Stanza is a name familiar to a large part of the iPhone/iPod Touch owning population, having been one of the first to really drive eBook reading to the mainstream. The name inspires nostalgia for the single app that made your iPhone into a Kindle, when the only alternative was to actually buy a Kindle.

In combination with the desktop application of the same name, Stanza was a powerful platform that allowed you to easily enjoy books on the go – and its uniqueness, in combination with excellent app design won the creators the 2008 Apple Design Award.

In 2009, Stanza was doing so well that Amazon took notice and swallowed whole the owner Lexcycle and their Stanza application. Supporters of the app immediately (and justifiably) thought Stanza had met its end, in the face of Amazon’s aggressively-pushed Kindle platform. But with the release of Stanza on iPad it appears Amazon still believes in this product enough to resuscitate it for one more frolic in the eBook fjords.

With some positive first impressions floating around, I decided to give it a shot. But in a world of iBooks and Kindle, I’m not entirely sure where Stanza fits nowadays. Put simply: why should we care anymore?

Rubbing shoulders with titans

Let’s get it out of the way. Stanza’s book reader is easily as capable, if not more so than that of Kindle or iBooks.

Where Kindle and iBooks offer a modest array of settings to tweak, Stanza offers a smorgasbord of tiny settings to satisfy even the most rabid config-tweakers.

From adjusting the margins and line-spacing of text to the justification and paragraph spacing and indentation on any book, even to adjusting the behaviours of tapping various parts of the screen. If you can’t adjust Stanza to your liking, then no eBook reader will suffice.

There are some genuinely useful features amongst this jungle of dials and switches, including a table of contents, full book searches and very tastefully done annotations and bookmarks.

To annotate, simply press and hold the paragraph you wish to annotate. To bookmark, it’s a matter of pressing the top right hand corner, bending the virtual page in. This is taking the ‘real-object interaction’ metaphor that Apple hopes developers will use to new heights.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Open vs Closed platforms

The biggest advantage, however, of Stanza is the openness of the application. Supported are a dizzying array of book file formats including: ePub, LIT, Mobi, Palm, Amazon Kindle, HTML, PDF, RTF and Word, as well as CBR, CBZ and DjVu which may be of interest to comic/anime enthusiasts, among others. (The comic book support is actually a relatively new addition – part of the June 2010 Update.)

You can import your own books using the desktop application (available for PC and Mac) and download them directly onto the device. This is a refreshing alternate path to getting content to read – instead of being forced to buy through associated iBooks and Kindle stores, you can BYO.

However, it’s just as well you can bring your own content because where Stanza excels at letting you get at every conceivable format, it fails somewhat in providing a smooth path to paid content. In a world of proprietary delivery mechanisms and vendor lock-in, Stanza takes an alternative approach, with varying degrees of success.

How Bazaar – Stanza and the free market model

(Above: the book store is not much to look at)

Instead of providing a single store, there are multiple sellers available to purchase from, contained within a book ‘marketplace’. There is both free and paid content and the overall approach is refreshingly democratic.

However, the benefits of Apple’s tyrannical approach to controlling their iBooks platform become increasingly obvious as you move around the store. The range is small and segmented. Moving between stores is often confusing: publishers determine navigation of their stores so store usability varies wildly from excellent to downright irritating.

With so many fragmented islands and navigation schemes, it’s also difficult to get the full picture of what content is available for purchase. Even if there were millions of books available, many customers may simply never see them.

For the average reader, who is simply interested in sitting down to read without hassle, iBooks and Kindle offer a polished experience that gives you just this. For those who like to fiddle, read an obscure format or want to have a more hands on approach to getting your books – Stanza will give it to you, but if you’re buying content you won’t have an easy time of it.

So why is Stanza on the iPad? Because it still fills an important niche. For those with self-assembled collections of eBooks, pieced together in a patchwork of odd formats, Stanza is your go-to. For those who would like more power and configurability, Stanza delivers.

For such a (relatively) old application, the core features of Stanza still hold up remarkably well against the new hotness of iBooks and Kindle for iPad. The mere fact that Amazon continues to support it in tandem with Kindle is a ringing endorsement for the power-user niche that Stanza fulfils.

And with a pricetag of free, Stanza is a worthy addition to almost any app collection.

Stanza is available from the App Store for free.

Power user rating: 4 1/2 out of 5
Normal user rating: 2 1/2 out of 5

Bloom HD is part of the growing category of musical instrument apps on iPad, but with a difference. This application was developed by Peter Chilvers in partnership with Ambient/Electronic music wunderkind Brian Eno. So for anyone familiar with Eno’s music, playing into this app immediately brings about the same ethereal, introspective ambient atmosphere he is so well known for.

Bloom HD is a really nice app. From the interface to the sound quality generated – it sounds, looks and feels the part. Interaction with the app goes like this: you press the screen and create expanding dots which also generate sound. The effect is similar to expanding ripples in a pond and is quite mesmerising.

I’ll take the high mode…

The app offers three modes – Listen, Freestyle and Infinite. Listen allows you to hear the computer jam with itself. The main melody sound is a kind of a cross between a muted piano and a xylophone/vibraphone instrument. The app is well set up for long sessions with an included sleep timer and the music produced is surprisingly listenable. Honestly, the app seems as thought it could set a pleasant if a little eery tone for getting some shuteye.

The other two modes – Freestyle and Infinite – are interactive and allow you to draw dots on the screen and receive immediate aural feedback. Freestyle takes short grabs of your playing and plays them back – the end result being, that you are effectively are jamming with your iPad.

Infinite mode loops your playing over approximately 20-30s, meaning whatever you play, you will hear again in 20-30s. This allows you to contemplate the sounds you want to make and create a beautiful short piece of music.

Devil in the detail

The thoughtfulness of this app is really something to behold – 12 ‘moods’ are included which result in different colour schemes and different musical scales you play on. Some really musically interesting patterns can be made with ease. The background pattern ‘evolves’ as you play: multiple layers of signature Eno strains fade in and out seamlessly, providing a foundation to build your melodies on. I wrote this entire review listening to just the backing track of one of the moods.

If there’s any gripes I have, it’s the single sound you can play with in the application. As beautiful as the muted piano is, one or two more sounds would add more variety and longevity, as well as musical interest. Sometimes when creating a complex piece (otherwise known as wildly touching the screen), the app refuses to play some of your new notes.

It appears there may be an internal limit to the number of notes that can play at once? If anything it would be more satisfying to have the new notes play, at the expense of the old ones, instead of the other way round.

Who needs mass appeal when you have pretty colours?

Of course, this application isn’t for the casual gaming crowd, nor is it for the fart app crowd. Not to be condescending, but this really is an alternative style of app. If you aren’t in the mood to transcend your current mental plane, then you should definitely pass on this one.

However, those looking for something different, with at least a little (even latent) artistic flair should try it for one of the most polished musical instrument experiences on the iPad. It may even expand your mind, man.

Our Rating – 4 1/2 out of 5

Bloom HD for iPad is $3.99 and is available here.

We recommend wearing headphones for the full experience with this app. The iPad speakers just don’t cut it!

The Moscone Center is fully decorated for Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference starting tomorrow, June 7. This year’s WWDC is a big departure from previous years, with the exclusive focus being on apps created for the iPad and iPhone. Specifically, there are no awards for Mac applications – a move which is sure to leave some developers scratching their heads. Sessions and labs are still being run on getting the most out of Snow Leopard technologies though.

Self-proclaimed geek and brilliant photographer Adam Jackson has posted an exceptional set of shots of the Moscone West building, in which the WWDC conference will be held. The top image is just one of the set.

The new iPhone and iPad focus is particularly evident in the new WWDC app released specifically for conference goers. You may be disappointed if you think users of the app will get the first scoop on the exciting announcements in store. The app simply contains schedule and parking information: a nice boon for those at the conference, but certainly nothing special.

The major anticipated announcement at WWDC10 is that of the iPhone 4G (fourth generation) and what a long and eventful road it’s been to get to release. The official release of iPhone OS4 is also expected, bringing with it the much sought-after multitasking feature for iPhone and iPad. For those you in the Developer program and not aware, beta versions of iPhone OS4 are already available for testing.

iPhone OS4 also will include folders, which should allow us to organize our iDevices a little more easily. iBooks for iPhone is also part of the OS4 package, although hopefully the range will have improved by the time it finally makes it to iPad’s pint-sized cousin.

(Above is Kevin Rose’s iPhone after iPhone OS 4 developer beta update installation!)

In anticipation of WWDC10, a full gallery of impressive HTML5 demos has also been released on the Apple website. This coincides with the soon-to-be-released iAd platform, also based on HTML5. In creating the gallery, Apple is laying the groundwork for the hard sell to advertising companies who have grown attached to the Flash platform over the past decade.

We’ll have more announcements as they arrive from WWDC10!

Wolfram Alpha for iPad is a strikingly clean and familiar frontend to the “knowledge engine” of the internet, but is it still useful off the desktop?

Hailing from Wolfram Research, famed creators of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha is a self-proclaimed “knowledge engine”. It’s not a search engine but rather, a fact and solution finding engine.

The goal of the platform is this:

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

And now, all that power is accessible via your iPad.

Choose your battles

Wolfram Alpha certainly chooses its battles, and completely demolishes them. Its focus is on scientific problems in the areas of Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics and host of others.

Solutions given are very relevant and specialized to whatever domain you are working in. There are diagrams for chemical equations and step-by-step solutions for many classes of Math problems. It’s a professional reference, an essential educational resource – above all, it’s a really nice site (and the iPad app promo site isn’t half bad either.)

And the app makes a great transition to the iPad platform. There’s not much new to see in the interface department but that isn’t so much a bad thing.

When opening the app for the first time, you’ll notice almost the same user interface as the site is used — which is actually a great thing considering the light, airy site interface that characterizes the site was already damn near perfect.

Upgrades abound

One improvement that jumps out is how much easier it is to find demonstration problems of Wolfram Alpha. An easily missable link on the front page of the website takes you to the web version of this. In the iPad application however, example problems are front and center and really demonstrate the versatility of the site.

Operating in my personal domain of Computer Science and Maths, I had no idea it did genetic and chemical equations and includes a whole lot of interesting stats about materials and elements. If that kind of thing floats your boat (and it does mine!) then you’ve come to the right app.

Wolfram Alpha for iPad also keeps a history of your previous entries, which is useful to see the progression of subproblems you’ve solved in solving one particularly nasty, larger problem.

It doesn’t go to 11

So the desktop version is essential, but does it belong on your iPad?

Let’s not mince words: the site and the app are almost one and the same. Short of some minor usability improvments mentioned above, the app is basically a window to the site.

To some degree, you’re paying for the priviledge of having the web page bookmarked on your home screen and nicely formatted for your iPad screen.

If Wolfram Alpha for iPad failed on any level, it’s that the site is already too good. How can you improve it in the transition to the iPad platform? I can’t really think of any obvious faults, and it seems the developers agree.

And even if there were areas to improve upon, would giving the iPad an edge over the web app really be a smart move? Especially when the web app is almost certainly their prime source of traffic.

Wolfram Alpha is an excellent app but there’s nothing the app brings to the iPad that can’t already be done on the desktop, and probably more easily.

At the basest level however, Wolfram Alpha justifies its price in making you smarter than when you started it. And you can never have too much of such a swish interface.

If nothing else, purchasing Wolfram Alpha for iPad is a cheap way of expressing your appreciation to Wolfram for providing such an amazing web application free of charge. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Mathematica!

Our rating – 4 out of 5

Wolfram Alpha for iPad is $2 and can be purchased here.

Screenshots

Another rushed iPad app bit the dust today – the St George banking application was pulled from the iPad app store. While parts of it were good, looking at the core banking part, it’s not hard to see why.

The main app screen has an attractive coverflow-based selection of the services they offer and a Google Maps integrated store finder. Initially it’s not a bad app at all.

But when you click the button to do your banking, there’s no attractive in-app banking but rather, your browser opens to reveal the same site you could have manually navigated to.

Purpose of the app? We’re not sure either. And it’s possible St George agrees, with the app having just disappeared off the App Store.

It’s surprising to see such an oversight when the main competitor app NAB while flawed, has exactly this feature. What’s going on, St George?

You can see the offending feature here in the St George iPad commerical (yes, there’s a commercial):

And what was the first casualty of here today, gone tomorrow rush job apps? I was sitting on twitter last night to see @decryption (of Mactalk internet-fame) ranting about The Age’s iPad app. This decryption chap doesn’t mince words:

I declare The Age app the worst iPad app ever. Absolutely horrible user experience. You couldn’t have fucked it up any worse if you tried.

Really? That bad? Actually yes.

For those not in Melbourne, Australia, The Age is one of our major newspapers so this isn’t some shonky garage effort we’re talking about here. Purchasing a subscription doesn’t occur in-app as you’d expect. A similar ‘browser-will-fix-everything’ approach as with St George is taken, throwing you out to Safari just to pay them.

The Age app shares another point in common with the St George app. It is temporarily deceased having been pulled from the iPad App Store also last night. Again from @decryption:

It seems that The Age app has been pulled, hahah.

Well said. Another one bites the dust.

To play devil’s advocate briefly, we congratulate Fairfax and St George for having the sense to pull bad iPad user experiences before they spread too far. Learning from your mistakes is a good way to get customers and if you come out with a vastly improved in-app experience, we’ll certainly be first in line!

Just when you thought the RSS reader space was well-and-truly saturated on the iPad, along comes another one! But where Pulse differs from Newsrack, as a good example of an incumbent RSS reader on the iPad, is with a new take on the news reader UI that might just catch on.

Developed by Stanford Graduates Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, Pulse’s UI is similar to the NPR app, with multiple ‘streams’ of RSS feeds. Where NPR has their different channels of media, each stream is a separate RSS feed.

The graphical aspect to each story is a big plus, providing you with added visual interest, rather than simply a confronting wall of text and article names.

Pulse is available now for $3.99 from the App Store. Judging by the current ranking in paid apps (#2!), customers are liking it, or at least have been bitten by the hype bug!

If you do happen to get it, post in the comments with your impressions.

Flight Control on the iPhone spread like a plague: a whirlwind of simple, addictive gameplay seamlessly mashed together with top notch production values.

Coming from the previously unknown developer Firemint, it had a very impressive reign at the top of the iPhone apps chart. And the new iPad incarnation is no slouch, continuing Firemint’s tradition of quality.

An unlikely concept for a AAA game, you take on the role of an air traffic controller. A god figure, sitting in the sky directing planes and helicopters from flying catastrophically into one another.

If Less is more, then a lot less is a smorgasbord

The beauty of the game is the simplicity. The concept is straightforward which makes getting to grips with the game a snap. The difficulty arises in the gradual increase in the number of aircraft you have to coordinate.

The ultimate goal is to land each aircraft on one of a handful of colored runways, the color of the aircraft determining which similarly colored runway it can land on.

The beep-beep-beep of the “imminent-crash” alarm will become a familiar sound as you repeatedly rescue the tiny inhabitants of the aircraft from the brink of death.

The control mechanism is perfectly suited for the iPad and couldn’t be simpler. Aircraft are directed by drawing a line from their current position to where you’d like them to go. The movement of the aircraft is very responsive with the only limitation being the differing speeds of the various types of aircraft.

Honky Tonk and the Art of Zen

Repeating loops of music aren’t often welcome, but Flight Control has a very memorable tune that plays in the background, evoking the roaring 20s a la the much under-appreciated Monopoly Tycoon PC soundtrack. As nice as it is, a couple of included tracks would be swell for variety.

The game has depth and challenge in spades and should keep you going for a while. There’s unexpected strategy required in landing large numbers of aircraft in progressively more confined spaces while creating loop-the-loop paths to stall landings. Multiplayer is an added bonus and again ups the longevity to a substantial level by any gamer’s standards.

I won’t sugar-coat it: the price will be a shock for those of you used to iPhone game prices. But for $5 you get multiple maps, difficulty settings, multiplayer and an expertly-crafted hunk of gameplay that will keep you hooked.

For many of you this won’t be big news, but for me and doubtless many others Flight Control HD is a new classic.

Flight Control HD is $5 on the iPad Application Store and is available here.

The iPad has finally had its official release in territories outside of the US and has attracted crowds and enormous queues to be the first to have one.

Rahul Kuduri was the first in line at the launch at the flagship Sydney store, lining up from 2AM the previous night. We applaud your dedication, giving professional line standers worldwide a run for their money!

The usual slightly disturbing, but infectious Apple Store enthusiasm was in full flight in all store in each of the release territories, from the German store in München, to the Japanese flagship store in Ginza. Thousands of other customers also received their pre-order iPad via mail today, including the very desirable iPad 3G models.

There have also been reports of possible delays for some Australians, simply due to enormous demand, outstripping the capabilities of delivery services. Hopefully, you are amongst the lucky ones that receive your iPad ASAP.

Check out the Ginza, Japan launch below:

Did you go out for the launch? Any launch-day debacles to share? Post in the comments.

A little change of pace today, with an iPhone/Touch app review.

If you’re in Australia, you may know CHOICE as one of the better sources for independent product reviews. For those in the US, Consumer Reports is your equivalent and in the UK, Which?.

CHOICE has released two new buyer’s guide apps for Strollers and Digital Cameras. The applications are designed for iPhone/iPod Touch but are also compatible with the iPad.

The apps are particularly interesting due to the number of reviews they throw at you at no cost, especially in the case of the Cameras app. The apps serve as detailed pocket compendiums for most popular cameras/strollers available in stores today.

How did this elephant get in my room?

Tackling the obvious head on, the purpose of the app is to encourage you to purchase CHOICE’s full consumer reports. The title of the app includes the word LITE to indicate this is only a sample of the full information available on the CHOICE website. However, when the quality of the research and production values are as high as they are, it’s hard to fault the price!

The Strollers app also includes a handful of outline reviews, but is slightly lighter on content than the Cameras app.

The style of reviews is especially suited to quickly digesting a product’s vital stats. Reviews are broken down into two parts: point ratings out of 100 in a selection of relevant categories and a set of good and bad points according to the reviewer.

Details, details

An exhaustively-detailed specification is included for each product which, although would be available from the manufacturer, is really convenient to have in-app. The specifications are certainly nice, but even more useful would be the ability to compare products on particular specs.

Being able to compare the zoom level or image stabilisation capabilities of cameras could be a very powerful feature. Perhaps this will appear in a future version.

Also included is a Best Buys list, which is simply a compilation of the best of all products reviewed. This is probably where you’ll be sticking, making the included favourites list a little useless. Why would you favourite anything when the Best Buys are already selected?

I can see this as being a go-to app when searching for a digital camera. Scenario: Your sales assistant isn’t crystal clear on the details of a particular camera (what an unlikely situation). You step in, armed with the Cameras app and save the day with accurate information!

Some strings attached

Some reviews are not good enough to make purchasing decisions on, and this is more prevelant in the strollers app than the Cameras app. But there’s certainly enough to get your started. Again, the app is a gateway to the paid content on the site, so you’ll have to head there for more detail.

If you’re unlucky enough to want more detail one of more sparsely reviewed cameras, then no, Cameras LITE will not suffice as your essential pocket camera guide.

Also, if you’re intending to use this with your iPad, be warned the visuals don’t stack up quite as nicely as on the iPhone/iPod Touch. The larger interface is nicer to navigate though however, and not nearly as pokey as it needs to be to fit on the iPhone screen.

Overall, the app does a sterling job of providing a pocket companion to Digital Camera or Stroller shopping with a very competitive price tag. It is missing detail in places, and this is where the website picks up the slack.

One improvement could be including full detailed reviews in a separate, paid version of the app. In that case, users like myself who don’t necessarily want to get involved with the site can still get at the premium content. Something to think about for the app creators.

CHOICE Digital Cameras – 4 out of 5
CHOICE Strollers – 3 1/2 out of 5

Screenshots

Founder of digg.com and Angel Investor, Kevin Rose has been at the forefront of iPad reviews, giving it one of the first in a fun 20 minute segment on the diggnation show and providing one of the best rationalisations of buying one on his blog, leading up to the release.

Posted to his blog today is his review of the one of the nicer iPad cases going around, the Dodocase.

The Dodocase is actually hand-carved, made out of eco-friendly materials and brings a moleskine, book-aesthetic to your iPad.

Kevin Rose’s review is below. The Dodocase site also has a sequence of interesting videos on how the case works and how it is assembled. It’s pretty staggering to see the materials being hand-positioned and cut, in today’s world of mass production. Respect for doing it the old-fashioned way!

Dodocases are available for the dodocase website for $49.99.