Joel

The iPad isn't just big business--it's also becoming the technological equivalent of a gateway drug into the wider universe of Apple products, helping the company extend its customer base to new audiences.

"The iPad has taken off not only in consumer in a meaningful way, but in education, and in enterprise, and it's sort of everywhere you look now," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during Tuesday's first-quarter earnings call.

This week's roundup of apps is all about making stuff-movies, pictures, games, and even a better living room. What can't your iOS device do?

Arqball SpinMagicPlanAlready this week, Macworld told you about Read It Later's reinvention as Pocket, an app that lets you save online multimedia for later viewing. The popular Draw Something app was updated with new features, including an in-game chat option, the ability to share your drawings, and an undo feature. Dan Moren brought you news of minor updates to iBooks and Cards. And of course we offered app guides for users interested in The Avengers-including the new Stan Lee-narrated apps Avengers Origins: Assemble! and Avengers Origins: Hulk-and drawing on their iPads.

When Dan Kerzner wants to show his colleagues at Microstrategy the latest numbers for the company, he calls them into a conference room that's equipped with a television and he fires up his iPad--and without further fuss the spreadsheet on his tablet is on the big screen for all to see.

Kerzner isn't using a projection system. There aren't a lot of cables snaking around the table and floor. Instead, he and his colleagues at MicroStrategy (which develops business-intelligence apps) are using a sometimes-mocked product--the Apple TV ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice )--for something it wasn't specifically designed to do: Connect iOS devices to televisions in meeting rooms. Turns out that, by making it easy for workers with AirPlay-enabled iPhones and iPads to wirelessly project their presentations to the big screen, the Apple TV can in fact be a useful business tool.

This week's app roundup brings you new and better ways to get in shape, watch TV, and battle alien pigs. Because in space, no one can hear you oink.

Already this week, Macworld's Lex Friedman brought you news of Smule's latest offering--Beatstream, an app that takes tracks from your iTunes library and turns them into a Tap Tap Revenge-style game. Lex also reported that the popular new game Draw Something had been acquired by Zynga. Jason Snell let us know about the update of Comixology's Comics app to take advantage of the new iPad's high-definition Retina display. And Chris Breen took a first look at the MyTunes Pro music apps, which he called "an attractive app given its $10 price."

Mike Daisey may have received his comeuppance, but Apple is pressing ahead with its efforts to improve working conditions at the overseas factories that manufacture its products.

As promised, Apple is now offering monthly updates to its Supplier Responsibility website, tracking efforts to reduce extreme overtime hours worked among employees of Apple's manufacturing partners. The update was first noted by John Gruber at the Daring Fireball blog.

For more than a year, Square has been on the leading edge of a revolution in commerce with its app that let merchants use iOS devices as credit card readers. On Monday, it expanded its efforts with a new app that turns an iPad into a fully-functioning cash register.

Like its predecessor, the new Square Register app lets merchants take and process credit and debit card payments without having to pony up for a traditional-and expensive-card-reading system. (With both apps, you must have a Square account, and obtain a free Square card reader, which plugs into the iOS device's headphone jack.)

If iPad owners found their Spidey-senses tingling last week, it was for good reason -- Marvel announced it is making 80 graphic novels featuring Spider Man, the X-Men, Captain America, and other popular characters available in Apple's iBookstore.

Marvel, of course, has its own well-regarded iOS app that offers mostly single issues of comics. Marvel's offerings in the iBookstore, meanwhile, focus more on multi-issue stories that have been collected into a single edition--and the prices reflect that. Prices range from $7 for many of the novels up to $25 for X-Men: Second Coming.

Apple is revamping its iAd mobile advertising service, slashing fees for advertisers and increasing the commissions it pays app developers who opt into the network.

As Advertising Age first reported on Tuesday, marketers now need to spend a minimum of $100,000 for a mobile campaign to get into the program, down from a $1 million minimum when iAd launched in 2010. And mobile developers will get a commission of 70 percent of the ad dollars earned on their apps, up from 60 percent.

http://readdle.com/Readdle has launched a new note-taking app for the iPad, one that lets users share notes with collaborators or view the documents as PDFs on their home computer.

Remarks-a new offering from the maker of the popular ReaddleDocs application-debuted Wednesday in the App Store. The app lets users take notes in meetings, lectures, or interviews-entering text by typing or adding sketches with a stylus; sketchers can choose paper styles and ink colors for their notes. Users can also annotate PDFs imported from Dropbox, Box.Net, mail, or other applications. (Documents can also be shared to a user's computer using a USB cable and the iTunes file sharing feature.) And documents created in Remarks can be shared with other Remarks users, adding a social collaboration component to the app.

Appigo has relaunched its Notebook iOS app, expanding the note-taking tool from an iPhone-only offering into one that also works on the iPad. The updated app can also sync its documents among multiple other devices.

Notebook 2.0 arrived this week in the App Store. In addition to its new status as universal app that works on all of Apple's mobile devices, the note-taking app also now offers Dropbox syncing--allowing users to recover their notes as .txt files from their personal computer.