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Filed under: Odds and ends, Freeware, iPad

That's the word from the giant U.S. bookseller. There is already a version for the iPhone and iPod touch, and Barnes & Noble says customers can expect the free software around the time of the iPad launch.

The reader will give B&N customers access to more than a million eBooks, as well as selected newspapers and magazines.

The Barnes 7 Noble Nook, which competes with the Amazon Kindle, has only been out a short time, but if the iPad is a success a heck of a lot more people may be reading B&N books on Apple's device rather than the Nook. Now we have to wait and see if there is a Kindle app for the iPad (other than the already-released and popular Kindle app for iPhone), but I think it is a foregone conclusion.

It sounds like Apple is going to allow these competing book apps on the iPad, rather than forcing people to only use the iBooks store; if so, that's a good thing.

[Via Engadget]

TUAWBarnes & Noble eReader for iPad coming soon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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#sony Sony's been pretty tightlipped about its ultra compact DSLR camera concept, but someone did share screenshots of what appears to be a rather nice menu system designed for a touchscreen. It looks like it'll gives almost complete control to fingers. More »

We played with the PlayStation Move at the party last night, but at Sony's more intimate gathering at the W Hotel today it was easier to get a better picture of the peripheral. The main games on the floor were interesting, but the game we wanted to play? SOCOM 4, with the PlayStation Move.

This was the game that was aimed at hardcore gamers, and the guys from Zipper told us that they were able to get this build up in a matter of weeks; the tools Sony was providing its developers for Move support were intuitive. This was also the first time we were able to use the secondary, nunchuk-like controller to add analog movement to the Move. We were able to play the game for about 20 minutes.

Aiming the crosshairs with the Move worked well, and I didn't feel any lag. While I was new to the game, the firefights and encounters were a blast with the controller; there is something much more satisfying about aiming at the screen with a controller instead of moving an analog stick. This is a controller that's ready for more mainstream use in shooters, and the fact that Sony already has a high-profile release that uses the technology so well is heartening.

The d-pad allowed you to give commands to your squad, and you can send two groups of soldiers to different objectives. It almost felt like a real-time strategy game; you can set up some series covery fire if you're able to think that far ahead in the combat. "We're looking at gestures," we're told when ask about things like throwing grenades and the like. "[The Move] leads a lot of accessibility to a hardcore game like this."

The team at Zipper spent three months with the controller, and the work has paid off. Will we use the Move when we're playing online and care about our score? Maybe not. But it adds an extra layer of fun to the gameplay of a title that already looks mature. It took a little bit of talking to get behind the velvet rope to play this demo, but it was worth it. We're starting to see the promise.

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CWmike writes "Canadian interface design firm MetaLab has accused Mozilla of stealing user interface elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making. MetaLab leveled the charges on Tuesday when the 11-person firm's founder, Andrew Wilkinson, blogged about the similarities between his company's designs and those posted by Mozilla for FlightDeck, a Jetpack editor. 'What they did was pretty ridiculous,' Wilkinson said on Thursday. 'There's a difference between inspiration versus ripping something off,' he said. 'The measurements of the graphic elements [Mozilla took from us] were the exact same, the very same pixels. When someone takes your images from the server hosting them, that's crossing the line.' Mozilla apologized to MetaLab on Wednesday, saying in a blog post, 'While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK ... We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.'" Alexander Limi of the Firefox User Experience Team points out that MetaLab has accepted the apology, too — worth bearing in mind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've always said AMD should go after the gaping hole between netbooks and thin-and-lights by releasing a low-power platform with solid graphics abilities, and it looks like the company's finally coming around -- AMD's John Taylor just told us that the chipmaker will be releasing a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid codenamed "Ontario" with integrated DX11 graphics sometime next year. If Ontario sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it leaked in the past -- it's a part of the "Brazos" platform built around the low-power Bobcat core. Of course, AMD has been promising Fusion chips of all stripes for years now without a single shipping part, so saying that a Fusion chip will get it into the netbook game in 2011 is mildly amusing -- while AMD's definitely turned things around, it's still incredibly late to the low-end party, and Intel's solidly beaten it to the hybrid CPU / GPU punch with the Core 2010 and Pine Trail Atom chips. Add in the fact that NVIDIA's Optimus-based Ion 2 chipset seemingly offers the extended battery life of Atom with the performance of a discrete GPU, and we'd say the market niche Ontario is designed to fill may not actually be so niche when it finally arrives. We'll see what happens -- a year is a long, long time.

[Image via OCWorkbench]

AMD to finally take on netbook space with new Fusion chip... next year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We've always said AMD should go after the gaping hole between netbooks and thin-and-lights by releasing a low-power platform with solid graphics abilities, and it looks like the company's finally coming around -- AMD's John Taylor just told us that the chipmaker will be releasing a netbook-class Fusion CPU / GPU hybrid codenamed "Ontario" with integrated DX11 graphics sometime next year. If Ontario sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it leaked in the past -- it's a part of the "Brazos" platform built around the low-power Bobcat core. Of course, AMD has been promising Fusion chips of all stripes for years now without a single shipping part, so saying that a Fusion chip will get it into the netbook game in 2011 is mildly amusing -- while AMD's definitely turned things around, it's still incredibly late to the low-end party, and Intel's solidly beaten it to the hybrid CPU / GPU punch with the Core 2010 and Pine Trail Atom chips. Add in the fact that NVIDIA's Optimus-based Ion 2 chipset seemingly offers the extended battery life of Atom with the performance of a discrete GPU, and we'd say the market niche Ontario is designed to fill may not actually be so niche when it finally arrives. We'll see what happens -- a year is a long, long time.

[Image via OCWorkbench]

AMD to finally take on netbook space with new Fusion chip... next year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple is set to take preorders for its highly anticipated iPad multimedia device Friday, and the company's Web site will begin accepting advance orders from customers at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, 5:30 a.m. Pacific.

#wii If you partake in Wii fitness regularly, you probably know that there is only one thing keeping you from having a full-fledged, muscle-building, vein-popping work-out experience: limited range of push-up motion. Thankfully, this push-up bar attachment lets you dig deep. More »

Cisco Systems plans to extend unified communications beyond individual enterprises, introducing a new appliance and a protocol that the company hopes will become an industry standard.

#hacking It used to be that jailbreaking your iPhone was a long, involved process, but worth it for the freedom. We've reached a new age, though, where emancipating your phone is as simple as plugging in an iDongle. Liberty! More »

We knew iPad pre-orders were starting tomorrow, but know we know exactly when all you lovable crazies have to stumble out of bed and transmit your credit card numbers to Steve's brain: 8:30AM ET, or 5:30AM on the West Coast. We generally recommend a bed shaker alarm clock, but hey, let's not pretend we haven't all turned a few long nights into tomorrow with our old friends Jackie D and Mistakes. See you on the other side, chochachos.

iPad orders start at 8:30AM tomorrow morning originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew iPad pre-orders were starting tomorrow, but know we know exactly when all you lovable crazies have to stumble out of bed and transmit your credit card numbers to Steve's brain: 8:30AM ET, or 5:30AM on the West Coast. We generally recommend a bed shaker alarm clock, but hey, let's not pretend we haven't all turned a few long nights into tomorrow with our old friends Jackie D and Mistakes. See you on the other side, chochachos.

iPad orders start at 8:30AM tomorrow morning originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Michael Rose / TUAW:
How soon is now?  Pre-order timing for iPad confirmed, 5:30 am PT  —  We've had more than a few inbound requests today, via email and Twitter, asking a slightly obsessive but completely understandable question: When can I pre-order my freakin' iPad?  —  True to form, the simple answer of …

With Mafia 2, developer 2K Czech is leaving the optimism to Tony Bennett: this is not intended to be a rags to riches crime story. Don’t expect golden dreams to come true. This is the story of a man trying to keep his head above water, a man who returns to America after seeing the devastation of World War 2 Europe, and tries to make his way in an unforgiving city.

When the game opens, Vito Scaletta has just been granted leave from the war to return home to his mother and sister after his father passes away. Settling a $2,000 ($2K) debt his father owed now falls squarely on Vito’s shoulders, and he’ll need to accept any job from every wiseguy and hoodlum he encounters to make ends meet. It’s a deeply personal narrative, and to hear Denby Grace, the senior producer from 2K Czech, describe his team’s game, it’s more Sopranos than Scarface, more Godfather than Goodfellas.

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With Mafia 2, developer 2K Czech is leaving the optimism to Tony Bennett: this is not intended to be a rags to riches crime story. Don’t expect golden dreams to come true. This is the story of a man trying to keep his head above water, a man who returns to America after seeing the devastation of World War 2 Europe, and tries to make his way in an unforgiving city.

When the game opens, Vito Scaletta has just been granted leave from the war to return home to his mother and sister after his father passes away. Settling a $2,000 ($2K) debt his father owed now falls squarely on Vito’s shoulders, and he’ll need to accept any job from every wiseguy and hoodlum he encounters to make ends meet. It’s a deeply personal narrative, and to hear Denby Grace, the senior producer from 2K Czech, describe his team’s game, it’s more Sopranos than Scarface, more Godfather than Goodfellas.

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TUAW reports that U.S. pre-orders for both Wi-Fi and 3G-capable iPads will go live on Apple's site at 5:30 AM Pacific Time / 8:30 AM Eastern Time tomorrow morning. Apple last week announced that pre-orders would begin on March 12th, but did ...

#iphoneapps There are a lot of iPhone games. Most of them are crap. A significant fraction are good. Few are great. Even fewer are great and original. Like this one might be! More »

#iphoneapps There are a lot of iPhone games. Most of them are crap. A significant fraction are good. Few are great. Even fewer are great and original. Like this one might be! More »

Back in November of last year, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service, and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades.

First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there.

This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast, just launched their app this evening. But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos.

And they’ve cleaned up the stream of information around these events. There is now a filter to show everyone commenting, or just your friends. There are also now number indicators to show unread items. And the check-in process has been simplified thanks to big green buttons that make it obvious.

Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter.

Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications).

On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc.

And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event with Foursquare, that service will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link provided in the Foursquare app with open the Hot Potato app and let them join the event with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge.

On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data.

Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features while at the same time simplifying the overall experience.

Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

CrunchBase InformationHot PotatoiPhoneFoursquareInformation provided by CrunchBase