The Jack-of-all-trades note taker

• Category: Productivity
• Developer: Sophiacom
• Version: 1.0.2
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

Some type of apps are available in bunches; surprisingly, the metronome is one of them.  The other one, much less surprising, is the note taking app.  There’s the default iPhone note app, apps that try special input methods, and those that transcribe voice notes into text.  YouNote is another note taking app - the approach it takes to be different is to allow you to take different types of notes.

First off you can take plain-old regular text notes. Type in what you want, save.  Load later.  To save itself from being completely vanilla boring, Younote adds little features like the ability to put in tags on the note for searching later, or attaching a contact to the note.  The second note is the photo note;  take a picture, and file it away as a note.

The next app is the voice app.  This app allows you to record an audio note.  There’s definitely a bug with this feature, because the playback volume (or record volume, not sure which it is) is so low that I originally thought that the playback didn’t work at all.  Only after a few tries did I realize it was just really low volume.

There’s also a doodle note, a mini MS paint for those quickfootball plays.  This one works pretty well I found - somehow with its simplicity and lack of too many options, i actually thought it responded well to my doodling than some pure doodle apps out there (although with much less tools).  Lastly, there is a web bookmark note that allows you to bookmark a website and add notes to the bookmark.

Overall Impression

Given the diversity of the functions in this note app, I’m willing to give this app a try for a while longer.  While none of the note types are particularly impressive, its usually not to be expected with jack-of-all-trade type apps.  You lose a little on the feature list, but you get a one stop shop in return.

App Score: 3.0 out of 5.

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Good with the right expectations

• Category: Productivity
• Developer: SpeechCloud
• Version: 1.1.0.0
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G
• Download URL

As much as I love my new iPhone 3G, there are some features on my blackberry that I do miss on the iPhone.  Some of those features, I keep hoping will be added with future firmware upgrades (the ability to send and forward meeting requests on Exchange, for one).  Others, I’ve been adding slowly through third-party apps.  Voice Dialing is one of them.

From an interface perspective, SpeechCloud is as simple as they get (not that voice dialers in general have too many features from what I’ve seen).  Hold onto a button, say a name, and the program will do its best to find the best match in your address book and dial the number for you.

In terms of performance, I’d say it’s good - as long as you have the right expectations.  Having been using the BlackBerry’s voice dialer and the built-in voice dailers in cars for a couple of years now, I know that you have to work with the program in order for it to work. E-nun-cia-tion is key.  Having enough length in the name for the program to uniquely identify the name is the other.  This is no different than any other voice dialers I’ve used; which is why in my address book even my wife’s entry has full first and last names.  If you stick to the rules, it does a decent (not perfect job)

Conclusion

Personally, I think VoiceDialer is pretty good for a free app.  Speech recognition is a tricky art, and personally I’ve found it to work no worse (but no better) than a lot of other voice dialing capabilities of hands free sets out there.

App Score: 3.0 out of 5.

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This App created some anticipation with its slick-looking interface. Does it live up to the hype?

• Category: Productivity
• Developer: Veiosoft
• Version: 1.0
• Cost: $6.99
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

One of the more annoying “feature” of the iPhone was the inability for the users to access its file system, not even some sort of designated area just for storing files.  Despite a nice 8Gb or 16GB of storage, outside of iTunes we can’t access any of it. Datacase is one of a few apps that aim to correct this disfeature and provide us with a way to get files onto the iPhone and access those files.

Because the iPhone restricts data access via the USB, access between the iPhone and your computer is enabled through a wireless connection (so for those without a wireless router, you’re out of luck). Turn on the wifi on the iPhone, and Datacase will provide you with the IP addresses (FTP and HTTP) to access Datacase. For Windows users, simple go to Windows Explorer and enter the FTP address and you can access the drive just like any other drive on your computer.  Uploads are pretty fast - a reminder that the bottleneck with WIFI Internet is the Internet and ISPs and not WIFI.

Once files are loaded into Datacase, it claims you are able to open web pages, media, PDF, and office pages. This is where I ran into problems. For my test, I loaded two mp3s, a PDF document, a word document, excel, and powerpoint document. The PDF opened without issues, nor did my excel (screenshot above) or powerpoint doc. Datacase was also able to view my word document, but it was very slow. For a 7-page document, it took approximately 20 seconds to load. Worse, I couldn’t get any of my mp3s to play - I kept getting an iTunes error “cannot open this movie file”.  I’ll email the developer on this and see if we can get a resolution on this, but I am not too bothered since I would want to access these files via the iPod function anyways.

I hope the developer adds more functions to the app itself with latter releases.  Other than opening and deleting files, there’s really not much you can do.  You can create subfolders within the app, but you can’t move files between folders.  I found myself not really using the app interface, but rather managing my files using Windows Explorer.

Summary

Although the feature set of this app isn’t as great as I had anticipated, for what I really use it for (storing and moving files), it seems to do it with pretty good speed and stability.  Hopefully the next version will come with more features that will make this one truly stand out against the rest.

App Score: 3.0 out of 5

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An Innovative Approach

• Category: Productivity
• Developer: ShapeWriter Inc.
• Version: 1.0.2
• Cost: Free
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

When I switched from my Crackberry Pearl to the iPhone, one of the things I was surprised about was how hard it is to type on the darn thing. I knew touchscreens would be different, but c’mon, we’re talking about the Pearl with its not-so-suretype keyboard I was coming from. Anything with a full keyboard has got to be better, right? Well, all I can say is that I got quickly acquainted with the backspace button.

Which brings us to Writing Pad. Writing Pad aims to offer a different approach to using the keyboard, integrated with a notepad program that can file the various notes away, or send the note via the email app.

I must say, the alternate input method is quite interesting. When I saw th screenshot at the app store, I half expected a hand writing recognition input method similar to the Palm Pilots of old. Rather, you are still offered a QWERTY keyboard, but rather than tapping on each letter, you simply hold down your finger and slide to each letter of your word, ignoring double letters if applicable. Writing Pad either identifies the word you are typing and pastes it onto the screen (much like the auto correct on the default keyboard), displays a list of words to choose from in a status bar, or identifies the wrong word (which can be corrected quickly with a single backspace).

The writing system takes some getting used to but works quite well to be honest. In the beginning it’s easy to forget the exact position of a letter when your finger is covering that part of the screen, but once you get the hang of it, you can type pretty fast. However, if you get a word wrong - and some words I just can’t do some words correctly - you’ll find yourself never getting it right. Thankfully, you can still tap on the keyboard normally.

Overall, after some playing around I quite like the writing system. Unfortunately for me there is one major downfall - the keyboard only works within the application itself, which means writing notes or sending outbound emails. While no fault of this app or the developers - this is a limitation set by Apple - it’s just not worth my time to build proficiency in one input method while everywhere else I need to use the standard keyboard.

Conclusion

Overall I quite like the app and after some trial and error started to really like the input method they’ve devised. The fact that it’s free is amazing for such a slick app. I probably won’t be using it much given that other apps can’t take advantage of the input method,but that’s a personal decision that shouldn’t take away from how great the product is.

App Score: 4.0 out of 5

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