Elmo and Friends Hiding in the iPhone

While I have not handed my iPhone over to anyone as tall as my belt line is high, I have enjoyed some quality play time sharing screen taps. That was a bit ago and we spent the time drawing in colors to great fun little doodles. Much easier than carrying a box of crayons and stack of paper on the plane.

I wish they had Elmo wrapped up in an app for the iPhone like they do now. It’s no slouch of a program, weighing in at 114 megs. Once you launch Elmo’s Monster Maker, the size makes a lot of sense. You (er, the child in your life) will be given a choice of faceless monster friends, each with a bit of uniqueness. Once you choose, you can then cycle through noses, eyes, mouths and hats till you have the combo that matches your mood or fun time plans.

You can tap the monster friend to get a few different interactions, you can choose to snap a picture that will be available in your photo album (yup, I used one of these snaps in a postcard I sent out for a birthday invite), you can have your monster play with Elmo, or it can just dance and sing on it’s own.

No, the app wont take notes for you in a meeting and it wont figure your finances, but it sure brings a chuckle in those long meetings. Double check the volume on your iPhone before you choose to launch Elmo when in the quiet conference rooms.

Documents To Go gets DropBox

A limitation we have been working around with Documents To Go is it only gathers documents from it’s desktop app.. The desktop app is very nice, works well, and free. Since the desktop to iPhone connection has required the two being on the same WiFi network, some folks can’t set this up or in the case of business uses is limited by IT what is on that network.

GoodReader has become a great option for viewing documents which can be grabbed from anywhere since it allows the movement of your documents via DropBox. This is viewing only… often the need to edit and share back out is very important around the office. Now, Documents To Go Premium has been updated with DropBox and Box.net – both free services that give you a virtual USB stick. Just drag files from your desktop to one of those services, grab those files with Docs To Go on your iPhone, view/edit to return to the cloud to share with others or use again on your desktop. What can be wrapped up in a sentence is a important feature for anyone that needs to stay connected to their documents anytime and anywhere.

The full list of items in this update:

– Box.net support
– Dropbox support
– Unified Document Search
– Search files by name from all DocsToGo sources
– Search box is available on the application home screen when scrolling up above “Local Files”

Posterous for the iPhone

Big news from Posterous today: a iPhone version of their posts. They have taken the time to alter the view when bringing up a Posterous site on your iPhone. Not only the views, but also the upload mechanism so photos and videos are resized for the iPhone screen size.

iPhone users can swipe left and right to go back and forth between pages! On a blog list page, swiping goes to the next and previous list of blog entries. On a blog post page, swiping goes to the next and previous blog post.

This is great timing as we are seeing more and more folks posting to Posterous since it is so simple to get started sharing.

Is It Still Texting If You Don’t Type?

No matter how cool the solution or ways to get around typing, driving and updating social media posts are best not done at the same time. End of public service announcement…

This is a bit of fun I use when buzzing about the streets at lunch time and I want to post a fun bit I saw on Twitter or Facebook. Instead of heads down with my nose in the iPhone and possibly a sign post in my forehead, I just speak what I want to submit.

Dragon Dictation is a free app (for now) that will take your spoken words and return text. The editing tool is as simple as tapping what it wrong and it will guess what you may have said. It is smart enough to know certain words wrong might mean it has the next few words wrong too to make a complete sentence.

Tapping the iPhone screen not near the text will get you the usual Select, Select All options – Select All, then tap the copy option. I’m sure you have it from here.

Go to the Social Media app, tap the text entry box and choose to Paste. Dragon Dictation does a pretty good job, I generally speak a bit slower than normal and it gets near 100% correct. Several folks in the office use this to do post up content to their Blog via the WordPress app.

Twittelator is the Twitter app use for these faster posts since adding new is avail right from the opening screen – with a word counter so I know if I babbled too much.

Now, if some creative developer could take the iPad’s iBooks ability to read a book and have your Twitter feed read to you it would cut out just about all of the screen reading. It would be like having a book read to you on the way to work. The latest news from around the world… as they say the only thing that moves faster than an earthquake is the twitter news about it.

Fun iTunes App Store Search – Google Chrome Extension

Sure, you could launch iTunes, go to the App store and search for an app, or find the latest hot top 25.

But, wouldn’t it be more fun to have a extension you could run right from your Google Chrome browser? Well, either way, this is a fun add-on for your browser. It wont help you get your day job done any faster but if your someone (like us) who are always wandering what new and hot for their iPhone, this will get your to your curiosity faster.

The free extension just loads right into your Chrome Browser so anytime you launch it, you have an extra little blue button to the right of the URL box. A little iPhone will pop up… from which you can choose to browse any of the categories, the top free/pay apps and you can search. Tapping the results will get your more details on that app.