I’ve been quite pleased with my purchase of an iPad, but when you spend your hard earned monies you want to be more than quite pleased. The reason I purchased an iPad was because I thought it was a revolutionary device, one that would bring a new dimension to surfing the web, enjoying multimedia and playing simple games.

But most of all I was looking forward to some apps from some highly skilled developers that would take advantage of the amazing apple UI that made the iPhone the best device of our time so far and the quality HD screen that displays bright vivid images beautifully.

Until now, I have been largely disappointed with the apps on offer, until now I have been struggling to find an app that delvers something new and noteworthy. Until now! So what app have I stumbled upon that has urged me to go as far as pick up my iPad and blog about it?
Answer: Flipboard.

Flipboard is a new take on the flip style flash interfaces many catalogue sites such as Next are offering. It allows you to add categorised content that is gathered from multiple sources to your contents page. So, you’re interested in technology? Add the TechCrunch feed, love food Add the smitten kitchen feed. The feeds are then presented in a flip style format, but you can also touch the article you want to read more about to see it in large format. This is presented beautifully with a slick zoom fade animation. If you want to see the full article on the web then a simple click on a web link takes you to the page. The clever part here is that it doesn’t just open up safari, it does this in it’s own browser so that when your finished you can go back easily to where you left off.

As well as adding content from multiple feeds, you can also add your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This again presents your Facebook and Twitter feeds in the same flip magazine style format. As far as Twitter is concerned, for me, this now makes it 100 times more interesting. The reason for this is the tweets from people you are following are pulled in as well as some of the content from links they are including in their tweet. This means you can read a snippet of the information on the URL they’re tweeting and see if you’re bothered enough to read the whole article.

The Facebook feed is also nicely done, allowing you to focus in on certain status updates or photo postings and add your own comments.

From the opening of Flipboard where you are presented in style with pics of the latest articles slowly zooming in and out, to then point you close the app after feasting on the all the content you’ve just flicked through. You know it’s an application you won’t be deleting any time soon.

I wouldn’t like to criticise anything about flipboard. You can see the time and effort that has been put in by the development team with every aspect of the app. I would like to see the option of adding more content boxes on the contents page, but understand this may have performance implications. The only other improvement I can think of is the ability to add urls of any rss feeds that are then pulled into the flipboard environment.

All in all though… What a Flippling good app! (sorry!)

Barcodes. How long have they been around? Well since 1952 actually – invented by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, but they weren’t commercially used until 1966 and there were no standards in place until 1970. The Universal Product Code (UPC) which we still use today was introduced in 1973, the following year a barcode scanner was introduced and the first product to display the lines we are used to now was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum!

But in this day and age where efficiency and speed mean everything in business (time is money!) it’s amazing to think that probably the world’s best time saving process was created so long ago.

Only recently with QRCodes have we seen a new advancement in the area. QRCodes being a 2D image that can contain a whole lot more data than a string of numbers.

Recently though, I’ve been playing with barcode readers on my iPhone. The most popular is RedLaser – but one often over looked is /index.asp”>Quickmark. This excellent iPhone (or Android) app can read EAN 8/13, UPC-E, UPC-A, Code 39 and Code 128 1D barcodes as well as the 2D QRCode format.

Now the advantage of being able to read code 39, which at time of going to press RedLaser cannot, is the fact you can specify alpha’s as well as numeric in your barcodes.

Now there are thousands of companies than produce their own SKU’s which contain both alpha and numeric characters so will have this information on their website or in their printed catalogues – but these same companies probably will not have the UPC reference for each and every product. Especially if the company is a supplier of multiple brands, i.e Argos.

Another useful function in Quickmark is to allow the app to redirect the user to a URL with the appended barcode reference once scanned. This therefore provides the opportunity for companies to enable users to scan their SKU and be sent automatically into their website to display the product.

There are also numerous websites where you can generate code 39 barcodes very easily. There are also font sites where you can download the code 39 font.
One such site that offers loads of useful tools for code 39 scanning is http://idautomation.com

If you are wanting to generate your own code 39 barcodes dynamically, you can easily do this using PHP.
It is important you have the GD library installed and can help if you also have FreeType, both of which require installation on your apache server which in many cases can only be done by your provider.

If you do have these installed then by using the scripts at…
http://www.barcodephp.com/1d/overview.php
You can very easily get started on generating your own barcodes on the fly.

I’ve had a blast at this and found it quite simple. One tip would be if you are trying to place your barcodes in a certain way on your webpage then the best script to use is the image.php script that comes in the download. This requires certain variables sending to the page – but apart from that is straightforward to use.
Many of the other demo scripts use header(”Content-type: image/jpeg”); which sets the contents of the page to an image. Once this is done it’s difficult to format your page as you want.