Making all of those fancy named coffee drinks at home… there is an app for that!

There has long been alcoholic beverage mixing apps for the iPhone. There are even a couple options to help pull the perfect espresso shot. This weekend I found a fun free app for the iPhone called Coffee Taste. It is truly for those that like the taste of coffee in their beverages. Those ‘beverages’ are not limited to a couple ways to mix milk and espresso, instead the app provides instructions for making 50 different drinks that happen to have coffee in them. These are all of those drinks you hear being ordered at restaurants that don’t serve drip coffee.

Besides being fun to play at home with coffee, why would you want to know how to make a coffee drink that you may never order? Actually, many of them carry names that have nothing to do with what is actually in the drink. Now with Coffee Taste’s help, when someone at the table orders a creatively named coffee drink, I know what I’m getting into.

Most of the drinks Coffee Taste don’t even have unusual ingredients so I can experiment a bit at home. The next time, when someone orders a Viennese Coffee, I know that it has heavy and light cream as well chocolate, I can tell the waiter to go ahead and cut the chocolate in mine down a bit… because I have a clue now what is actually in that fun cup o’coffee.

If you have a hard time remember which drinks you like and don’t like, Coffee Taste lets you star the ones you like for quick reference later at the restaurant.

Drafts for the iPhone, just a few improvements away from being used every day!

I want to love Drafts for the iPhone, as I could really use the core features of the app. I already plunked down the money to buy it so I’m really hoping the developer ‘fixes’ it so I can get milage out of it. They have developed several apps on the iPad that I really enjoy using every day so I know they have it in them to create something great with Drafts.

The app is for taking quick snippets of text, not really notes, not tasks, rather reminders of an idea. Those ideas that will lead to something else that you don’t have time to think through. Drafts is  extra visual fluff, it has only the things you need. A clean area to add text to, a button to start a new draft, a button to see the list of drafts, a search, a button to share and a keyboard.

After you type a quick draft, tap the ‘+’ to start another, or select the paper icon to see and select-to-view a list of drafts done previously. Drafts presents each entry with a line of what action was taken on it previously such as sharing. This UI is where I start having issues. A lot of clunky feeling with the borders and oversized basic action icons. There is keeping things simple and there is no need to add bulk with visuals that look like the physical world, but the below screen feels very unfinished. It may seem silly, but that is what the iPhone is about, a finished user experience.

Choosing Drafts‘ share icon gives you options to send the text out through the iPhone’s build-in Twitter account or another one. You can also copy the text to use elsewhere, add it to a email or do multiple functions as MarkDown if that is how you typed it.

Around the office we are starting to use a lot of Markdown, especially for meeting notes done with our iPads. To use the Markdown language inserts (+, *), you have to go three keyboards deep. Wouldn’t it be nice if the bullet and bold tags where offered in the big empty space on the icon bar? Maybe make that an option in the app’s settings. Better yet, here is the developer’s chance to show everyone else how to make Markdown even easier, make those buttons Bullet and Bold icons that insert the Markdown instructions. They have taken radical steps on their iPad apps abilities, here is their chance to shake up the iPhone app world.

For me, I won’t be deleting Drafts from my iPhone, I just know they will be making it feel as well as it works very soon.

 

Getting through task lists on the iPhone, my way using SlickTasks

There are a ton of options for managing task lists on the iPhone. Many work very hard to look like their old paper counterparts, others attempt to find a different way of helping with your task lists. I have for a long time been using ToDo by Appigo. It works well for sharing my lists across multiple devices and family members. A rethink on how things should work was Clear that I covered earlier. Those two are also great examples of the extremes.

What I have been looking for is a way to have all of my work and personal lists show on one overview, have multiple layers deep of tasks, sort/search and better sharing of different lists. Recently, I started playing with SlickTasks, which hits a lot of my ‘wants’. Since it is Free for the day, I thought it was a good time to mention it.

What SlickTasks doesn’t do is collaborate or share with others. What it does do is let me have a task within a task within a task within… it just keeps going as deep as I need. After using the ‘+’ to set up a task, tap the task line to add another item at the same level, an item one deep, delete the line or Detail to fine tune. Just to say again, I can have a project, with a list of tasks, with a list of people/family members inside of any of those tasks and each person can have a list of tasks.  “=Happy!!!”

Each line item can be enhanced as needed. The Due Date, Style for line coloring, Priority and Tagging is fine tuning that helps see what needs to be done now or can be pushed off till the next time I have a chance to tackle it. Off the bottom of the screen shot below is the ability to email the task to others.

Near future due dates show on the screen. As well, icons that there is a note attached to the line item. Everything can be color coded overall, by group or at the line level. I like little icons on lines to say what group a task falls in which SlickTasks doesn’t support, but the color coding seems to work much faster to set up and reference. Tap a check box to have a line placed through the item as completed.

All of the lists can be collapsed. Also, everything in SlickTasks is drag/drop. I am able to re-order the lines or groups of items. Also, each line can be moved from group to group just by dragging to where it needs to be. Alters warn of dated tasks and priorities.

Switching from the Outline view to the ToDo view, SlickTasks lets you view your items as you have their due dates set, by their Tags (business, work, client, home, shopping, etc…) and their Priority. This way I can see the items I need to get done for the day no matter what list of projects they fall under. It is much easier to move from item to item this way than only viewing a project at a time, having to jump from one to the next to see what else could be done at that time.