Many of you know the website TED.com. There already was an iPhone application for TED.com but now there’s an iPad variant too. For the ones who don’t know ted.com here’s a short introduction.
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.
TED talks are most of the time very inspiring. Since I’ve owned the iPad my opinion was that a TED application on the iPad would be a great way to view the TED talks. In this article I’ll go through the most important features of the TED iPad app.
After starting the application you’ll see an overview of the latest featured TED talks. Below the featured talks there’s an “Inspire Me” button on the bottom-left and 3 buttons (“Sort”, “Top Tags” & “Tags A-Z”) on the bottom right.
The menu has 4 buttons. Next to “Featured” you can find “Themes”, “Tags” & “Saved Talks”
Inspire me
Inspire me is a button to randomly find TED talks based on your input. The “inspire me” Menu has 2 questions “You want to see something…..”
and the second question is “How much time do you have”
After answering these 2 questions you’ll get a playlist of TED talks which are suitable for you based on your input.
Themes
All TED talks are categorized in 50 Themes. The “Themes” button shows a list of all the themes (in 5 pages) and when you select a theme, all the TED talks with the selected theme are presented in an attractive way.
Tags
Just like themes, tags is another way to find interesting TED talks. but now more specific on tags. What I don’t understand is the Tags-button on the Featured page and a tag button as a separate page. I think the tag-section is good to find some TED talks. There are 2 entry points for the same functionality, and that can be a little bit confusing for some users.
No Search
The thing I really missed in the TED application for iPad is a search functionality. O.k. I have to admit that the themes and the tags work very well, but if you’re looking for a real specific TED talk, the themes and tags simply don’t do it for me. For instance I was looking for a video by Derek Sylvers called “How to start a movement” – I both knew the name of the presenter and the title of the TED Talk, but it was not easy to find that specific talk. So I truly hope that a next upgrade of the application also has a search functionality added.
Saved talks
This is a feature I particularly like, and this feature made me fall in love with this application. It is possible to download your favorite TED Talks for offline viewing. So you can watch your favorite TED talks anytime, anywhere. Saved TED Talks can also be deleted.
Final thoughts and wrap-up
I was completely surprised as I saw the TED iPad app in the iTunes Store. Because I’m a great fan of the TED video’s I immediately downloaded the app and I had to write a something about it. The app is really a must for anyone who likes the TED talks.
I think this is a great start to a perfect TED iPad application. In the test period I experienced a few crashes (max 3) while using this application, but I sadly cannot recall when the application tend to crash. The lack of a search-functionality is something that bothered me most of all in this application.
On the other hand the possibility to save talks for offline usage is something I am very, very excited about!
The post TED: Ideas worth spreading – iPad application appeared first on Johan van Mierlo's MobilityMinded.