The latest update to Flipboard has gone in a slightly different direction… now information providers that distribute their news via audio instead of visual graphic is included in the same free universal app.

As the update states, the audio content is in the same place you would normally go to choose new information providers. Tapping the red ribbon in the upper right corner of the screen will give you the categories with the content providers inside of each. New is the ‘Audio’ group.

Selecting a option from the Audio list presents you with a page of that provider’s audio bits. It is very much like an overview page of PodCasts. Choosing a icon will start the audio broadcast. As with any source, this is a page preview, you must tap the ‘Add’ in the upper left corner to have this group appear on your overview pages as an option to jump to quickly. For us, Flipboard is all about the visual aspect of our iPad experience so we are divided on whether everyone sees the need for audio news to be in the same app. For those that have a workspace that allows listening to their news too, the new feature extends the ‘convenience’ factor for using Flipboard on the iPad.

Line & Verse has a nice, simple layout. On opening the app, you can choose your poetry form from a clutter-free gallery. In seconds, you can start writing your haiku, English sonnet, limerick, ballad, go wild with free verse, or compose in one of the other forms (there are twelve in all). The basic structure of the poetry type lays out how many lines your chosen form traditionally has, and helpfully lays out for you the meter, number of syllables, and/or rhyming structure. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can turn off the guidelines by selecting the blueprint icon on the bottom left side of your composition (though this feature wasn’t immediately clear, and when I pressed it, I didn’t notice that the guides had vanished, leaving me to think that (a) the icon didn’t do anything and later (b) the program was bugged and took away my hints… it was working as designed, I just didn’t know what the design was at the time).

The Line & Verse app gives you a number of features. Informative help text gives you more details, though not overwhelmingly so, into the technical and historical background of poetry types, individual lines or couplets, and more. The layout is simple and easy to navigate, once you know what the icons do (there is no harm in trial and error and the icons’ purposes are intuitive). Line & Verse adds a helpful additional bar with a few of the punctuation marks you would normally have to navigate to the number and symbol modes for the keyboard. With the tap of an icon, you can view historical examples of the format in which you’re working. You can preview the poem or look up the definitions of words in the built in dictionary (just select the work as you would to copy/paste and swipe over to “Define”). Elsewise provided no rhyming dictionary, but this was a deliberate decision, which fits nicely with their omission of mechanical enforcement of structure, meter, and rhyme. Elsewise wants you to be able to break the rules if you wish—something that is part and parcel of poetry as art. You can add notes to a poem you’re working on. Finally, you can share your finished poem with your real life muse via iTunes, e-mail, paste into other documents, and save as PDF files.

Line & Verse is a great tool for the casual poet (if you’re a hardcore poet, slamming stream-of-consciousness free verse in smoky coffee bars, you either already know the various format rules or break them at every opportunity). With little to get in the way of the poetry-creating experience, if you want to emulate the bard with an accurately structured a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g sonnet, Line & Verse is the way to go.

Or rather:

Go buy Line & Verse.

Write poetry in the spring

On your iPad… um… thing.

Special Thanks to Ben for being the Poet in our group and submitting the above

Yesterday we got an update from Steve King out of Alameda California about his ‘Hand Stylus‘. Reading the name, the assumption would be that the stylus is some sort of finger thingy. Actually, he is providing a pen style stylus that appears to be physical feature rich. The knurled grip area takes us back to our drafting pencil days. The tips are replaceable by the user so that cuts down on the need to replace the whole pen if the tip goes soft. You may notice the clicker end of the stylus pen… yes, the tip is retractable so it is safe to carry in you pocket. Vital statistics: weight with pocket clip = 0.8 ounces; without pocket clip = 0.7 ounces. Length (from extended tip to top of plunger) = 133 mm or 5-3/16 inches. Width = 9.0 mm or 11/32 of an inch.

The Hand Stylus is being offered in many colors with a matte or gloss finish. Pictures can tell only part of the story, so we are looking forward to spending a day with these to see if they live up to the requirements of a true daily users. The distribution of the Hand Stylus is currently through a Kickstarter project… while it has 30 days left, it has been successfully funded multiple times over the asking amount. The project shows a July 2012 delivery date. We will try and contain ourselves waiting till then.

Well, actually you can move drawings and handwritten text around your work area if your using the free universal app Inkflow. To understand the full capabilities, we have put together an example page below to talk through.

Across the top of the page is the only tools/navigation needed in Inkflow. Gallery is the overview of created books, next is the share button and the undo/redo buttons. The arrows on either side of the ‘Page 2 of 2′ will let you navigate through the book, the right arrow has a ‘+’ to add another page. To the far right is the lasso and drawing tool.

On the actual work area, the three ‘w’ across the top where drawn the same, using the adjustment lasso, we moved the edge tall, wide and smaller to show how you can actual alter the shape of text and drawings too. That lasso tool can be seen in use at the bottom of the screen where we circled the word ‘Here’. Text can be moved to another location, resized, or tap to delete. You can use the lasso to grab any part of anything on the screen, just draw it around the little box of the two boxes on the right of the screen to move it only. Lines can be split if you use the lasso through rather than around a line.

The bold text in Inkflow is accomplished by zooming in with two finger pinch/expand, writing, then zooming out.

The list of sharing your text/drawing creations is an interesting mix. Note the last ‘Upgrade to Inkflow Plus! option, this is covered at the end of this post.

Books of text writing and drawings can be added through an overview screen. The last opened Inkflow book is shown as the first in the list.

We didn’t miss mentioning features of Inkflow in the above comments. That is what you get with the free version of the Universal app. If you want more capabilities like unlimited number of pages in a ‘book’, ink colors, an eraser, copy/paste, insert/delete pages and saving a page to the iPad photo library… you have to buy the ‘Plus’ package through an in-app purchase. That bundle of features is $4.99, the developers state that price is a discount right now down from their normal $7.99.

One issue used to be that recording with the iPhone meant the device wasn’t able to be used for other things. Running an app like the free Recording Pro has solved that problem. Recording Pro will let the iPad record the meeting in the background while you still use your iPad to look up documents, write notes or do a presentation. As a reminder, please always ask everyone in a meeting if it is OK you record the meeting, it’s the law. We have yet to have someone say no since a audio file stored away can really clear up how a decision was made months later when projects need to wrap up.

Recording Pro is just one option, but this universal app keeps it simple so it gets the job done with less overhead. It is an audio recording app, not an audio mixing app. There is a tone when the app starts/stops the recording as well there is an on-screen animation showing the recording happening… important so you don’t have to check if anything is getting done by the app in the middle of the meeting.

Recordings can be paused and restarted, as well renamed later. Management of the audio recordings out of Recording Pro can be done within the app or shared. Exporting to the desktop computer allows for meetings to be archived and retrieved when needed without having to use up all of the iPad’s internal memory. We put them on DropBox so any of the team can stream to their desktop/iPads to review.

Lucky us, the Time in Words has come to the iPad. Of course, with a lot more features than the light up box has.

The background colors of the text area can be changed by swiping across the screen left/right. Not something you can do with Time in Words when it is a bunch of letters cut into word, all back-lit.

Trying to show seconds in words would be near impossible to read. About the time you could read the word, it would be changing. Thus, seconds are show in numbers, outlined in letters. To get to seconds, tip your iPad to the side… which is to say, while looking at the screen, twist the iPad like a steering wheel of a car. Do the same to return to the regular time being shown in words.

If you read the reviews, there are many people saying the app isn’t in English. Actually, the app shows the time words in many languages… very cool! Reading the instructions, or just by trying things, it can be discovered by swiping up/down will let you cycle through the languages provided in Time in Words.

There are options on the market now that have replaced the old wire and specialized plug with USB and even wireless. Now, Brookstone introduces one of these smaller scanners (12.1″w x 4.4″d x 2.8″h and weighing just 1.44 lbs), with a iPad doc on it. No need to take the paperwork to the computer, now you can scan where the papers are. Put a scanner on the kitchen counter, open print mail or get your hands on a new recipe, turn that paper into a digital image on your iPad. We have yet to see one of these in action, but expect someone on the team to be buzzing by the mall and report back if they where able to touch one.

To use, there is a free related app that ‘sees’ the scanner, collects the scanner’s data and converts it to a 300 dpi jpeg file. We would assume these could be shared to your cloud or network storage pretty easily. Interesting, Brookstone took the time to mention that taking photos of your documents is not as good. We have good luck with Genius Scan+ software but agree that getting lighting correct in the kitchen and other household rooms that have multiple small lights that create shadows.

You may have read, everywhere, that Evernote has bought the company that developed the Penultimate app. Evernote is the free text note and image cloud service for your desktop and iPad. And, Penultimate is the bound notebooks on the iPad with pages to flip through for drawing and handwriting. In both cases, software we use every day.

The ability to save your Penultimate creations to Evernote has been around a long time. It isn’t a feature brought about from the two companies joining. When working on a note, choose the share button in the upper right corner of the page to ‘Send Page To…’, choose Evernote from the list of options (Dropbox free cloud storage is another option when needing to share).

The ‘send to Evernote’ feature in Penultimate can be tuned. Choose which folder in Evernote you want the note to go to. The Advanced option is where you choose how you want full notebooks sent to Evernote to be handed, as individual notes or all pages in the notebook to a single Evernote note. This tuning is available through the settings area and does not pop up when choosing to ‘sent to…’.

Start up the desktop Evernote, sync and the Penultimate handwritten/drawn page appears as a new note. You can move the note to another folder, save the page out to another desktop app, as well add typed text to the page.

Now the magic… by moving the handwritten iPad Penultimate note through Evernote’s cloud, a recognition engine is run against the document. This feature does NOT change the handwritten text to typed (OCR), but it does tag the handwritten words so a search will find words within the written text. Note though that the engine can be fooled by bad handwriting, it found the lower ‘river’ but not the upper one where the ‘v’ is smaller and runs into the ‘e’.

Searching in the desktop Evernote software can be done across all documents too via the entry box in the upper right corner.

There is a Evernote iPad app too. Once you sync your Penultimate notes to Evernote, they appear on the desktop software and iPad Evernote app too. Selecting the note is similar to the desktop app. If you click on the Penultimate actual note, Evernote opens it on the iPad as an image file that you can share or open in another app.

And, since the note went to the iPad Evernote app via the Evernote cloud service, the search works on the handwritten text on the iPad too! So, the Evernote app has both notes you typed directly into it and handwritten notes from Penultimate, allowing all to be grouped together per event or project.

With the Universal app Slideshow Builder, we can add the Ken Burns effects to photos in a slide show we can distribute through the cloud.

Creating a new slideshow starts with setting up the default actions all slide photos will have. Many of these can be fine tuned at the image level during your fine tuning. The start is also where you set up the name and background music.

The ‘Photos’ button makes the iPad’s photo libraries available. Choose one or many images to have in the slideshow. Depending on the default set above, Slideshow Builder will either import images of use a duplicate of your photos.

When you have your images chose and select Done, they appear as a slide show image list on the left panel of the screen. You can go back to another photo library folder on your iPad to select more images. The photo’s list order can be moved about with drag/drop. Tap an image on the left to have the image action editor become available.

Tap the image to have the Slideshow Builder image action customization box appear. This the tool you use to set where and size of the area that the slide view will start with.

For enhanced movements around the image, flip off the default slider and you will be given an expanded list of features to apply to each image. This allows to control the movement from one area of an image to an another or from a spot to full image view. The length of time a slide shows and what the transition between slides will be.

When your through editing, Slideshow Builder will compress all the images and actions into one file. That file can then be stored on the iPad you used to create it with, shared out via iCloud and/or shared directly to devices other people have. It is a great way to auto distribute a slideshow that the team needs to use in meetings or events.

Elago has everyone covered with their wide variety of iPad stylus options. Two that rose to the top of our discussion yesterday was their two new Slim and Grip styles (Both on sale right now!). Both come in a variety of colors. But, the big item for the serious stylus users is the rubber writing tip is replaceable. Not the say some companies call replaceable where your expected to rip off the old and glue on the new. Elago has their tips mounted on a threaded stud so you can just unscrew the old and twist in a new fresh tip. Notice, neither of these come with pocket clips.

Elago Stylus Slim available in 6 colors with Replaceable Tip (Extra Rubber Tip included)

Elago Stylus Grip also with 6 colors and Replaceable Tip (Extra Rubber Tip included)