Andrew Peters has posted his solution to my iPhone battery problem. He was kind enough to contact me through Twitter and offered his expert advice freely. I can't say how he comes by his expert advice. Use your imagination.
Needless to say, I am very thankful for his assistance. His post is thoughtful and complete. It also describes his experience with what does and does not drain an iPhone battery. True Genius.
Michael likes where Evernote is going with their acquisitions of Skitch and Penultimate. I'm not as enthusiastic.
Background I was an ardent Evernote user from the early days. I started exploring it when it was still web centric. When Phil Libin focused like a laser on the Mac, I was thrilled. I pumped massive amounts of info into it. I had two pro accounts just to support the company.
My enthusiasm waned when I wanted to extract my info into an archive.
The beauty of attracting smart people to the comments section of Macdrifter.com is that they write smart things. "Mo65" mentioned ZoomNotes in the comments to my Real World Note Taking post. I've been fascinated with it ever since.
ZoomNotes is a sketching app. Its unique feature is a virtually unlimited level of zoom, but with a couple twists. Rather than drawing with a super-magnified line when zoomed in, the line autoscales with the zoom level.
I stumbled across Mimpress in the AppStore and I like where it's going. Mimpress is a unique presentation app for the iPad. Slides are written in a variation of Markdown with html and custom tags. The app then uses Impress.js to present a slide show with some impressive transitions. Here's a web example of an Impress.js presentation.
I've read about Impress.js before but never looked into the options. There are a surprising number of transition effects that involve moving through space from slide to slide.
I wish I lived near SoHo so I could go to this art exhibit about iOS designs. This is what you get when a company with taste takes over a consumer electronic market: Phone UI is considered art.1
By way of Subtraction
This is not sarcasm. I fully agree that there are some stunningly artful iOS app designs. ↩
While Writing Kit is not my primary iOS text editor, it is among the best out there. PacoTheSage has an excellent review up.
I learned a lot from my push to explore Simplenote alternatives. In all fairness to the Simplenote team, they fixed the web interface within 48 hours and the iOS updates were pulled from the AppStore and then updated a week later.
After this week, I may not be going back to Simplenote for creating notes or writing in general.
A Lesson Learned I've replaced Simplenote on my iOS docks. WriteRoom now lives there.
I write many posts to Macdrifter from my iPad and occasionally my iPhone. One place where both of these tools fall down, is inserting images into a post. On my Mac, I have so much automation running that I just select the image file and hit a key combo to resize the image1, upload the file to my server and grab a url to the image.
To fill the gap, I've tried some crazy stuff.
I'm not a professional artist. Therefore this is an 890 word review about a stylus. Does anyone come here for short reviews?
I like my Cosmonaut stylus. It is comfortable and provides just enough resistance against the iPad glass to feel like a real marker. But let's face it, it's big. It works well for big blocky letters, but not for details.
I purchased the Adonit Jot Flip stylus a few days ago and it is the iOS stylus to beat.
Will Shipley and Dr. Drang both wrote smart articles about upgrades in the Mac App Store. I agree with Will that the lack of upgrade pricing may discourage developers from making significant changes to their applications. However, I think there is a big part of the user base that is still getting accustomed to paying for software at all, let alone for an upgrade. There's also a risk that less scrupulous developers will offer upgrade pricing instead of fixes and patches.
