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Eager to be the first on your block with an iPad? Apple started taking orders for the tablets on Friday. Wi-Fi models running from $499 to $699 will be available on April 3; 3G models, costing $629 to $829, won’t be available until late April. Along with the advance orders, Apple released some details on what’s expected to be a key app for the new device — e-books. Promoting the iBooks feature of the iPad, Apple’s web site explains, “iBooks works with VoiceOver, the screen reader in iPad, so it can read you the contents of any page. Even with all these extras, reading is so natural on iPad, the technology seems to disappear.” The site also promotes iBooks …

Topics: Features , Troubleshooting , Ask TUAW Welcome back to Ask TUAW , our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal’s note handling, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you’re using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we’ll assume you’re running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don’t specify), or if it’s an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have. …

Editor’s note : When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. SOme of their investments include Skype , Zynga , Factual , and RockMelt . Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware , which they sold to HP for $1.6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape. At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The …

Topics: iPad It seems that a lot of Apple-related events happen while I’m on cruise ships. Back in 1998, for example, I was aboard a cruise ship when I read the headline that Apple had decided to drop the Newton MessagePad . Before we went on this trip, I knew that Apple would start taking iPad pre-orders and reservations on March 12, so I expected that I’d just be able to pull up the Apple website early in the morning, pop in my reservation, and then go on with my vacation. Little did I know that it was going to take me until 4 PM local time (3 PM ET) on March 12th …

Here’s this week’s PlayStation Video Store update. From award winning movies like The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Bastards and Precious, to some awesome HD TV shows, this weeks line up got you all covered.

How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you’d find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That’s what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we’ll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important forces in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer of which depends the success of many a device, is whether “bonus” features like second screens and…

Users who are planning to purchase Apple’s iPad with a 3G modem probably already know that AT&T is offering two data plan prices for the device, which are $14.99/month for 250MB or $29.99 for unlimited data. While it’s not too hard to walk into an AT&T store to request for the change in plan, it seems that Apple has gone one step further, and made things easy for everybody. You’ll be able to sign up, check your data usage, manage your account, and even cancel your service directly from the iPad. Since there is no contract binding you to a specific data plan, you’ll be able to switch between plans as and when you wish, which is …

Topics: Cult of Mac , iPad We’ve had more than a few inbound requests today, via email and Twitter, asking a slightly obsessive but completely understandable question: When can I pre-order my freakin’ iPad ? True to form, the simple answer of “March 12th” is not adequate for the real early adopters , and they ask again: Yes, I know that, but what time can I push the button? When does the pre-order page go live on store.apple.com ? Do I need to stay up all night, refreshing the page? We understand. We know where you’re coming from. We asked Apple PR to…

Topics: Found Footage , iPad Call me crazy but I think this is hysterical. Doritoscanada has put together a wry and dry iPad introduction parody using, of course, Doritos. It’s only one minute long so check it out and see if you don’t agree that it’s just about perfect. Thanks to Luis Ortiz for sending it in. TUAW Found Footage: The Doritos iPad Parody originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Topics: Apple Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It’s been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone’s view controller class is testable or not. In response to these discussions, iPhone developer Jonah Williams has written up a view controller unit testing how-to over at the Carbon Five web blog. His write-up offers examples that show how to incorporate some best practices into your code. Williams points out how broken NIB bindings are a common problem for iPhone OS applications. To address these issues, he regularly adds simple assertions that…