Hasta La Ideas

Maximize the meat experience with this DIY guide

To true pork connoisseurs, store-bought bacon is an affront to the culinary arts. Ramp up your cured meat game by embracing the tastiest of DIY projects: homemade bacon. “The Better Bacon Book” marks the latest iPad-exclusive how-to publication in Open Air Publishing‘s digital instructional series. This edition takes you through adventures in everyone’s favorite breakfast meat, covering everything from setup and curing to slicing and frying. Hailed by chefs around the world for its seemingly limitless potential, bacon and its counterparts are carefully detailed in this indispensable guide.

Tom Mylan, executive butcher at The Meat Hook in Brooklyn, guides users through 20 instructional videos. The book contains tutorials for making slab, face and Canadian bacon, in addition to guanciale and pancetta. Mylan shows you how to butcher the meat, build your own smoker from a trash can and cook the perfect slice. For those not ready to dive fully into homemade bacon, the app also lists the top suppliers of mail-order bacon, curated by the author of “Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon“, Ari Weinzweigeg.

The Better Bacon Book also includes recipes from top restaurants and bars, so whether you’re spreading on some bacon jam or slurping down a plate of clams with rye whisky and bacon, there are endless options to get your pork belly fix. Open Air has upped its game in this app, including a feature to allow users to zoom into pig parts at various moments in the instruction videos called “image hotspots”. The book’s completely original content is now available for purchase from the iTunes App Store.

A new app curates mood-based music playlists

A mammoth music library should inspire pride, not anxiety. The problem is, how do you begin to sort through tens of thousands of tracks? Shuffle functions are too dumbed down, and there’s no time to create a custom playlist for every occasion.

Enter HABU, the mood-based music app that auto-generates playlists from your library based on how you feel, designed by Gravity Mobile leveraging music mapping from Gracenote. The emotional interface is all about intelligent entertainment, filtering information to enhance the user experience. “HABU was created for people who’d rather spend their time discovering new music than creating custom playlists,” says Jeff Benson, director of product management for Gravity Mobile. “With the average customer listening to 17 to 19 hours of music per week, we saw the need to design and develop a music app that could surface highly targeted playlists and music recommendations.”

HABU comes with an intuitive “mood map,” a circular visualizer that groups songs based in their position on two axes. Songs are plotted between “positive” and “dark” on the y-axis and “calm” and “energetic” on the x-axis based on their classification by Gracenote, which takes a range of variables into consideration when assigning them a specific emotional tag. The results get placed into 25 mood groups with 100 individual moods. That way, your gloomy, energized, yearning and upbeat personas are never without a constant stream of music. The intensity of a mood’s plot signifies the quantity of content for that mood, and users can share their maps with friends over Facebook.

The app uses Gracenote’s “sonic attribute technology” to create mood profiles for more than 30 million tracks. This allows HABU to generate tailored playlists at the touch of a finger, empowering the user to browse even the most prolific music collections. Reading user tastes, HABU finds similar tracks and lets you preview songs before downloading them. According to Benson, the app “is set up to interface with a customer’s own content as much as it is to discover new content via song recommendation and mood-based discovery.”

HABU is currently available in the Android Market for 99 cents; the iPad app is set to drop this Spring.

A seminal culinary textbook goes digital in this all-inclusive app

For the last decade, the chefs at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) have been publishing The Professional Chef, an industry-standard textbook for aspiring cooks. Now available on the iPad, the significant volume has been given a much more accessible interface for professionals and home cooks alike. With 415MB of content under the hood, the e-book’s 36 chapters include 850 recipes, 100 videos, and 175 diagrams, not to mention 750 photographs of the final product. Powered by Inkling‘s interactive template, the app is set up to to be efficiently used as a learning tool. That means that you’ll spend less time searching for things and more time studying them. Culinary students can even test their kitchen knowledge with the built-in quizzes.

Content-wise, there are few apps that can rival The Professional Chef. The ingredients index covers all the food you’re likely to encounter in an international kitchen, explaining useful information like standards of quality, seasonal availability, and production techniques. It’s intelligently organized, and we were impressed to see their breakdown of cheese—fresh, rind-ripened, semisoft, hard, grating, and blue-veined—which can be a bit overwhelming to neophytes. The diagrams are especially useful if you’re used to relying on a butcher but want to get more hands-on with your food.

The technical aspect of cooking is something that the app handles especially well, with video demonstrations from CIA’s own chefs. Things like how to properly disjoint a rabbit, sharpen a knife on a wet-stone, and cook something sous-vide require detailed explanations from experienced professionals. You will also learn about tools of the trade like china caps, cheesecloth, and salamanders (no, not the amphibian).

The app is supremely navigable, and it’s easy to get sucked into browsing everything from terms to recipes to boning techniques. While intended for use in and around the kitchen, it’s just as enjoyable to explore while lounging on the sofa. With integrated hyperlinks and the iPad’s swipe to menu feature, the app is infinitely more convenient than 1056-page print edition. At around $50, it’s an investment, but one that will easily justify itself for cooking fanatics. Available now on iTunes. Alternatively, the book is available in the Inkling Reader where you can buy chapters individually for $3 each.

A digital notebook that allows you to showcase your creative talents or next big idea

There are a myriad of creative applications for sharing videos, links and music, but few allow you to extend personal projects or ideas. Clibe—a digital sketchbook app that has just soft-launched—allows you to create on an iPad just as you would with paper and pen, and then share the book with friends or add it to Clibe’s public gallery space. Your entire notebook (which can also be kept completely private) lives in the cloud, so you are also able to access it from any computer. When someone shares a book with you all of their changes are reflected in your copy as well making it a living document.

I’ve been using a beta of Clibe for over a month, and I am impressed with the set of tools it offers. You can paint, draw, use text or import photos from an iPad camera, photo library or social networks. There are different paper and pen types as well, allowing for a great creative range. The app can be used for anything from personal doodles to scrapbooking to presentation planning, such as the sketches I created below as part of the preparations for my talk at Future Trends in Miami next month.

One of the benefits of its digital format is its wipe-board capability. I can use Clibe with a group of clients in order to diagram a new idea, and if we decide to modify that, I can erase a portion or start over easily. As developer Roberto Tagliabue points out, you even start a meeting by uploading a client’s UI screenshot, and draw and move things around from there.

The vast potential to share ideas and generate creative flow with Clibe is exciting. The newly-launched app is available for free in iTunes for a limited time.

AOL’s personalized newspaper app

To keep up with the fast-paced iPad app industry, AOL’s latest effort to up their relevance comes in the form of Editions, a magazine-esque daily news update specifically geared to the reader. After a test run, it rates surprisingly good—well worth the free download at least.

The aggregator aims to stand out by allowing for customization from preferred news sections all the way down to font size and banner cover. By syncing with AOL, Twitter and Facebook identities, it adapts to user preferences, providing only the news and information most important to them.

Once you have a personalized profile, you can browse the app’s automatic suggestions or search for other sites to add. Messing around with tags and keywords provides more or less from any given source. These choices then roll into your profile, which updates for the following day’s issue, tailoring the content to your interests.

Also of note, once you choose a news story from the in-app excerpts, the magazine redirects the user to actual news providers’ sites. This nice little ethical decision gives actual pageviews to the original publisher, giving credit where credit is due—an Internet-era practice we’ve always backed.

Look to the iTunes App Store where Editions is now available for free download.

via The Unofficial Apple Weblog