There's a lot of joking about the latest Samsung offering, the Galaxy Note. It's a rather large phone-tablet device with a stylus. I've read and heard a lot of ridicule that confuses me. If we want Samsung to start innovating with their own products and stop copying Apple, this is them doing it. Sure, I would not buy or use a Samsung Note, I have an iPhone and iPad, which I think are superior.
There's a lot of speculation about the Apple TV display. I think there will eventually be one but I also think there are greater opportunities for Apple. A computer display with built-in Airplay would help to transform iOS into a full fledged computing platform. But the display must be paired with a changes in iOS mirroring.
I agree with Viticci's assessment of the iOS-ification1 of OS X. But there is one feature missing from iOS that will prevent it from ever being effective with an external display: a cursor.
Some funny things I noticed while browsing the app store.
There's a lot of anger on the app store
This app might be worth $0.99 just for the name
Hey, isn't this the game everyone's been playing and talking about?
Now that's quite a coincidence
AppStorm has a good interview with Dustin MacDonald of Acrylic Software. Acrylic makes Pulp and Wallet for Mac and iOS. I always like to read about the creative people behind these indie companies. These people are the life-blood of iOS and OS X.
PhatWare have updated their iPad app for notes, PhatPad. It still sucks that their website relies on Flash but the app is good.
Not only does PhatPad have extremely fluid sketch tools and audio recording, but the handwritting to text facility is great. I really like the ability to hand write and convert a selection to text. It can be very distracting to have handwritting converted on the fly. Sometimes I just want to make a quick note and not worry about getting the text conversion on the spot.
Ed Bott recently elaborated on the evils of iBooks 2[1] due to the proprietary nature of the iBooks format. Guess what? iBooks 2 supports EPUB. He can sell his EPUB and still have it viewed on iBooks. I have many EPUB and PDF books that I have added myself. They look like crap. What Ed is apparently mad about is that Apple has created a tool that he wants to use because it’s better but it doesn’t output the format he wants so he can sell it somewhere else.
This is the first thing I have seen that made me consider jail breaking my iPhone. Just turning off WiFi by voice is worth it.
I'm not a fan of jail breaking. I've done it but quickly reverted. It's just not worth the hassle of waiting for an updated jail break to upgrade the OS. I'd rather accept iOS as it is and be confident I'm installing trusted applications and that I am fully supported by Apple.
I've been noodling away on a review of Twitter clients for the iPad, but Viticci did a great job. Read his instead.
Clark seems to like the official client. For me, I've stopped using the official client because I no longer trust Twitter's design sense. I've been using TweetCaster Pro on the iPad for basic twitter use. I like the simple conversation and attachment view. On the iPhone I use Tweetbot.
WritePad is probably the definitive handwriting recognition app for iOS. It’s been updated to version 6. It’s a very capable note taking app. WritePad supports Dropbox syncing and Google Docs access. There is also support for Spanish and French recognition (in app purchase) as well as a user dictionary and shorthand support. There’s really no training necessary although it does allow some minor tweaks to how recognition is performed.
There’s a good round of discussion about the appropriate way to implement a mute switch. Gruber favors the current design. Andy doesn’t.
I agree with Gruber on this one. According to Andy’s design, I would have to go in and manually disable all audible alerts in the settings every time I wanted to use an alarm. Otherwise, the damn phone would be dinging every few minutes from incoming email. Yes, I have audible email alerts.
