who started using it on the iPad will need a bit of relearning to do to get comfortable with it on the iPhone. But, that said, it is great to be able to quickly scan through interesting links provided by people I follow on Twitter and Facebook. Now, if only Flipboard could help me sort through my messy Google+ stream.