Published on September 9, 2008
Note taking tool Evernote has taken a page out of Omnifocus’s book, adding location tagging and filtering to it’s iPhone / iPod Touch application. Now, notes you create with the Evernote mobile app are tagged with your location using CoreLocation. Location (with distance radius) has been added as a filter field for setting up new searches, letting you filter your notes based on this data. For instance, I setup a saved search called “Here” that only returns notes that were created within 1 mile of my current location. This could be used for a location context system, much like the one Omnifocus promotes.
Personally, I still haven’t found a place for Evernote in my every day life, but I’m still excited to see the service grow and mature… it is shaping up to be an impressive product for sure.
Evernote Website
Evernote App [iTunes Link]
Omnifocus for the iPhone/Touch
Published on September 8, 2008
As Dropbox gets closer to launch, new features keep popping up. I have been hoping for a mobile version of the site for a while, but didn’t realize until I popped into the Dropbox forums this morning that one already exists. I’m not sure how long it’s been up, but I imagine it’s relatively new.
When you go to www.getdropbox.com (use https:// for a secure connection) on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the site automatically detects that you’re using Mobile Safari and loads a mobile version of the site. The interface has three tabs: a Home tab that shows you recent account activity (with thumbnails), a Files tab that lets you dig through your folder structure, and a Photos tag that lets you access your photo galleries, complete with thumbnails and full-screen photo view.
Dropbox has a great mechanism for sharing files. When you drop files into your “Public” folder, the files are uploaded to the Dropbox servers and given a unique public URL that can be accessed by anyone, without needing a Dropbox account and shared folder access. I use this all the time for sharing screenshots or quick mockups of projects I’m working on, or pretty much any other file I’d typically e-mail as an attachment. The only thing really missing, to me, in the mobile version of Dropbox is access to this public URL. I’d like to see a link along the lines of “e-mail this file”, where the site would dump the file’s public URL into a blank message in Mail.app. This small addition (that I’m confident we’ll see) would really round out the functionality of Mobile Dropbox as I need it.
I haven’t loaded the site up on my Windows Mobile phone yet to see if there is a PocketIE friendly version of Dropbox yet, please leave a comment if you have any info on this. If you haven’t made it into the Dropbox beta yet, don’t worry, because it looks like it will be going public any day now!
Published on August 15, 2008
WikiMe [iTunes Store Link] was just released by SupportWare for the iPhone and iPod Touch. WikiMe is another great application of the CoreLocation service built into the 2.0 Mobile OSX firmware. When you launch the app, it grabs your location and then shows you a list of Wikipedia articles of places in a configurable radius around your location. Touch an item in the list, and you view the Wikipedia article page in a built-in browser. From there you can show the location of the article’s subject in Google Maps, Bookmark the page in WikiMe’s bookmarks list, or e-mail a link to the Wikipedia article to a contact.
You’re not restricted to seeing articles for your immediate location though, you can plug in any zip code and get results, regardless of where you’re currently located.
I can see this app coming in very handle while traveling, especially in areas with a lot of history. It’s like a social media tour guide. At $0.99, I think the app is a great deal. Cheap enough to be bought without hesitation, but the authors are still getting compensation for their nicely executed app.
Published on July 22, 2008
Wordpress has released an official native app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It lets you create new posts as well as edit existing posts on Wordpress.com hosted blogs, as well as self hosted installations of Wordpress 2.51 or higher. This is an app I have been hoping for, so I was excited to try it out. The app looks very slick so far. I’m going to upload some photos too to test that out too. The auto-correction for the keyboard is disabled in the post title and tag fields, but thankfully it is intact when you are typing up a post’s body. You can post images from photos you have saved on the device (I used it to attach the screenshot). One feature I hope they will add is the ability to moderate comments. I expect that the app will grow to add such features with updates overtime.
iTunes store link
Official Wordpress for iPhone site: http://iphone.wordpress.org/
Published on June 9, 2008
In the WWDC 2008 keynote, Steve Jobs phrased the price of the the iPhone in an interesting way. He said , “the price is a maximum of $199.” [1:40 mark in the video]
The WWDC2008 Twitter account said something that really sparked my interest: “Factoid: iPhone 3G = $199 “MAXIMUM” price. Subsidies coming?” ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘if we get some AT&T subsidies going, it could drop to $99 or even free with a two year contract!’ However, I now think that this was exactly the wrong way to approach this statement.
AT&T has come out and shed some light on the subject. $199 IS the subsidized price already. Also, activation won’t be happening at home over iTunes any more. In order to walk out of a store with an iPhone 3G in your hand, you will have to sign a 2 year contract on the spot. True, you can cancel the contract within a “trial” period, and I’ve seen a few people leave comments saying that this is a loophole to get the phone out of contract. What they’re forgetting is that you have to return the phone if you cancel the contract within the trial period.
When Jobs said that the phone would have a maximum price of $199, I think what this really means is that AT&T will not be selling these phones without a contract attached to it. You’re not going to be able to pay the full manufacturer’s price (which I suspect is $400, or even more) to get a phone contract-free. I think this is to limit resellers from unlocking the phones without financial consequence. Now they’ll have to pay the contract termination fee to redistribute, and this will jack up the cost of unlocked phones. Also, I imagine that you can only sign and immediately cancel so many AT&T contracts before red flags go up (unless they want to let you keep dumping money into their pockets with early termination fees).
If you aren’t familiar with how subsidies work, head into your local cell phone distributor and ask for the out-of-contract prices for any of the phones. I think you’ll be surprised.
Note taking tool Evernote has taken a page out of Omnifocus’s book, adding location tagging and filtering to it’s iPhone / iPod Touch application. Now, notes you create with the Evernote mobile app are tagged with your location using CoreLocation. Location (with distance radius) has been added as a filter field for setting up new searches, letting you filter your notes based on this data. For instance, I setup a saved search called “Here” that only returns notes that were created within 1 mile of my current location. This could be used for a location context system, much like the one Omnifocus promotes.
