From the land of Shakespeare we have a remodeled hotel that has gone Mac in every room. The Menzies Welcombe Hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon is now about as tech-friendly as a hotel can be, especially for a hotel built in 1866. All guest rooms now contain a Mac, a flat screen TV, internet connections, Skype and Wi-Fi along with...

Sometimes staying committed to a daily task is difficult. You get busy with other activities, and then you totally forget that you promised to exercise (or write a letter, or practice piano) every day. If you have difficulty integrating new activities into your daily life, then you should check out Commit for the iPhone. Commit is...

My non-TUAW job is in print journalism, where I spend my nights as a designer for a newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Part of that work involves being able to estimate, from the glance at a photo in InDesign or a paper dummy, how much of a story I can fit on a page, photo dimensions and more. The same goes for online design. Design...

Announced today at Apple's education event, iTunes U -- a long-standing feature of the iTunes Store -- is now a separate application (universal) for iOS devices running iOS 5. Since 2006, iTunes U has been a way to electronically distribute class lectures. Both Berkeley and Stanford have released courses on iTunes U, as have many...

Apple has released iTunes 10.5.3 for Mac and Windows. As of this writing, it's available from Apple's site, but not Software Update. As noted by MacStories, the new version adds support for synchronizing the iBooks 2-savvy textbook format announced during today's education event. It's been an exciting day for Apple fans, especially...

As part of today's education announcement, you can pick up a preview of the biology textbook book E. O. Wilson's Life on Earth as a free download from the iTunes store. Requirements for this title are an iPad running iOS 5 and the latest iBooks version, the newly released iBooks 2. Parts of this textbook were demoed during the event...

Apple has announced the free iBooks Author, an OS X application for creating any type of ebook. As with Pages, a number of templates are available for authors to use to get started with making a book. With a tap, they can be filled with stock text. Elements such as audio and video can be dragged and dropped onto the page. Keynote...

Today is Apple's big education event and the company kicked off its announcements with iBooks 2, which will bring a new textbook experience to the iPad. As expected, these textbooks will include standard text interspersed with interactive high-quality images, videos, animations and 3-D models. This content will be more than pretty;...

Welcome to TUAW's coverage of the January 2012 NYC Education event. Apple has invited select media to the Guggenheim to announce new educational directions. TUAW is metaliveblogging the event, bringing you updates, analysis, and insight with our trademark TUAW flair. Please keep refreshing the page. Newer updates will appear first,...

Last year, GE launched a pilot program that lets its employees choose between a Mac notebook and a PC desktop. The program is not well-known, and only 1,000 employees have chosen a Mac over a PC. This number is expected to rise as more employees become aware of this option, and new employees join GE because they consider the...

I saw quite a few document scanners for iOS devices at CES last week, but this is about as elegant as they come. Brookstone is offering a scanner called iConvert, which uses your iPad as the receptable for anything you scan with it. Not only does it scan your documents with a 300 dpi scanner, but it even does a very nifty...

Apple purchased a whopping 349 million micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) microphones last year to put in all of its various iOS devices, which means it is now the biggest purchaser of such microphones in the world. That number grew 173 percent from 2010 to 2011, putting Apple up over Samsung for the most microphones bought...

Mobile/social game giant Zynga has made four more acquisitions in mobile gaming, having already picked up quite a few iOS and mobile development companies in the past. This time around, the biggest pickup is a company from Germany named Gamedoctors, makers of the very popular ZombieSmash title. Page44 Studios is the second purchase....

Bloomberg adds yet another dollop of confirmation to the rumors about tomorrow's event that Apple will have plenty of educational news to share. Most of the rumors have revolved around a textbook-based system for iBooks, and Bloomberg agrees, saying that Apple will introduce not only more textbook integration for iBooks, but new...

Every once in a while Apple gets granted a big chunk of patents all at once, and this is one of those times. In addition to an Apple TV patent we've described in its own post, Apple's been granted over 20 other patents ranging from advanced trackpads to iPhone circuit board designs and beyond. Patently Apple describes the advanced...

There are plenty of photo cropping applications for iOS. Here's a new wrinkle that caught my eye. The app is called AntiCrop, and it's a US $0.99 universal iPad app that does the opposite of cropping a photo. It actually adds new data to the top and sides of an image, allowing you to reframe something that didn't come out right in the...