So, the iPad. It’s a few weeks in and I don’t regret buying it, and I keep finding new uses for it (and every now and again, a new problem with it) and keep on enjoying it.

One interesting thing I find about the platform is how many people keep coming up with “revolutionary” applications for it. None more so than in the (social) news sector.

It seems that it’s not more than 7 days between the latest revolutionary app for reading news coming out promising to change the way we consume content – and then promptly failing at it.

The problem with all of these applications is that they are simply not flexible enough. While their interfaces my be interesting and they do a good job of rendering content in a pretty and nice-to-use way, the actual content is curated in a pretty plain and unimaginative way.

I want to take a look at the major players in the news apps, and see where they do well and where they fall down. I’m mostly not going for the newspaper or magasine type apps here – they are not innovative at all and are of no interest to me. What interests me are the curation type apps, with interesting layout models and those that really take advantage of the iPad’s unique platform.

My job means I frequently see Twitter news and details within seconds of it breaking; and more often than I would like, I am left with my head in my hands.

This is because I have seen way too many blog posts from people who really should know better, making mistakes when it comes to what Twitter’s up to.

Let me explain.

You may or may not have seen over the past few hours that my face has been somewhat plastered all over

I was reading an article in a New Scientist magazine yesterday on the train to London and I came across an article discussing bugs in the software that power aircraft.

Software is becoming more and more important in aircraft as it controls and interferes in more and more transactions between the pilot and the aircraft.

I was very worried to begin with when I thought it said they were partly powered by C#, but I was slightly better after I realised it said C , as well as C and assembler.

I should hope that the people who program and test the assembler code do a good job, that stuff can be tempremental at best!

So, over the weekend (I did a lot of tinkering ) I downloaded and installed the latest flavour of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Installation was a breeze, it was simple for me as I just overwrote everything on the hard drive. The installation has been simplified slightly, making it a bit easier to do and some improved functionality like the location map being a bit more intelligent.

So, I booted it up, and entered quite possibly the fastest thing I have ever seen running on this machine. It’s a Dell Inspiron, at least 3 generations and 4 years old, so it doesn’t usually perform that well. This, however, runs like it’s on fire. Simple tasks and general apps are so quick to load, and the new Firefox 3 beta goes like there’s nothing left to do.

My other favourite features are the rather nice new background, but more importantly nice features like it using the full resolution of my external monitor (where Feisty used to run a 20″, 1600×1050 monitor at 1024×768 ) and the all-improved password facilities – instead of having to enter the root password to access a dialog box with only one restricted function, you can access the whole box and then just “unlock” those functions to enter your password and continue.

All in all, Hardy Heron is a great long term support system, and I’m sure any minor bugs will be worked out in coming updates. I’m looking forward to 8.10, more features, and increased usability for newbies so that Ubuntu can spread itself to computer users everywhere.