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The most impressive titles in this collection are Al Gore’s Our Choice and Planetary, but all of them are worthy of checking out on their own merits. Read on for the details.

Since the initial release of the iPad last year, many publishers have been exploring new paradigms for delivering electronic content, working to depart from the old-school pages-of-text delivery into more rich and immersive multimedia applications. Al Gore’s Our Choice ($5) follows this trend, blending the basic textual structure of an e-book with interactive media.

The app begins with a video introduction by Al Gore, followed by a quick yet informative tutorial that shows you how to interact with and explore the content. The app then opens to a rotating view of the earth with the user’s current location shown as a blue dot. Swiping left and right navigates between chapters, with each chapter’s content shown in a filmstrip style view at the bottom to allow the user to navigate to Dell latitude d630 Battery,Dell latitude d620 Battery any page within the chapter. It’s worth noting that the app doesn’t actually include the content in the App Store package, instead requiring the user to have a Wi-Fi connection and sufficient free space (around 1GB) to download the content over the Internet when first starting up the app—a painful process if you want to start skipping around immediately. That said, content is downloaded quietly in the background whenever possible and most users will find that by the time they’ve watched the intro and tutorial they’ll be able to start using the app right away. Given enough time, the app actually does download the entire book and store it rather than accessing content on-demand, so offline use is not a problem, however we found it rather odd that the content wouldn’t have simply been bundled within the app in the first place.

Our Choice provides an extremely natural feeling, gesture-rich interface for navigating content, and its clear that a lot of attention to detail went into the app’s UI design. Pictures can be zoomed in using standard two-finger pinch gestures, but rather than simply displaying a static transition, the image expands and actually moves and rotates with the gesture. Video clips provide similar transitions, and actually continue to play in-place as the user drags and expands them. Similar gestures can be used to zoom out from a specific page to the chapter index and expand sidebar images, which transition to full-screen views with a nice, smooth unfolding effect.

Every picture in the book is geo-tagged and provides a link to a map displaying where the picture was taken; some images are also accompanied by audio narratives. Interactive infographic images allow users to drill down through graphics and charts to see more detailed information simply by tapping-and-holding on appropriate Dell kd476 Battery,Dell inspiron 9400 Battery sections of the image.

Our Choice is a universal app for both the iPhone/iPod touch and the iPad. Although the app experience is clearly better on the larger iPad screen, the iPhone version surprisingly provides the same features and UI effects, even including traditionally iPad-only features such as in-place video playback. While Our Choice is not the first great interactive book app we’ve seen since the iPad came out, it definitely scores high points for having one of the most fun and natural-feeling user interfaces we’ve seen, presenting serious and important content in a manner that’s enjoyable and intuitive to explore. You can decide for yourself whether Al Gore’s environmental message is worth consuming, but here, the medium in which it’s delivered is compelling in and of itself. iLounge Rating: A-.

Bloom Studio’s Planetary (Free) is a new iPad app that blends a combination of iTunes visualizer and innovative music exploration. Upon firing up the app, users are presented with a view of all of the music on their iPad Dell latitude d820 Batteries,Dell latitude c400 Batteries as a galaxy of star systems with artists, albums and songs presented as stars, planets and moons orbiting each other.

Planetary provides one of the most appealing and unique ways we’ve seen of viewing your music collection, and it doubles as a really cool visualizer. iPad 2 users can also take advantage of display mirroring over HDMI to display Planetary on an HDTV, although seeing the app provide a separate, high-resolution TV-only stream with only the visualizer portion would be a better way of handling this feature. Additionally, it would be nice to have some alternative ways to begin or interrupt a trip through the iPad’s library besides navigating through the alphabetical artist list, and in the event that Apple offers a way to access a Home Shared iTunes library through apps like this, we would expect that it’ll be even more exciting to explore the galaxy of songs on a computer. Regardless, Planetary is definitely worth checking out in its current form, and it’s free.

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