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Want to get a good night’s sleep? Then best switch off that iPad well before you turn

A lawyer hunted down a suspected thief who stole his iPad – after police refused to

Since the iPad’s release in April of 2010, the device has found its way into both homes and classrooms. It’s amazing to see the number of educational apps available on the market. Some mix games with reading, while others focus strictly on promoting literacy. It seems that most all children love the ability to interact with mobile devices, but can these devices be a learning tool particularly well suited for kids with autism? For many apps, the answer is yes.
During Apple’s March 2 special event announcing the iPad 2, Steve Jobs introduced a video featuring a 10-year-old boy with autism, Leo, using the

The day the tsunami struck Japan, Apple launched its tsunami-seller, the iPad2. My calendar for 3.11.11 — the date of the massive 9.0 earthquake — was steady:
1.Write
2.Teach
3.5 p.m.: Stand in line for iPad2
When the first iPad was unleashed, like Harry Potter’s magical wand, but for adults — I stood in line for three hours to buy the shiny portal for my parents. The hype around the iPad2 this spring is almost unbearable. And, like a true APPLEaholic, I was driven by “the hunger.” After all, it was Eve who first ate that apple promising the Tree of Knowledge.
I count myself among the disciples to Steve Job’s elegant technology, his sleek, design style born of his calligraphy training, his artistry and eloquence that make Microsoft geeks look like dunderheads — or worse,

Soon after Amazon announced it was selling 143 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers, a writer friend with a new iPad told me she had gotten rid of five shelves of books. “They were so dusty! I hadn’t even read most of them. Why was I keeping them for so long?”
It made me take a good look at my own unread books, one of which was a wormhole back to college. My girlfriend back then was in love with the Romantic poets, so one birthday I gave her a mammoth new biography of

Charlie Sheen has called those in line for the iPad 2 “trolls” – setting off a wave of queues for the iPad 3. The iPad 3 is not due out until November, but that is not stopping these hearty souls with tiger blood running through their veins.
“Why would I want a half-baked product that Apple withheld key features from?” asked Jermaine Korla, a college student who has the 214th place in the iPad 3 line on 5th Avenue and 59th Street. Korla and the others are hoping to pressure Apple to release the iPad 3 ahead of schedule and are threatening to borrow tactics from protesters in Egypt and other countries.
Many have called for a “Release the 3″ Day at 1 infinite loop at Apple Headquarters in Silicon

The Apple iPad 2 was launched by the so-called “rockstar CEO” Steve Jobs today in San Francisco to a broad reception of live blogging, tweeting and “cloud” participation online. It will give shareholders a brief moment of comfort to see that Steve is still fit and well despite his medical leave.
While there has been a lot of online coverage of events and conferences in recent time, the live blogging and tweeting around the iPad 2 launch shows that we really are living in a real-time ‘news’ consumption age. The concept that you can have a press release to ‘spin’ an announcement anymore is just ridiculous. You are dealing with real-time assessment of your brand, your products and capability

Live Blogging — keep coming back
More on Twitter. Follow @LarryMagid
San Francisco: Steve Jobs is on stage at the Apple event in San Francisco talking about Apples success in true form. He said that Apple just shipped its 100 millions iPhone. Said that everyone of our “post-PC products” has been a blockbuster.
Jobs said that there are now 65,000 apps specifically tailored f.”or the

David Pogue, tech guru and columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote an article about his six-year-old son’s iPad addiction. I was laughing to myself while reading it because I can relate to the constant requests to become entranced by the flashing lights and bright colors, and the yearning to grasp and hunch over an electronic device. I have a six-year-old son as well.
The difference is that my son’s would-be addiction is to my iPhone or my husband’s iPod Touch, either or, depending on who is more willing to relinquish the shiny, sparkly

Q&A with Joe Weber, CEO FlyingWord.
FlyingWord is creating a line of books that immerses the reader in a totally new experience. It’s not a matter of adding video or audio streams, as on typical DVDs. FlyingWord takes a book and focuses on the beautiful nature of the story, the value of the education, and the nature of the illustrations, then extend them several steps further.
To get a sense of the reading experience, click to see the Treasure Island YouTube video. The experience includes Robert Louis Stevenson’s fantastic book, a wonderful audiobook, and the first ever use of 3D illustrations, and physics interactions in a full-length

This is an edited version of a post that originally ran at The Daily Marauder
Taking a stance on Flipboard vs. The Daily, two iPad applications which supply news content to their audiences, highlights the friction between old media and new and distinguishes the ways two companies are bringing information to users. Flipboard is a social magazine launched in July 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll touted by Apple as iPad App of the Year and one of TIME’s top 50 innovations of 2010. The Daily launched in February 2011 by News Corp., designed to be the first iPad-only newspaper.
The Secret Sauce
Flipboard
“Flipboard is the ‘platformifiication’ of publishing, open to anyone who wants to publish through

Theologians, psychologists and sociologists agree about the benefits — spiritual, emotional and communal — of confession.
Revealing our sins and missteps to another person, whether in writing or in person, helps alleviate guilt and its accompanying anxieties, leading to happier, healthier living.
Most recently, in what appears to be an unprecedented move, the Vatican gave its imprimatur to a thoroughly modern take on the ancient act of confession when one of its American bishops gave the thumbs up to “Confession: A Roman Catholic App,” a new application for the iPhone and iPad that allows users to prepare for and simulate the experience of entering a church confessional booth.
Developed by the Indiana software company Little iApps LLC, the “Confession” app — which sells for $1.99 via iTunes — leads users through a “personalized examination of conscience” with “password protected profiles and a step-by-step guide to the sacrament.”
Little iApps developer Patrick Leinin has said he was inspired create the “Confession” app (and eventually other Catholic-friendly programs) by Pope Benedict XVI’s World Communications Day address where the pontiff endorsed the spiritual value of “new media” saying “if used wisely, [it] can contribute to the satisfaction of the desire for meaning, truth and unity which remain the most profound aspirations of each human being.”
Since the pope was the inspiration for Leinen’s app, he sought a nihil obstat (meaning, in Latin, “nothing hinders”) from his local bishop, the Most Rev. Kevin Rhodes, which says, essentially, the app is theologically kosher.
While the “Confession” app received the bishop’s seal of approval, the Vatican cautioned users against thinking that it could be a substitute for physically entering an actual confessional with an actual priest.
“One may not speak in any sense of confessing via iPhone,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said in a statement earlier this

Like a morning paper, the cover story of The Daily focuses on yesterday’s news.
I really wanted to like The Daily, the new iPad-only newspaper from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The idea of a 21st century newspaper that combines, text, graphics, video and social networking in a singe app is very appealing. And the iPad is a great delivery platform for the content. I was also impressed by the effort News Corp put into this

Halfway through a year-long pilot study using iPads instead of textbooks, a San Francisco eighth grade algebra class is showing signs of every teacher’s dream: the spark of engagement in her students’ eyes.
Jeannetta Mitchell, a veteran teacher with 20 years of experience, is encouraged by what she sees so far. “This is not a magic wand,” she says. “This just makes it more fun for them to learn. Nobody’s just sitting there writing down the answer, saying ‘I don’t know how I got there.’ They know how they got there.”
During my visit to her class last Friday, it was apparent that she was a big part of the reason they understood those

11-inch MacBook Air (Credit: Apple)
Apple, in its earnings report last week, announced that Mac sales in its most recent quarter were up by 23 percent over the same quarter last year despite the popularity of the iPad, which competes with personal computers. Overall, PC sales were up only 3.1 percent in that quarter, according to Gartner.
One reason Mac sales surged is two new MacBook Air laptops, which in my opinion are the best portable PCs on the market.
I was an avid Mac user during the 1980s but have mostly used Windows for the past 20 years because I had a strong preference for lightweight laptops from Lenovo, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard.
As a frequent business traveler, I need a small and light notebook PC, which is why I’ve been carrying around a 2.9-pound Lenovo X300 for the past two years. And I do carry it around. I had it in my bag constantly during the recent Consumer Electronics Show, for example, pulling it out on a moment’s notice to record a radio interview, access the Web, edit a photo or a video, or fire up Microsoft Word to work on a column.
But on returning from CES, I thought it was time to try out an even lighter notebook PC, so I borrowed both an 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air from Apple to try

Lots of pundits took their potshots at the iPad as it was first coming to market in early last year, with even video sketches on YouTube mocking the name as some kind of high tech version of a feminine hygiene product.
Now, a year later, with Apple reportedly having sold 15 million of the devices, no one’s laughing — at either the product or the name. The high technology industry as a whole, instead, is realizing that Apple’s not just changing the game of what was perceived as pretty much a niche market, but they’re in the process of renaming the game.
For the past few years, since tech companies have been R&D’ing the future of the computer, there’s been a lot of focus on tablets. Microsoft’s been yapping about one for years. As has HP, Samsung, Dell and anyone else with a dog in the

After six seasons starring on the hit MTV series, “The Hills,” and a steamy TV commercial for Carl’s. Jr. last summer, Audrina Patridge stepped into the dance arena with an impressive stint on ABC’s hit show “Dancing with the Stars.” Up next, she teams up with legendary producer Mark Burnett to produce a new reality series, which will introduce fans to her family, and show a different side of her life.
Audrina shared a few of her favorite travel hits and misses with me, just as she was sliding back into reality, after a well-deserved vacation in Australia over the

The Financial Times is enjoying a big rise in digital revenue, the publisher announced on Friday.

read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

Last week, I attended my first Consumer Electronics Show, the massive exhibition of all things technology in Las Vegas. Not unlike Sin City itself, it’s something everyone should see once, just for the jaw-dropping sensory overload. With 140,000 attendees walking 35 football fields of show floor, it’s no surprise that a booth showing state-of-the-art recliners looked like a podiatric casualty ward.
For someone whose particular interest is children and media, it was easy to get lost in the redwood forest of iPad cases, tablets and 3D TVs, and miss the saplings of innovation meant just for young people.
Fortunately, the Kids@Play conference within CES offers a coherent platform for these devices and their followers. 2011 panels covered virtual worlds, interactive learning and — the session I moderated — the rise of motion-based devices and content.
Hardware and software that key off of children’s activity are important for two big reasons.
First, with growing attention to childhood obesity, it’s encouraging to see screens that aren’t “lean back” or “lean forward”; they’re “jump up and dance around.” This movement (pun fully intended) may have begun with the Nintendo Wii, but new devices — like Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox 360 and gesture-recognition technology from Omek Interactive — liberate kids from controllers and wires, engaging the entire body and upping the intensity.
The first time I tried Kinect, I swayed tentatively to control my whitewater

The British Library unveiled its “Treasures” app this week for the iPhone and Android, allowing people to hold some of the real treasures of Western Civilization in their hand (or hands — if you have an iPad). The app gives you access to high-resolution photos of more than a hundred of the museum’s most revered documents, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original copy of the Magna Carta, and pages from Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.
Being the geek that I am, I paid the two dollars for the app (which is a lot for me — I won’t even shell out 99 cents for the full version of “Angry Birds”). I was sold by the access to the museum’s literary manuscripts, including its thousand-year-old manuscript of the epic poem “Beowulf.” It’s arguably the first work of English Literature — though, as it’s written in Middle English, you probably won’t be able to read it (here’s a sample):
It turns out that the app only features about a dozen literary works, so you’d better be interested in the museum’s other treasures to make the it

Tablets like the iPad are great for consuming information but what about creating? (Photo Credit: Apple, Inc.)
If there was one thing obvious at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it’s that just about every company in the consumer electronics industry envies the success of Apple’s iPad.
Tablet PCs have been around for more than a decade. But until Apple came out with its little iPad, they simply never gained any traction. Microsoft certainly tried with various versions of its Windows tablet editions, starting with a version based on Windows XP. And at last year’s CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype of a Windows “slate” PC from Hewlett-Packard that was supposed to be aimed at consumers, but when it finally emerged in October 2010, it was an enterprise device released with little

LAS VEGAS — The iPad App for the New York Times has had 1.5 million downloads since it launched in April, says Ray Pearce, who heads circulation for the newspaper. We interviewed him at CES last week. This number puts it ahead of weekly circulation for The Times which is about 950,000. Sunday is 1.3 million.While only some who download the App read the paper on their iPad, surely far fewer than those who read the print edition, the number of downloads represents a major move to digital consumption as a “deep reading” experience says

For years now, Apple Computer has held a firm grip on the consumer electronics gadget market. With huge hits like the iPod MP3 player, the iPod Touch media player, the iPhone cellular phone device, and lately the iPad, Apple is consistently hitting the consumer nail-on-the-head. So why is it so hard for competitors to keep pace, much less surpass any of Apple’s offerings? I believe that Apple’s intent (and business model) is to have its competitors shooting at moving targets; targets that Apple itself uses to keep the competition busy shooting at “technological shadow puppets”.
Due to the advancements of electronic technologies, the consumer electronics sector has been really busy (and very competitive) in the last 10 years or so. Advancements like lower powered devices, battery life improvements, sharper screens, touch enabled interfaces, and the like, have created a surge in new and innovative gadgets for the

Much to my surprise, I got an iPad for Christmas. I already have a desktop computer, a laptop and an iPhone. Why would I need an iPad? Then I remembered a video that went viral a few months ago of a man finger-painting a realistic portrait from a live model on an iPad, using the Brushes app. If you haven’t seen it, check it out:
Being a recovering artist, as opposed to a practicing artist, I ignored all the red flags that go up whenever I encounter art supplies of any kind and downloaded the Brushes app. Twenty-four hours later, I came up for air.
Brushes records all of your strokes and they are immediately available for play-back, stroke by stroke. After doodling for a while, the possibilities for animation became abundantly clear and I began experimenting. So, if you will indulge me and remember that I’m not a practicing artist, I offer my day-after-Christmas doodlings, just to give you a taste of the possibilities:
What can a real artist do with an iPad? David Hockney, always eager to experiment with new media, currently has an exhibition, Fleurs fraches (Fresh Flowers) at La Fondation Pierre Berg in Paris, consisting of iPhone and iPad drawings. Some are projected, some are shown on actual iPhones and iPads displayed museum style in a darkened gallery. He continues to update the exhibition, emailing new works every day. It runs through January 30.
(Click here to see a video of the exhibition and a discussion between Hockney and curator Charlie Scheips.)
(Click here for a review of the show in the Atlantic.)
Are you doing iPad art? If you would like to submit a piece of your own with the animation for possible publication on this blog, upload it to YouTube and email the URL to me at iPadsubmissions@offrampgallery.com. Do not attach the original movie file to the email — they’re too large and I will have to delete them unopened.
Book Review of My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic
My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic is a slim volume of questions put to advertising mogul, art dealer and collector Charles Saatchi, and his answers. He refuses to be interviewed in person but allowed questions to be submitted by journalists, critics and members of the public.
Keeping in mind the controlled environment in which he presents himself, Saatchi comes across as surprisingly candid, self-deprecating and funny. It is also abundantly clear that he adores his wife, domestic goddess Nigella Lawson. It’s hard to dislike a man who loves his wife and says when asked about a recent weight loss, “I was fat and ugly and now I’m thin and ugly.”
When asked if he is concerned about his impact on the art market, he responds: “I never think too much about the market. I don’t mind paying three or four times the market value of a work that I really want. Just ask the auction houses. As far as taste is concerned, I primarily buy art in order to show it off.”
Just a regular Joe following his passion. He does sometimes come across as self-serving, such as when asked to look ahead 100 years and say who are the great artists who will pass the test of time:
“General art books dated 2105 will be as brutal about editing the late 20th century as they are about almost all other centuries. Every artist other than Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd and Damien Hirst will be footnote.” Saatchi famously funded Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (a.k.a. the $12 Million Stuffed Shark) and showcased it in 1992 in the first Young British Artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. The piece resulted in Hirst being nominated for the 1992 Turner Prize (which he didn’t win that year) and launched him to superstardom.
Saatchi redeems himself when asked what he thinks about artists: “Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.”
This book is a light and interesting read, another piece in the puzzle for anyone who, like me, struggles to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible world of contemporary art.
Upcoming Events at Offramp Gallery
Anita Bunn: The Sun Tells Quite Another Story
January 9 – February 6, 2011
Opening Reception: Sunday, January 9, 2-5pm

Anita Bunn, untitled, 2010, halftone photolithograph, 18″ x 14″ framed

Offramp Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition, Anita Bunn: The Sun Tells Quite Another Story from January 9 – February 6, 2011. The opening reception will be on Sunday, January 9, from 2-5pm. For her second solo exhibition at Offramp Gallery, Los Angeles based artist, Anita Bunn, will be exhibiting a new series of works that continue her exploration of the act of noticing as well as the temporal nature of the still and moving image.
Cross-posted from Jane Chafin’s Offramp Gallery Blog

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