In addition to being an iPhone/iPad enthusiast, I am a full time biology professor at the University of Texas Pan-American. Since I first purchased my iPhone in 2008, and my iPad in 2010, I have found them to be indispensible tools that I use almost on a daily basis. Some of the apps are the routine built in apps (calendar, contacts, etc) while others are specialty apps that I used for a specific task. As a faculty member, I divide my activities into one of three categories – teaching, research, and service, and I use these two devices in each arena.

Teaching

I teach a few different courses, and I am lucky enough that the General Biology text I use can be purchased through the iPad app Inkling. I encourage students to purchase it this way, and I also have a copy myself.

Using an ebook version like this allows for more interaction with the material – both through animations, videos, but also interactive tools. I can easily whip out my iPad when I am discussing a topic with a student to show them the material, which is much easier than flipping through the actual textbook. On a beneficial side note, the students are much more likely to bring the iPad to class than to lug around a heavy text book.

On a more mundane front, I use the Calendar to keep track of weekly advising meetings, when I schedule tests and quizzes, and even how much longer I have until Thanksgiving break! Trust me, the absent minded professor is many time a very real stereotype – without the Calendar I would probably forget half of my student appointments!

The iPad and iPhone also allow for more rapid response to student questions by email or by blackboard. I have also in the past used the iPad to show multimedia demonstrations and videos I may have, rather than try to load them on to a pen drive. The iPhone also allows for me to take pictures of my students in the lab or in the field, which I can hopefully use to entice future students to take some of my courses!

Research

When I where my research hat, I use my iPhone and iPad are equally valuable. I take them with me to conference, rather than lugging around a big notebook computer. That way, I can practice my presentation in the hotel using Keynote or Documents to Go.

I can keep up to date on email (nothing like coming home to an inbox with 300+ new mail messages). And when I am feeling a little lonely, I can use FaceTime to chat with my wife and daughter at home.

When I am doing research in the field, I use my iPhone as a GPS device, to track where my field sites are, but also to take pictures on the field locations. I use the voice memo recording all the time to record notes to myself about experiments and research ideas.

In many cases, timing for an experiment can be critical – rather than buy various digital timer, I simply use the built in timer on my iPhone to make sure I remember to proceed with a certain step of an experiment at a specific time.

Service

Service is the bane of almost every faculty member. We usually love research, most of us enjoy teaching, but no one likes service to the university. But we all have to participate in committees and administrative tasks. I find that bringing my iPad to meetings is an easy and efficient method to record notes – the built in keyboard works very well, and I can usually take my notes for meetings as fast as I could writing by hand.

In the event that I need to write something manually, I have to notebook apps – PhatPad and PenUltimate, that I use for drawing figures or jotting down little memos.

And if it is a large boring meeting, there is nothing like sitting in the back and playing a little Angry Birds to pass the time. And again, the Calendar is great to make sure I don’t forget all these meetings that I need to go to – especially with Siri, so she can tell me on a daily basis what I need to do.

In addition, I can download any documents or PDF’s that we will be looking at and simply view them on the iPad with my GoodReader app, saving paper and making it easier to carry mounds of paperwork around! For example, I am the parliamentarian for one committee, so I can make sure to always carry around a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order!

Miscellaneous

Our school has also developed an iPhone app that we can use to access any of the proprietary university systems – Oracle for business system and Blackboard for teaching and student interaction. That means I am not limited to using a university computer to log in to authorize a purchase order, plan a trip to a national conference, or post grades online for students.

I have also found myself using Siri for reminders more and more – especially location based reminders. I find I may remember something I need to do while driving home. In the past, I would forget it many times before I got home, but with Siri I can just set up a location reminder to do something when I get to work, or before I leave work. It works great – I probably have about 2 or 3 Siri reminders going off every day!

The iPhone and iPad make many routine tasks easy, and make many time consuming tasks painless. They both enhance productivity, allow me more time to interact with students and engage in research. The thing I like the best is that they just make everything easier – scheduling meetings, remembering to buy cricket food, taking notes at meetings, or helping a student studying genetics.

Phil Nickinson over at Android Central got his hands on some pre-release info about Barnes and Noble’s next great iPad competitor, the Nook Tablet.

Let’s start with the obvious: Even in a photocopied black-and-white image, it looks like the Nook Color, no? And it retains many of the same features. Same retangular design, same rounded corners, same hook in the lower left. The display is unchanged as well — a 7-inch VividView IPS display at 1024×600 resolution and 169 pixels per inch. But inside. Man, this thing’s been beefed up.

He’s talking 1.2GHz TI OMAP, 16GB of storage, 4hrs. of video playback, 802.11 b/g/n, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, and while there’s no mention of Android, much like the soon-to-be-released — and no doubt aimed-squarely-at — Amazon Kindle Fire doesn’t do much to point out the little robot behind the curtains either. And while they don’t have Amazon’s online muscle, BN does have retail stores to show off their wares.

Hits November 16 for $249. Anyone getting that instead of a Kindle Fire? Instead of an iPad? No, seriously?

Source: Android Central

Oink, a new app from Kevin Rose’s app development lab Milk, is now available for download in the App Store. Oink is a social recommendation and ranking app that takes a Foursquare-like check-in approach, letting users rate and rank the different items — instead of places — that they like.

The main idea is for users to recommend and rate products from different businesses so they can share with friends and spread the word about the things they enjoy. It seems like a really great idea, as long as enough of your friends are using the service, and gives a fresh approach to finding and enjoying items with like-minded people.

Oink is an easy way to rate and rank the things around you. Instead of just rating places, you rate the items inside. You could easily find the most popular items on a menu and see if a friend has tried anything there. Then if there’s something you like, it's just a single press to rate it and share it with friends.

What you can do with Oink:

• Rate items around you and share with your followers
• See all the cool stuff your friends and other users are Oinking
• Find the best things in town (e.g. Best “Pizza” in Denver)
• Find the items at a place (e.g., Best roller coasters at Six Flags)
• Build “cred” in your areas of interest
• Share your Oink activity on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare

Oink is available on the iPhone and iPod touch for free.

App Store Link

We’re getting a bunch of emails and tweets asking if Siri is down for anyone else, so we’re guessing the answer to that is — yes, yes it is. It’s still working for some of us, mind you, and Siri has been up and down intermittently, and a often, since launch, but this once again seems to be more widespread than normal.

So you know the drill — let us know if Siri is down for you, and if so, where you are, how long it’s been down for, and when it goes back up.

When Kevin introduced you to Mobile Nations, he mentioned some of the great new initiatives we had planned. We’ve been hard at work on one of those for a while now — Mobile Nations Broadcasting.

Mobile Nations Broadcasting brings together all your favorite audio shows, including the Android Central Podcast, the CrackBerry.com Podcast, iPad Live and iPhone Live, the PalmCast, and the WPCentral Podcast, along with our cross-site, cross-industry Mobile Nations Podcast, and new shows we’ve added over the summer, including ZENandTECH to help you center your inner geek, Iterate on mobile design and user experience, and Superfunctional to keep our bodies in balance with our gear. And we’ve brought them to life — with video.

We’ve got some great new technology behind us and it lets us not only stream all our hosts, for all our shows to you in real time, but make them available to you afterwards on YouTube, via RSS and iTunes, and… well let’s just say a lot more places to come. We’ve already launched Monday Brief, Android Central Video, iPad Live Video, iPhone Live Video and TiPb TV, ZENandTECH Video, and Mobile Nations Video, and we’ll have the other shows on your screens and your TVs very, very soon. And we’re not stopping there. We have a few other new shows in the pipeline as well and we can’t wait for you to see them. Starting tonight, with Girls Gone Gadgets.

Girls Gone Gadgets is hosted by Georgia and Ashley Esqueda, two of the smartest, savviest, sexiest, and most entertaining women in tech. They’ll be bringing you everything from Android to iOS, from the hottest devices to the latest gadgets, from kickass apps to the most mind-blowing accessories you can imagine.

GGG premieres tonight at 10:30pm EDT. See you there!

• Subscribe via iTunes: Audio | Video
• Subscribe via RSS: Audio | Video
• Download directly: Audio | Video
• Show notes

Rene, Georgia, Seth, and Marc Edwards of Bjango talk iOS 5.0.1 and battery life, Gmail for iPhone, new iPhone 4S ads, the Apple television, and Siri on iPhone 4. This is iPhone Live!

Hosts

• Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)
• Georgia (@GeorgiaTiPb)
• Seth Clifford (@sethclifford)
• Marc Edwards (@marcedwards)

Credits

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

Even with all iOS 5 has to offer, if you’re anything like me you’ll always find a reason to jailbreak. I’ve always been the type of person who wants more flexibility and control over my iPhone. Luckily, a bunch of Jailbreak tweaks and apps have been updated for iOS 5 compatibility and allow me to have just that.

There will no doubt be a flood of them soon but for right now, right this minute, here are a list of our favorites, the ones we think are the best — TiPb's Top 5 Jailbreak apps and tweaks that will help you get the most out of iOS 5!

SBSettings

SBSettings has not only been around forever, it has remained one of the most useful jailbreak utilities available. It allows you to add quick toggles for commonly used features such as brightness, 3G, airplane mode, bluetooth, and more. While SBSettings comes with a lot of the more commonly used toggles built in you can download even more from Cydia. You can also download themes to change the look of SBSettings as well.

Now with iOS 5 compatibility it has never been easier to access quick gestures and manage your device. Simply enable SBSettings in Notification Center and it’s right there whenever you need it.

Free – Cydia Link

Activator

This is yet another utility that’s been around almost as long as iOS has. But for most jailbreakers this is a tweak you’ll definitely want to have. You’ll probably end up using it anyways whether you realize it or not. Some apps even require that you install Activator in order to use them.

The whole point of Activator is to make it easier to get to things you use most frequently. If you send a lot of texts you may want a gesture that allows you to bring up a BiteSMS quick compose screen. Activator allows you to do this by simply assigning certain gestures to specific applications. Tons of jailbreak applications and utilities have built-in support for Activator.

If there is ever a period of time I have to suffer with a stock iPhone I still find myself trying to open things with gestures only to frown when it doesn’t work. I still find myself wondering why shortcut gestures have not been more heavily implemented into iOS considering the wide adoption rate of Activator among the jailbreak community.

Free – Cydia Link

Dreamboard

While I think iOS has the cleanest and slickest interface out of any smartphone on the current market I still get bored from time to time and feel the need to switch it up. While a lot of long time jailbreakers have used tools like Summerboard and more recently Winterboard, the jailbreak scene just gets better and better. While Dreamboard is a newer app in its early stages it shows a lot of promise.

The ability to customize and create themes comes built into the app. You can replace and swap out icons and customize until your heart’s content. For jailbreakers who are rather picky about themes and want the ability to have more control over “the little things”, Dreamboard may be just what you’re looking for. I’m sure we’ll start to see Dreamboard extensions and downloadable themes cropping up in Cydia pretty quickly. At the time of writing this I already see over 15 themes available for Dreamboard. This is definitely a jailbreak utility to keep your eye on.

Free – Cydia Link

IntelliScreenX

YouTube Link

While I’ve always been a huge fan of LockInfo by David Ashman I have to admit that the guys over at Intelliborn really stepped up to the plate with their new version of IntelliScreen for iOS 5.

The tight integration with the already built-in Notification Center is really what makes this version stand out. You can just tell that a lot of thought and energy went into the project. While Notification Center is good, IntelliScreenX makes it great. It adds the functionality that Apple left out. Everything from accessing all your information from the lock screen to having a top shelf feature for toggles has been re-worked from the ground up. Intelliborn is definitely giving apps like LockInfo a lot to live up to with their next release.

The down side is as of writing this it has not yet been released. Until then you can check out the video above to see it in action. This is one I keep checking on and can’t wait to try out for myself. A few other sites have been able to get a early hands-on with it and have walked away quite impressed. It should be available this Thursday or Friday to the public. We’ll add a link and update when it’s readily available for download. Let us know if you see it up!

Free trial, $9.99 – Will add link when publicly available

BiteSMS

I’ve tried several messaging replacement apps but I always find myself coming back to Bite. When it comes down to it, it just works. It gives me the control I want and then some. And the update for iOS 5 is no different.

This time it’s coming back around with a new face lift and even tighter integration to iOS. Not only will BiteSMS play nice with iOS 5 but it will also handles Apple’s new iMessage protocol. The app just feels a whole lot cleaner this time around. I also like that users are now given the option to natively re-skin the Bite icon to the default Messages icon and hide the stock icon.

The iOS 5 compatible version is still in beta but it’s public. In order to use it you’ll need to add the following repository in Cydia –

http://test-cydia.bitesms.com/

Just a reminder that since it is still in beta you should expect a few bugs here and there. I’ve been using it for a bit now and haven’t experienced too many issues outside of a crash here and there.

Free trial, $9.99 – Cydia Link

Your top Jailbreak app or tweak?

While this is our list of must have jailbreak apps we know you guys all have your own lists. Feel free to let us know of any cool jailbreak apps or utilities you’ve found as well. And if you’re thinking about jailbreaking but have some questions first make sure you check out our TiPb jailbreak forums for all the help you need and answers to many commonly asked questions.

Chris Stevens at Fast Company has written about the harrowing ordeal of being a small time developer in the big time App Store. It’s nothing new, but it’s something that hasn’t been in the headlines for a while.

It's this label "gold rush" that has been most often applied to the App Store. The potential for success, and risk of failure, is so great that in many ways the App Store has provoked a gold rush among developers. Although the successes are spectacular, the failures are apocalyptic. The mainstream press focuses on the glorious few and gives very little attention to the money being lost on the App Store–a problem compounded by the embarrassed silence of those struggling to turn a profit on their work. In a climate where approximately 540 apps are submitted for review every day, it's easy to see why the Appillionaires are an exclusive and rare breed.

Knowing to get in on the ground floor was probably the first big gamble. Now it’s trying to get noticed among hundreds of thousands of other apps and dozens of existing, entrenched competitors. Can you just make a better looking Twitter client, a more adorable and addictive casual game, or an easier way to share photos with filters and bank on success, or will there always be the element of a crap shoot?

Years ago we talked about the idea of a premium App Store to encourage big companies and game houses to invest in iOS and get higher prices in return, but what about the small, indie developers, the next great innovators in the making? Could Apple revamp the App Store format to give them a better chance as well?

Source: Fast Company

The highly anticipated iPhone fitness accessory, Jawbone Up, will be available this Sunday. A colorful wrist band with built in sensors and a vibration motor, Jawbone Up is designed to track your eating, sleeping and exercise patterns.

Up is a tool designed to improve your lifestyle and it is designed to work with the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch via an app that can retrieve the information recorded from the wrist band; strangely via the 3.5mm headset jack. The app can then tell you a plethora or information and help you move more, sleep better and eat smarter.

• Use the UP wristband and iPhone app to track your steps, distance, calories burned, pace, intensity level, active vs inactive time, GPS routes and more.
• Program your UP wristband to vibrate on your wrist to remind you to move when you’ve been inactive for too long. You control the interval and timeframe.
• Put your wristband in sleep mode to automatically track your hours slept, deep vs. light sleep, awake time and overall sleep quality.
• Replace your noisy alarm clock with UP’s silent Smart Alarm; it vibrates on your wrist and intelligently wakes you up at the ideal moment in your natural sleep cycle just before your desired wake time.
• Say hello to your new food journal. It’s as easy snapping a photo and responding to prompts about how each meal makes you feel.
• UP gets to know you by asking how you feel after each meal. Over time, you can use your responses to help discover which foods make you feel your best.

Up is more than just an accessory and app, it also offers a social network where you can join challenges or set up your own. You can challenge friends to motivate them and yourself to new levels of fitness and health.

The Jawbone Up will be available from Sunday November 6 online as well as in Apple Stores, Target, AT&T and Best Buy. The Jawbone Up Band comes in three sizes and will cost $99. The app is available as a free download.

App Store link

Source: Jawbone

Every day, TiPb gets flooded with announcements for new and updated iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games. So every day we pick just a few of the most interesting, the most notable, and simply the most awesome to share with you!

• IntoNow: Makes watching TV more engaging, social, and fun – using a little bit of magic. Just tap the green button when you're watching TV- whether live or recorded – and IntoNow will identify the show and reward you with related content, personalized recommendations, and discussions to connect with friends. [Free for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• My Town 2: Create the city of your dreams filled with your favorite places from the real-world! Get your town thriving as you buy, customize & upgrade real businesses. Earn coins to beautify your town with awesome decorative items. Grow your population & expand with tons of cool buildings, houses + rare & unique Wonders. [Free for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• TuneIne: A new way to listen to the world through live local and global radio from wherever you are. Whether you want music, sports, news or current events, TuneIn offers over 50,000 stations and 120,000 shows for you to choose from. Now with iOS 5 Twitter support! [$0.99 for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• Print Agent PRO: View, print and share documents. [$5.99 for iPad - App Store link] [$1.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• Patchy: Patchy, a little patch doll, has been left behind in an abandoned house. So he sits by himself, and watches the world outside through the window in front of him. One day all of that changes. Patchy hears a little girl cry one rainy evening. He decides to cheer her up, and does the most wonderful thing a Patch doll could ever do. [$2.99 for iPad - App Store link]

Any other big apps or game releases or updates today? If you pick any of these up, let us know what you think!

Ringtonium, the popular ringtone creation app, just got better. It now has a wheel for fine-tuning the beginning and end of the chosen clip for your ringtone. It also has a mic so that you can record your own sounds and effects.

I played around with Ringtonium, and it’s a fantastic little app. The UI looks nice and is super easy to use. The adjustment wheel is really what differentiates this app from being good to being great. Say goodbye to awkwardly cut off ringtones, now you can fine-tune them to end at just the perfect spot.

Way easier than you could expect interface, clean and slim HD design with super accurate ringtone start/end adjusting wheel. Meet new Ringtonium 2.0.

• Endless number of ringtones absolutely free
• Longest ringtone length time Apple ever allowed
• High quality ringtone sound from your favorite music
• HQ mic recording
• Best customer support video integrated in the app
• Super easy to use navigation

Update includes:

• iOS 5 retina redesign
• NEW help video added
• SoundCloud integration (approved by musicians)
• Store your ringtones right in the App
• View, listen, arrange ringtones without leaving the app
• Delete ringtones without syncing with iTunes
• Upload ringtones to the Cloud in just one tap
• Share ringtones via Facebook, Twitter, email

Giveaway

The good folks at Bamboo Group have given us 5 promo codes to give away to our readers! For a chance to win, let us know which songs or sounds you plan you use for your first ringtone! Must provide a valid email address to win.

Ringtonium is available on the iPhone for $0.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

According to Dev Team member MuscleNerd, the current version of Redsn0w can still jailbreak the beta of iOS 5.01. In case you missed the news, Apple released a beta of iOS 5.01 to developers yesterday to address various bug fixes; notably battery life. The good news is that you can still jailbreak it using Redsn0w. If you have decided that you can't suffer the iOS 5 bugs any longer but don't want to forfeit your jailbreak either, you are safe to proceed.

Devs trying today’s 5.0.1 beta can JB with existing redsn0w (but select the 5.0 IPSW thru GUI or command line)

The jailbreak remains a tethered solution for now and does not work with the iPhone 4S or the iPad 2.

Update: Redsn0w has now been updated to version 0.9.9b8 and it now supports iOS beta 5.0.1. There is no need to use the iOS 5.0 IPSW anymore!

Source: @MuscleNerd

 

Randomly accurate rumor site Digitimes has pair of stories up saying that Apple may be looking to re-design the iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air, and imac next year. This according to “upstream supply chain” sources.

Apple has asked makers in the supply chain to develop flat panel modules and LED light bars for two iPad prototypes, codenamed J1 and J2, the sources revealed.

Stranger still:

Apple’s new generation iPad will enter mass production soon with the launch set for March 2012, according to sources from the upstream supply chain; however, the sources revealed that internally Apple does not view the new iPad product as iPad 3, but rather an upgraded iPad 2 and the real iPad 3 will not be launched until the third quarter of 2012 at the earliest.

iPad 3 likely will ship when Apple can make Retina display panels cheaply enough, at high enough yield rates, to make sense.

Source: Digitimes, x2

Notability, the note-taking app for iPad, received a big update that includes handwriting, PDF imports and annotations, and autosync to the cloud.

Handwriting is happiness! With this addition, Notability continues to provide the tools to capture ideas and information at school, work, or anywhere.

• Full-featured Handwriting: Pour your thoughts, ideas, and notes onto a personal canvas. Write wherever you desire with amazingly smooth digital ink. Use zoom-view to quickly record the smallest of details. Choose a paper to suit your style while using a variety of pen colors and widths to create beautiful notes.
• PDF Annotation: Import a class note, syllabus, lecture, presentation or book chapter, in PDF format. These documents provide great context for note taking. All of the tools are available for annotation, including pens and highlighters, writing blocks, images, type, and more.
• Advanced Word Processing: When speed and accuracy are essential to your notes, the advanced word processing features supply the perfect tools to assist you. A fully customizable tool bar places your favorite tools a touch away: font presets, bold, underline, italic, and cursor controls help you compose notes quickly. Create outlines easily using bullets or numbers. These are just a few of the tools that integrate seamlessly to support your note-taking style.
• Linked Audio Recording: Audio recordings automatically link to your notes. Confidently take notes, with the knowledge that linked recordings help with review. During playback, simply tap a word to hear what was said at that moment. Our unique audio amplification features create brilliant recordings in any setting.
• Media Insertion: Enhance your notes with pictures from your photo library or iPad 2 camera, web clips, figures and writing blocks. You can move and resize these, so they take the proper place in your notes.
• Library Organization: Your notes are important to you, so Notability makes it easy to organize, protect and share them. You can place notes in subjects, and can put subjects into categories. Notes can be kept safe by password protecting them. Auto Sync makes backing up notes easier than ever, as notes are automatically uploaded to Dropbox, iDisk or WebDAV in a format you choose. And the import feature makes it easy to retrieve your notes and PDF files from the cloud. Also email notes, export via iTunes File sharing, and AirPrint.

Giveaway

The good folks at Ginger Labs have given us 5 promo codes to give away to our readers! For a chance to win, just leave a comment below!

Notability is available on the iPad and on sale for $0.99

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Ever taken a landscape photo when you meant to take a portrait, or vice-versa, and wondered how to change it so your iPhone or iPad displays it correctly? One of the new features of iOS 5 is the ability to rotate images directly with the Photos app.

1. Open the photos app
2. Tap the photo you wish to rotate
3. Tap Edit
4. Tap the rotate button on the bottom left. It looks like an upward arrow curving to the left.
5. This will rotate the photo 90 degrees to left (or counterclockwise). Tap it as many times as you need achieve the desired rotation.
6. Tap Save.

There have been many times where the accelerometer of my iPhone didn’t trigger the camera rotation when taking a photo, the photos was awesome otherwise, but I didn’t want to be share it on Facebook because I didn’t want to be the loser who uploaded an incorrectly-oriented photo. Well those days are over! Now you can rotate the photos where the iPhone made an error and used the wrong orientation. Don’t be that guy on Facebook or Twitter ever again!

Let us know how this worked out for you. And if you have any questions, let us know in the comments below!

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward…)

Following up on the beta release of iOS 5.0.1 for developers, Apple has also released iTunes 10.5.1 beta 2, replacing the now timed-out iTunes 10.5.1 beta 1 and allowing for continued testing of iTunes Match.

The Loop‘s Jim Dalrymple also noticed iTunes Match is now up and running on Apple TV.

While Apple missed their previously stated goal of releasing iTunes Match in September, but since it’s still in beta, it looks like they’d rather take the time to get it right, rather than just right now.

Source: developer.apple.com, The Loop