You've no doubt seen the split keyboard that iOS 5 brought to the iPad, but it turns out it has a few hidden buttons on the edges. Here's how they work. More »

Tumblr is introducing a new feature today that lets its users pay a dollar in order to have their post featured on the Tumblr Dashboard. The option is called “Highlights,” and it’s now available right from the new post page on Tumblr. With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important.

“Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly incredible photo,” wrote Tumblr’s David Karp on the company blog this morning.

In typical Tumblr cutesy style, the Highlights option includes six icons: a lightning bolt, caution sign, heart, megaphone, unicorn (!) or cheeseburger (uh…what?).

There are also dozen of messages to choose from, like “help!,” “urgent!,” “watch this!,” “cool!,” etc. Some messages pertain to events (“save the date!”) while others refer to news (“today only”), products (“buy this!”) or even questions (“answer this!”).

In addition to being marked and annotated, the highlighted post is slightly larger and has bigger font, too.

Before publishing a post with a Highlight, you’ll be prompted to fill in your credit card info or make the $1.00 payment via PayPal. Whether or not the option really brings in more eyeballs and clickthroughs remains to be seen, especially since the low barrier to entry could see the feature used so regularly that Tumblr users end up with Highlight-blindness.

But for now, the trick is working. (Oh hey, BuzzFeed has an awesome new iPad app? Brb).

The excellent document handling apps of Readdle have launched a new addition to their family with the new Remarks for iPad. It’s an app specifically designed for marking up PDF documents or images and sending them along in a nicely packaged format for others to review.

We’re fans of the Readdle family of apps here at TNW and we still use its PDF Converter for a lot of our document sharing needs. Like many other apps produced by the company, Remarks doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead it concisely takes care of the issues around marking up PDF documents that you’re reviewing, likely to be returned to the sender for perusal.

The app allows you to open up a PDF document, quickly add your hand scribbled or text-written notes and export it to another application, print it or email it in PDF format. There are also options that allow for text input as well as highlighting and strikethrough if you’re working with a primarily text-formatted document.

We’ve also seen the use for it as a photographer or copyrighters assistant. You can import images directly from your photo library and mark them up with your various notes. These can then be packaged in the sharing-friendly PDF format and sent to an artist to follow the instructions you’ve given.

There’s even a nice magnified view that allows for fine tuned annotation and placement of text. This should help if you’re marking up some fine print.

As with most of Readdle’s apps, Remarks features a minimal and visually pleasing interface that allows your documents to stay center stage. What controls are there are all regularly used, with little in the way of feature bloat. This is great for an app specifically designed for ‘quick notations’. You want to get in and out of a doc quickly and the app fits the bill well.

Multi-page PDFs are displayed with a tap of the grid button and you can jump around even a big document easily. This makes it easy to scan through a legal document and pop in initials and signatures wherever they’re required, another great use of Remarks.

The standout feature for me, however, is the hand written notation features. The finger tracking of the app is second to none, absolutely some of the quickest and most accurate I’ve seen. Even tiny scribbles and super-quick jots are captured accurately and the feature just gets better with a stylus. It’s only a segment of the overall capabilities of the app, but there is just no substitute at times for a quickly scrawled circle, arrow and note to get your point across.

Remarks is an easy add to the toolbox for anyone who has to make notes on PDF documents and ship them back out with any frequency. It’s got a solid, but not overly expansive, feature set and it’s blazingly quick. The handwriting speed and accuracy is especially exemplary among these kinds of apps.

Readdle has told us that future updates will include much-requested features like cloud syncing and an even faster rendering engine.

➤Remarks

You know what’s funny? If you Google “how do you get kids to learn” (sans quotes, even), the first result goes to this TechCrunch blog post about an app that lets kids draw butts on the iPad. Really! The post details the company called Madbrook (aka Everything Butt Art), which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May. It’s the brand behind a series of printed books, all of which are meant to teach creativity and step-by-step drawing while using humor and silliness to appeal to the young demographic.

Now, the iPad app promised at Disrupt has finally arrived. The company’s first digital creation, Butt Art -Kids Learn to Draw Zoo Animals Step-by-Step, has gone live in the App Store.

OK, seriously. Butts?

Yes, butts.

The interactive app teaches drawing by starting everything with a butt shape (a rounded, lowercase w). The end result is not actually a picture of a butt, mind you, but a fairly cute animal drawing instead. In the printed books, Everything Butt Art at the Zoo and Everything Butt Art on the Farm, the results are zoo animals and farm animals, respectively.

In the new iPad app, however, kids don’t just draw and trace shapes, they can also decorate the drawings with stamps, play a hidden shape game (Butt Hunt!), and read a full-color e-book, too.

While parents may roll their eyes at this sort of thing (is this really a blog post about drawing butts?!), the key takeaway here is that Everything Butt Art is a company that has managed to tap into how kids think. They’re making learning fun, by making it silly and giggly and yeah, kind of stupid…but it works. (Butt it works?) Don’t believe us, though, just ask your iPad-happy kids to try it out.

The new app is available as a free download in iTunes and comes with three animals. The remaining twelve are available as add-on packages for $0.99 per 6-pack.

iPad: If you're looking for a video editor for iPad that offers a little more flexibility than iMovie and runs on a first generation device, Avid Studio has more options and control than other iPad offerings. More »

From time to time even jaded tech hacks get a "wow!" moment. I had one last night when I saw that Avid had launched an iPad app.

Avid? The high-end video and ProTools firm? An iPad app? Yep, yep and yep.

Avid reckons the iPad makes a great wee video editor, and its Avid Studio plays happily with the firm's high-end desktop software. It's right, and it's not the only firm thinking along the same lines. Apple, of course, already does Garageband and iMovie, Adobe has Photoshop Touch, and there are stacks of digital audio products such as Auria and the tasty-looking Bitwig music studio.

Not bad for toys, eh?

Getting better all the time

What's really great about this is that we're still in the very early stages, both in terms of technology - we've gone from single core to dual core to quad core tablets already; imagine what horsepower tablets will have in five years - and in terms of what's possible for our tablets to do.

Take music, for example. You can use your tablet as a quick and dirty composition device, or as a controller for a desktop music production program, or as a fully-fledged studio, or you can slot it into another bit of hardware such as Behringer's utterly brilliant/completely demented iAxe or its faintly frightening iPad mixers.

This isn't about whether tablets are better than PCs or vice-versa; it's about people, and what they can do, and the ever-expanding universe of possibilities today's technology delivers and tomorrow's promises.

We've only had iPad-y tablets for two years. What on earth will we be doing with them in ten?

Most cellphone chargers keep sucking power even after your phone is fully charged. The Dexim Visible Green Charger shuts off as soon as your device reaches 100%, and the cable lights up to let you know when the device is charging—no need to turn it on and see. More »

DocStoc, a document sharing site has been focusing on providing bundles of premium professional documents for businesses for some time now. But today, the startup is expanding to producing articles and videos related to starting and running a business, providing more than just form documents for professionals.

Docstoc has launched four iPad apps: Legal and Copyright Small Business Toolkit; Sales Techniques and Training Secrets; Adwords and SEO Secrets; and HR & Employee Management Advice to help businesses streamline operations, sales and more.

As CEO Jason Nazar explains, in addition to becoming the go-to destination for documents for small businesses, Docstoc also wants to be a content resource as well. In addition to the four released this week, the startup will be releasing 30 “Teaching and Training” Apps for Small Business in Q1 of 2012.

All the apps are free and include original video content with SMB and startup experts as well as articles and access to premium documents for free (for a limited time, Nazar says). Eventually, Docstoc will expand these apps to Android. Nazar explains, “We want to create a high quality Khan Academy for small businesses.”

Currently, Docstoc sees around 20 million unique visitors per month and has almost 30 million registered users, with the highest concentration being small business owners and operators. Nazar says that Docstoc’s revenue has been growing 100% each year for the past three years and has been profitable for last 2 years.

Time has shown that tablets can do amazing things, and using them to build immersive books is one of them. But up until now, I’ve never seen a children’s book that truly realizes the hidden potential packed into the iPad, and I’m proud to say it has to do with butts.

Everything Butt Art is a wonderful series of books that started showing up in stores less than a year ago. The concept (ahem…) behind the book works well in almost any form, but it really becomes magical once you see it on the iPad — and now you can. It’s part book and part drawing app, and it teaches step-by-step drawing with a twist, as all the drawings start with a butt shape (a rounded lowercase w).

TNW sat down with founder Brian Snyder to get an inside look at the app before it was released…

HW: Tell us about your inspiration for the book

BS: The inspiration for Everything Butt Art can be traced back to when I was seven or eight. I used to spend hours doing step-by-step drawing. Being a silly kid, I’d start with a butt shape and challenge myself to see what I could turn it into. Then, I’d show off my drawings to friends. They were a big hit. When my daughter was about three, I showed her some of my go-to butt art. She loved the whole idea of it. Because it’s such a simple concept, I was sure someone else had done something with it. After searching quite a bit, I found there wasn’t anything like it. Using silliness and technology to encourage creativity in kids felt like a worthwhile pursuit.

HW: How you believe it represents the future of children’s books?

BS: We don’t think of ourselves as a publisher, despite the fact that we’ve published two books. More so, we had a concept that made sense in both print and digital forms. We always think tech first, but didn’t want to take the Everything Butt Art experience away from a child just because they didn’t have a $500 device. Many more kids can spend $9.95 on a book and grab a pencil or a crayon. When one witnesses a classroom of children engaging with Everything Butt Art, it becomes clear why we want it accessible to all. However, we’ll continue to focus on tech first. I think more children’s book publishers need to do the same.

HW: Are there any other commercial apps that are trying to create an app like Everything Butt Art?

BS: While building the Everything Butt Art iPad app we observed our kids using lots of apps that don’t have an inherent parent-child connection. We believe that it’s important for parents to be engaged with their young children’s use of technology. At the same time, we wanted this engagement to be frictionless for the child and adult. Sharing with mom and dad is automated so they can be intimately involved whether they’re in the next room or across the country. It also initiates this really cool cycle. A child is creative, parents are rewarded and feel connected by seeing the child’s drawings as they occur. In turn, parents encourage the child to spend more time being creative – win, win. All the while, the child’s art is being saved in the cloud attached to his or her profile. It’s powerful stuff.

The app comes completely free to try, with the option of purchasing more animals to draw (e.g.: snake, hippo, panda, bird, lion, zebra, chameleon…). The whole experience was hilarious, entertaining and simply fun for me, so I can only imagine how much kids will love it.

If you have kids or know anyone that has kids, you owe it to them to try this app out. It really is magical.

➤  Everything Butt Art, via the App Store

Earlier analyst estimates from December had pegged the monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile apps at around 300 million per month. This number includes smartphone apps, like those for the Android and iPhone, but also apps that run on BlackBerry, Nokia, and feature phones. At the time, that number equated to roughly 40% of the company’s overall user base.

Facebook hadn’t revealed an official number for monthly active users on mobile since September, however, which was then at 350 million users for both mobile apps and mobile web combined. Today, thanks the Facebook IPO filing, we have an update to the official numbers: there are now 425 mobile monthly active users as of December 2011, out of Facebook’s total 825 million users.

Facebook defines a monthly active user (MAU) as a user who accessed Facebook via a mobile app or via mobile-optimized versions of the Facebook website (e.g., m.facebook.com), whether on a mobile phone or tablet device like the iPad, during the period of measurement.

The company said that mobile usage of Facebook increased in 2011, including in major developed markets like the United States where smartphone penetration has been rapidly growing. But the mobile MAU has also been driven by other product enhancements, including Facebook’s acquisition of Snaptu in April 2011 and the launch of the long-awaited Facebook iPad app in October.

However, despite the large numbers of mobile users for the social network, Facebook doesn’t currently display ads through either its mobile apps or websites. That’s a large, untapped market for Facebook’s advertising efforts, since, in many cases, users only engage with Facebook via mobile – not on the desktop-sized web. Not surprisingly, Facebook didn’t assign a number to its “mobile only” demographic. When it comes to how many Facebook users only interact with the social network via apps or the mobile website, it’s still going to be anybody’s guess.

Facebook also notes that its revenue may be negatively affected by the fact that it doesn’t currently monetize its mobile user base via ads. This will continue “unless and until” it rolls out either ads or sponsored stories (promoted stories from advertisers) to mobile devices. The global mobile advertising market was $1.5 billion in 2010 and is expected to grow at a 64% compound annual rate to $17.6 billion in 2015, Facebook notes in the filing. With that number in mind, Facebook says it believes in its potential future monetization opportunities. (No kidding).