Application reviews

Send a message of many words by using images

Regular follows know that I am a fan of taking pictures with my iPhone for both work and pleasure. Work images can be a snap shot of a whiteboard full of information to use later, a screen shot of information on the iPhone, or pictures of an event that shows work in progress or the atmosphere. Please images are exactly what you expect, pictures of my lovely wife or of our energetic Bichon, Luna.

Several posts ago, I covered a couple applications I have been using to send images with frames and/or text via email. For more than a week, I have pulled both in favor of Lifecards. An app that enables multiple images to be placed together, text added, resulting in a single document I can send.

Lifecards includes a large collection of templates (350!) in 20 categories. Each category is a group of templates around a particular theme. Templates have spaces for a variety of picture quantities from 1 to 4 and text boxes. If you change your mind about a template you chose you can change to another without having to reassign images. Images can be resized and twisted with tools that work the way you would think they should. Text editing is done through the usual iPhone / Touch text screen, with the added feature to change the font, text size and colors. Lifecards works equally well in portrait or landscape views:

If you need to stop working, closing the application saves your project to finish later. When done, the template, images and text is wrapped up into a single image which is saved to the built in Photos -> Photo Albums.

Here is one image I put together in just over a minute to send out to our team about a problem with desktop images that were effecting our presentations:

Read more
Application reviews

What is the first book you bought?

Amazon introduced their Kindle book support for the iPhone / Touch today. Allowing you to purchase and read any of their 250,000 (currently) books originally created for their Kindle (2.0 introduced a few weeks ago) electronic ink book reader. There is of course pros and cons to that… if you are a serious book reader, you will enjoy the larger screen of the actual Kindle device. While the iPhone / Touch have smaller screens, causing the text to format poorly, you do have full color available where needed.

Amazon isn’t the first and only book reader for the iPhone, there are many available with a variety of features and ranging from Free to 14.95 for the reader only. Also, do not confuse book reader apps with document reader / manager applications.

I will hit on a few of the bigger names today (based on number or downloads and support). In no particular order, I will start with the Amazon Kindle iPhone app since it is most likely what brought you here today. When looking for this application in the iTunes App Store, you will find a lot of “Amazon” applications for searching and buying, you want the “Kindle” version which is their reader.

The Amazon Kindle app is among the simplest of interfaces in the group. It’s strengths are in what is going on behind the scenes, what Amazon calls “Whisper”. The book text presentation is full justification black text on white background, providing methods to see your progress, swipe your finger to change pages, slider to jump to another page and bookmarking. Whisper watches what page your on and tracks so if you have the book on other devices your ending spot will be remembered across all of them. Archiving is also supported with Amazon keeping track of your purchases so you do not loose your books if you remover them from your device. Finally is the ability to buy and load books, which Amazon makes as easy as possible. This interface is locked to only view Amazon distributed books. Purchasing books is done through Safari

Read more
Using every day

Holiday and Note Cards from your iPhone or Touch

I carry notecards and a felt tip quick dry pen so I can jot down notes I need to leave behind. Notes for myself are typed right into my iPhone so I can search and organize on both my iPhone and my notebook via a sync. What I’m not good at is getting to a holiday card store. It isn’t that I don’t want to, time just slips away.

A lot of people get around this shortcoming we share by using the many online electronic card Web sites. Now, those sites are getting phished so most people who get a email alerting that they have a card waiting, they never click the link to go see what you ‘sent’.

Lucky for the iPhone and Touch owner, you can now create cards right on your device and send those bits of well wishing inside of an email. The two apps I will cover here is “Postcard” and “Memento“.

The brief description:

Postcard – Use an image you have in memory on your device, snap a new photo, or use a screenshot of a Google Map. Add text, add a to email address, send and the receiving party gets a email containing the image/text side by side in a postcard image.

Memento – This application comes with 19 card ‘frames’. You can select a image from your device or take a new image to put inside of the frame. Each frame has a text box that you can change the text to match your greeting. Your creation is saved in a list to use/edit later then send inside of an email when the need arises.

Read more
Quick Manual

Yes you can… fix your iPhone and Touch

If you one hop your iPhone or Touch, you will most likely pick up a device that is fine. I have actually been amazed at some of the bounces our devices have survived. One time in the line to put my things in the airport security bins my iPhone tumbled out and walked all the way past the security scanner. On the other side we had a phone drop from knee hight and we picked up it up with a broken screen.

If a break happens in your future, there are a few options. Best Buy has a Warranty option. Apple offers replacement on manufacture defects. Otherwise, you can buy a remanufactured device with trade in for a little off of buying a new. You could always buy a new device and extend your ATT service contract.

In the case of a broken screen… you could replace it yourself. The parts, the tools and the instructions are all readily available. You will be working with sharp little pieces of broken glass, little connectors, little screws, tight rubber gaskets, and… well, you get the idea. Apple wont be accepting the device back as a trade in if they think you opened the device. All these negatives, why would anyone risk it? Apple previously loved replacement units are around $250 vs a replacement screen is $69.

Read more
Quick Manual Using every day

Read the content of your favorite Web sites

One of the strengths of the iPhone is it’s Web browser. Not just a smaller version of the desktop counterpart. Mobile Safari allows you to pinch, stretch and double tap on pages to make the size adjust for your ease of viewing.

If your are like us, you have a handful of sites you go to on a regular basis to view the content. With the built in Mobile Safari, you still have to sift through adds and other bits. Some sites (like ours) has a special version that shows when you visit via the iPhone browser so you can get to our content directly.

A popular system for many years now is becoming more popular with the increased user base of ‘Smartphones’. The technology is called RSS. If a Web site offers this, you subscribe to the site’s RSS address to get a automat feed to you of either a short version of their articles or just the text of new articles.

RSS ‘readers’ are popular for desktop computers. They reach out for you and grab the RSS content from the sites you visit often so you don’t have to. Google has a popular reader that allows you to pull content from site, highlight what you liked best for later reading, remove what you don’t want to read and most important – read the text when it’s convinient for you whether your online or not (you have to be online sometime to get the content fed to the reader).

Now, that technology is available for your iPhone and Touch through a variety of ‘reader’ applications.

Read more