Universal Mind bills iBrainstorm, its free iPad app, as a “creative collaborative tool.” The productivity offering aims to replace the whiteboard—or at least move the whiteboard onto the iPad’s touchscreen. When iBrainstorm undergoes further upgrades, I might be able to get behind that vision. Until then, you’ll want to stick with a physical whiteboard.
Essentially, iBrainstorm turns an iPad screen into a drawing surface, one with a brownish hue. You use your finger as a black dry-erase felt-tip pen to make notes, draw, or scribble down whatever you want on the …

Stop analyst bullshit and rejoice from bullshit from iPad competitors indeed!
ViewSonic thinks 45 million tablet computers will be sold in 2011 and that half of these will be iPads, according to DigiTimes.
ViewSonic itself wishes to grab 10 percent of the other, non-iPad half, getting 5 percent of the global pie. [My head is about to jam, please stop with numbers.—Ed.]
The difference between analysts and ViewSonic is that the latter wants to make a living out of their sales and analysts make a living of whatever bullshit they write. So they …

Are you looking at your screen rotation lock hardware button on the iPad? Well, remember that with iOS 4.2, due in about a month from now or even less, it’ll become a Mute hardware button.
The same happened to iPhones when their iOS 4.1 rolled out.
There’s no hope that things could do differently. Steve Jobs allegedly replied to question In IOS 4.2 for iPad is the switch on the side going to be the mute and not screen orientation lock from now on? and answered Yep, while answering Nope to question …

Moonchaser Software is announcing the release and immediate availability of Cartouche HD 1.0.1 for iPad.
Your mind will be challenged to arrange columns of hieroglyphs (glyphs) into lines of three or more.
Once completed, the lines of glyphs will disappear and the remaining glyphs will fall under gravity, and may create new lines. [If a three falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?—Ed.]
As the game progresses, the speed of descent for new columns increases.
Nothing new, many will think. Hieroglyphs are quite old, …

OpenTable has finally brought its restaurant reservation services to the iPad, taking advantage of the screen’s additional real estate to improve upon its app for the iPhone and iPod touch.
The OpenTable app offers the same search functionality as the iPhone version, including the ability to to search by restaurant name, cuisine type, neighborhood and current location. Users can search for open tables for their party within a specified geographic and time range, pull up a restaurant’s location on a map, and peruse the menu and diner reviews before making a …

Since Apple’s iPad hit the market in April, doctors at Chicago area hospitals are increasingly using the hot-selling tablet as a clinical tool, writes Monifa Thomas on the Chicago Sun-Times.
Within the next month, the University of Chicago Medical Center plans to provide iPads to all of its internal medicine residents, expanding on a pilot program launched earlier this year. Similarly, Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood has given iPads to all of its orthopedic residents as part of a pilot program.
At U. of C., for instance, plastic surgeon Dr. Julie …

Qantas Airways is going to offer iPad to passengers of its Jetstar flights.
A spokesman of Qantas said that final tests are undergoing and a broad roll across the network is to take place soon.
Most interesting: Qantas would be discussing with Apple about a more integrated network proposition, that is, on-flight entertainment services.
Australians live upside down, but maybe are on something way bigger than apps.
[Or higher, Mile High Club-style.—Ed.]
[via MarketWatch]

Air Sketch for iPad is no ordinary sketch app!
Provided you’re in the same wireless network, you can sketch on the iPad, starting from a PDF document or an image on the iPad, you can watch the same PDF document and sketching in real-time on several PCs or Macs.
All you need is an HTML5 browser (just like Safari, Firefox, Chrome and all the latest crop) and point to the iPad address plus the IP port you can change on the iPad.
Air Sketch is great for presentations in the boardroom, classroom, or …

The DodoCase for iPad ha been so successful that RickShaw Bags has designed a bag around it.
The DodoBag comes for protecting in the safest and most stylish way a DodoCase, with an iPad inside, of course. [What is there inside the ipad, then?—Ed.]
Inside the DodoBag, a padded pocket specifically designed for the DodoCase leaves plenty of room for battery chargers, iPhones or iPods, earbuds, newspapers, pens, pencils, erasers, wallets and the rest of everything.
The DodoBag is made by rugged Cordura nylon inside and out, has a nice Velcro flap closure, …

Although in Chinese, the video below well deserves a look: a fake Steve Jobs, a chinese one namely, holds a press conference yesterday in Hong Kong to celebrate the launch of the MTR Mobile (Hong Kong’s transportation ) subway app (check here the app, if you dare!).

The clone at the conference was local celebrity Law Kar-ying; Law seems to have studied the man he was emulating quite well: he gets everything right, from the gulps of bottled water to the Levis and turtleneck.
Great!
[Via Tuaw and winandmac.com]

Keep your iPad always at hand in the most literal sense of the phrase, with the line of products from Hand-e-holder.
The Michigan-based company thought of a two-parts device: an adhesive disk to be put on the back of the iPad and a strap that resembles a biking glove and firmly stays around the hand.
Strap and disk together secure the iPad even if held with just one hand and ensure the iPad doesn’t fall to the floor in case of distractions or accidents.
The strap even has a swivel head that lets …

Regexecution is a reference for regular expressions (commonly used in *nix, Mac OS X, PHP, Perl and a lot more programming languages).
Available as an iPad app, allows full character searching and real-time testing.
As anyone involved into programming and Mac OS X scripting, we deal almost every day with regular expressions, those somehow cryptic and pretty concise language expressions that provide great help in getting text and number pattern out of messy data.
It’s common in Perl, *nix shell scripting (hence the Mac OS X), PHP, Python, Ruby and more, so you’d …

A father+son team from Park Slope decided NASA wasn’t doing enough to document the stratosphere, and decided to take matters into their own hands.
After testing their “19-inch helium filled weather balloon” in Brooklyn, Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max headed upstate and launched the device, complete with a camera and an iPhone, into space… nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth’s surface.
The craft was an 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone (!).
The camera recorded video …

Julian Horsey at Geeky Gadgets showed an innovative and comfortable way to make iPhone and iPad work in collaboration: the iPad iPhone Connector Clip!
That’s a DIY project made with plastic extrusion, a Dremel drill, superglue, enamel paint and sufficient chutzpah to put everything in place with good precision.
The same procedure allows for two iPhones, or two iPads, to be mounted together. Are there apps for that?

Signs Studios has released Surfwrite, an app that allows a web browser and a rich-text editor run side by side.
This is one of those apps I get addicted to: I’m now able to browse several web pages at once (with tabbed browsing) and, without exiting the app, I’m able to write down reviews, articles, notes or whatever.

The text I’m editing right now (this review!) can be used as a mail attachment (even with on-the-fly PDF conversion) or to update a Twitter or Facebook status.
Surfwrite, IMHO, is a dramatic improvement in …

Alessio Nanni is a young and talented [and handsome too, says my fiancée, ‘the very opposite of you’.—Ed.] Italian pianist.
His last experiment puts music and sound together, recalling Wassily Kandinsky or Jean-Michel Jarre. It’s called Synaesthesia and is based on his own programming language, created to associate colors and shapes to sound.
Don’t point your iPad to Alessio’s site though: the performance is available only through Flash.
It comes out anyway that Flash is just a wrapper for a Vimeo movie, freely enjoyable on the iPad.
Truly a lesson to be learned and …

Did you have a look at TouchUp for the iPad by RogueSheep lately?
For US$ 2.99 (€ 2.39) you can get one of the best retouching package currently on sale at the App Store.
Easy to use, and still ready for pros thanks to add-on packs of advanced effects, TouchUp applies over a dozen effects in layers to photos.
TouchUp is well conceived for the iPad interface, since you can brush any effect on or off with a tap and slide of your finger.
The app imports photos from Photo Library, or Flickr’s Photo …

Jim Lee found the iPad a good way to further express his comic art.
He sketched Wonder Woman on his iPad while getting a haircut, and he drew on a fan’s iPad instead of on paper, during a convention.
But Jim is for sure the only artist to have done a great job on the wrong side of the iPad. Provided that wrong means doesn’t go away when turning power off.
This unique iPad could be won by someone lucky attending ComiXology in New York City area, at booth 2127.
[via Macenstein]

Mercedes-Benz enjoyed its iPad-on-board summer pilot program and took decision to expand it to all 355 dealerships across planet Earth.
Basically, a dealer had to get a prospect Mercedes buyer to finalize purchase and, often, the prospect got cold feet while getting away from the dream car and closer to the actual expense.
The pilot program instead allowed 40 dealers to complete a sell on the iPads, in front of the vehicle.
Andreas Hinrichs, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz Financial, evaluated the experiment as overwhelmingly positive and announced that iPads will be …

Giving iPads to 18 Canadian ministers and five senior staff members in the province of Saskatchewan is going to cost about CDN$ 23,000, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
However, the government plans to heavily cut costs of printing and paper, so to save 200 percent of that figure by a year.
We weren’t used to Canadian politicians being so smart. [With the exception of Canadian common people, especially blonde gals mad for awesome hockey players like my cutier brother.—Ed]
[via The Unofficial Apple Weblog via CBCnews]