Join Dieter, Leanna and Rene for our final wrap up of iPad launch 2010! If you have any questions, leave a comment below, hit us up on Twitter @tipb, or better still — join us live in the chat room via http://www.tipb.com/live

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Grab your iPhone, launch VoiceMemo, record yourself introducing the show. Tell us your name, where you live, your favorite app, and finish it off with “…and my favorite podcast is TiPb Live!” Then email it to news (at) tipb (dot) com. We’ll pick one of you, and you’ll be on the show!

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Chat with you soon!

TiPb Live! Tonight at 8pm ET/5pm PT (1am GMT) is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Loopt has not only launched a new iPad app this week, Loopt Pulse [Free - iTunes link], but now a new version of their iPhone app as well [Free - iTunes link].

What’s the big difference? How about the ability to easily find interesting people, places, and events with just your iPhone and Loopt’s map screen. Yawing in the middle of a droning conversation, eyes drooping at a lame party, not sure where to go in the center of sleepy-town USA? Loopt’s full-scale assault one boredom just might have your back.

There’s also a new version for BlackBerry, if you find that interesting.

My Canadianess prevents me from trying it (location services are typically highly region-sensitive by virtue of their content partnerships), so if you give it a whirl let me know if I’m missing out.

Loopt for iPhone gets interesting… in real time! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Hot on the heels of Dieter’s epic review of Crosswords for iPad [$9.99 - iTunes link], the fine folks at Standalone, Inc have offered up some Promo Codes for TiPb readers.

We’ll give away a couple tonight on TiPb Live, but if you can’t attend don’t fret, just jump into our brand new iPad Apps and Games Forum and tell us your favorite crossword puzzles!

Give away starts now and ends Sunday, April 11 at 12pm PT. US App Store account needed to redeem promo codes. Promo codes expire so if you win, redeem asap!

Crosswords for iPad give-away is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Here we have NOVA HD [$9.99 - iTunes Link] for iPad, an action-packed first-person shooter (FPS) that should make any Halo fan feel right at home.

For video of me playing (kinda funny), pictures, and more — stay with us after the break!

The graphics on NOVA are smooth and beautifully rendered, and make full use of the iPads processors. The various levels are a lot of fun and increase in difficulty gradually, which should appeal to moderate and power gamers alike. There’s single player mode and multiplayer mode (my favorite), which allows you to play online against friends or random opponents. Nothing says stress relief more than being able to sneak up on a friend and and send them to bullet-ridden oblivion, or maybe thats just me…

The controls are much easier to get used to than I expected. Movement is controlled with a virtual d-pad on the left, direction by swiping the screen, and shooting, reloading and using grenades by virtual buttons on the right.

Gameloft has once again taken a popular game genre and made a beautiful, highly playable version for mobile. If you love FPS, pick up NOVA HD for iPad.

YouTube link

Quick Review: NOVA HD for iPad is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Tomorrow at 10am PT, 1pm ET, Steve Jobs puts sneaker to stage and, along with SVP of iPhone software, Scott Forstall, gives us a sneak preview of the highly anticipated iPhone 4.0. No one outside Apple knows exactly what new features and paradigms iPhone 4.0 will offer. However, tradition demands we make our best guesses and ask you to do the same.

This isn’t what we want, mind you. We told Apple what we want back on December 25, 2009: multitasking, better notifications, widgets for the home screen, instant access to important settings, themes, gestures like pervasive pull-down-to-refresh, system-wide “back” implementation, orientation lock, and resolution independence, along with a ton of great reader suggestions in the comments. We’ve also asked for a Finder app, like the Photo but to store document files.

This is what we think we’ll actually get, given the rumors and the direction Apple looks to be going. This is us, TiPb staff and TiPb readers reading the tea leaves…

iPhone 3.2 (aka iPad) features

This is the most obvious, really (and we’ve written about it before). All the little tweaks and enhancements Apple has made to the underlying OS, like adding “replace” to cut, copy, and paste, adding spell check to auto-correct, adding dictionary lookup to text select, etc. Wallpaper for the Home Screen, week view in Calendar and the other, sometimes small but still important, chance to the built-in apps, should be there as well. So should Bluetooth keyboard support. Oh, and iBooks.

Better Mail handling

Steve Jobs himself reportedly responded to an email saying a “universal inbox” was coming. That means, like Mac Mail but unlike current iPhone Mail, users with multiple accounts would have the option of seeing all their new messages in one place and not have to tap into and out of multiple folders every time they wanted to check every new message in every account. (Yes that sentence was crafted to feel as laborious as the current process!). Whether we’ll see more than that — IMAP IDLE, multiple exchange accounts, “synergy”-like messaging integration, etc. is unknown.

Multitasking (of a sort)

We’ve been hearing this for a while now — that Apple will offer some level of multitasking in iPhone 4.0. We’ve even seen it in the shadows. The three use-cases that it could cover are background tasks (listening to streaming internet radio while you browse Safari, keeping navigation running while you check Mail), fast task switching (going from Notes to Contacts and back), and multi-window workflow (dragging data from one application space into another).

While the “Pandora” model could easily be handled by allowing streaming accounts to be entered inside iPod (which already has background access going back to iPhone 1.0), the navigation model won’t be solved unless there’s a more universal background implementation. However, Apple has always put stability and mainstream user friendliness ahead of power-user functionality. A compromise seems most like — full background access for a highly limited number of applications.

Fast task switching was accomplished in large part by the speed of iPhone 3GS. What remains missing is the consistent saving of state by apps on exit (if you leave a twitter client or a race game and then go back it should be at exactly the place you left it), and a more elegant way to quickly move between apps — swiping between two apps 11 screens apart isn’t very Apple. The rumor here is for a Mac OS X-style Exposé implementation where a double-click of the Home Button would cause the current screen to fly out and a grid of active (background) apps to fly in. That sounds much more Apple.

Multi-window drag-and-drop may not be obvious given the small size of the iPhone, but given how Palm’s webOS Cards view presents apps — and how the iPhone Safari Pages view does likewise — is remains a tease. Still, we don’t expect it. Not yet.

New home screen (SpringBoard)

SpringBoard is the internal name of Apple’s Home Screen UI, which right now consists of an 11 page-wide application launcher grid with SpotLight search bolted on to the right. Rumors have persisted since before iPhone 3.0 that Apple has a new SpringBoard experience waiting in the wings. Again, there are several elements that could be at play: better organization, glance-able information, themes.

We’re not wishing here, so no grandiose “Apple will re-invent the metaphor for home screens with some ingenious new approach”. We’re looking at what Apple has already done for clues as to where they’re going. Stacks, then, where groups of similar apps are combined together until a tap expands them into a grid-launcher would be reasonable. Likewise, Dashboard where useful, glance-able information is always just a tap (or swipe) away. Dashboard could even integrate SpotLight, allowing it to replace a singletasker with a multitasker (how fitting). It could function similarly on the Lock Screen, for ultimate glance-ability.

We don’t see themes, however. Though they’d be a boon to users and designers/developers alike, they don’t seem very Apple (beyond the home screen wallpaper already mentioned).

Improved notification handling

We’ve beaten this one to death — if you get a constant stream of SMS, IM, game challenges, or any heavy amount of notifications each new one obliterates the one before meaning all but the most recent functionally never existed and hence never notified you of anything. Both Android and Palm webOS do this more functionally, though developers have complained to us that it may be too complex for the mainstream market Apple is targeting (too much management for mom). Could Apple create a more robust yet still drop-dead-simple notification system for the iPhone? Sure, and given how fast and far push notification has been adopted, we think it’s likely they will.

The simplest solution would be a Notification app (please, no smiley face logo) that listed all new notifications. When you’ve received multiple notifications, the dialog would show the most recent but also inform you of how many others you’ve missed, and an option to “see all” would be presented.

But that would likely make no one happy. This more than multitasking might be the most difficult nut to crack, and may end up being part of that new Home Screen mentioned above. That’s closer to guess work than we’re comfortable with for this post, however, so we’ll just leave it there for now.

iAd platform

“iAd” was rumored to be shown off on April 7, and April 8 is just a day later. Apple’s mobile advertising platform could certainly be part of the iPhone 4.0 SDK feature set unveiled for developers. Gossip says Steve Jobs wants to do for mobile advertising what iTunes did for digital music — make it not suck. We certainly hope so. Punch-the-monkey with push notifications is certainly not the new Home Screen experience we want.

iTunes.com

It’s fairly certain iTunes is moving to the cloud and becoming something akin to iTunes.com. We’d love to see streaming video from Apple, MobileMe “whispersync” to keep our place between iPhone and iPad, and other great, media-centric features. But Apple typically saves those for September to coincide with the new iPod touch and lately, new iTunes releases.

###Mobile iChat

We put this here just for Chad. We still think Mobile iChat (text and audio/video) is coming but not until the 4th generation iPhone is revealed at WWDC 2010. Apple usually holds a few new OS features back to show off the new hardware (like Compass, VoiceControl, etc. last year). Patience, Chad!

MobileMe 2.0

Beyond “whispersync” MobileMe has fallen so far behind Google services, DropBox and others that Apple really has to up its game here. Photo sync, cloud backup, and other features have gone from nice-to-have to must-have. Again, however, that feels more like a WWDC 2010 Phil Schiller announcement to us.

One more thing…?

That’s what we think is most likely to come with iPhone 4.0 tomorrow, but Apple has shown they can always surprise us (who expected the long, long list of previously missing features rattled off at the iPhone 3.0 event?). What are you expecting to see?

What will we get in iPhone 4.0? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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The TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) have deemed Apple’s new iPad magical enough to pass through airport security scanners mostly without your having to remove it from your travel bags. Mostly.

The Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday that in general you should not need to remove your iPad from your bag. That’s because it’s relatively small and people who carry the device often don’t have bulky accessories like plugs and external drives that clutter the image when computer bags are screened.

Screeners may still ask you to remove your iPad if they can’t get a clear image of the device.

You might also find a few screeners not yet familiar enough with the policy or the iPad, so again, leave your iPad in your bag unless and until you’re asked by the men and women in uniform to take it out. Then take it out.

We haven’t heard about other countries yet, but if you have let us know in comments!

[Cheap plug/question avoider - that's the Marware Eco-Envi for iPad pictured above.]

TSA: Leave iPad in your baggage unless we tell you to take it out is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Yeah, so the iPad does eBooks, movies and apps but what we all really want to know is — Will it Blend! (iPad smoothy anyone?)

The process is pretty straight forward. Get iPad, place in blender, push button, and see the magic happen. Amusing way to get out your iPad overload frustrations, or do you worry about harmful fumes and the general wastefulness of the project? Video after the break!

Will the iPad blend? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Marco Arment raised a flag on the iPad App Store field today and called foul over Apple using private APIs in their first-party iBooks app.

Private APIs are meant to be exclusive to Apple’s OS and built-in apps (like Safari, Mail, iPod, etc.) because they’re experimental, transitional, or otherwise not something that developers should count on being there in the same form in the next OS update. They’re still works in progress. Public APIs on the other hand are an agreement between Apple and developers that they can be used to build apps safely and confidently because they won’t be changed in a future update (Apple won’t break existing apps).

Up until now, Apple has played by their own rules and all of the apps they’ve not built into the iPhone (Remote, Keynote Remote, MobileMe Gallery, etc.) have been based on public, no private APIs. Reportedly Pages, Keynote, and Numbers were careful to stick to public APIs as well. That’s only fair. If Apple could do things in the App Store that competitors like QuickOffice or Documents to Go couldn’t, developers could rightly call it unfair, and that could lead to trouble.

However, according to Arment and backed up by oldmanuk, iBooks does make use of private APIs for functions like the in-app brightness control, a feature that would get a competitor like Amazon’s Kindle app rejected from the App Store.

Developers are understandably upset about this seeming break in Apple’s policy.

Thing is, Google famously got away with using private API for their Google Mobile App in late 2008 only to have those API made nice and legal in 2009.

So for TiPb’s part, we’re going to wait for the iPhone 4.0 event in 2 days and see if the private vs. public API landscape doesn’t change when the next SDK beta hits the streets.

[Thanks Dev for the tip]

Regarding Apple’s use of private API in iBooks is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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