AppReview posts

With OmniFocus for iPad just now hitting the App Store, I haven't yet had as much time as I would like to use the application to its fullest potential. My initial interaction has, however, been positive. Costing a rather steep $39.99, OmniFocus for iPad brings another professionally priced tool for professionals into the App Store iPad arena.

OmniFocus offers a way to create to-do lists on steroids. You can brainstorm out ideas, then start organizing and classifying them into separate projects, tasks, and "contexts"; contexts allow you to make tasks relevant to where and when you are working on things. Items related to working at home will not intrude into your "Office" context, for example.

Rocknor's Donut Factory is due to hit App Store on Monday. It is an iPhone update of a Windows game that was critically acclaimed back when it was released in 2003. It offers terrific puzzles and fun gameplay that's unfortunately hampered on the iPhone by a too-literal transition from the original game.

In this game, you move dough through a factory -- shaping it, cooking it, topping it, and shipping it out -- using a variety of assistive machines. You have to be clever. Some of the factory floor layouts are fiendish. Getting each donut produced to order to meet your quotas isn't as simple as you might think.

I'm not the most musically inclined person, but I do tend to try out a bunch of different music generating apps on both my iPhone and iPad. Sometimes the end result is more or less successful, while other times I may as well have been sitting in front of a Baby Grand with just my index fingers and the sheet music for Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor in front of me. The newly released Hexaphone from Impresario Digital, thankfully, fits the former quite well.

Hexaphone uses samples generated from an expensive Nord Lead 3 synthesizer to provide you with five different sound patches and eight different scales to use, as well as 17 percussion beats to accompany your music. You can lay down a drum beat, then record a bass line and play it back while you lay down another track, and then more upon that if you want.

What's most interesting and different about this music app is how the keys are laid out, making it much easier to hit the intended notes on a smaller iPhone screen. The app works quite well on the iPad, though one optimized for the larger iPad screen would be most welcome. See the video on the next page.

My only gripe with the app so far is not being able to easily export recordings, though the developer says that's coming in a future release. The developer's website has lots of instructional videos for musical newbs like me, and they do a good job of showing you the capabilities of the app, before or after you buy. You can grab Hexaphone in the app store now for $2.99 (25% off).

Word Driven from Headlight Software, Inc. transforms a cherished car trip game into a fun iPhone application. You're given three letters to work with (in the real world, you'd get those letters from passing license plates, but here they are automatically generated by the application) and must produce a word using each letter in the proper sequence.

The underlying dictionary seems pretty robust, handling nearly all the words I threw at it. At each possible completion, the application chimes to let you know you can submit the word as-is. If your word continues on further, you can keep typing, otherwise you can tap to submit.

A month or two back, I shelled out US$4.99 to pick up a copy of yxplayer, a video playback utility available on the App Store. Yxplayer isn't particularly user friendly or over designed. I am also about as far away from yxplayer's core demographic as anyone can get. (More about that later.) And yet, I'm going to give it a double pair of thumbs up and recommend it to anyone who owns a video-capable camera that shoots AVI video.

I am a mom. I own an inexpensive Creative Vado unit. Right now they're selling at Amazon for about $50. We picked ours up at a Newegg sale for something like $25 shipped last year. It's a great little Flip-like video system that my 7-year-old can happily use and that works well with our living-room media Mac mini. It takes pictures (they aren't fabulously good) and shoots AVI video (ditto) and my son loves it to pieces.

RocketBoy 2D from PowPowGames (great and appropriate name!) is a bloody, graphic side-scroller shooter game for the iPhone. It's also amazingly well realized with a strong design aesthetic that's sure to please both visually and through its sound design. The graphic designer did a bang-up job (pun reluctantly intended) creating a coherent visual feel that tickled my fancy. Despite its juvenile look, RocketBoy 2D is not for kids. I meant it when I said "bloody". Watch the video.

Sure, you'd love to be able to check and answer your email while you're driving. But fortunately for the rest of us, many countries, states, and municipalities have made the act of reading and tapping out emails on your iPhone while driving illegal. Hands Free Software has come up with a solution that not only reads your incoming mail to you, but allows you to reply to those emails through voice.

Text'nDrive Pro for iPhone (US$19.99) works with a single email account, scanning its inbox to see if any new messages have arrived. If there's something new, it reads the message to you and then lets you reply to it if you wish. After receiving a review version of the application from Hands Free, I installed it on my iPhone 4 and then promptly got into my car and drove away. Within a minute or two, I heard a rather loud and obviously computerized male voice that I knew was not my wife speaking. Sure enough, Text'nDrive Pro had received a new email in my MobileMe inbox and proceeded to read it to me.

While I was able to ascertain what the voice was saying from the speaker of my iPhone, Text'nDrive Pro does work with all Bluetooth headsets and hands-free kits, so you can customize the way that you listen to the spoken emails and prompts to your preferences.

Last week, TUAW featured a post about how development house tap tap tap has been able to string together a series of App Store successes. In that post, we used tap tap tap's sales stats for Camera+ to demonstrate the company's success not only in the U.S. App Store, but internationally as well. That post got me intrigued about the Camera+ app, so I purchased it for installation on my iPhone 4. What I found is a US$1.99 app (it's currently on sale at that price, so buy it soon) that is a must-buy for any iPhone owner who likes to dabble in photography.

The UI for Camera+ is the first clever detail in an app that's chock-a-block with little wonders. What you see after launching the app is what appears to be the viewfinder on an DSLR camera with a small LCD display below. On that display are two buttons -- Take photos and Lightbox.

Take photos does exactly what you would expect -- the screen zooms up from the viewfinder view to a full-screen iPhone image of what your camera is facing. On the iPhone 4, of course, you have the choice of either the front-facing camera for self portraits or the high-resolution (5MP) camera for taking pictures of other people or objects. When you're ready to shoot, you can either just press the traditional shutter button or turn on image stabilization.

Violet for the iPad (US$2.99) from My Black Dog Books is the latest entry in the emerging field of interactive books for children. Geared at children ages 4 and up, Violet is the first of a series of stories about a charming little girl with a big secret. The 20 page book tells a nice little tale, along with a moral, and it introduces elements that will be continued in future books.

Allison Keeme's illustrations are beautifully drawn, and they take full advantage of the graphic capabilities of the iPad. If you like, you can take a look Allison's process of building the graphics. I'm positive that small children will enjoy reading about Violet and her secret identity. The world of Violet has a consistent look and a great attention to detail. When the family gathers around the breakfast table after one of Violet's exploits, they look absolutely exhausted, but you'll have to read the book to see why. There are two specific tasks to perform in the book, and I think it was a good design choice to have the book do it if the child doesn't.

Unfortunately, I found a number of problems with the execution of the app, which may frustrate small children. There is scant interactivity to be found. With many possibilities for interaction, only a small number of things that you can tap on actually do anything. There are quite a few pages that are static. In fact, outside of credits on the first page, the first bit that does anything appears on page five, and you might easily miss it. There is a spider that swings when touched. If the accelerometer was used, as in Alice, it would be much more apparent. I can imagine small kids getting frustrated by tapping on everything and not getting paid off very often. A real design problem is that you need to tap on a page in order to display an arrow that, when tapped on again, gets you to the next page. I think the arrow should be persistent and eliminate an unneeded tap on every page.

I've spoken of my Trailguru love in the past. It's a simple GPS application that has, unfortunately, seemed to drop off the radar at least as far as software updates are concerned. I know its creator is still on the scene -- because I can track his bike runs on the trailguru.com website -- but the iPhone application languishes. That's a big shame, because I have friends on trailguru.com and I have localized months and months of progress there. The site isn't polished or perfect, but I really do like using it.

Today, however, I discovered something fabulous. I learned that Runmeter -- an otherwise excellent application without a cobranded website -- can export its trails to gpx files and e-mail them off. Why is that so exciting?

Well, it means that I can use the Runmeter app on my iPhone 4 -- running in the background using iOS "multitasking" -- and then later send my results up to the Trailguru site via my desktop system. I e-mail them to myself and then use the Trailguru webpage to load the gpx files.

On Thursday, iOS developer Tiger Style will release Spider: Bryce Manor HD in App Store. TUAW was lucky enough to get an early peek at this application. Spider was one of the most popular iPhone games of last year, and offers an interactive puzzle where you explore an abandoned mansion as a tiny arachnid, building webs to trap insects. I gave Spider a hands-on try and, as you can see in the video, I am neither nimble nor quick. I found the game mildly entertaining but a little frustrating -- I think most users who are a little better coordinated will have more fun building their webs and catching their insects but klutzes like myself might not have as much fun.

First released on the iPhone, the game has been redesigned thoroughly for the iPad. Developer David Kalina tells us, "We took a lot of care making the game really sing on the iPad, [adding] an iPad exclusive single device multiplayer game mode called 'Sidekicks' -- it's the sort of experience that you can really only have on the iPad." I appreciated the graphics and music design, where clearly a lot of time has been invested.

The game should be available on the iPad this Thursday for $4.99. If you missed this title last year, the iPad's bigger screen might be just the place to try it out for yourself.

If there's anything that I love writing about, it's writing apps. I'm constantly looking for new and useful apps that will let me write on any device at any time, and keep all of the devices nicely in sync. For that reason, when I heard about My Writing Nook for iPad (US$4.99) and the iPhone / iPod touch version called simply My Writing Nook ($2.99), I immediately contacted developer PT Software Solutions to give it a try. What I found is an uncomplicated app that is perfect for writing manuscripts from any device.

Like many of the apps that I wrote about last year in preparation for NaNoWriMo, My Writing Nook is best for producing large quantities of text without worrying about formatting. The interface is spare, and for situations where you're just concerned about committing as many words as possible to virtual paper, that's what many writers want.

In the standard writing mode, you are typing onto a blank sheet of cream-colored paper. There's also a "dark and stormy night" mode which presents you with white letters on a black background. The settings also provide nine different fonts in a variety of sizes. Auto-correct and spell checking are turned on by default, and a real-time word count can be enabled with a single finger swipe. If you'd like the kids to stay out of your Great American Novel, you can password-protect your work.

Do you want to tie a specialized knot? There's an app for that! Animated Knots isn't particularly polished or overdesigned. Instead, it presents a list of knots that are arranged in categories, such as boating, fishing, and scouting. You tap on a knot, and you see the knot tie itself on screen using stop motion photography. I must admit, it's kind of cool.

Not only do you see each stage of the knot formation, but you also get a text accompaniment (which you can pause to read) that explains exactly what you need to do at each stage in order to create the knot. This app gave me flashbacks to summer camp, where I learned to tie a bowline with my eyes closed in under 5 seconds ... and that's a good thing.

Heading off to a conference? Here are five little apps you might want to consider adding to your iPhone before heading off to the airport. They all provide functionality that may come in handy when you're on the go.

SpeakerClock ($0.99) provides a bright easy-to-read display showing you exactly how much time you have left to present your paper and take questions. It's a deceptively simple application full of lovely little design touches. I used it at a recent conference and found it an absolutely valuable tool to have around.

This app works well both on the iPhone and the iPad -- as a conference organizer, it's really great to use the iPad's larger screen from across the room. As a speaker, the iPhone version works particularly well when placed on a small business card stand on the speaker's podium.

Want to easily share your contact information? Contxts offers a simple solution. You can sign up for a free account at contxts.com, where you can enter your details. Anyone with a phone (it doesn't have to be an iPhone) and an SMS plan can text a short phrase (like "demotuaw") to 50500 and they'll receive the information you set up at their website. Their free iPhone app lets you edit that information directly. What's more, when you turn the iPhone on its side, you can display a "HELLO my name is" contact sheet that instructs people how to retrieve your contact data. What's great about Contxts is that it's a solution that works with any group of people, whether they've hopped onto the Apple iPhone train or not (of course, if they have an iPhone or an Android phone, there's always Bump).

Dazzling Flashlight 4g is one of several new applications (like this one) that uses the iPhone 4's new built-in rear LED as a flashlight. Over the last day or so, we've heard from other developers who are building similar tools. Cramzy developer Iliya Yordanov was kind enough to send over a build of the app for me to test while the product waits on Apple review.

As the video here shows, Dazzling Flashlight 4g offers two kinds of flashlight functionality. It provides the standard "light up the main screen with a bright, white window" that has been on App Store from the beginning -- but it also offers direct control over the back LED flashlight as well. That LED provides strong, clear illumination and is really a nice way to shine light in dark rooms or at night.