Joel Liu's Library tagged iPad →  View Popular, Search in Google

But the modules feature is not gone. I’ve simply included all modules which could be downloaded before from my server directly in iCab Mobile, so all the modules are automatically available without downloading them before. So for most users nothing serious has changed.

 

The only problem is with the modules (written by users) which I don’t know of. Users can no longer write and share their own modules themselves. If you know of such a module or if you still want to write a module, please contact me. I can add these modules to the next updates of iCab Mobile and this way the modules can be still shared with all iCab Mobile users.

”Modules” for iCab Mobile are simply a more comfortable variation of bookmarklets, and these are still allowed by Apple (and I assume Apple can not forbid that the user will save and use bookmarklets). Maybe if I would have called the modules “smart bookmarks” and would have made installing them much more complicated, Apple would have never asked to remove the ability to download them from the internet.

Also of interest, especially to mobile application developers, are the differences in app and Web usage between tablets and phones. On smartphones, apps are 6 times more popular than Web browsing, while on tablets, the difference is not as significant.

The study, conducted in April 2011, found that on smartphones, apps were used 85% of the time, but the Web browser was used just 15% of the time. On tablets, apps were still popular, but were used just 61% of the time as compared with Web browsing, which was used 39% of the time.

 

Says Jing Wu, from Zokem's research team, "it can be speculated that for tablets, the bigger screen and the better overall user experience in browsing contribute to the relatively higher face time for Web browsing. On smartphones, on the other hand, a smaller screen and of course, better availability of apps, contribute to the apps' dominance."

"I think we've got a clear vision moving forward," Klein told me. "We've seen other notes apps out there, and we're the only ones heavily going the academic route. In fact, There are many different niches out there, and we've seen some great [notetaking] ideas that we really like, but nothing that's targetted specifically towards students. We made a conscious decision not to make a more general app, to make it the best experience for students."

The Pulse Smartpen is a digital voice recorder that captures audio while you write. If you hear a good comment, write down a keyword on the "smart" paper. It then becomes a trigger point for the recording. When you want to listen to that part of the recording, just tap the pen on the word and it plays back without you having to search for it.

 

Of course, this means the pen requires a special kind of paper to work. Livescribe calls it Dot Paper, as there are microscopic dots all over the writing page that the pen's built-in infrared camera recognises. Since what you write has no bearing on the recording, other than setting a marker for the audio file, you can doodle, draw graphs or pretty much anything.