Flipboard seems to have a winner with their new magazines. They are easy to assemble and look great. I can envision them becoming an important publishing tool with a few more improvements. Some areas that need beefing up include:

• The ability to add editorial content to flipped content.
• More flexibility with images included in the flipped content, like choice of image used.
• The ability to embed content that isn’t hosted elsewhere, for example an index to the content or a publishers statement explaining the purpose of the magazine.
• An easier way to manage expiring content. As it stands now, the magazine just grows and grows and grows as more content is flipped into it. I would prefer a way to expire off older content (perhaps by age or perhaps by article count) so the magazine doesn’t become unwieldy. Using the Flipboard Editor to manually delete pages is a pain.

For an example magazine, check out the NotSoFAQs Mag.
View my Flipboard Magazine.

Flipboard Android, Flipboard iPad and Flipboard Web are all available to view the magazines.

I’ve been using Waze for several months now, both the iPad version and the Android version (they are basically the same on both platforms), and have to say I love it.

It uses the power of social media to help you decide the best route to travel by using reports from other Waze users to both calculate your best route and visually show you where the traffic is on a 3d-like map display. The whole concept of using user reports of traffic in real-time is awesome and marrying that to route navigation and calculation sometimes seems like magic. Waze has sent me home on numerous different routes (including ones I never would have thought of on my own) by taking into account user reports of traffic and accidents along the various possible routes.

Waze is free and I highly recommend it.

Thinkbook by bitolithic is the killer application for iPad in my book.  It has helped me organize my notes and keep track of todo’s in a way that feels comfortable to me, mainly because it is so flexible (todo’s can be put right in the notes, yet an overall ‘Dashboard’ can be created to give a consolidated view of all of those todo’s – very neat and powerful).

Some of the main features of Thinkbook include;

• Plenty of note types: text notes, todos, questions and projects. Notebooks and pages behave like notes too so you move them around however you like using the slider.
• Use special finder notes to create dashboards. This feature is powerful, let’s you organize your todo’s basically any way you like, yet you can still get a view that consolidates them.
• The slider, a brand new way to make new notes and rearrange, move, copy and delete existing ones.
• Tag everything you can see. They’re inherited, tag a notebook with ‘work’ and every note in it will be treated as work.
• Fast search for text and tags.
• Dropbox integration. Backup and restore to Dropbox, export and import notes, pages, notebooks and projects as text, work on them on your PC, then import them back into ThinkBook.
• Easily email notes, pages or books.

The only thing missing for me is a desktop counterpart.  If bitolithic would just come up with a PC and Apple desktop version, I believe they would have a hit application on their hands. I highly recommend Thinkbook to all iPad users.