On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.

“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.

While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the web vs. app debate – standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores. (We’ll be digging into the web vs. app debate with three influential publishers at paidContent Live later this month.)

The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.

“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.

He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.

“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”

For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.

The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.

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The Dutch company — which I described earlier this year as ‘the semantic web for the rest of us’ — has just announced a $1.6 million seed round led by NEA, the Sand Hill Road firm that has backed the likes of Salesforce, Macromedia and 23andMe.

It marks a significant moment for the company, which is trying to build a self-service semantic engine that can help companies and individuals understand, drill down and work with data, documents and content. That’s all a bit hand-wavy, so to get an idea of what Silk does, here’s what I said the last time I wrote about it:

It works like this: you build a series of pages inside Silk and link them together with tags. The pages can be anything you like: text files, pages from your website, company documents, your schedule. And the tags, too, can cover anything you like: any genre of data you can imagine.You then use the simple editor to add tags to your documents (telling it, for example, that the “United States” in your file refers to a country) and it connects the dots for you.

For example: say you’ve got a set of files with information about various countries and you want to rank them by GDP. While traditionally you’d have to do it manually — or at least get an underling to compile a spreadsheet from the data in your documents — Silk makes it far easier to perform the same task without requiring those extra steps.
If your Silk pages are tagged properly, the app simply joins the data together and allows you to instantly build charts, graphs or maps documenting the data you’re after.

That’s still the case. It’s an entirely web-based service, and to get an idea of what it can do, try taking a look around the Countries of the World subdomain that Silk has up and running. It allows you to combine and re-combine different data sets on nations from all over the globe that has been drawn from Wikipedia.

The site runs impressive technology and it’s remarkably fast — but it still requires some work to turn it into a really useable service for the kinds of businesses that can make the most out of it. CEO and co-founder Salar al Khafaji said it was a “milestone” for Silk.

The company had previously raised a $455,000 round led by Atomico (Rdio, Fon, Xobni). The London-based fund will be joining this round too, alongside angel investors Anil Hansjee, Philippe Cases and Jens Christensen.

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Several of the entrepreneurs presenting their startups at Rock Health’s demo day on Wednesday held both medical and business degrees, which was reflected in their focus on using technology to improve efficiency and communication for medical doctors and their health-conscious patients.

Rock Health is a seed accelerator for digital health startups, and its second class of entrepreneurs presented their pitches on Wednesday. In exchange for admission into the program, the startups received $20,000, San Francisco office space, and five months to launch their ideas.

Three of the startups presented particularly interesting solutions to problems faced by medical professionals, and should be on your radar as they grow:

Docphin

Docphin has built technology that makes it easier for doctors to search for, download, and share medical journal articles without the hassle of multiple academic login screens. Doctors connect with their academic institution for access, and then search for articles that interest them, search by keyword, or check articles that were released since they last logged in. “It’s Kayak.com meets medical research, except you’re not trying to book a last-minute flight,” said Mitesh Patel, co-founder and CEO.

Docphin is also building an enterprise product that allows institutions to pay a licensing fee and then distribute training videos and documents to its doctors. Patel said Docphin is getting ready to close its second seed funding round, and has recieved investment from groups including the Mayo Clinic. It’s easy to understand how doctors used to readability apps like Instapaper or modern search engines would be attracted to Docphin’s product.

Cardiio

If you’re carrying an iPhone in your pocket, you’re carrying an incredibly sophisticated computer, and startup Cardiio looks to take advantage of that technology by using the iPhone camera as a biosensor to measure patient heart rates. How does it work? Users simply hold the iPhone camera up to their face, tap a button on the screen, and wait for the iPhone camera to measure light reflected off the person’s face. Increased blood flow reduces the amount of light reflecting off a person’s face, so the iPhone camera sensors can detect a person’s heart rate based on that information.

The app is incredibly fun to use, and would likely appeal more to consumers hoping to track their heart rate on the go than doctors in a medical setting. But the possibilities for use seem fairly widespread. The biggest question with Cardiio seems to be whether or not the technology will work consistently. Cardiio’s founders said they’ve tested the app against heart rate monitors, and it’s been very accurate. The Cardiio iPhone app will likely launch in the iTunes Store this week, and the company is working on an Android app coming up next.

Agile Diagnosis

Trying to remember the different steps to take in diagnosing a patient’s illness, but don’t want to carry around physical medical textbooks or copies of the the latest medical guidelines? Agile Diagnosis is an HTML5 web app that produces flow charts for doctors on the go, aggregating the latest medical recommendations from textbooks and professional society guidelines. The company began with information from commonly-used medical texts, and is expanding it to include guidelines from medical societies and widespread medical literature. The information is presented with hyperlinks in an interactive flowchart, letting doctors select for further information or skip steps they understand well. Experienced doctors can also use the charts and information to explain medical terms or conditions to patients.

Most recently, 30 percent of the app’s traffic came from iPhone users, closely followed by 20-30 percent from Windows desktop users. The founders said Agile Diagnosis is intended to provide doctors with the latest resources at their fingertips, and provide feedback to the societies writing and developing medical guidelines for doctors.

Agile Diagnosis already has 10,000 users since its beta version launched in March, representing more than 240 academic medical centers and 20 hospitals. The company has raised 2.5 million in funding, and is looking to expand its team.

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The company, based in San Francisco and Austin, is releasing its first mobile app Tuesday since launching a Web site last fall.  The HTML5 app ties into Loku’s discovery service, which leverages big data, data mining and natural-language search to figure out all the interesting places, events and news happening in a local area.

The Loku app–really a mobile Website–pulls in local data on events, music, restaurants, news, photos and write-ups from local blogs. Users who turn to the app will find the data tailored to their particular location and the time of day. Those users can increase their local ranking among fellow users by exploring more of their city or contributing back content into Loku. The Loku app will launch initially in San Francisco, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC, with other cities coming online in later this year.

The HTML5 app is a pretty slick piece of software, enabling animations like page flips up and down that let users view all the interesting and relevant things happening around them. Users can also get alerts that come in from the top and bottom of the app.

Dan Street, the CEO of Loku, told me in an interview that he first thought the company would just alpha test its mobile service using the HTML5 app before pursuing a native app first. But when he saw how flexible and powerful HTML5 was in creating native-like experiences, he decided to start right there and follow up with dedicated apps wrapped in a native shell for Android and iOS. Those apps will appear in the coming months.

“I think it’s the right order. It’s hard to change a native app when it’s in someone’s hands. With HTML5, it’s super easy to make updates and you can control distribution,” Street said.

Street said that during a limited test in Austin, Loku got 17,000 users on to the mobile Web app in a couple of weeks. That makes him think there’s no immediate need to push out a native app; to get Loku on their phone, users can just navigate to Loku.com and then bookmark the app or save it to their home screen.

“As the technology keeps maturing, you’ll see others do Web first then get it nailed and get traction before they go with native apps,” Street said.

I think Loku may be a little ahead of the curve here but it’s taking an interesting approach.  Having a Web app lets it take advantage of Web search marketing and it focuses Loku’s efforts on one product that it can more easily port to different mobile platforms. Also, starting first with a mobile Web app lets companies knock out bugs quickly, something that can be slower on iOS because of Apple’s review policy.

Native apps will always have their place, especially for more performance-intensive apps like games. And HTML5 is still in need of more seasoning, especially in providing better access to the underlying device hardware. For example, it’s hard to upload photos  and use the device camera with HTML5, something Facebook has also cited as a problem. But increasingly, the hardware makers are opening up more access to their devices for HTML5 apps. And that is going to make mobile-Web first more of an option for developers.

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Ecoute

Ecoute (French for “listen”) is aimed at being a minimalistic standalone player that syncs with iTunes. It’s been around the longest of the players listed here, having recently reached version 3.

The best way to describe how Ecoute looks is to imagine what the iPhone’s music app would like if it were ported to OS X. Navigation is done through lists, with album art on the left side to make it easier to distinguish between entries. There’s a breadcrumb navigation bar at the top, so it’s easy to get around.

Ecoute has a lot of nice touches. The Dock icon displays the currently playing album artwork, global keyboard shortcuts allow you to control playback in the background, and the controller (which can be customized with available themes) can display the current album artwork on the desktop. You can also share the current track on Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.

Ecoute is available in the Mac App Store for $8.

Enqueue

Enqueue’s name comes from one of its main features: a queue in the sidebar that acts as a temporary playlist. You can drag songs and albums into the queue and listen to them in order, making it easier to plan and enjoy long listening sessions. Enqueue also has a mini player view available that just shows the queue alongside controls. Being able to see the queue makes it a lot more useful than iTunes’ mini player.

The rest of Enqueue’s interface is more traditional than the others in this list, but that doesn’t make it less useful. There are four tabs at the top for your library, playlists, history, and preferences. The library tab adopts a staid browser layout, with filter columns at the top and results below. I don’t much care for this configuration, so I was happy to see I could change it in the view menu to display just a list of artists on the left and results on the right.

The history tab displays your most played artists or songs and how they relate to each other using a bar graph, which is unique among the apps in this list. Further features include iTunes sync, Last.fm scrobbing, and configurable global shortcut keys.

Enqueue is available in the Mac App Store for $10.

Sonora

Sonora (Spanish for “sound”) has a straightforward interface with a lot of power buried beneath. The toolbar houses the controls for play, pause, shuffle and the like. The middle of the toolbar is occupied by the queue, an area where you can drag albums or songs from different artists to make a temporary playlist, similar to Enqueue’s. By default, the queue will be populated by songs from the currently playing album, which makes it easy to skip to a different song while browsing music as well. A sidebar along the left lists all artists, and the main browser shows album artwork arranged alphabetically by artist, like iTunes.

The most interesting feature of Sonora is the ability to type anywhere in the app to bring up a search box, which works a little like Alfred. Type the name of an album, hit enter, and it starts playing. It’s slick, but hard to discover initially.

Unlike the other apps listed, Sonora is still in beta, so be warned you might run into a bug or two. It’s available from the developer’s website for free for the time being.

Rdio

Rdio is unique among this group in that it streams music rather than playing downloaded files. This allows for a much broader selection of music, as anything in Rdio’s vast catalogue is available to stream. Instant access to new releases and recommendations is also a plus for Rdio. The downsides, of course, are the requirement of a network connection and the lack of more obscure artists.

The Rdio app itself is basically a wrapper around a web app, though most people wouldn’t notice. The load times are fast; I’ve never had to wait long for a song to buffer, and the UI loads quickly as well.

Rdio also has social features built-in. Other users can follow you and see what you’re listening to, and you can share your activity to Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter.

Rdio is available for free, with a variable song cap (basically, the more you use the service, the lower the cap becomes). Unlimited desktop and web access is $5 a month, and unlimited web and mobile access costs $10/month.

Note: A competitor to Rdio, Spotify, is also quite popular. The reason I’m not covering it fully is because I think the Rdio app is better, though it still deserves a mention.

Vox

Vox is different from the other apps mentioned. Instead of choosing music from within the app, you choose it from the Finder. This behavior goes back to the early days of music players, when you chose music from the file manager instead of within the app itself.

The UI consists of several palettes rather than one unified window. The palettes can be hidden or shown with simple Cmd-number shortcuts, i.e. Cmd-1 to bring up the player, Cmd-2 to bring up the equalizer. The advantage of this kind of design is that it’s easy to show and hide what’s necessary. Of course, the downside is that it’s a little harder to use.

Vox has a large list of supported file types, including FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and Apple Lossless. There’s also an export feature, which can convert every file type it supports into a good selection of formats, including AAC and WAV. It can even apply effects to the exported version.

There’s also a menu bar entry for Vox, which lets you easily pause, skip, and choose a new song. Vox is available at the developer’s website for free.

Are you sticking to iTunes for listening to music, or have you switched to a different app to fulfill that need? Let us know about your favorite in the comments.

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If you checked out my hands-on of the Kindle Cloud Reader back in August, you’ll already have a good idea of how the touch-optimized store works: You can browse recommendations and categories via a smooth scrolling highlights section with full cover pics, or check out best-seller lists. Big, finger-friendly buttons abound, making it much easier to browse and buy. In general, it’s far superior to using Amazon’s standard site.

Now that the store is broken out on its own, you can add it to your home screen for easy access, and also all books now offer the option to read samples and full purchased versions directly from your native Kindle app instantly. You can also still opt to read in the Kindle Cloud Reader web app, if you prefer.

I liked my initial experience with the Cloud Reader, but it wasn’t compelling enough to get me to abandon the native Kindle app. Now, the new optimized store site means it’ll be even easier for me to check out new content on my iPad, all while using my reading method of choice. This is a smart move for Amazon, which is clearly still seeing the value in keeping an up-to-date native offering available for iOS device owners, as it proved with its substantial update to the iPad app in December. Considering apps seem to be gaining momentum on mobile devices as compared to the web, that’s not surprising.

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Creating a web clip icon for each iOS resolution

There are apps in the Mac App Store, like Icons, that can help developers create web clip icons. Otherwise, you can just use your favorite graphic editor or even the basic OS X utility Preview (included free on every Mac) to create the image files required.

For the iPhone 4 and latest-generation iPod touch, a 114px x 114px image is what you’ll need. IPads optimally use 72px x 72px, and all other iOS devices prefer 57px x 57px image files. In all cases, the web-standard resolution of 72dpi is the way to go. If you like, you can manually create a custom image for each device, or you can just create an image targeting one device and let the others scale the image up or down as needed.

One thing that iOS does on your behalf is add image effects like rounded corners, a drop shadow and the iconic reflective shine to the icons you create. To take advantage of this, ensure that the image file you create is perfectly square and free of any shine or gloss. If you prefer to add your own effects, be sure to append the -precomposed keyword to the end of the image file name.

Adding the icons to your website

If you’ve decided to use just a single image or set of images for your entire site, then simply copy the files to the root directory of your domain. On the other hand, if you want to add different icons to different individual pages of your site and name them however you like, simply add the following link element to your pages, substituting your custom file name for the href value:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/your-custom-icon.png"/>

This also works if you create specific icons for each device’s particular display characteristics. You also need to include the size attributes, as illustrated in the following code:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="your-custom-icon-for-iphone.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72" href="your-custom-icon-for-ipad.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114" href="your-custom-icon-for-iphone4.png" />

Now when someone decides to add this page to their home screen, the image file you created will be used in place of a scaled-down thumbnail of the page itself.

Users increasingly want to access content on the Internet using their mobile devices, and that means iOS devices for a large percentage. If you want to make a lasting impression, make your content accessible on iPhones and iPads first of all, but also make sure that if users do want to save your site for later viewing, they can find it among their many web clips and apps with relative ease.

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The versatile Evernote application that acts as a general note-taking tool for just about anything in your digital life (text notes, photos, websites, media and more) has achieved considerable success as a mobile app on iOS and Android devices, and as a native desktop application, available for both Mac and Windows machines. The Mac app recently gained a lot of traction thanks to its introduction in the Mac App Store, Apple’s software sales marketplace.

According to Evernote VP Andrew Sinkov, the goal of the new Evernote Web design is to make the web version a priority, whereas before it mostly operated as a fall-back option when native apps weren’t available. That’s all changed, according to Sinkov:

In order to address major changes both in user expectations and device types, we needed to completely rethink Evernote Web. The new design is the combination of the best ideas from our desktop and mobile versions. The result is an interface that is much more usable and feature-rich. It’s also designed for a greater array of device types, everything from desktop browsers to tablets to netbooks to internet TVs.

The web app also needed to feel more powerful, according to Sinkov, which is the result of evolving user expectations:

In the beginning our userbase skewed older than for most services. Today, we’re seeing tremendous growth in the student demographic. For that age-group, the expectation is that products on the web should be as powerful as those on the desktop. So, we rebuilt Evernote Web so that it is no longer a secondary player. Our users also wanted greater potential for integration with other tools and services that they use, and the rewritten underlying architecture will support a lot of expansion.

The new design definitely feels much more like an application, and less like a website. There’s no wasted space, and the layout will be very familiar to users who have experience with Evernote’s desktop clients. The three-column layout is taken straight from those native apps, and resembles the type of interface used in many iPad apps when used in landscape orientation (which is also a design concept used heavily in OS X Lion). It’s popular because it’s so usable, and because it works well with a variety of different interface methods (touch, mouse, etc.).

Evernote Web also introduces a number of new features, like the ability to stack notebooks by dragging them on top of one another. This essentially creates subgroups for your notebooks, so you can organize your clips with a greater degree of specificity. Your saved searches from desktop versions of Evernote will also be available to the web app, and notes can optionally auto-save as you work on them to protect against data loss from browser or computer crashes.

Maybe the single most impressive new feature of the Evernote Web redesign is the introduction of better sharing, including Facebook integration. By clicking the “Share” button located at the top of each note, you can now share your notes via Facebook or email. It opens up an entirely new social aspect to Evernote, which has typically been more of a personal use tool. Sinkov sees Facebook sharing as just the beginning for Evernote’s social potential:

Evernote’s focus has been, and will always be, on preserving your ideas and memories. The natural extension is to selectively connect your memories to your social graph. Our users have ben asking for ways to share a single note with their friends, family and colleagues. Now, we’re making that possible. Today, we’re launching Facebook sharing, but more social sites are coming soon. We’re treating Evernote Web as a testing platform for exciting connections with other web services.

Sinkov sees Evernote as a means by which users can add some permanence to the social web, which in many ways tends to be ultimately very fleeting (consider the lifespan of the average tweet, for instance). To that end, the company is also working on making social inputs a priority for the future of the service, too:

There are many third-party tools available today that bring social streams into Evernote, with more on the way. We’re also working on making these connections more seamless. So much social content is designed to be here and gone, which is unfortunate because there’s a lot worth saving. Evernote can become your social archive–the place where it is to easy save everything that used to fall through the cracks.

The new Evernote Web promises to do much more than its predecessor, and it does so with a smarter, simpler interface that won’t overwhelm new users but still brings a number of powerful new tools to the table for more experienced ones. Evernote is a rare example of a company that seems to consistently “get it” with its offerings across platforms, which it does by paying attention to the unique advantages and abilities of each. Now, with more ways to branch out and connect with the social web, Evernote proves once again that it’s a versatile service eager to go where the consumer is while still retaining the core features that make it unique.

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Here’s my video interview with Deb Ng of the Freelance Writing Jobs Network. Deb has been writing freelance since 2000. You may have seen her byline on About.com, iParenting Media, and the BlogWorld and New Media Expo, but she also writes for clients. She’s a former newspaper columnist, and currently provides professional blogging and social media consulting services, as well as working with the Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas, coordinating speakers and sessions.

What’s your favorite web app?