Avid Studio for the iPad enables you to quickly arrange your clips in the Storyboard, make precision edits using the Timeline, and add high-quality transitions, effects, and soundtracks to your movie footage.

The Avid Studio app combines a storyboard and timeline interface, where users can arrange clips in the storyboard, then use the timeline for precise cuts. It also offers touch controls not found in the desktop, like the ability to resize and rotate titles with a gesture.

Avid Studio is available now on iTunes app store for (a mere) US$ 3.99

With your iPad as your karaoke stage and studio, you can sound like a pro, record your stellar performances, and share your favorites with one touch!

Soulo’s innovative features get you inside the song like never before.
SING with built-in pitch enhancement so you’re always in key.
Turn the lead vocals up if you want to hear them or down if you’re ready to take the lead.
Add pro voice effects like Reverb, Tone, and Echo.
RECORD your performances, or make music videos with iPad2’s camera, then SHARE your favorites on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter with one touch!

Features:
- Give star-worthy performances with Soulo’s pro voice effects:
- Real-time, pro-style pitch enhancement so you’re always in tune!
- Reverb adds richness to your voice.
- Echo adds depth.
- Tone adds fullness and clarity.
- Add the Soulo Mic for a full-on karaoke experience! Digital Wireless and Wired versions available.

- Key info means pitch enhancement happens in real time, and lyrics stream with the music so you won’t miss a beat.

Soulo Karaoke is Available on iTunes store.

The Indicommons application provides a new way to access the wealth of historical imagery and information from around the world that is found in the Commons. No matter where you are, you can browse through the various institutions’ collections, or search the Commons for items of interest. If you have a Flickr account, you can also help enrich the Commons by adding tags and comments to the various Commons items directly from the application.

Where exactly does Commons come from?
Here’s a quick Commons primer even though you’re a Flickr fan:

Indicommons represents outreach from the Flickr community beyond Flickr, to broaden knowledge of The Commons among the public and civic institutions around the world and to increase participation by the public in the Commons. The name, Indicommons (pronounced “in de commons”) derives from the Latin indico, to make publicly known, and commons, the old English word chosen by Flickr for its Commons project, meaning the land held in common by the people of a town.

A Short feature list for the Indicommons app (supporting both iPad and iPhone/iPod touch):

• Support for Flickr galleries – add photos to your galleries on Flickr to share your curations with the rest of the world.
• Support for video – now you can watch the videos that have been uploaded to the Commons
• Image caching – recently viewed photos are now cached locally to improve load times.
• Support for iOS4 multitasking

Check more on Flickr and Indicommons on iTunes.

More figures show that on December 26, online sales rose by 27.8 percent compared with 2010.
Eyeing online sales across 500 retailers on December 25 and 26, IBM’s latest holiday benchmark report found a surge in cybershopping from mobile devices.
A full 16 percent of all online traffic recorded by IBM came from mobile devices, a surge of 109 percent from last year.
The great – and strange news come from the fact that purchases from mobile devices reached 11.3 percent, an increase of 165 percent from December 26, 2010.

What about iOS?

Among all online purchases made on Christmas Day, 7 percent were done through an iPad and 6.4 percent through an iPhone, giving iOS devices 13.4 percent of all online purchases that day.

Other stats from IBM’s Dec. 26th Benchmark Update:

• Online sales grew by 16.4 percent over Christmas Day 2010
• 18.3 percent of all online sessions on a retailer’s site were initiated from a mobile device, up from 8.4 percent on Christmas Day 2010—an increase of 117.8 percent
• Sales from mobile devices reached 14.4 percent versus 5.3 percent on Christmas Day 2010—an increase of 172.9 percent.

Android devices accounted for 5 percent of all online purchases on Christmas Day. And moving to the next day, the iPad again led with 6 percent of all online purchases, followed by the iPhone with 5.8 percent and Android with 4.6 percent.

Overall, online sales on Christmas Day grew by 16.4 compared with last year. Among all the online traffic analyzed by IBM, 18.3 came from a mobile device, a jump of 118 percent from Christmas of 2010. And actual online purchases from mobile devices hit 14.4 percent, a leap of 173 percent from last Christmas.

One would expect many of those online purchases to be music, apps, and other digital content for mobile devices. But John Squire, chief strategy officer at IBM Smarter Commerce, told Forbes that IBM looked only at purchases from retail stores through the mobile browser.

(By the way, it’s funny to go back to our October 2010 post and read the “2011 iPad selling forecast” by so-called experts!)

[Via Forbes]

By the way, Mac Plus case went for some 9 bucks on eBay….

[Via TechMoan and Hirac]

Box.net gives you from 5 GB (free) up to 1 TB (or unlimited, paid) storage space to enjoy team collaboration, cloud computing or just an easy way to backup files, photos and your stuff (check here for correct pricing and plans).

This kind of services seem the perfect companion to iPads and iPhones: without even using iTunes syncing (nor iCloud) you can have the same photos, videos, PDFs (on iBooks, for examples) wherever and whenever you want it!

Here at theiFile.com we use it for almost everything, including work!

Today, Box.net just updated the iOS apps with the most awaited features of it all: direct upload of photos and videos.

You’re now able to take a photos with the iPhone/iPad2 camera, save it online and get a shortlink that you can send via e-mail or share on Facebook.

It’s that easy!

Download Box.net on iTunes here for free.

Today, Flipboard becomes available for iPhone and with a stable release too!

A new personalized-reading app for the iPhone is being launched by Flipboard, the design-centric company that led the customized-news charge with its app for iPad.

News can be rapidly browsed with a thumb flick from the hand holding the iPhone, like a digital Rolodex.

As you may expect, signing up a (free) account on Flipboard bring the same content, RSS-feeds and windows arrangements and setup on all your iOS devices, be it an iPad or an iPhone so it’s a setup-once and leave it in the cloud process!

It’s the kind of thing you’ll ask yourself how you lived without!

Flipboard for iPhone is available on iTunes for free here!

Now, celebrating a 25 years span of (fantastic) solo career, Sting releases a “message in an iPad”: an appumentary (!) – sorry – a free app that combines music, concert footage, photographs and videos.

The central feature: footage from Sting’s performance last month at New York’s Beacon Theatre, including duets with guests like Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder.
But the app, which is only available for the iPad, is also intended to serve as a retrospective of the artist’s entire solo career.
In all the app features over four hours of music videos, concert footage, interviews and more.

Introducing the Sting 25 app, Sting itself performed the song Fragile, dedicating it to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and saying, “In some way he’s created our future.”

This app comes in at a critical moment for music industry, where apps represent largely uncharted territory in music.

Recently the singer Björk married songs from her album “Biophilia” to a series of spacey video game-style interactives.

Otherwise, few artists’ apps have grabbed mainstream attention—most that exist are rudimentary, compiling tour dates, Twitter feeds and the like for mobile devices.
Artist managers and labels have held off on attempts to develop ambitious apps because the payoffs are unclear.

Sting’s approach seems so innovative just like the very first CD-ROM for Mac by Peter Gabriel 20 years ago or so…

But how much did it cost to make? What’s behind such a new-media production?

More than one million dollars. This is according to the Wall Street Journal and TheAppSide.

“Having recently released a 25th anniversary Sting box set, the singer’s label, Universal Music Group, and publisher, EMI, say they eagerly supported the app as a high-tech showcase for Sting’s catalog,” explains the newspaper.

“The music companies offered up the copyright clearances required, but didn’t chip in on the production budget. Those costs, in the low seven figures, were primarily covered by sponsors American Express and Chevrolet.”

The app was made by New York firm Radical Media, and includes concert footage, photos, handwritten lyrics and diary entries, and 360-degree spinning instruments. Which would explain why it cost so much to make. Hats off to whoever struck the sponsorship deal to cover most of those costs.

Whatever this may turn out, it’s a great app, a great appumentary made in a great way by a great musician of our time!

Warning: the app is 442 MB, this means you should rely on a strong Wi-Fi connection before attempting to download it and, sometimes, it may slow down a bit since it’s quite huge but… it’s all worthwhile!

Get Sting 25 for free right now on iTunes.

So what are we waiting for?
What are those features, seen by many as Steve’s latest legacy?

Better Notifications: iOS 5 will include the new Notification Center, which can be accessed by swiping your finger downward on any iPhone screen. You can customize which notifications appear, including emails, texts, Game Center updates and weather. The point is to make notifications less like that interrupting cow in your knock knock joke.

iMessage: The new messaging feature allows iOS users to communicate over 3G and Wi-Fi with any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running iOS 5. You will be able to send photos and video, receive message delivery and read receipts, and see when others are typing. iMessages are synced to all of your devices, so you can pick up a conversation where you left off. Apple also promises your messages will be encrypted end-to-end for security.

Reminders: For the forgetful among us, reminders combines to-do lists and reminders. The feature can alert people to the simple things such as, “Pick up your dry cleaning,” or, “Your mother-in-law has been at the airport for an hour, prepare to sleep on the couch.” You can also set up a geofence around an area, that will set off a reminder once you leave that space. Reminders sync with Outlook, Apple’s iCal and iCloud so that they’re available across all of your devices.

Twitter Integration: Forstall said, ““We have integrated Twitter deeply into the OS. We have integrated Twitter into many of the built-in apps.” You only have to log in to Twitter once in your iOS device’s Settings screen. Then you can use it across the built-in iOS 5 apps and share websites from the Safari, YouTube, Photos app and more.

Newsstand: All of your favorite news publications, such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and Allure, are aggregated into a special folder on your home screen iOS device called newsstand. Apps purchased in the Newsstand section of the App Store automatically download to this folder. While you’re going about your business, Newsstand continues to download new content from your subscriptions.

Camera: When you need to whip out your camera and grab that fleeting shot of a seagull flying in front of the setting sun, you don’t want to wait to unlock your phone and access the camera. Apple’s answer to that is a shortcut in iOS 5 that doesn’t require you to enter a lock code to take a picture — just double click on the home screen and hit the Camera button. iOS 5 will also have new camera features, including auto focus and exposure lock, a rule-of-thirds grid overlay, pinch-to-zoom and the ability to use the volume up button as a shutter release button. On the other side, there are finally editing options to clean up pictures after you take them, including red eye removal, cropping and auto levels.

Game Center: We’re all about content discovery lately, and gaming is the next frontier. iOS 5 is rolling out game and friend discovery to its over 67 million Game Center users. A sequel to Infinity Blade by Epic Games is also coming out, made specifically for the new iPhone 4S.

New Safari: Forstall says, “”This next feature is one of my favorite: Tab browsing.” Tabbed browsing is just as it sounds, a way to switch between pages you’re reading simultaneously, like you do on a desktop. If you don’t have time to read a page, you can now “save” that page for later with the Safari Reader tool. Saved articles will be synced across all of your devices with iCloud, so you can pick up an article on your iPad where you left off on your iPhone.

Mail: The iOS Mail app will be more like a traditional email inbox! iOS 5 allows you to flag messages, search your whole inbox and write emails with rich text formatting, including bold and underlined fonts.

PC Free: Cast off the chains tying your mobile to your computer! With iOS 5, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users will no longer have to physically connect to a computer in order to activate their new devices or download important iOS updates. And with iCloud, you can backup photos, email, and other data wirelessly as well.

Check Apple’s iOS page for more tips!

Facebook for iPad, now available in the iOS App Store (update: it’s still rolling out), looks much like the version that leaked in July. The app is designed primarily as a consumption experience, which is why the app emphasizes photos. Photos take up the entire screen, and users can pinch to zoom in on them. Navigating through a photo album is done simply by swiping left or right.

The Facebook iPad App includes a left-hand navigation bar for accessing the News Feed, photos, messages, Groups and settings. Notifications, chat, status updates, search and Facebook’s other key features made the cut as well.

The app does offer a few new features. Users can play their favorite Facebook games in full-screen mode, thanks to the launch of the Facebook Platform for mobile devices and iOS. Games from EA, Zynga and more will support additional features such as Facebook Credits.

Facebook didn’t forget about video, either — Facebook for iPad supports HD video and Airplay, so users can watch Facebook videos through their Apple TVs or their other Apple devices.

Check Facebook for iPad here on Facebook and here on iTunes.

[Via Mashable]

A quick fix: delete, then re-install the app from the App Store.

Click here for more details.

The information you’re required to enter is simple:

• select your departure and return locations and dates,

• choose your passengers,
• tap Search.

Skyscanner will search for the cheapest travel dates, provide details on itineraries, and let you book directly from the app via phone or Exploretrip.com.

You can create a favorite flight to reference in the future in order to check for updated prices.
Plus, your recent searches are listed at the bottom of the search screen.
Want to avoid layovers?
Swipe the Direct Flights Only button to search for flights! ;-;

BlogFire (free) is a mobile aggregator that does just that, but pushes notifications to your device for any blog site or feed that you manually add.

The app won’t bombard you with alerts if you don’t want it to, because you can pause notifications and mute sounds.

The Quiet Hours setting prevents BlogFire from notifying you about new posts.
You’re also able to determine the time period between receiving new alerts.
Sharing posts is easy, as well. To do so, select an individual blog post and tap the share icon (which looks like an arrow shooting from a box).
Tap More (or Facebook) and choose a service such as Twitter or Delicious.

Another bonus: you don’t have to set up (yet another) an account to use BlogFire.

CamDictionary ($4.99) from IntSig Information packs several features into a single app.
Whether you’re an international traveler or language translator, CamDictionary can recognize and translate text that you place in front of your iPhone’s rear camera.

Using viewfinder in the app, steady the device and pause the viewfinder, so you can tap a character, word, phrase, or sentence.
CamDictionary can translate up to 16 languages including Korean, traditional Chinese, Dutch, German, and more. It also supports Bing and Google translations between 54 languages.
You can hear the pronunciation of 18 different languages, thanks to the text-to-speech feature.

In addition, CamDictionary saves recent history, making it possible to check offline the previous 500 entries.

Mashable reports on this topic quoting Norman Winarsky, longtime search expert and co-founder of a personal assistant startup (SRI) that was acquired by Apple.

“Tablets enable a full, interactive experience that involves not only text, but potentially speech and interactions,” he says.

Search on tablets will incorporate how you engage with your tablet’s touchscreen, front and back cameras and microphone. “Where are you looking? What are you seeing? How much time are you spending reading?,” he says as ways to imagine new avenues for search on tablets.

What’s next?

The future of search, as pioneered by the tablet’s form factor, is the dynamic interaction among all of your senses, foretells Winarsky.

Winarsky’s predictions aren’t all that far fetched, especially if you align yourself with the camp that believes that tablets will replace laptops and PCs as the primary devices for personal computing purposes.

Forrester, for one, estimates that tablet sales will total 195 million between 2010 and 2015, with tablet sales eclipsing laptop sales by 2015. Apple is currently dominating the market; it alone sold 9.25 million iPads in its fiscal third quarter — the company’s best quarter ever.

What is the most used search engine on iPad alone?
Check this interesting report (and graph) from SearchTerms:

[Via Mashable]

Now the wait is over! iPad owner can now download the very iPad-only Skype version on iTunes App Store!

Was it worth the wait? Let’s see.

Skype for iPad leverages the huge screen estate, enabling a completely different communication experience with the world-leading VoIP software, be it with video-calling features or in chat mode.
Some features have been customized for the iPad-version, making it somehow unique among all others (PC and Mac included): it’s quite basic but it’s fully functional – with some little extras.

In fact, you’re now able to send chat messages in the middle of a video-call, use emoticons, easily find your contacts by means of a “contact grid” with large-size avatar pictures.
Right now, there’s no way to get a list-view of your contacts if you happen, like us, to have a looong list of them.

Browsing through recent converstation is now a lot easier, thanks to a enhanced one-key searching feature.
Paid services like SMS sending, are now a lot easier to use: you just open a contact and select Send SMS

Moreover, iPad 2 users, will enjoy the fact that both camera, front and back, are now available for voice and video calling!

Skype for iPad works on both 3G and Wi-Fi networks: that’s the biggest difference with Facetime, right now, which needs a Wi-Fi-only connection.

Call quality is definitely good, even on 3G connection, just like it was on the iPhone version; we’re now using Skype for iPad on a daily basis: all in all it was really worth the wait!

Download Skype for iPad now for free in iTunes Store!

Check and download all iPad wallpapers here!

Today they’re announcing the new content guide!

Tap on the red ribbon at the top of your Flipboard to open the Content Guide. Here you can quickly browse great content, add social networks, or use the search bar to find any topic, blog, or person you want to check-out on Flipboard.

That’s cool for most users that still haven’t moved to the Facetime side of modern communication!

ZDNet has been able to preview the iPad-specific version of the Skype app and published several new pics along some pretty info.

Performance issues and worries?

Although Skype for iPad will work on both iPad versions, you’ll only be able to broadcast video from the iPad 2, since it has a front-facing camera.
You can still receive video on an original iPad. Skype for iPad will work on both Wi-Fi and 3G, but it was quick to point out that video quality might take a hit on slower 3G connections, and we were quick to verify that Skype quality is often subpar over 3G.

Check here for more info and here for full Skype for iPad preview.

Available – for free – starting June 28th!

Some interesting facts:

Guess what? No iPad 2 competition – yet!

[Via BusinessInsider]