ipad

tl;dr: If you need a long Lightning cable, this is one of the few reliable options. If you need the fastest charging possible for an iPad, stick to Apple's much shorter cable.

A year or so ago, the owner of NOYCE Labs sent me a sample iPhone-compatible microphone to test, and I really liked it—I still use it for impromptu recordings with my iPhone, in fact!

So when I got an email requesting I review NOYCE's latest product, the longest (at least that I know of) Lightning USB cable available on Amazon, I gladly accepted. NOYCE sent me their 13-foot-long (4 meters for the non-Imperial reader) Lightning cable, and I've used it for a couple months now, so I figured it was a good time for a review.

The Mass Explained App for iPad looks like a pretty awesome app ("coming soon") from Agnus, LLC. I haven't seen the app in action (just screenshots), but even if it's just a bunch of static pages like an interactive book, it looks like the content is high-quality:

I really hope the app function as good as it looks. If so, I think this would be a good template for other similar apps explaining sacraments, sacramentals, the Rosary, prayer, saints, the Vatican, etc.

Basically take encyclopedic knowledge of a Catholic subject, and marry that with some great illustrations, images, and 3D models, and make a very nice interactive app or iBook. I would buy the whole series!

In yet another example of Microsoft copying Apple's user interface concepts, the latest update to the Xbox 360's dashboard/Xbox LIVE integration now uses the same 'slide-to-left-to-search' user interface paradigm that started with Apple's iOS 3.0. Watch for yourself in the video below:

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's been taking some great steps in a new and innovative direction in UX/interaction design... but it seems their design teams still copy off Apple when they need to. Of course, there are worse companies to copy from—at least they're not copying Android!

My best zen face. (Photo from Scott Maentz).

I just finished my workshop presentation at the Catholic New Media Celebration entitled "Sanctifying Mobile Technology." I talked about some ideas I have to help Catholic parishes and organizations spread their mission through iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.

My full presentation was recorded, but I don't have the video yet. However, I do have all the slides, and tons of links, over on the presentation page here on Life is a Prayer.com.

You can view photos from CNMC '11 in the linked Flickr group.

I haven't seen much about this feature yet, so I figured I'd put it through its paces and share what I found. WYSIWYG editing on iOS devices is finally here! For a long time, contentEditable support has been lacking on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, and it's been slightly annoying, as the only way to add richly-formatted text on these devices was doing a two-step through finding the carat characters and writing the HTML yourself.

Plus, some WYSIWYG editors (like TinyMCE) simply disabled the WYSIWYG from attaching to a textarea if it detected an iOS device. No longer, however: I've tested CKEditor (latest nightly) and TinyMCE (latest nightly), and both work perfectly (surprisingly well, in fact!) on the iPad running iOS 5 beta 6:

Thanks to iOS5's support for contentEditable text areas, rich text editors like TinyMCE and CKEditor (two of my favorites, which I install on many Drupal sites using the WYSIWYG module) now work great for editing content on the web in mobile Safari!

This means that I'll be more likely to do site content work on the road with my iPad 2. I just wish they supported file select fields so I could also add images more easily on the go.

Check out all the details over on Midwestern Mac: WYSIWYG Editing (contentEditable support) in iOS 5.

A few notes on the iPad 2, based on reading the tech specs thoroughly, and observing some videos frame-by-frame: