Flipboard for iPhone Now Available →

The much awaited update to Flipboard — the one that was supposed to bring support for iPhone is now available in the App Store.

The update, v1.7 is now a universal app running on your iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. This update also brings along a feature exclusive to the iPhone (for now) called Cover Stories — a curated collection of content being shared with you.

With Flipboard for iPhone we’re introducing Cover Stories — one place to quickly catch up on some of the most interesting news, updates and photos being shared with you right now. The more you interact with your friends and the stories being shared, the smarter Cover Stories gets. You can refine what appears here by adding content to your Flipboard, muting anyone you’d rather not hear from, and connecting to your social networks. Cover Stories will be coming to your iPad in the near future.

Go ahead and grab Flipboard from the App Store. It’s Free.

Justin Williams on iPad Magazines →

Justin Williams, developer of popular apps like Elements and Today, shares his experience of trying to read his favorite magazines on his iPad:

Remember, kids. The first rule of App Club is that no one gives a fuck about your brand. A splash screen with a giant logo is something that makes editors and marketing directors feel good, but to a user it just feels like a meaningless delay. You know that feeling of frustration you get each time there’s a 15-second preroll before a video on the web? That’s what a splash screen with logos and advertisements is.

A lot of magazines available on the App Store suffer with the same issues Justin outlines above. I have personally tried apps like India Today and GG — none of which impressed me.

50% Off on all AgileBits Products →

1Password is one of the first apps I install on a Mac and highly recommend to anyone who is serious about the security of their online presence. Heck, we’ve written extensively about 1Password here on Smoking Apples various times in the past here, here and here. The fine folks at AgileBits are having a “Thanks-To-You” Sale wherein all their products are 50% off. If you’ve held off on your purchase and needed a reason, let this be it.

If you use the following links to purchase the apps, you’ll be supporting us as well.

• Purchase 1Password for Mac
• Purchase 1Password Pro (Universal app for iOS)
• Purchase 1Password for iPhone
• Purchase 1Password for iPad

Samsung finds parts of Galaxy Tab 10.1 ‘inadequate’ compared to iPad 2 →

Engadget:

It has led to Samsung, purveyor of an Android 3.0 tablet by the name of Galaxy Tab 10.1, to look more closely at its own hardware and pricing model and, according to executive VP Lee Don-Joo, “improve the parts that are inadequate.” We don’t know what those are, specifically, however he notes that “Apple made [the iPad 2] very thin” and also goes on to say that Samsung will be rethinking its pricing strategy with the Tab 10.1.

Yes, because parts is why the Galaxy whatever sales are going to be ‘quite small smooth’.

Twitter v3.3′s Quick Spam Bar [screenshot] →

We thought it was all fun and games when Twitter played around with the Mac app’s icon. It yielded much laughter and sarcastic joy. The iOS update on the other hand comes with “Quick Bar”, which is Twitter’s way of saying “here’s some spam with our free app”. A pop-up bar which spits out trending topics like anyone’s even interested. The only ones happy about this “feature” would be third party twitter client developers.

This iTunes review by David Rae sums it up nicely…

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get #quickbarsucks pop up in the Quick bar?

Motorola Xoom: The HTML5 Developer Scorecard →

The Sencha team runs the Xoom through some browser tests. Very impressive performance in SunSpider tests, but:

[…] the CSS3 animations are almost completely broken. We often found even for the most basic animations the browser skipped frames, incorrectly rendered elements, or didn’t run the animation to completion. If Animations were simply slow, that would be one thing, but the Xoom CSS3 Animation support faces basic correctness issues. […] It’s been nearly a year since Apple shipped the iPad and we’re still incredibly surprised that Google and Motorola have yet to build a mobile browser that has a correct and high-performance CSS3 implementation.

We’re just days away from what will take away that performance edge.