• Our take? It depends on the app. Right now, the iPad does three things really well. It allows you to surf the Web at nearly the same clip as a laptop, it rules at non-Flash video playback, and it allows you to read the news better than either a newspaper or Web browser. For a 1.0 product, this is polished. But we’re journalism nerds that read a lot of links, so let’s focus our appeal. How is reading and curating news on this thing, anyway? (Hint: Pretty good.)

First: What a good news app needs

• one A simple format that makes it easier, not harder, to read the news. It’s not a newspaper or a Web site; it’s a little of both
• two An easy way to share content – you should be able to copy quotes, tweet links, and e-mail articles to a friend (or yourself)
• three A solid offline reading mode – these apps need to be able to work without a wi-fi connection nearby; all of the apps had this

Second: The best news apps

• best The Reuters app is
  super-readable,
  easy to scan, and
  best-formatted for
  the iPad. It’s also
  the one that tried to
  look least like a
  newspaper.
• great The USA Today
  app has a mix of
  strong readability,
  easy organization,
  and smart uses of
  swiping. It’s nearly
  as good as the
  Reuters app.
• eh The New York
  Times app isn’t
  bad, but its body
  type isn’t on the grid. The Wall Street Journal app tends to overreact
  to tiny movements.
• wtf The Associated
  Press app went all
  scrapbook with
  their format, which
  is OK – for a
  scrapbook. For
  reading hard news,
  it’s very annoying.

Third: Twitter on the iPad

• 
  Best balance Twitterrific was designed for the iPad the way that one would expect someone to use an iPad Twitter app. The use of Twitter lists, for example, makes for great news-reading. Less is more in this case.
• 
  Most complex TweetDeck could stand to be a little less complicated right now. It loads too many windows at once and comes across as a bit bloated and overwhelming. A bit more interface furniture to clean up the look would help this greatly.
• 
  Best mashup As many people know, the EchoFon/Firefox setup is hard to top for reading linked tweets, and TweetBrowser goes a long way to replicate that on the iPad. Only issue: We wish we could hide the feed in the horizontal format.

• » One side note: Webkit’s skills at rendering the Twitter web apps are mostly pretty good. The web version of Hootsuite is actually better than the iPad-native version of TweetDeck on the iPad. Threadsy also works great, as does the Web version of Seesmic. You’ll have to use a two-finger swipe to navigate, though, which can be cumbersome.

Overall: What did we think?

• » What we like: It’s a good reading format, and Safari could handle nearly everything we threw at it (except the TinyMCE rich-text editor, which means it sucks for blogging because WordPress uses that). The format is awesome for video and music. Once Hulu and Spotify get apps on here, it’s seriously a one-stop shop. Also, being able to load articles on the device and take it on the wi-fi-less D.C. Metro was downright perfect.
• » What we don’t like: It can be hard to hold the device upright, especially if you’re not sitting at a table. It’s strange that Apple didn’t consider putting a kickstand on the back. The keyboard is usable but not heavy-duty. Apple should consider putting in (or allowing) additional keyboard setups that make it more usable for typing in HTML. Right now, it’s a serious chore.
• » What we want to see: Surprisingly, we don’t miss multitasking on the iPad – it actually wasn’t noticeable for most apps. But we think someone needs to create a single app that mixes social media, web browsing and blogging/word processing. TweetBrowser gets the first two down, but WordPress‘ app isn’t designed for this at all. We smell opportunity (eh, Tumblr?).

• Pink Floyd, as you might know, prefers that people listen to their albums in full form, but they never said anything about re-imagined versions of the tunes from “Dark Side of the Moon” thrown together in Famitracker. Above is “Money,” which has a very whiny vocal part. What do you guys think? There’s a whole album available to download. source

• Perfect response to this feature: “I like the TEXTp, but could you cut the font size in half? some videos look horrible and you can’t even make out what it is with the current font size. If it were 6 or 8 instead of what looks like 12 then you would still cut down on bandwidth but get more people to switch because they will still get their video.” (Oh, and people are downright angry about the new layout, which has been around for a while in beta form, and are threatening to quit the site where they watch all their videos. Because, as we all know, the most rational people in the world are YouTube commenters.) source

• If you’re gonna go retro, might as well go full-tilt. Back in the dark ages of video games, Mega Man was king – and his style of gaming was all but ignored for years, in an attempt to making gaming more complicated. But a couple of years ago, they decided to go full retro again with Mega Man 9, and now with the new Mega Man 10, they’ve decided to create a commercial to match. We’re gonna eat some Legend of Zelda cereal now. source

• hadron A particle that has mass,
  bound together from smaller parts called quarks. Protons and electrons are types of hadron
  (which we didn’t misspell).
• collider A device that takes two beams headed in opposite directions and makes them run into each other, in an attempt to make two sets of particles combine.
• higgs boson The thing which is suspected to give matter its mass if Peter Higgs‘ theory pans out. The Large Hadron Collider is trying to figure out whether it’s real or not.
• dark matter This weird, cool stuff that
  scientists think makes up a quarter of the universe, and kinda shapes the trajectory of the universe a little. Like we said, weird and cool. source

• 27km length of the underground tunnel, near Geneva, where
  all the good stuff happened this morning
• 3.5x the strength of the atom-smasher compared the next-highest level of energy achieved
• 99.9% the speed of the collider compared
  to the speed of light; any faster, and we might all die source

• So, if we all lived somewhere with the density of Brooklyn (which is packed, but comfortable), we could all fit into New Hampshire. How cool is that, kids? Kudos to Shane Keaney, who designed this clever graphic as part of a Good Magazine contest. Sadly, some of the graphics are a little messy compared to Shane’s, which does a great job of explaining a very detailed concept in incredibly simple terms. Great job, dude. If we had money, we’d give you a job blogging for us or something. source

• As might be clear to the people who regularly use ShortFormBlog, we’re big fans of the Apture contextualization technology, and we’ve actually been testing out the newest version on the site for months. However, and this is big news, they’ve launched a public beta, with some significant(ly awesome) changes. You might notice that the bar on the bottom of the site has been replaced with a branded pop-up bar on the top with really cool social functions at your fingertips. They’re really excited about it (and have some awesome ideas about context), and so are we.
• » Want to see something cool? Select this text: “Elvis bananas.” Then hit Control-C/Command-C to copy it. You should see something really awesome happen. Just sayin’. source