Sometimes an app drops into the iOS App Store that really makes you ask, “Why didn’t Apple bundle that into the OS?” The story typically ends up with Apple buying out the company or straight up “borrowing” the concept for the next iOS iteration (see Siri and Volume Button Picture Taking). Such is the case with Our Pad, by Ghori Networks.
Our Pad aims to solve the biggest problem with sharing an iPad: lack of user accounts. The app bottles up your user accounts for Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Twitter into a pseudo user-profile.
Now, obviously this app doesn’t have OS system level access to be able to trick Safari into auto-selecting your desired accounts. Thus, your browsing has to happen from within the app itself. I can think of a few clever ways around this, but for now, I’m keeping them to myself.
Our Pad hides your account info from other users of your iPad and protects everything behind a clever pattern password system, not unlike Android’s iteration. So no need to worry about your flatmate tweeting from your account about your love for Justin Bieber.
Now on to the problems. As I stated before, this isn’t a hack to trick Safari into letting you have multiple accounts. You are stuck using a pretty crappy browser from inside the app itself. So, basically you are adding yet another browser to your expansive app collection. Not to mention the already included Safari.
For the price (free at time of this writing) it might be worth taking a look if this is a problem that plagues your household, but honestly I’d rather see it built into iOS.
So the ball is in your court Apple. We want, nay, we need this feature. If not for sharing hardware with our wives, children, and friends, then do it for those of us with six Twitter accounts, six different Google Apps accounts and three real Gmail addresses. Using safari is a pain in the ass for these purposes, and with the exception of Twitter, multiple account support simply isn’t a priority for the service providers themselves.
Via: Life Hacker
