I reviewed GarageBand for iPad recently and, as I said in the review, I wish I could give this app six stars. With the combination of smart touch-screen controls, tons of loops, an incredible amount of instruments, and smart instruments that make even someone with no musical talent sound good, this app is simply a must-have at $4.99.

This week Apple issued a small update for the app that will be welcome news for GarageBand fans. Now you'll be able to transfer your iPad masterpieces to your Mac to work on them further in GarageBand for Mac. This is particularly good news to me because now I can take my iPad with me on trips, make new songs, then easily transfer them to my desktop when I get home.

Are any of you as excited about GarageBand for iPad as I am? Let me know in the comments.

This week's apps are a challenging physics-based building-game sequel and an upgraded iOS version of a very popular golf game franchise.

SimplePhysics (99 cents) is the sequel to popular physics game BridgeBasher, challenging you to make structures that will withstand the laws of gravity and nature--while remaining under budget.

You start with a helpful tutorial level that shows you the ropes by having you build a tree house. Your requirements are that you build the structure to withstand the weight of four 50-pound children (don't worry, they use boxes to symbolize the children). Before testing the integrity of your structure, draw supports between onscreen anchors to make sure your tree house will hold. When you're satisfied with your work you can put your tree house through a Certification test, but it must hold the weight of the four children for 10 seconds in order to pass.

Every level in SimplePhysics has new requirements and challenges you'll need to meet to pass, but the game gives you lots of tools to help you test your structures. Before certification, you have the option to use a "finger" test, in which you touch and drag support trusses to determine their weak points, making it possible to alter your structure before the final test. But even with the added information, we found this game to be extremely challenging, especially in later levels.

Overall, SimplePhysics makes for a great successor to BridgeBasher, with several useful interface additions and structural challenges to keep the game interesting. But be aware that this game will definitely challenge you and you may end up doing levels several times before you succeed.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 ($6.99--iPad version is $9.99) is the first game from the popular golf franchise on iOS since April 2009, and it's easy to see that this latest game is leaps and bounds beyond the original. The graphics on the iPhone 4 Retina Display are silky smooth, reminding me of console-level golf games. The controls have been fine-tuned as well, making it easy to adjust shot types and switch clubs depending on the situation.

You get the choice to play as Tiger Woods, alongside him, or as any one of several current pro male and female players. You can also create your own player and customize clothing, clothing color, and skin color. Later, when you earn some money for various challenges on the course, you'll be able to upgrade your equipment for more-powerful shots and better accuracy to help you improve your scores.

Rather than the standard three-touch hit method found in other golf games, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 uses a vertical swiping method for better precision--the down swipe determines shot power and on the up swipe you can slightly curve your swing for draw and fade shots. Even once the ball is in the air you can swipe repeatedly in any direction to put spin on the ball. All of these shot variables will come in handy in various situations, and we like that there are so many controls for shot precision.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 lets you play quick games, head-to-head matches against friends over Bluetooth or a local network, or Tiger challenges with unique requirements, or you can play through your own PGA Tour. You also have the ability to connect to Facebook and try to beat your friends' best shots (which you can watch) on specific holes. Sadly, there is no online multiplayer at this time, but it seems like a no-brainer that EA would add that functionality in a future version--we'll just have to wait and see.

Even without online multiplayer, with a streamlined control system, customizable players, and tons of challenging courses to play on, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 is the golf game to beat on iOS. Anyone looking for golf game that's closer to simulation than arcade will enjoy this title.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you able to get past the Ferris wheel in SimplePhysics (I haven't yet)? Do you like the control system in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12? Let me know in the comments!

You can build a quick-and-dirty Web site using any number of services--but not many of them fit in your pocket. New app Zapd lets you create a simple, attractive site with just a few taps. It's easy to use, surprisingly fun, and totally free.

To get started, you choose one of 20 basic but visually pleasing themes for your site. Then you give it a title and start adding elements: text, photo, or link.

Photos can be snapped on the fly using your iPhone/iPod camera or imported from an existing album. As for links, you have to enter them manually--it would be nice if Zapd gave you the option of pulling links from your Safari bookmarks, but I wouldn't call that a major shortcoming.

These three elements can be rearranged just by dragging and dropping. This can be a bit tricky within the tight confines of your iPhone's screen, but ultimately it works just fine.

When you're done, Zapd will instantly publish your site to a custom zapd.co (yes, that's .co, not .com) URL and/or share it via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail.

I can think of countless uses for Zapd, from throwing together a quick family- vacation travelogue to chronicling the progress of a work project. All that's missing is a native iPad version. Even so, Web site builders don't come any easier--or more convenient--than this.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Despite arriving a week later, Firefox 4 is outpacing Internet Explorer 9 in real-world use so far, new statistics show.

Microsoft released IE9 on March 14, and Mozilla's Firefox 4 arrived on March 22--both brand-new even by the fast-moving standards of today's software market. By month's end, IE9 accounted for 1.0 percent of browsing activity worldwide, according to statistics from analytics firm Net Applications. Firefox 4, though, reached 1.7 percent, despite its later start.

Firefox 4 has a big advantage in usage statistics over IE9: Windows XP. Mozilla's browser works on the decade-old operating system, but IE9 requires Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7. Given that Windows XP machines represent 54.4 percent of the usage on the Internet right now to Windows 7's 24.2 percent and Vista's 10.6 percent, Windows XP is a big ally even if the growth is with Windows 7.

IE9 has injected a massive dose of new competition into the browser market. Microsoft's browser supports a raft of new Web standards, led the charge for hardware acceleration, and offers much higher performance than its predecessors. But IE still isn't the browser of the technophiles, so it's reasonable to expect IE9's usage to trail that of Firefox.

Expect usage of both to increase more when people are actively encouraged to update.

"Firefox 3.x users have not yet received a major update, but will receive it soon (usually, major updates come 60-90 days after a major release). If they check for an update manually, they of course will find Firefox 4," said Mozilla spokeswoman Valerie Ponell.

As for Microsoft, "Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June," said Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE business and marketing, in a blog post.

When all versions were taken into account, IE still leads the overall market with 55.9 percent of usage in March, with Firefox in second place at 21.8 percent. Only IE, though, ceded share to the up-and-coming browsers in the market right now, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.

IE dropped 0.9 percentage points from February to March, while Firefox staved off the rivals with a 0.1 percentage point gain. That's not much, but it's a stronger showing than the steady losses that Firefox has experienced since reaching its high-water mark of 24.7 percent of usage in November 2009.

Chrome continued its steady rise, from 10.9 percent to 11.6 percent. Safari rose from 6.4 percent to 6.6 percent. And fifth-place Opera stayed level at 2.2 percent for both February and March.

Net Applications' statistics are based on the activity of about 160 million visitors per month to Web sites using its services. It adjusted its technique slightly for February's statistics after the U.S. government released new per-country Internet usage statistics that the company factors into its results.

For example, IE got a small boost in February because it's widely used in China, which showed higher Internet usage, while Firefox slipped a bit.

"This adjustment corrects an increasing inaccuracy over time as population shifts occur and reflects reality more closely than unadjusted numbers," Net Applications said last month.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Less than a month after RockMelt threw open its doors to anybody from the public interested in its Chromium-based browser beta, RockMelt is set to break ground on its second beta today as it hopes to continue attracting new users and developing features.

RockMelt beta 2 (download for Windows | Mac) comes with four noteworthy improvements: a new method for integrated bookmarking that will be strikingly familiar to Instapaper and Read It Later fans; a revamped Twitter interface; a new chat notification bar and better support for multiple, simultaneous instant messages; and upgrading the browser's core to Chromium 10.

The new bookmarking feature, called View Later, lives in your location bar as an analog clock icon, next to the traditional bookmark star icon. Click it to save the URL to read later, and then click on the View Later icon in your App Edge (the sidebar on the right) to access your View Later list.

Now, that's a nifty feature to have baked into the browser, but it's not unique. What's great about View Later is that RockMelt has extended it to all interactions with the browser. The View Later icon appears next to Facebook updates, tweets, and RSS items, too. All View Later items are synchronized along with your other RockMelt data, so you can easily mark something to read later at work and then check it at home.

RockMelt's Twitter integration now includes Twitter search, makes "@" mentions more accessible and allows you to click on them to see a tweeter's full stream, and makes Twitter lists more discoverable. In a phone conversation yesterday, RockMelt CEO Eric Vishra explained that the redesigned Twitter app in RockMelt coincidentally lined up with Twitter's own push to rein in some third-party apps. "We're just coincidentally moving in the same direction [as Twitter]. Users wanted these changes."

Vishra also said that RockMelt users are frequent Facebook instant-messagers, with most people using RockMelt for around six hours per day and running at least three chats at the same time during some point of their day. To that end, RockMelt has improved its chat integration so that instant messages now appear at the bottom of the browser window. The look of this is similar to how instant messages appear in Facebook itself, reinforcing the familiar interface.

RockMelt now has its Facebook Edge on the left, its App Edge on the right, and chats appearing at the bottom of the browser like a function-specific status bar. At a time when browsers are heavily pushing a minimalist interface, it's interesting to see a company build out the interface again.

Another point of comparison with the competition is user base. RockMelt got a lot of attention when it made its debut in November, but the company has not sought a rapid expansion of its user base. Vishra refused to elaborate on how many users the browser had, simple reiterating the "hundreds of thousands" number he stated at the beginning of March 2011. He said that instead of attracting installs, he wants to build a dedicated base. "Anybody can build a vacuous bubble pretty easily. We're looking to build something that people really use," he said.

Going forward, Vishra said that RockMelt aims to focus on more full-featured app integration. How this affects Chromium's ability to run smoothly has yet to be seen. In CNET's recent benchmark analysis of Chrome 10, it fared poorly in memory usage when compared against Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9.

Comic Sans, the Windows font reviled by font snobs everywhere, has joined the big leagues.

Monotype Imaging released the oxymoronic but definitely real Comic Sans Pro, taking advantage of April Fools' Day to bring some humor to the occasion. The new typeface combines a script style geared for typographically clumsy children's birthday invitations with high-end font features more commonly used on wedding invitations.

"Comic Sans Pro contains a versatile range of typographic features including swashes, small caps, ornaments, old-style figures, and stylistic alternates," Monotype said, referring to a variety of ways designers extend beyond the standard character set for practical and aesthetic reasons.

But the company wasn't taking itself too seriously. The typeface is good for scrapbooking and school projects, but that's not all, said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Monotype Imaging.

"Comic Sans is also a favorite in professional environments, used in medical information, instructions, ambulance signage, college exams, corporate mission statements, and executive reprimands--even public letters from sports team owners to their fans," he said. "Breaking up with your spouse? Why not write a letter in Comic Sans Pro, embellished with a typographic whack!, pow! or bam! Comic Sans is everywhere, and now it's even better."

The typeface costs about $120 from Monotype Imaging's font subsidiaries including Ascender, ITC, Linotype and Fonts.com.

It's a good thing Monotype Imaging had a sense of humor, because Comic Sans was the butt of some Google April Fools' Day joking.

The Google Webmaster Team tweeted about its Comic Sans work, directing people to the Comic Sans for Everyone site to download a Chrome extension that turns all fonts shown in the browser to Comic Sans.

"We'll be rolling out Comic Sans as our default font across all Google products on April 4, 2011," Google said in the prank site. "Whether it's search results, text ads, emails, or documents, our research has consistently shown that the most effective way to achieve user happiness and higher [advertising] conversion rates is to use the Comic Sans font."

If you don't want to install the extension, try searching for the term "Comic Sans" on Google. The result--search results displayed in the font you'd expect--looks less like an April Fools' joke and more like an Easter Egg.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Digital comics have been around for longer than the iPad, but they were previously confined to either the computer or a tiny smartphone screen. The iPad breathed life into this burgeoning field by providing a larger, colorful display that was still portable.

How the eye follows the page
In fact, one of the very first apps to debut on day one of the iPad's release in 2010 was Comixology, an app that allows you to purchase, store, and read comics right on the iPad.

Comixology's iPhone app debuted in late 2009, but it wasn't until the iPad version that the digital comic potential was realized. Comixology boasted a reading experience that's almost cinematic, supposedly mimicking how the eye follows the printed page with a mode called "guided view." In guided view, you read panel by panel, instead of page by page. David Steinberger, Comixology's CEO, claims that around 50 percent of its users use guided view instead of full-page mode.

Content deals soon followed, as Comixology started offering titles by Marvel and DC, the two biggest names in comics. Indeed, Comixology helped the two publishers come up with their own dedicated apps in the iTunes App Store. It has also created title-specific apps like the Scott Pilgrim app that only carries Scott Pilgrim books.

The reason is simple: Specific apps get higher level searchability in the iTunes App Store. This proved especially useful when the movie of the same name debuted and people wanted to read the books that inspired the film.

Audience diversity and growth
One of the more interesting results of digital comics on tablets and smartphones is that they typically draw in more casual consumers who are newer to comics. Steinberger said, for example, that the digital audience tends to favor pop culture hits more than traditional comic book fare. When the zombie-centric "Walking Dead" series debuted on AMC, digital sales of the comics on Comixology went up dramatically. This might be because casual consumers either don't know about their local comic book store or just don't want to go there.

"The [traditional] distribution of comics is lame," Steinberger said. "They're not on newsstands anymore, they're not in the corner stores. They're only available to direct-market retailers and there's less distribution than it used to be. There's great opportunity here to gain a larger market [of comic readers]."

He pointed out that the app actually includes a retailer finder. While it might seem odd that Comixology is promoting its brick-and-mortar rivals, Steinberger sees them more as allies.

"Everyone expects us to be a disrupter to steal market share," he said. "We feel that the way the market is shaped in the first place, there's an incredible chance here to enlarge the market. We feel that getting more people to discover comics at all is great for everyone."

Publishers and pricing
Perhaps the most compelling reason to buy digital over print is that you get practically infinite shelf space and inventory. Back catalogs are easier to access without having to go through the disappointment of missing one or two titles in a vast collection.

But to please the true comics fan, Comixology and competitors like Graphic.ly need to deliver new comics on the same day as the print version arrives in stores--this is called day-and-date delivery, and it usually happens on Wednesdays. Some publishers already do this, like Archie, and Marvel and DC do deliver a few of their titles this way. But the numbers aren't nearly where they should be, especially with popular titles and independent releases.

The other issue is pricing. While most comics are 99 cents and $1.99 each, current issues can be $2.99 or the same price as the print version. Since the comics are DRM-protected, some readers might not feel the price is justified.

Steinberger admits that DRM might not be palatable, but it's a necessary evil--"otherwise publishers don't do this at all." However, since Comixology offers its content not only on iOS devices, but also on the Web and on Android, Steinberger says that hopefully the seamless reading and downloading experience will make the DRM less heinous.

One way for publishers to lower the price is to go it alone without a third-party distributor. For example, Viz Media and Dark Horse have developed their own apps that you can download on the iTunes App Store. Their books are typically cheaper than their print counterparts--some Viz books are half the price, while Dark Horse charges around $1.49 per issue.

Dark Horse goes a step further to cut costs by trying to avoid Apple's e-commerce system, redirecting users to the mobile Safari app to purchase comics, much like Amazon's Kindle application.

UPDATE: We've learned that Dark Horse has changed its pricing to $1.99 per issue for in-app purchases, putting the publisher on par with the others.

Expanding market
Even though Comixology was there first, it's no longer the only player in the game. Graphic.ly is an up-and-coming competitor in the space--the company has apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Even though Graphic.ly's library of titles is not as large, it has worked out a deal where it's the only Android app to deliver Marvel comics--Comixology's Android app blocks Marvel content, at least for now. Graphic.ly also has a social component to its app that lets you clip a panel and share it on Facebook, leave a review on individual issues, and read your friends' reviews.

While Comixology is iOS-centric, it has recently been very bullish on Android, and is working out a better in-app purchasing experience with Google. But Steinberger admits that it all started with Apple.

"Without Apple, this market would not have happened," he said. "They created a sense for consumers that they should buy digital content on their devices. They make devices for image-rich content."

Digital future
When asked about the future of digital comics, Steinberger said the first step is for publishers to get comfortable with day-and-date releases of digital copies. The risk is understandable--both retailers and publishers are afraid that sales would go down as a result.

"But we're getting a lot of data that as we're selling a lot of "Walking Dead" books, hard-copy sales of "Walking Dead" keep going up too," he said. "We're expanding the market, we're not destroying the retailer. We're helping them. It's beneficial for everyone to have all content available everywhere as soon as it can."

In fact, Comixology recently announced a digital affiliate storefront for retailers so retailers can start selling comics online, too. Steinberger claims that it's actually connected to the retailer revenue-wise, and it is in Comixology's interest for the retailer to do well.

Comixology also developed a publisher portal for self-publishers and independent creators. You can sign up, submit your books, set up the guided-view system, and use its own in-house software to create the digital comic. The book will then go on sale in the Comixology store. Obviously Comixology will take a percentage of sales and there might be an entrance fee, but it might be the easiest way to get your self-published book distributed.

"There's room for growth in the market," Steinberger said. "We still love print. We have walls of trade paperbacks and hardcovers in the office.

"But digital is for people who haven't read comics in 20 years because of too much bulk, or the people who travel who don't want to carry around books," he continued. "We've heard stories of comic fans who threw away their collections years ago to clear up space in the garage or the basement, and are now back because of us."

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there will be a panel about digital comics at WonderCon at Moscone South this Friday, April 1, at 7 p.m. PT. in room 220. Panelists will include David Steinberger, who was interviewed for this article, as well as Micah Baldwin, CEO of Graphic.ly, and Michael Murphey, CEO of iVerse, another distributor of digital comics.

Originally posted at iPad Atlas