Drunk with the Christmas spirit after having paid off my pre-fabbed Foxconn piece of consumer-ready genius we otherwise know as the iPad 2, I decided to belly up to Best Buy for another round of zero percent financing. I showed mild restraint, purchasing the 13-inch Macbook Pro (4 GB/500 GB). Sure, the 17-incher had more memory…
Author: Ethan Machado
Welcome to TapCool, the personal website of Ethan Machado. I’m a former Missouri Journalism award-winning writer turned UX designer (but you can call me a content designer or UX writer if it makes you feel better), who loves working at the intersection of technology, design, and content. If you’re looking for a strategic and dependable creative leader, I am the human you seek.
While Others Flop, iPad Still Has Room to Improve
With the unceremonious failure of HP’s TouchPad nearly complete, the conventional wisdom continues to be that the iPad is a superior tablet without any real challengers on the horizon. While that may be true, the iPad has several areas for improvement that consumers will demand as they start the en masse transition from a world…
Words with Friends vs. Scrabble
My Scrabble addiction left me strung out by a computer with xeroxed copies of two- and three-word cheat sheets and a copy of Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis scattered among the soda cans and emptied bags of chips in my pathetic studio apartment. I’ve come a long way since. I took a good five or…
Fruit Ninja: Death by a Thousand Swipes?
Invariably, a new gadget gets a scratch or nick that somehow seems to deflate its perceived value. While I still love my iPad2 like a father loves his child, seeing the first evidence of an imperfection had me all torn up inside. I had spent yet another day marveling at the versatility of my 10-inch…
iPad Apps for Work
I used the most common excuse in the book to rationalize buying an iPad. I need it for work. I walked into the store with a straight face, and I’m still walking around with a straight face, reciting the line, I need it for work over and over again. Here are the top five ways…
iMarker a Blast from the Past
When I arrive home from work, the first thing my 5-year-old son does to me is whisper in my ear, “Can I use your iPad now?” I dutifully comply, and soon enough he is begging me to download another demo app or to buy him Super Monkey Ball because there is a character from Sonic…
Tap Cool Goes to iPad School
I have never been an Apple fan since my dreadful experience with the iMac back in the late 90s. Times have changed, and no one can deny that Apple leads with new, ground-breaking products. That became all too clear when I started project managing (and doing some mark-up and CSS) a new website for an…