MyWebClip mini review and AppStore rating idiocy

One of my favorite iPhone applications is MyWebClip from forYou inc.  It’s a bookmarklet aggregator as well as a quick dial application.  It’s a very nice way to link to frequently used web applications and I find it a lot easier having them all categorized in one place without having to dig through my screens for a specific icon.  It’s nice knowing all web applications are in one place.  I find it fast and very well written to act just like another screen of icons on your iPhone.  It gives me quick access to my home automation whic his web based, full screen weather maps from weather underground, google reader etc…  You manage it just like the regular iPhone application icons by touching and hold to bring up the X to delete items and you can add items by URL or by browsing and then adding like a bookmark to create an icon.  I have very few applications I use multiple times a day and this is one that I wouldn’t want to live without.

I got an upgrade today that had a few nice new features:

• browse with google mobile proxy
• shake for full screen view
• numerous bug fixes

While I haven’t had much trouble with any bugs or crashes it’s nice to see them keeping up with some updates.  I was happy to get the update but I was disappointed to see a 17+ rating on this application when I installed it.  I would guess this is due to the application being able to access the web from inside of it but this is no different than safari which ships with every iPhone.  Should we restrict iTouch and iPhones to anyone over 17 due to them shipping with Safari?  There have been countless articles about the idiotic and inconsistent ratings of the AppStore but this is the first one I had personally experienced vs just reading about it so I thought it was worth a mention.  This application should be rated general for everyone and I feel like it got a bum rap with an adult rating.

CSS Cheat Sheet by Concentric Sky

Concentric Sky has released a series of Cheat Sheets that are nice offline references on various topics.  I picked up the CSS Cheat Sheet application and thought I’d give it a quick review.

The application launches very fast and that is a welcome change from several other frequently used applications I use that don’t launch very quickly so it was refreshing to see this application launch so fast.  The initial view is a list of elements used in developing Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.

Scrolling up and down through the list is straightforward and selecting an individual element takes you into a detail view for that item which lists a description of the item as well as example usage.

The detail view lists each value associated with the particular element and a detailed example of it’s use.  I like that Concentric Sky cheat sheets are self contained applications.  What I mean by that is that they don’t have to have an Internet connection.  All of the information is stored internal to the application so it’s nice to be able to pull it up on the bus and browse a little if you pickup a cheat sheet on a topic that your just getting into.

There is a search bar at the top that lets you quickly locate items in the list to save you some scrolling.  The search seems to only search the main list Category name or list item with the search term matching from the start of the category or term.  For instance I searched for “color” and it didn’t locate “background-color” but found all items in the “Color” category and also the “color” entry under the text category.  This isn’t really limiting but I found it interesting enough to note.

Concentric Sky has a number of other cheat sheets you can checkout here at their web site: [Cheat Sheet Products] If you find a Cheat Sheet for a topic your interested in or learning it’s an easy decision to pick up these great little references for 99 cents each.

My 2008 in software review

I read a nice post from Alex Payne [link] on software he purchased but no longer uses and was inspired to highlight the software that I’ve used the most this year.  I think it might be interesting to some as I’ve made the leap from windows to OS X this year and am also currently using an iPhone as my full time phone.  I use software outside of this list but these are my heavy hitters that I am using on a daily basis.

OS X:

• Adium is a chat client, some love it some hate.  It is a pretty decent free chat client. 
• iStat monitors your mac, temp/processes everything free but donations encourage
• EventBox is a new on the scene social network client that has got real promise I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and like it pretty well so far.  I paid for it while it’s only $15 hoping they work out the rest of the kinks and expand it further.
• smcFanControl2 , my macbook pro (late 2008) runs super hot especially when I’m trying to play a game in emulation mode which I do on occasion.  This little utility lets you set the default fan speed to a higher rate keeping your laptop cooler
• Qumana is a really nice blog editor.  I’m using it to write this post and it has spell check and a bunch of other nice features.  I like the wysiwyg wordpress online editor but I’ve lost to many posts to bad network connections and strangeness so I like to use a client editor instead when possible.
• 1Password  is an awesome piece of software.  turn off password saving in firefox/safari and use this.  supports unique passwords per site and auto fills in forms as well as syncing to an iPhone client.
• iTunes, I’m not a huge fan, but it works for what it does and having an iPhone and iPod nano for nike+ means I’m using iTunes, surprisingly it works pretty well on the mac.  Totally different than my windows iTunes experience.
• (updated) InsomniaX is an awesome utility I forgot about in my initial post.  It keeps your macbook/pro awake when you close the lid and has preferences to tune how your power settings behave when on/off power based on lid closing.  By default its not possible to run with the lid closed.

Multi platform:

• Emacs,  if you don’t know emacs then man up and start learning.  It’s a fantastic editor and a great tool once you get some basic learning down on it. -> [learn]
• TiddlyWiki  is a personal wiki that works on your own local machine inside your web browser.  No web connection is required and it has been a great organizational tool as well as a notebook.  It’s a great place to store little coding routines and methodologies you used to write something that you’ll want to reference in a year.
• Microsoft Mesh is a great way to keep files in sync across several machines and it supports several platforms and those it doesn’t directly support you can access via the web.  Drop a file into a folder on your desktop and it appears everywhere you have mesh setup in a few minutes.
• Firefox is a good web browser.  I’ve tried others and chrome shows some promise but it’s unfortunate it isn’t out for other platforms yet.  I like safari on the mac but I miss my extensions to much.
• Evernote is a multi platform notebook that has some very nice tools to integrate into browsers and phones allowing you to view and add information across platforms.  I wish it had a decent todo template built in but it seems a bit outside of what most people want to use it for.
• SVN is a code versioning system that allows you to version and manage source code,

Windows:

• Spaz – one of the best twitter clients I’ve used.  Not the most feature rich but its fast if Adobe AIR isn’t freaking out and it has the best font/color scheme out of the box for being able to read things without any eye strain which is a problem for many twitter clients imo.  It’s open source so if your so motivated you can customize to your hearts content.  Spaz is cross platform also.
• Visual Studio – I use this to author/support ceTwit as well as for my day job
• Putty – hands down the best ssh terminal for windows with fantastic tunneling and its free

iPhone:

• Tweetie is a good twitter client but has some sloppy implementation on a few things that will hopefully improve in a newer version.  It’s very powerful with multi account support and built in saved searches but I’ve been recently bugged about mailing myself links to tweets and when I launch tweetie again it didn’t remember where I was even though I had just sent myself a mail to a link.
• 1Password is the iPhone client for the above desktop component.
• BeejiveIM is a multi platform chat client that as some nice features.  One of the things I appreciate most is it’s ability to leave me logged in even if the client software isn’t running.  It will email you alerts if you get messages when your not running BeejiveIM if you are logged in.
• Shovel is a decent way to waste time browsing digg stories.
• Facebook offers a nice way to keep up with your facebook account.  I heard the first release of this was bad but this one seems ok to me.
• i.TV is neat for finding local movie show times and browsing tv listings, you can also set remote Tivo recordings
• TapDefense is a nice free version of the classic tower defense game.

iPhone YouTube needs more awesome (lots more)

The iPhone comes with a YouTube player.  On the surface I think that’s pretty great.  It does allow searching and playing YouTube videos and emailing someone a link to a video.  The part I dislike is that that’s pretty much where the functionality ends.  It has no association with your account or other things that actually make YouTube awesome.

I’m really missing the ability to share a video or mark a video as a favorite or play through my play lists.  I would also like to see a change to all video applications on the iPhone that allow you to play video’s in portrait mode.  It seems podcast videos can do this but iTunes synced movies and YouTube can’t play in portrait mode which is a drag since I want to watch them in a cradle sometimes.

I think a refresh on the YouTube player is needed and adding the following features would make it amazing instead of just a token feature to say the iPhone has YouTube support.

• Store and login to my YouTube account
• View and play my YouTube Favorites
• View and play my YouTube play lists
• Add videos to my play lists
• Mark a video as a Favorite
• Allow comments / rating of videos

These initial changes would go a long way to improving the iPhone YouTube experience.  I’m hoping for an update in future releases.

eReader for iPhone

I’ve been using eReader on and off for a few weeks and thought I’d post some thoughts.  I was looking for a simple application that was free and also let me upload my own books that I already had collected.  eReader can read eReader PDB format.  There are tools to convert most formats into PDB so it’s not to big of a hassle to get your own text into a PDB format.  You can also find pre-formatted free PDB files at places like http://manybooks.net/

When you open eReader it will present you with a list of your installed ebooks.  They can be sorted by Title/Author/Date.  Once you tap a book it takes you to the reading view directly to your last page.  There is no need to make a bookmark or other action to remember your place it automatically remembers your place in each book your reading.

The reading view can be full text, display graphics and a tap bring up the menu to return back to your library or access settings/zoom and other options.

One of the features I’ve found most useful is being able to load your own books that you may already own from having a palm, or have converted from other sources.  From the library menu select the “+” in the upper right corner and choose “Another site” to type in the url of a website where you may be storing some books.  The web page you type in will display inside eReader and if you select a PDB file it will be downloaded and added into your library.

I’ve gotten some good use out of eReader and it’s earned a permanent spot on my iPhone.

You can read allot more about eReader [here] at ereader.com eReader iPhone faq

WordPress on The iPhone

I’ve been playing around with the WordPress app on the iPhone and it’s very nice.  The application is very simple but allows for quite a good bit of functionality.  If your not familiar with WordPress its one of the more popular pieces of blogging software that runs on web servers to allow publishing blogs.

Initially you configure your blog or blogs by entering their web address and your username/password for access.  The application will go out and attach to your blog and if you got your settings correctly entered it will set up your site.  This will setup the blog as an item on the application start page.  Each time you launch the WordPress application you will be presented with the main page that contains links into manage each of your configured blogs.

If you enter into the link to manage a particular blog you will be presented with a listing of posts that are on the blog as well as a folder that links into any local drafts.  Local drafts are posts that you have been working on that you have saved only on your iPhone.  These are not published to your blog in any form.  To begin writing a post you can select the edit box which is the small square with the pencil in it in the lower right corner of the posts list.  Once you select this you’ll be presented with the “write” window that will allow you to title your post as well as add tags/categories and display its current status which indicates if its saved locally or has been published to the server as a draft or live post.

The editing is pretty basic but you can upload pictures into your post from within the application which is nice.  For this post I wrote the whole thing on the iPhone and then published it as a draft to the blog and did the final formatting on the site.  All of the pictures I took as screenshots on the phone and uploaded them through the WordPress app along with the post so when I went online I went directly into the draft and all of my resources for the post were here to work with.

One thing I did notice is once I posted a draft if I tried to edit it again on the iPhone it was raw html instead of a rich text mode so thats something to keep in mind it may be better to keep a draft saved locally until your mostly done with it because it gets messier if you post it as an online draft then try to edit it again on the iPhone.

All in all it’s a nice application and you cant beat the price “Free”!