This video presents Popular Science + –  the first digital magazine from publisher Bonnier’s ongoing project to rethink the way magazines can be read on devices like the Apple iPad.

With Popular Science +, the publisher is trying to define “the future of digital magazines.”

The demo is slick – but also seems completely misguided. Popular Science + seems to exist in a state of denial about the existence of new media and social media.

In fact, the explicit goals of the project put preserving the status quo ahead of innovation:

Our goal has been to preserve all the qualities that make magazines such a powerful, popular medium—inspired packaging of carefully curated content by a team of expert editors, delivered in a visually dazzling issue with a beginning, middle and end—and at the same time to reinvent it in a way that makes it come to life on the iPad’s screen.”

They’ve taken a 100 year-old vision for magazines and translated it very elegantly onto a new platform.

How does Google/Twitter/YouTube/blogging/podcasting/social networking fit into this sterile vision?

It doesn’t.

Foodev has updated Caster – its podcasting app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, to support multi-track recording and the iPad.

Caster is a $4.99 app designed to let you create and publish podcasts on your mobile device, including podcast recording, audio editing, uploading and RSS publishing.

Features:

• Record chunks of audio at a time or all at once
• Waveform editor
• Clip reordering and deleting
• Cut, Copy, Paste
• Audio Normalization
• All podcast clips are combined into a single file
• Writes podcast in m4a/ALAC format – if ALAC is unavailable on your device, it writes to a wave.
• Download your completed podcasts via FTP or publish directly from the palm of your hand!
• Existing podcast RSS files are synced with Caster
• Multi-track recording and editing
• All RSS Fields are editable from your device
• Review previously recorded podcasts
  copy and paste between podcast issues
• Automatically generates a new RSS when publishing
• Upload existing audio clips for use in your podcast
• FTP Server to download your podcast via WIFI
• FTP Client to automatically publish your podcast
• Built in documentation
• Publish via email, and link in twitter and facebook

This is a preview of Ohm Studio – a new Internet music collaboration platform that looks a bit like GarageBand for the Web.

The promo video is focused on “cloud-based” collaborative music making, but it’s easy to imagine using the same service for podcast creation.

Matt Akers, host of the Zune Insider Podcast, talks with Nate Muller, a PM from the Zune team, about the awesomeness that is the Zune HD firmware update.

Highlights include Smart DJ and using the Zune HD on a TV through a Zune HD dock.

We haven’t tried this – because we’re still chafing from our experience with the original brown Zune – but the Zune HD 4.5 update actually looks pretty swank-a-dank.

If you’ve tried it, let us know what you think!

Mashable today highlighted a site called iPad Peek, calling it a “nifty tool that lets you see how any website will be rendered on the iPad.”

It sounds like a good idea, Unfortunately, iPad Peek doesn’t do much more than put a pretty iPad picture frame around the site you want to test.

iPad Peek works great – as long as you don’t care about:

• how text wraps;
• the size of type on the iPad;
• whether your graphics show up or not;
• the placement of images; or
• whether you get an accurate idea what iPad users will see.

It’s a little surprising that Mashable is promoting this – because no one should use iPad Peek if they are seriously interested in understanding how a site looks on an iPad.

WordPress.org has released and updated version of WordPress for iPhone – making it compatible with the Apple iPad.

The new version, officially WordPress for iPhone OS, isn’t a leap forward in terms of features – but the extra screen real estate available on the iPad makes a huge difference.

Where editing blog posts on the iPhone is possible, most people are going to reserve it for doing things like emergency fixes. On the iPad, though, creating new posts and screening comments is fast and relatively easy.

“In order to ensure that using WordPress on your iPad would be a great experience from day one, we decided not to add any new features. Nada.,” explains designer Matt Thomas. “This release is all about taking advantage of a huge 9.7″ touchscreen.”

“Writing and editing posts is far easier than before. Skimming through your comments and moderating them is far faster than before. And using the app is simply more beautiful than before,” he adds.

We’d like to see a WYSIWYG editor and support for creating and uploading audio.

Nevertheless, WordPress for iPhone OS is maturing into a very useful tool – and the fact that it’s free is amazing.

Have you tried out WordPress on the iPad? If so, let me know what you think of it!

Entrackment (App Store link) is a $2.99 app for the Apple iPad that turns it into a wireless control surface for GarageBand.

If you create podcasts in GarageBand and you’ve got an iPad, Entrackment is a no-brainer. It’s cheap and it lets you control all the primary recording functions of GarageBand.

The first reviews are coming in for the new Apple iPad and the consensus is that:

• It’s not just a big iPod touch after all; and
• It’s actually sort of magical and revolutionary.

Here’s a quick roundup of the reviews:

• USA Today says “Apple has pretty much nailed it with this first iPad, though there’s certainly room for improvement. Nearly three years after making a splash with the iPhone, Apple has delivered another impressive product that largely lives up to the hype.”
• PC Week says “Having used the iPad for some time, I can tell you that the device just makes sense. When you combine basic-but-essential work tools with iWork, an improved browser, e-mail, iPod, and photo applications, a well-executed e-Book platform with iBooks, and throw in thousands of downloadable apps and games, and package it all in a gorgeous, slim slate with a beautiful 9.7-inch touch screen, you have yourself a winner.”
• The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg says “After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop.”
• The New York Times says “The bottom line is that the iPad has been designed and built by a bunch of perfectionists. If you like the concept, you’ll love the machine.”

Even given that Apple only sends review devices to a select list of analysts that have histories of favorable reviews of Apple gear, it looks like the skeptics were wrong. The Apple iPad is more than just a big iPod touch, it’s actually the first of a new generation of computers.

I know where I’ll be this Saturday. How about you?

Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg has announced a new service, VaultPress that is designed to meet the growing need for automated backups and security patches for WordPress self-hosted sites.

Here’s how Mullenweg describes the service:

The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.

In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.

VaultPress fills a huge hole for WordPress self-hosted sites. It remains to be seen how automated updates play with critical plugins. If VaultPress can deal with this issue in an elegant way, it could be hugely beneficial for bloggers and podcasters.

VaultPress is in beta now – see the beta application for details. VaultPress plans to charge around $10/month for the service.

Remember the Joojoo?

The Crunchpad?

That much-hyped $500 tablet computer that’s not the Apple iPad?

No?

Despite generating a lot of buzz with tech bloggers, Joojoo creators Fusion Garage appears to have had difficulty translating that into orders.

Gizmodo reports that there were 90 pre-orders for the JooJoo, and 15 of those were returned. Preorders for the iPad are estimated at 250,000-300,000 units, about 3,500 times as many.