Inspire Pro, a popular painting app for the iPad, got a facelift this week with an update that introduces a plethora of new features. But instead of just telling iPad users about the update, app developer KiwiPixel instead touted the changes at a live art demo at Macworld/iWorld.

Tucked away in a quiet corner off of the show floor, KiwiPixel had an iPad hooked up to a large monitor, so expo attendees should see various artists at work throughout the day. Or, they could stop and take a quick lesson and try the app out on their own iPad, as the artists would give pointers and describe their painting techniques for any interested passerby.

As for the Inspire Pro update, Version 2.0 sports a brand new user interface with redesigned graphics, button controls, and title bars for an improved canvas experience. It also packs 30 different brushes, divided into sets by brush type: oil paint, airbrush, and basic shapes; each brush can be used as a wet brush, dry brush, or eraser. I really liked the mixing effect that you can use with any of your dry brushes; this effect allows you to blend two colors together to make a custom color mixture, mimicking the experience of creating the perfect color on a real painter’s palette. The app also supports the Hex3 Jaja pressure sensitive stylus for even more painting control.

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In the months since its March release, FiftyThree’s Paper has become my go-to sketching app for doodling, planning, or quick drawings. I’ve used it to design my new apartment, create a few Twitter avatars, and sketch away a few Saturday afternoons. But the first iteration of Paper, as beautiful as it was, had its flaws: fixed brush sizes, limited color palettes, and no zoom. Wednesday’s 1.2.1 update, which brings both color mixing and support for the Pogo Connect pressure-sensitive Bluetooth stylus, doesn’t fix every problem I have—there’s still no way to enlarge the canvas—but it’s a wonderful step forward. I took the update for a brief whirl, using the Pogo Connect as my chief drawing implement.

First things first: Though this update does give you several color palettes to choose from—including, thank goodness, several shades of skin tone—you’ll need to pay an additional $2 if you want unlimited color choice. Along with the various brushes you can purchase, this brings the total cost for Paper to $9, which I think is more than fair for what the app can do.

And what a color tool Paper has brought forth. Mixer is both a color picker and a palette mixer: You can either tap the white circle inside the Mixer to bring up sliders that allow you to pick the right color shade, or you can rely on old-school color mixing to get what you want. Pick an initial color from the palette view and swirl the white circle clockwise until the color takes up the entirety of the black circle, then pick a secondary color and swirl the white circle counter clockwise (as if you were mixing it into the circle). Your initial color will change into the second color, giving you all the hues in-between to pick from. You can even go back and forth—clockwise and counter-clockwise—to see the full range between colors.

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A new iPad app for novice designers has arrived on the scene. With Quark DesignPad, the company that has traditionally catered to the professional sector of the design world has debuted a mobile consumer product that gives new designers and students an entrée into grid-based layouts.

The free Quark DesignPad, which you control with a fingertip or stylus, lets you get started quickly in prototyping designs. The app offers an intiutive way to get started with a design, and then share it via email or Twitter, or further refine it in QuarkXPress. You do not have to own QuarkXPress to use DesignPad, but the app will assist professional designers too in executing and sharing quick mockups on-the-go.

Starting a design

When you fire up DesignPad, you’re greeted with a clean, unintimidating tableau that offers 11 pre-defined layouts representing popular document types, such as brochure, poster, flyer, display ad, letterhead, and newsletter. Each document has its own structure, which you can change to suit your needs.

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Thanks to the iPhone, many more of us have a camera in our pocket. But, like any art, great photography takes time. (Maybe not as much money wasted on roll upon roll of 35mm film, though.) That’s why we put together Macworld’s iPhone Photography Superguide, our attempt to help you glide through the rough patches and on to photographic stardom.

This book explains it all: The nitty-gritty bits of taking pictures, editing and sharing your work, and using third-party apps and accessories to move from mischief to mastery. Learn how your iPhone can quickly transform into a portable camera when you need it to, whether it’s buttons pulling double duty or app shortcuts built into iOS.

Discover how to take pictures in almost any situation using old photography tricks and tips. Decide how you’d like to edit, sort, and organize your images; we offer tips on the Photos app, iPhoto for iOS, and suggestions for third-party applications that can make your image-editing easier. And, if you want to see what other goodies can propel your iPhone to mobile photograph greatness, we’ve got just the thing with a roundup of the top iPhone photography accessories.

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When the iPad was originally launched in early 2010, artists looking to use it as a creative tool had a relatively small range of apps to choose from. But in the two years that followed, developers have packed the app store with a vast range of powerful creative tools, now making it difficult to discover the right art app for you.

As someone who uses a number of art apps, I generally ask myself two major questions when looking at new contenders: Does this app offer anything new that I can’t do already? And will this app do something that I can do already, but in a better way? Let’s take a look at KiwiPixel’s Inspire Pro and see how it compares.

Interface

Inspire Pro’s interface is, for the most part, simple and easy to understand and use. The gallery area greets you at the app’s launch with impressive examples of how the app can be used. A row of buttons at the bottom of the gallery allows you to create new canvases, export, duplicate, rename, delete, and share your paintings, and provides help and tips for those new to the app.

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When first released, Flipboard felt like it was born for the iPad. The app began life by culling links from your Facebook and Twitter timelines, presenting them in a magazine-inspired layout, driven by excellent design: You could feel the pages of turning as you swiped with your finger. Over time, the app’s focus broadened; it could display content from all sorts of sources, including major publications. In its latest iteration, Flipboard for the first time became available on the iPhone and iPod touch as well. In addition to slimming down a bit to fit that smaller device’s screen, the app scored some new features, to boot.

Not too long ago, Flipboard introduced accounts. Those accounts serve two purposes: Multiple folks sharing a single iOS device could each create a unique Flipboard account, giving each individual access to his or her preferred content sources. That way, you can choose to see stories from Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, while your roommate can focus on Vanity Fair and The Onion. Benefit two: Your Flipboard settings carry over seamlessly between different iOS devices.

Thus, the moment I loggoed into Flipboard on my iPhone, all my old content sources were there. Flipboard on the iPhone is clearly the same app as the iPad version, but the app’s designers cleverly reoriented things a bit to make the app fit better on the smaller screen. The most obvious difference is in the flipping itself: On the iPad, you swipe horizontally to flip between pages; on the iPhone, pages swipe vertically instead. Most of the time, it feels natural, but I’ll admit that on occasion I mistakenly try to swipe horizontally first—blame plenty of time spent using the iPad version of the app.

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Whenever I’m picking out cards for my friends and family, I always end up choosing a letterpress option—there’s something special about that vintage, handcrafted look. Yet I never fully understood how these cards were printed until I tried out Bonadies Creative’s LetterMpress, an app that turns your iPad into a virtual letterpress printer.

It might seem strange to bring a 15th-century invention to the iPad, but LetterMpress takes full advantage of the iOS interface, while offering an engaging and authentic experience. The app lets you create your own letterpress designs with all the traditional letterpress tools—from type case to furniture (wood spacers). Launching the app takes you to an empty press bed, where you can start composing your design. You can choose from Type & Art, Furniture, Lockup, Galley Tray, and Rule from the bottom navigation bar. Rule makes a ruler appear in the press bed, while tapping any of the first four options reveals a sliding tray of those objects at the top of the screen.

The Type & Art tray features 22 woodcut font options and numerous vintage-looking borders, blocks, and images. You can tap and drag your choices into the press bed and arrange them from there. Keep in mind that the app works best in landscape mode, with the Home button on the right side; this way you can arrange the letters from right to left (though the letters do appear upside down and backwards). The app mimics the way traditional letterpress prints are set, and like its real-world counterpart, it takes time and practice to master. If you're looking for a simple and easy-to-use design app, then LetterMpress might not be for you.

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Spotify, the popular-in-Europe music subscription service has arrived in the U.S. The service is available in three flavors—free (you can listen to a limited number of hours of music per month at 160kbps), Unlimited ($5 a month with unlimited listening at 160kbps), and Premium ($10 a month with unlimited listening, 320kbps tracks where available, and support for downloads and mobile listening). I’ve had experience with the current crop of domestic streaming services—Napster, Rhapsody, Mog, and Rdio—and have now browsed through Spotify. Here’s what I’ve found while using a Premium plan.

Note that the free service is invitation-only right now (submit your email at the Spotify website to request an invite), but those willing to pay for Unlimited or Premium access can sign up immediately. Paying customers also have the ability to invite five people with their accounts, but that option wasn’t enabled for me (probably because I’m using a press account).

When you receive an invitation you'll be able to listen to six months worth of unlimited Spotify music at 160kbps. After those six months expire, these invitation accounts are limited to 10 hours of listening per month and five plays per track. After the invitation period expires and everyone can simply sign up for a free account, those with free accounts can listen to up to 20 hours of music per month for the first six months. After six months, it's back to 10 hours of music per month and five plays per track.

Highlights

There’s nothing new or mysterious about music subscription services. They’ve been around for years, but other than free services such as Pandora, the play-exactly-what-you-want-to-play-when-you-want-to-play-it-services haven’t caught on. Spotify hopes to change that by offering an ad-based free plan as well as heavily integrating social networking into its service. The idea is that your friends will encourage you to use the service by recommending music to you, which, in turn, may tempt you to pony up for the Unlimited or Premium plans to remove the restrictions inherent in the free plan. And, like Napster, Rhapsody, Mog, and Rdio, when you pay for the most expensive plan, you can then download any of the millions of tracks offered by the service to your iOS or Android devices for offline listening.

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In today’s “Share everything! Share it now!” culture, many apps will let you disseminate your images into the wilds of the Internet—and quickly, at that. However, this often leads to a fractured experience for the photographs themselves: I know my own pictures are currently published across no fewer than seven different services, the result of often picking up an intriguing new app—I’m looking at you, Color—only to lose interest days later.

Image service Photobucket thinks it’s come up with a way to combat the problem. The company’s Snapbucket app, released earlier this month, allows you to not only host your images on Photobucket (where they can be accessed anywhere), but also style them in-app and share them with friends on your favorite social media service. And it succeeds, to an extent.

Photobucket’s aim for one-stop photo snapping, styling, and sharing is clear from the moment you open the app: Upon launch, you’re greeted with a live preview of whatever your iPhone’s rear-facing camera happens to be pointing at; from this view, you can also switch to the front camera or enable the flash, though there’s no option to enable the iPhone 4’s High Dynamic Range (HDR) feature. If you’ve already taken a photo you’d like to upload and style, you can access your photo library from the icon in the lower left corner.

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When Apple released iMovie for the iPhone 4 last year, I felt a palpable sense of longing. I was excited to have a mobile version of iMovie, but a video-editing app seemed ideally suited to work on the iPad’s large screen. I could easily imagine how it would work, and yet it ran only on the iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod touch.

Since then, it’s been a given that the software would jump to the iPad, and with iMovie for iOS 1.2, we get to experience what was no doubt on the drawing boards, if not yet in the shipping schedule, of Apple’s engineers. iMovie takes what can be a complex task—just look to Adobe Premiere or Apple’s Final Cut applications to see how deep video editing can be—and makes it not only accessible, but touchable.

That tactile interactivity makes video editing more engaging. You get a better sense of assembling the movie using your fingers instead of being once removed by the mouse on a computer. My three-year-old daughter and I put together a quick movie, where she chose clips from the Videos pane by tapping on them. She became a co-editor, versus directing over my shoulder on the Mac (which usually results in her losing interest and walking away).

This update runs on the iPad 2 (but not, alas, the original iPad), the iPhone 4, and fourth-generation iPod touch, exposing potentially millions of iOS device owners to a top-notch video editor. iMovie for iOS 1.2 could be the friendliest version of Apple’s video software yet, a welcome introduction to the process of turning raw video clips into movies that say more than just, “I pointed my camera at that place.”

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GarageBand ’11, part of Apple’s iLife suite, is a versatile application. With it, you can create musical scores by stringing together audio loops, play and record virtual instruments, record “real” instruments plugged into your Mac, create iPhone ringtones, record and assemble podcasts, create movie soundtracks, and play and record your guitar through modeled amps and effects.

Wonderful as the Mac-based GarageBand is, however, far too many people ignore it completely, or open it once to see what all the fuss is about and never do so again. They do this because GarageBand is perceived as a musician’s tool.

With GarageBand for iPad, Apple is sending a different message: Yes, GarageBand is a tool for making music, but anyone—from musicians to tin-eared newbies—can use it. No talent required. It underscores this message by eschewing the podcast, ringtone, and movie-soundtrack elements and focusing entirely on making it easy to compose music. It includes a variety of “smart” instruments that allow you to play pleasing notes, chords, and beats on virtual keyboards, guitars, basses, and drums without requiring that you have a lick of musical training.

That doesn’t make GarageBand for iPad a toy or somehow unworthy of trained musicians. In addition to its smart instruments, this eight-track recorder includes a wide variety of virtual instruments (synthesized and sampled) that you can play and record; lets you record real instruments jacked into a compatible audio interface as well as sounds recorded with the iPad’s microphone or a compatible external mic; includes modeled guitar amps and stompboxes for guitar players; offers a couple of different ways to create drum tracks; and even includes a sampler instrument that allows you to use an onscreen keyboard to play back sounds recorded with a microphone.

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IK Multimedia's new AmpliTube 2 for iPhone is a free update of its beautifully rendered guitar and bass amp and effects modeling app. New to this version is a single-track recorder and the ability to speed up and slow down songs from your iTunes library to learn or practice. A four-track recorder and five new stompbox effects are available as in-app purchases.

With more than 14 years of experience modeling amplifiers and effects for studio use for both Mac and Windows, IK Multimedia has improved the already impressive sound of its amps and effects. Its five new stompboxes—Graphic EQ, Parametric EQ, Reverb, Limiter, and Compressor—bring the number of available effects to 16. The full AmpliTube app ($20) includes 11 stompboxes; AmpliTube LE ($3) has five; and a free version offers three. You can purchase individual effects from within the application for $2 each.

As before, AmpliTube includes a chromatic tuner and a metronome. You can use IK’s own iRig to connect your guitar or bass, though other connectors are available. With the full version, you have your choice of five amplifiers and speaker cabinets; the LE and Free versions come with one set. Additional amps and cabinets are available for $3 each. As before, there are 36 numbered preset slots with several of them already configured. Version 2 gives names to the preconfigured settings, but you can change or add your own names. This is much easier than remembering, for example, that preset number 4 is your clean and number 6 is your heavy metal lead setting.

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iMovie ’09 is a kind of litmus test for Mac users. There are those who admire its simplicity and the fact that it requires virtually no knowledge of video editing to operate. Others loathe it largely because it behaves so little like a traditional video editing application. iMovie on the Mac will likely continue to be controversial, but if you have your expectations regarding iMovie for the iPhone screwed on just so, you’ll find very little to argue with.

And how might those expectations fit comfortably? By accepting that, in most cases, iMovie for the iPhone isn’t going to replace the full-blown video editing application on your Mac. While you can produce and deliver polished movies with the mobile version of iMovie, it’s very much an on-the-go editor that’s necessarily limited to help you work faster on a small-screen device.

What came before

Prior to iMovie for iPhone, you had precious few Apple-supplied editing options for the video you captured with the iPhone. After shooting video you could open your clip in the Photos app, trim its front and back, and sync it back to your Mac or share it via e-mail, MMS, or to a MobileMe gallery or YouTube. These options still exist within the Photos app, but iMovie additionally allows you to piece together multiple clips, place transitions between those clips, add titles, incorporate stills with the Ken Burns pan-and-scan effect applied to them, add a music bed that attempts to get out of the way when there’s audio in video clips, and apply a theme to the finished product.

Workflow basics

I’ve gone into detail about how this is done in my hands-on with iMovie for iPhone. Rather than repeat those details, I’ll sum up the way it works.

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Good news, podcast fans! No longer will you have to dig through your iPhone or iPad’s unaptly-named Music app in order to sate your listening appetite. On Tuesday, Apple released a new free app—titled, much more appropriately, Podcasts—which now serves as the one-stop shop for all of your iOS podcast needs.

Podcasts’s closest relative is probably iBooks, in that it not only organizes your podcasts into a library and lets you listen to them, but it also provides a front end for downloading them as well. Of course, since podcasts are free, Apple’s opted to call this last feature a Catalog instead of a Store (though it looks pretty much the same as the iTunes Store).

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Faced with growing competition from new video-centric rivals, Dropbox on Thursday unveiled a revamped iOS app that lets users automatically upload their photos and video to the company’s cloud-based storage service.

The update to Dropbox’s universal app for iPhone and iPad lets users upload photos and video to the cloud using either a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. The new version gives you a choice of manual or automatic upload. Just turn on the Camera Upload feature in the settings, and the app will upload your video or images automatically. The company has also created a new Gallery view so users can see thumbnails of all the images they store with the service.

Dropbox’s move comes just weeks after the unveiling of two new apps—Pixorial and Cloudee—aimed at letting users store their video to the cloud for private use or targeted sharing. While Dropbox is well-established, the proliferation of services indicates there's a growing market for services that let users save and access video from nearly any electronic device they own.

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Viddy ( ), the Instagram-inspired app for sharing brief video snippets, scored a significant update this week. Both the app and the website now offer more features so that users can better control how their 15-second videos are shared.

Chief among the new Viddy updates is the ability to choose your own thumbnail cover art for the videos you upload, and you can apply one of the 20 available photo filters to your thumbnail, too.

Among the other improvements to the service are upgraded production packs, which let you mix and match video effects with any custom soundtrack to create unique looks for your visual masterpieces. Also included is near real-time video rendering, which makes uploading and processing your videos go twice as fast as it did before—so long as you’re running iOS 5. And in another bit of bonne chance, Viddy now includes localizations for numerous languages besides English; among them: Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Thai, Filipino, and Portuguese.

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Previewed at last March’s iPad event, Autodesk’s SketchBook Ink has hit the App Store for all to test and play with. Being the naturally curious sketcher that I am, I took it for a quick spin.

The app isn’t as flashy or robust as SketchBook Pro or Autodesk’s other iPad offerings, which is partially to its credit—controls are simple, and a tutorial is easily accessible within any section of the app. Unfortunately, you’re limited to a single layer of art and one background layer imported from the Photos app.

When you first launch the app, you’re brought to a blank canvas. There are toolbars on three sides, with Autodesk’s signature silver circle in the bottom center to banish and call up those at will.

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iPhoto for iOS received its first update since its release in March. Version 1.0.1 (113 MB) includes a Copy Link button for your journal’s URL to use when publishing a journal to iCloud. The update also fixes an issue that could cause duplicate photos to appear in Photos view.

The Cards update comes just in time for Mother’s Day—version 1.1.2 (33.8 MB) includes letterpress cards made with Mom in mind. Other updates include new Get Well card designs; plus new designs for birthdays, thank you cards, and more. Addressing envelopes will also be easier, as the app improves address verification accuracy and fixes an issue with editing addresses.

Apple fixed a few small issues with GarageBand, including an issue that sometimes caused songs to crash or go missing when being pushed to iCloud. GarageBand version 1.2.1 (801 MB) also fixes a SoundCloud error that occurs when logging in through Facebook.

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This week’s app roundup brings you new and better ways to get in shape, watch TV, and battle alien pigs. Because in space, no one can hear you oink.

Already this week, Macworld’s Lex Friedman brought you news of Smule’s latest offering—Beatstream, an app that takes tracks from your iTunes library and turns them into a Tap Tap Revenge-style game. Lex also reported that the popular new game Draw Something had been acquired by Zynga. Jason Snell let us know about the update of Comixology’s Comics app to take advantage of the new iPad’s high-definition Retina display. And Chris Breen took a first look at the MyTunes Pro music apps, which he called “an attractive app given its $10 price.”

Here are a few other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week:

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Adobe has announced that Photoshop Touch—the centerpiece of its suite of mobile Touch apps—is now available for the iPad from the iTunes store. Priced at $10, it runs on the iPad 2, and is compatible with iOS 5.

With Photoshop Touch, you can use your Apple tablet to produce and edit images, combine images, apply effects, work in layers, extract parts of an image, and refine work created on the tablet with your desktop Photoshop program. Photoshop Touch also has a social networking component that lets you share your work with Facebook friends and view their comments.

Introduced last fall as part of the company's mobile app initiative, and thus far available only for the Android OS, Photoshop Touch is the second of six Touch apps to be made available for iOS devices. Of the other apps—Proto, Ideas, Debut, Collage, and Kuler—only Adobe Ideas, a vector drawing and sketchbook app, has thus far been available for iOS.

Advanced image editing and compositing

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Avid, the Massachusetts-based creator of pro-level hardware and software for multimedia production, has unveiled a precision video editor for the iPad.

Avid Studio for iPad launched Thursday in the App Store. The app lets users take raw videos, photos, and audio in their iPad library—or accessed from a separate iPad camera connection kit—and arrange them into a slick-looking movie; the app can also use the iPad 2's camera to directly capture raw video. Those videos can be shared directly to YouTube or Facebook, or exported to a user's Windows computer for further editing using only the company’s Avid Studio for PC software.

Avid Studio for iPad appears similar—in both price and capabilities—to Apple’s own $5 iMovie app, though it lacks iMovie’s compatibility with the iPhone and iPod touch. Both apps use the tablet’s multitouch screen to offer pinching-and-zooming for frame-by-frame editing of video clips. Avid also offers a number of 3D animations among its transition and title templates.

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Vacation and travel videos are a fun way to share a quick take with friends and family—even while you’re still on the road. With iMovie for iOS on your iPad, you can quickly and easily cut your casual videos, spruce them up with themes, mix video with still photos, and add effects, music, and cool-looking titles. Here are a few simple steps that will get you from raw shoot to polished vacation video in short order.

Organizational detail

As with most vacations, you and your companions are probably shooting photos and videos with a variety of different devices—iPhone, point-and-shoot camera, DSLR, or an iPad. There are several ways to organize this media on your iPad before getting down to your editing task. Having iCloud activated on your iOS devices is convenient because it will allow photos to appear immediately in your Photo Stream. If you brought your laptop along, you can sync your videos via iTunes.

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Along with Apple’s iPad announcement on Wednesday, the company released updates for pretty much every major iOS app in its wheelhouse. Now, this isn’t all that surprising, given that most of Apple’s apps needed a graphics update to take advantage of the iPad’s Retina display. But hidden amongst the tweaks and pixel perfections, some apps also received new features—including iMovie.

In a world…

iMovie may not have the flashiest updates of the bunch, but it does gain a neat new feature from iMovie ’11 on the Mac: movie trailers. Now, when creating a new project, you can choose to instead create a trailer with one of nine different templates: Retro, Romance, Scary, Superhero, Swashbuckler, Narrative, Fairy Tale, Expedition, or Bollywood. You can swipe through and preview these for a better idea of what the trailer formats are like—be prepared for child spies and adventuring backpackers.

Each template prescribes a running time and a number of actors needed to properly fill out the story, though creative types can surely work around this. (I hear sock puppets and green tennis balls make great stand-ins.)

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As computers have become more affordable and taken on increasingly important tasks in our lives, it’s common to have more than one of them on the premises. While it’s terrific that family members and co-housers needn’t line up to use a single computer, things can get confusing when you have media scattered among a group of computers that everyone would like access to.

This is exactly the situation I faced. Many computers; dabs of media here, larger dollops there; and no really solid scheme for making it available to all the devices I own. Having finally had enough of the frustration, I resolved to do something about it. This is that story.

Gather and organize

Job One was to grab all the digital media I owned and put it on a single hard drive. For this I purchased a 2TB FireWire drive and moved from computer to computer, copying any music, video, podcasts, audiobooks, and ebooks I could find. I wasn’t particularly careful about what went where nor did I care about playlists or play counts. I wanted a fresh start and I was willing to lose the playlists I’d created for the greater good of taming my media. To ensure that I didn’t lose any media I didn’t trash any of the files on my computer. I simply created a Media folder on the drive and copied my media files and folders to the new drive.

I then attached that drive to my Mac Pro, held down the Option key, and launched iTunes. When you do this, iTunes prompts you to either choose a library or create a new one. I then followed these steps:

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Apple touts its GarageBand for iPad application as a great way to play and record music without the need to learn scales or time signatures. Musical newbies aren’t the only ones interested in using the $5 app, however. GarageBand for iPad appeals to seasoned musicians, too. And those with significant investments in recording equipment may be wondering which, if any, of their existing gear will work with the portable version of GarageBand. I decided to grab my trusty iPad, my iPad camera connection kit, and powered USB hub and plug in whatever I had around to see what would work.

The iPad Camera Connection Kit includes two adapters that plug into the iPad’s Dock connector. One of the adapters has an SD card slot that allows you to transfer photos and videos from a camera card into iMovie or iPhoto for iPad. The second adapter has a USB 2.0 input that allows you to connect a camera, or other USB peripheral to your iPad–I used one to connect a Flip camcorder.

Whether peripherals work with the iPad or not depends on a number of factors. USB Class Devices (those that don’t require driver installation) and devices requiring little power are the most likely to work. For peripherals needing more juice, like the aforementioned Flash camcorder, a powered USB hub may be necessary to work with the iPad.

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The iPad 2 offers a number of exciting new features. Chief among them is the ability to capture video from the integrated cameras and edit them with the new iMovie for iOS 1.2. Unfortunately, the video camera on the iPad is better suited for FaceTime video calls than for capturing a child’s first steps, or similarly important moments, for posterity.

Thankfully, you can import video files captured from other devices, though compatibility is hit or miss. We haven’t had any luck importing files captured from Canon DSLRs, but we have had some success with Cisco's Flip video cameras. If you have a Flip, here’s how it works.

Step 1: Capture a movie

Use your Flip to shoot some video.

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To take advantage of the video recording capabilities of the iPhone 4 and the latest iPod touch, Apple introduced a new iOS app for editing video: iMovie 1.1 for iPhone 4 and iPod touch (4th generation). That’s really the full name, which is why from now on I’ll refer to it as just iMovie and assume you know I’m not talking about the Mac application.

iMovie is fairly easy to use, but it also carries expectations based on what iMovie for Mac (or really any video editor) can do. Being a mobile app, some capabilities aren’t available—or are they? Here are some tips for expanding the editing features of iMovie 1.1. The steps below assume a basic knowledge of how to use the app.

Split a Clip

Before the iMovie 1.1 update, it wasn’t possible to split one clip into two parts (a basic editing operation). The update added the feature, but it’s not obvious at all. Or rather, there’s no obvious control for splitting a clip, but once you know how to do it, the action becomes obvious.

In the timeline, select the clip you want to split and scroll it so that the playhead is at the split point. Next, swipe vertically with one finger from the top of the clip to the bottom along the playhead, like you’re slicing a strip of film with a blade (which is actually how film clips are split).

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For today’s column, rather than serving a lone main entree, I offer a small plates special of three items—ranging from iTunes 10 crashes to iWork for iPad file sharing.

QuickTime may cause iTunes to crash

Following on the heels of my prior coverage of iTunes 10 troubleshooting, a new Apple support article reveals that “Tunes 10 for Mac may be unable to open or may quit unexpectedly.” While such crashes are a possibility for any application, and may be due to a myriad of causes, Apple focuses on one particular cause and cure in this instance: “This issue may occur if you have more than one copy of a QuickTime component in different folder locations.” These component files have names such as DesktopVideoOut.component or Sonix SN9C201 WebCam.component. The files may be located in one or more of the following folders: /Library/Components, /Library/QuickTime, ~/Library/Components or ~/Library/QuickTime.

If you find the exact same-named file in more than one of these locations (most likely one in a /Library directory and another in ~/Library directory), delete one of the duplicates. This should eliminate the crashes.

Does it matter which duplicate you delete? Yes, it can.

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With the arrival of iOS 4, the iPad, and iTunes 9.2, iTunes can now manage e-books for syncing to Apple’s iBooks app. iTunes accepts two types of book files: those in ePub format, and PDF files. Organizing e-books in iTunes can be a bit baffling, however. Here’s a look at how you can keep your e-book library spic and span.

First, you’ll see in iTunes a Books library in the program’s sidebar. (If you don’t see it, choose iTunes -> Preferences, click the General icon, and check the box next to Books in the Show section.) This library, represented by a book icon, houses two types of files: audiobooks and e-books.

If you have both types of files, you’ll see them in separate sections when you click on the Books library icon in the default Grid View: Books and Audiobooks. You can choose List View or Cover Flow if you want to display your books differently, however. (You can find out more about these different views in another article I wrote.)

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