Thanks A Lot, Rovio!

My 22-month-old son LOVES Angry Birds! And I've loved letting him play - it's been great for problem-solving. First he had to figure out how to navigate the app. Then he had to figure out how to make the birds go in the right direction - his first instinct, of course, was to swipe the way he wanted them to go. It took him weeks to figure out how to pull them back and let them go. Now he's starting to get excited every time he smashes a piggie, and I think soon he'll be working on actual strategy to aim the birds at the piggies. (Not quite there yet, but hey, he's not even two, cut him some slack!)

All of that came to an abrupt halt yesterday. Why? Well, Rovio pushed Angry Birds Toons onto every Angry Birds app on every platform. Now, next to the big Play button that takes you to the game, there's an equally-big Toons button. This basically takes you to a built-in TV station with Angry Birds cartoons to watch.

I don't think my son has played the actual game since. He just keeps turning it to the video channel and zombie-ing out.

I keep my toddler's TV time and iPad time separate, and for good reason. TV can be a very useful educational tool in limited quantities, but research has shown that at his age toddlers don't learn as effectively from TV as from the real world. Too much TV can actually hinder their language development, even if it's good shows like Sesame Street. When he watches TV (which is very limited, and entirely through Netflix or DVD), he becomes a lump. He stares vacantly, sits there, doesn't pay attention to what's happening around him.

When he plays games on the iPad, he's actively engaged. He's developing hand-eye coordination, he's solving problems, he's often even interacting with the rest of the world (his new favorite is to play Endless Alphabet and go find his foam letters to match the ones in the game). He still needs to spend lots of time playing with physical toys and running around and reading books, so obviously he's not on the iPad all day (and anyhow, it's my iPad damn it, I want to use it!), but I definitely allow him more iPad time than TV time.

But now Angry Birds has turned the iPad into another TV screen. He's glued to the videos the same way he's glued to Wonder Pets. And as far as I can tell (through both inspection of the game and Googling), there is no way to turn them off the way you can turn off power-ups!

It looks like I'm going to have to delete the game, or at least hide it away in a folder where only mommy and daddy can find it. Thanks a lot, Rovio. I'm sure I'm not the only parent who is annoyed by this.

Top Toddler Apps: Endless Alphabet

Since my 21-month-old son uses my iPad nearly as much as I do these days, it seems appropriate to review some of his favorite apps along with my faves.

I recently downloaded Endless Alphabet by Calloway Arts (designers of the terrific The Monster at the End of This Book), and it has quickly become a favorite. Two immediate advantages: it's free AND contains no ads, a rare combo these days. I don't mind ads on my apps, but too often they frustrate my son when he can't get them off the screen or gets taken to the App Store or web browser repeatedly when he accidentally hits them. So no ads is a big selling point in a toddler app. UPDATE: Ads have now started appearing, although they are rare. About once or twice a day one pops up, usually when he starts up the app. They aren't as bad as ads in many free toddler apps, but still a bit of an annoyance. I paid the 99 cents to make them go away.

The game here is simple enough, but keeps him engaged for a good long time. You pick a word out of the ever-changing lineup (the app downloads new words regularly - again, this is FREE!):



Then you get a straightforward puzzle, putting the letters into place. It's got enough of a margin of error that he rarely gets frustrated, and is smart enough to let him move two letters at once if he wants (another important toddler feature - letting them touch however they want).



When the puzzle is done, they are treated to a short animation about the word with a voiceover giving its definition.



And that's it - now you go to the next word or pick a new one! He can easily spend 15 minutes at this, which is as long as anything keeps his attention.

I think he's right at the perfect age for this app. A few months ago, his fine motor skills weren't quite good enough for this type of puzzle. By the time he can recognize all the letters on his own, simply slotting them into place won't capture his attention for very long. But it's perfectly designed for a two-year-old.

If I have one complaint, it's that the letters don't always say the right sound - an E will always say its short sound, even if its long sound is used in the word. But this is really a very minor in an outstanding (and did I mention FREE?) app.

Conceptis Brings Japanese Logic Puzzles to the iPad

I'm a puzzle nerd, although I'll admit that having a baby has slowed me down a bit. I do regular crosswords and occasionally sudokus, but I'd rather do a cryptic crossword or another type of Japanese logic puzzle like a Nurikabe, Heyawake, or Hashi.

These logic puzzles are perfectly suited to the touch interface of an iPad, but until recently they were only available via iPhone apps. The low resolution limits the size of the puzzle grids, and therefore the difficulty of the puzzles. The hardest Nurikabe in the paid app only took me about ten minutes to finish - and I am not especially good at these.

Finally, though, these are slowly making their way to the iPad in full HD resolution!

 Most of these puzzles were invented by Japanese company Nikoli, but are often distributed in the United States by Conceptis, Ltd - while the iPhone apps were under the Nikoli name, the iPad apps are by Conceptis. Currently there are six iPad apps available:

• Nurikabe
• Hashi, also known as Bridges
• Pic-A-Pix, also known as Paint By Number.
• Link-A-Pix (a Pic-A-Pix variant)
• Fill-A-Pix (another variant)
• And of course, Sudoku

The interfaces are clean and uncluttered. These apps are all free, and come with an impressive 120 puzzles each to get you started! 40 easy, 40 medium, and 40 hard. Additional puzzles can be bought in various packs ranging from $1.99-2.99 depending on the size of the puzzles.

If you enjoy Sudoku, or its cousin Ken-Ken (which has been making regular newspaper appearances lately), I highly recommend you check out these other logic puzzles via these excellent free apps! These just started rolling out in November, with the most recent appearing in January, so hopefully they will continue to release other puzzle types.

My favorite iPad text editor: PlainText

One app I've been using a lot lately is PlainText, a simple text editor that syncs seamlessly with Dropbox and saves as actual .txt files. (Free with ads, lose the ads for $2.)

I use TextEdit a lot on my Macs, doing almost everything I can in plain text or .rtf documents. I only use Word when I actually need the features. But it was surprisingly hard to find an editor on the iPad that could open and save to a simple .txt. I tried Evernote, but it saves you work as some internal file type that can't really be accessed outside of Evernote itself. Same for my extensive collection of notetaking apps that allow both typing and handwriting.

I wanted an app to work on simple lists, blog posts, and other writing projects in, so that I could also open them in TextEdit or other programs on any computer. Enter PlainText.

It's simple and does its job beautifully. It creates a folder in DropBox, and you can either set it to sync continually or only when you tell it to. (I had it set to sync continually, til my husband was using the computer and got annoyed when it kept telling him that Note.txt had been updated - now I sync manually.) You can create subfolders within the app. The text editor itself is simple, no frills. The document list is in a column on the left (it doesn't autohide in portrait, by the way), or you can go into focus mode and see only the text you're working on.



It's certainly nothing fancy. But it is precisely what I'd been looking for. If I could wish for one upgrade, I would want it to also do simple .rtf files, possibly via MarkDown. I've had a hell of a time finding anything on iOS that does .rtf. But for now, it's serving its purpose very well.

A few favorite photo apps

Sorry I've been gone for a bit, but hopefully I'll be updating regularly again now!

I do a lot of photo editing on my iPad. A LOT. My camera has an Eye-Fi card in it that auto-uploads every picture I snap to Photobucket. I use the Photobucket app to sort through those, put them in albums, etc. Then I download the ones that need fixing up and do that on the iPad and reupload them with the app.

I have literally a couple dozen photo editing apps on my iPad, but over time I've found that there are just a few that I keep going back to, the workhorses that are good for more than just a few gimmicks.

Snapseed - There's a reason this app won app of the year last year. We went to Hawaii this year, and the photo problem was that there was tons of nice scenery, but it was overcast and rainy almost the whole time so it was hard to get a nice shot of it. Enter Snapseed, with their Drama filters and excellent tuning tools. Over and over again, I put in a photo that was too dark, too underexposed, and it found whatever information was hiding in there and brought it out to great effect.

Photo as originally taken:


After running it through Snapseed:


Snapseed brought out details of the island that I thought had been lost, and made the water look more like it had before the clouds rolled in and dulled its surface. And it took just a couple of minutes!

PhotoGene - This is actually a recent purchase, but I'm already using it constantly. I bought it for its redeye correction - the Photos app can catch some red eyes, but sometimes it overdoes it and you wind up with eyes that look like they came out of a horror movie. Rather than simply putting black blobs over the red, PhotoGene adjusts the color to a yellower hue and darkens it. And if that doesn't work, it has a dodge mask feature that lets you darken just the bit you want, to get rid of remaining pupil glare. And if that doesn't work, it has a cloning heal tool, and I will freely admit that I just printed out a couple pictures that had one iris cloned over to the other side to cover up an irretrievably red eye. You have to be careful with that, of course, or you'll wind up with some very creepy results, but if you're careful you can't tell, especially at 4x6 size. The masking tools are useful for a variety of other applications as well, and I have barely begun to explore this app's other features.

Here is an example of my dog Fred before:



And after redeye correction and a burn mask in PhotoGene:



As you can see, the Photo app correction is a little too harsh in this picture; I find it works best when the pupil is well-defined and is the only thing that's red:



PicStitch - I assumed that a collage-making app would be a gimmick I'd use once or twice and forget about, but this turns out to be a very useful tool. When I have a variety of similar shots that I want to share online (say, of my baby trying different foods and making a mess out of all of them) I don't have to make my FaceBook friends flip through a whole album. I even print them out sometimes - I wanted to capture the interesting local options on the Waikiki McDonald's menu, but didn't really want to print out four photos of a McDonald's, so instead I printed this one picture:

iKeyWi HD - The tweak I've been waiting for!

For the longest time, one of the main jailbreak tweaks I have really, really wanted is a keyboard with arrow keys. Sometimes, especially when you're moving (or have a baby bumping the iPad), it's really hard to get the cursor exactly where you want it. It's easy to get it within a couple characters, but that doesn't cut it if you've placed it before the stuff you want to delete.

Thanks to iPad Help, I discovered that such a thing finally exists! iKeywi HD (link will take you to Cydia) adds a fifth row to the keyboard as well as arrow keys in the lower right corner, and makes all non-alphabet keys completely customizable. The tweak costs $3.

This is exactly what I've been hoping for! Not only arrow keys, but numbers on the main keyboard as well as the ability to make all kinds of symbols easier to get to. The keys are smaller because you're fitting more into the same space; for some people with big fingers this might be a downside, but for me it just makes it easier for me to type one-handed in landscape!



Now, I was all set to tell you that, unfortunately, the tweak is buggy to the point of being unusable. BUT - I went back to Cydia to check for an update, and sure enough, the worst of the bugs have been fixed! Yay for developers who are on the ball! There are still a few problems to watch out for, though:

- At first, it had problems capitalizing words at the start of lines or sentences. Now the only issue is if the word needs to be autocorrected, it gets corrected to lowercase.

- The arrows weren't working for me in many apps - now they work almost everywhere. They still aren't working for me in Mail, or on some website text boxes in Atomic.

It's also a bit sad to lose the ability to swipe up from the . and , keys to get to ' and ", but since everything is customizable I can still get to those with the shift. The other feature I'd like is being able to actually turn the keyboard on and off in Settings - right now the only way to revert to the standard keyboard is by deleting iKeyWi entirely.

Now that the worst of the bugs have been fixed, I think this tweak is definitely worth the $3 if you've been wanting a better keyboard. I came for the arrows, but I'm staying for the ability to assign entire HTML tags to a single key.

My new addiction: Fairway Solitaire HD

Back in college, at one point everyone on my dorm hall was addicted to a solitaire game called Tri-Peaks. The cards are laid out to form three pyramids with only the bottom row face up. You turn over a card from the draw pile and can play the card above or below it from the board, earning more points for longer runs. Like most solitaire games, it's the perfect balance of mindless clicking with just a hint of strategy to keep you paying attention.

I have a Tri-Peaks app on my iPad, and it's fine (and free). But just the other day I ran across a game that takes the Tri-Peaks concept to a whole new level: Fairway Solitaire by Big Fish Games. First off, almost every level uses a new and unique card layout, and some are much harder to clear than others. I found the level full of "52 Card Pickup" boards especially challenging:

Second, they add in a few trick cards to slow you down - in keeping with the golf theme, things like water hazards, sand traps, and roughs. This board has blue water hazard cards, all of which must be cleared to unlock the rest of the cards:

But to make up for these difficulties, you get those clubs down in the bottom right corner - playing a 4-iron puts a 4 down for you to play on, etc. You find these randomly, or can buy them (and other helpful add-ons) with golf bucks.

Which brings me to something I really appreciate about this game. There is an excellent balance between the rate at which you earn golf bucks and how badly you need the helping items you can buy. Unlike many "freemium" games, it's never impossible to play without buying more golf bucks with real cash (although, of course, that is an option). If you want to use clubs constantly you'll need to, but if you're playing smart and using your clubs judiciously you'll find that you can usually afford them when you really need one.

The free version of the game comes with eight full courses of 3-9 boards each, and due to the inherent nature of solitaire games the replayability is very high. But this game was so addicting, not to mention well-designed, that I had no problem paying the $3 to access all 50+ courses (plus extras). And I rarely pay for games!

The one complaint I have is the low value of long runs. Runs of 5 or fewer cards have no value aside from the cards they clear, and runs of 6 or more are worth only a paltry number of golf bucks. You only get a major reward - 1000 gb - if your runs (only those of 6 or more each) add up to at least 20 on one board. In traditional Tri-peaks, even runs of 3 or 4 can be worth significantly more points than individual cards cleared, and a long run of, say, 15 is worth quite a lot. I'd like to at least see runs of 10-20 cards rewarded more heavily here.

Overall, though - well done, Big Fish!

Yes, Virginia, there is Flash on the iPad.

It's possibly the most persistent myth about the iPad: No Flash support.

Competitors like to trumpet it to let you know that they give you a "fuller web experience." iPad newbies express concern that their new device will be horribly hobbled. People come to jailbreaking forums asking if there's any way to get Flash by jailbreaking.

Let's ignore the fact that Adobe themselves have declared mobile Flash dead and that the majority of the web has already moved on to HTML 5. The fact remains that there are some sites that still use Flash heavily - Facebook games, photo editors, local restaurants that haven't touched their site since it was built in 2004. Are iPad owners really sacrificing this chunk of the web?

It is true that Safari, the built-in web browser, doesn't support Flash. And it was true that when the iPad was introduced, there was no way to get Flash. But the iPad is nearing two years old, and has hundreds of thousands of apps built for it - do you really think nobody thought there was money to be made in a Flash-supporting app? Of course they did, and of course they found a work-around - by running the Flash through their own servers on its way to you.

In truth, iPad owners have several options for Flash browsers (no Jb required):

Puffin - This is the Flash browser that I personally use. To be honest, 90% of the time if I come across a site using Flash I just leave the site and find somewhere else to do my business. But I wanted to give Flash on the iPad a try. Puffin works great for video, and slow but acceptable for editing photos and photo books on sites like snapfish. It seems to have some trouble with Zynga games on Facebook, though, randomly reloading at inopportune times. At 99c, though, it's a cheap way to check out the occasional Flash site on your iPad.

Photon - I haven't tried it myself, but Photon gets very good reviews for speed and handling of a variety of Flash sites, and seems to be extremely popular. Popular enough that according to AppShopper it hasn't once gone on sale since raising its price to $4.99 in August, but if you need regular and reliable Flash it may be a good investment.

iSwifter - Don't let the Free tag fool you - iSwifter only gives you ten minutes of free browsing at a time to check it out, after which you'll need to pay $4.99 in-app for the full browser. I took the free sample for a short spin. iSwifter is designed with Flash games in mind specifically - it definitely handles Zynga better than Puffin. But if you're looking for more general Flash support, it comes up short on websites it hasn't been specifically optimized for.

SkyFire - SkyFire was the first browser to bring Flash to the iPad, and is still popular. However, its capabilities are limited to Flash video, not interactive content. If that's what you need, it's what SkyFire was built to do and according to reviews it does it well. But if you might want to use some interactive Flash content as well sometimes, $4.99 seems like a steep price for a fraction of the functionality of Photon.

Apps I'm Thankful For

We had our feast on Monday when my mother in law was in town, so today we get to relax and eat leftovers and watch the parade - and blog! Here are a few apps I'm thankful for that have improved my life in some small way:

Sleepstream 2 - The "soft piano" music gets my baby to sleep every time, and the "distant thunder" kept him there until we bought a Gentle Giraffe so I can take my iPad out of the room while he's sleeping. :)

Baby Geek - As I recently posted about, Baby Geek helps me track his sleeping so I can see that his bedtimes are getting earlier and his naps longer and breathe a sigh of relief.

TextFree - I don't have a smartphone, and I don't have a text plan on my dumbphone. At 20c per message sent OR received, I avoided texting unless necessary - until I found this app. It gives you a real phone # to use for free texting. My mom and sister are very happy that they can now contact me via their favorite method, and from my end it's a lot like instant messaging - and autocorrect beats T9 every time.

AppShopper - This app lets you make a wish list of apps, then notifies you when they go on sale. I've gotten some good deals this way! You can also search the app store for recent price reductions and view an app's entire price history (if an app's never gone on sale, I assume it's doing fine at the current price and isn't likely to be reduced soon and just buy it - but many go in sale every couple of months, making it worth the wait).

Photobucket - Along with an Eye-Fi card for my camera, this app has helped me go nearly all-iPad for my photos.

Dropbox - Is there anyone with an iPad who isn't using Dropbox yet? Sure, now with iCloud it's not as vital, but it's still a great tool.

Dimmer - This JB tweak lets you turn the brightness on your iPad all the way down - I don't know how I made it through so many nights of feedings without it!

Baby Loggers

If you don't have kids, you probably think the idea of a baby logger is at best obsessive and at worst pretty creepy. What is it? Just what it sounds like - an app that lets you track when your baby falls asleep, wakes up, has a diaper change and what was in that diaper, when he eats and either how long and which side if you're breastfeeding or how much if it's from a bottle. Some also let you track development, keep track of doctor's appointments, and more.

The thing is, when the baby is first born, the doctors want you to track this stuff. You need to make sure enough food is going in and coming out, and that the baby isn't sleeping too long between feedings, to make sure everything's working right. At first we wrote it all down on a paper they gave us at the hospital, but then I discovered apps that let you track it with one tap. More recently, it's been clear to us that E has never really slept as much as they claim newborns sleep, and we wanted to keep track so we could try and get his sleep patterns into more of a, well, pattern. With the help of a baby logger, we now know for sure that he sleeps an average of 11-12 hours a day instead of the usual 14-16, including only 2-3 hours of naps instead of 4-6. Now that we know what we're dealing with, and what a bad night looks like versus a good night, we can start to address the problem.

I've tried three baby loggers since E was born, and the one I've stuck with is Baby Geek. The interface takes a little exploring to figure out, but you'll have it mastered by the end of the day. I used this to track diapers and feedings for a few days, but have been tracking sleep with it for two months now, so that's the feature I'm most familiar with. Baby Geek gives you simple one-touch tracking, with the nice touch that if you go to change the time of an event, there is both a clock to adjust and buttons to automatically jump it back 5, 10, or 15 minutes. It has the best graphs of any of the loggers I tried - you can view totals of each type of event by day, or timelines with all or only one type of event shown, and it separates day and night sleep (at times you pick). You can email the entries and have the program sync across two devices, so both parents (or one Nd a childcare provider) can keep track. And probably a dozen other features I'm not thinking of because I only use the most basic one. And all this is only $.99.

The other two I tried are BabyBix and Baby Log. I liked Log better than Bix, but not well enough to shell out $4.99 for it once the free version ran out, which only took about a day.

Here is how the three stack up (Some are my subjective ratings 1-10, 10 highest):

	Baby Bix	Baby Log	Baby Geek	Winner
Price	Free	Free trial for a day or two, then $4.99	$0.99	Bix
Starting an event	Several taps	Two taps	One tap	Geek
Email reports	No	Yes	Yes	Log & Geek
Quality of graphs	5	8	8.5	Geek
Ease of use	3	8	9	Geek
Unique feature	Integrated message board	Bar and line graphs	Day vs night sleep shown on graph	Log or Geek
Unique annoyance	Crashes a lot	Past events must be entered by start time and duration, not start and end time	Only shows past two weeks' with of data	No one wins this!

This entry is cross-posted to Don't Call Me Crunchy.

Hulu Plus: A resounding "meh"

Netflix has been my main source of TV for a few years now, but there are a handful of current network shows I watch. I've never been good at being home at just the right time, so the past year or two I've tended to rely on unsanctioned downloads to watch many of them at my leisure. But with a new baby, downloading a show and then either getting it to my iPad or finding time to sit in front of the computer is even more unlikely than getting to watch the show as it airs! Hulu+ seemed to be the perfect solution, so I signed up for a one-month trial to check it out.

Pros:
- Brings House, New Girl, Bones, and Glee to my iPad with a minimum of fuss, right after the episodes air.
- Same reasonable $8/month as Netflix streaming.

Cons:
- Ads in shows that you're already paying to watch.
- Doesn't have all the shows I watch (no How I Met Your Mother, for instance).
- If you leave the app for even a second, it doesn't just pause your show and let you pick it back up - you have to entirely reload the show. This has made some things completely unwatchable if I'm trying to, say, have a conversation over IM at the same time. Netflix does not have this problem.
- Even after paying $8/month for the privilege of watching shows that are free on a desktop on your iPad, some shows are still only available on a desktop computer!
- Many shows go back only a few episodes, so it's not great for picking up a new show and getting caught up. (Like I was hoping to do with Castle.)
- If you put a series in your queue, it only adds the current episodes. When a new ep comes out, it's not automatically added to the queue - in fact, once you've watched all current episodes, the show is removed from the queue entirely. If there is a way to "subscribe" to shows for automatic access to new eps, I haven't found it.
- No Wii support. Although I do watch Netflix on my iPad, when I'm home I mostly access it through my Wii so that I can use the nice big TV I paid $300 for. For some reason, Hulu+ works on Xbox and PS3, but not the most common gaming console in the country.

Overall, I think the annoyances outweigh the benefits for me. I won't be paying for this service. But I will be finding an easier way to get shows from Megaupload to my iPad.

Why jailbreak?

So far all I've said about jailbreaking is that I briefly screwed things up with IncarcerApp - but all was well once I deleted it. Not a ringing endorsement! But the truth is, JBing has given me control over a variety of features that make using my iPad easier and more enjoyable every day.

SBSettings/Activator - these sort of go hand-in-hand, and are generally suggested to be the first things you get from Cydia, as many other tweaks depend on them. Among other features, with SBSettings I can now swipe my status bar and get control of a variety of settings, like brightness and switching wifi on/off. (My iPad and router don't always agree, so being able to reset wifi with a touch is a huge improvement for me.) Also note in the screenshot below that my status bar shows not only the time but the date and how much memory I currently have free - also due to SBSettings!



Activator, on the other hand, allows me to assign meanings to a variety of actions - for example, a certain swipe on the screen brings up the task switcher bar, without the possibly-baby-waking noise of a double-press of the home button.

NoLockScreen - What it says on the tin. A lock screen makes sense on a phone to avoid embarrassing butt-dials. But when was the last time you hit the home or sleep buttons but didn't actually mean to turn on your iPad? If you're tired of sliding to unlock, here is your fix.

BrowserChanger - If you use a non-Safari web browser like Atomic or iCab (and if you don't, you should check them out), you're no doubt frustrated that links in all other apps still open in Safari. Fixed!

RetinaPad - Now we're getting into paid packages. You know how Apple cripples iPhone apps on the iPad, not allowing them to run at full resolution even when you hit the 2x button? They did this for an okay reason - to encourage developers to create real iPad versions of apps instead of just resting on their iPhone version. But now that the iPad is a bona fide hit, it's kind of silly to keep the pixelated mess - RetinaPad will fix that for you.

Dimmer - I actually just bought this tonight, and I don't know what I was waiting for! If you've tried to use your iPad in bed (say, during 2am baby feedings, not that we know anyone doing that right at this very moment...), you know that the brightness controls really don't go down that far. Dimmer lets you dim the screen as far as you like - and I am loving the results so far!

iFile - Direct access to your iPad's filesystem. Don't use this one unless you consider yourself clueful enough not to move or delete anything important! This has been really helpful to me in getting some word and excel files back and forth to DropBox from apps that don't let you do it directly. The downside is that I've discovered just how many apps don't really store your work in individual documents that can be easily moved around!

I've installed a few other packages, but these are the ones that I actually use regularly and that have a real impact on my iPad experience. Do you have any to suggest?

Better than the Website 2: Photobucket

Lots of sites have poorly-designed apps that just aren't necessary or useful considering how well the iPad browses the non-mobile-optimized web. But a few have apps that I even prefer to the website on a desktop browser.

The latest is for photo sharing site Photobucket. Although it has long been my photo host of choice (or at least, since Yahoo! Photos shut down), the website is slow, clunky, and cumbersome to navigate. In fact, I think I share fewer photos because it's just a pain to use.

The app may completely change my photo sharing habits. The interface is simple and sleek, photos load quickly, everything works smoothly and like you expect it to.




Icons in the top right let you navigate subfolders, upload and download pics to/from your iPad, and share the photos. When you are viewing a single picture, you get the familiar list of copy-and-paste options for sharing it on different types of websites.




I have yet to run into a single glitch or bug, though I've only been using the app for a day.

This is an especially great find for me right now, because with a new baby I've been looking for ways to streamline my photo taking/sharing. I have a small camera with an Eye-Fi card in the diaper bag, and the card uploads all pics both to my computer and a private folder on Photobucket. This app now makes it ten times easier and more convenient for me to sort through those uploaded pics, move the good ones to public folders, and share them with friends and family.

The one thing I would love to see in an update is the ability to select multiple photos in an album to perform batch actions like deleting and moving to another album. Currently these actions are only available as you view each photo. But even so, I'll take this app over the website any day!

Ooooopsie

Well, I ran into my first JB problem. I installed IncarcerApp, which is supposed to let you turn off the home button at will - trying to iPad one-handed while feeding the baby, I often hit home by accident while holding the bezel.

I went in and turned it on... And my iPad promptly froze. I had to do a hard reboot (holding down both sleep and home buttons), but then I was able to go into cydia and remove the offender. No permanent damage! But it did remind me that I should really be backing up more often, especially before I install any JB apps that aren't well-known to be stable. But yeah, steer clear of IncarcerApp.

I do, however, have RetinaPad, SBSettings, Activator, BrowserChanger, and several other JB apps/tweaks running beautifully!

G+ app - disappearing act - UPDATED

I didn't act fast enough today, and apparently missed out on the Google+ app!

The app was widely reported in the blogosphere to have gone up this morning, and even to have already received one update. But I guess the update wasn't enough to quell widespread reports of the app's instability and constant crashing, because it appears to have been pulled entirely. The app store links in these posts no longer work, and a search in the store for Google gives no love.

So perhaps it's best that I missed out, so that I didn't have to be frustrated by an app that just wasn't ready yet - but I sure hope they get it together and repost it soon!

Update: It seems that it wasn't pulled (although there are still stability complaints) - it's simply only available for iPhone (not even iPod touch), to the point that you can't even view it in the app store if you're on an iPad. Very odd, I wonder what it is about it that makes it not usable on the iPad unlike almost all other iPhone apps.

Therefore, the many headlines touting the arrival of an iOS app are wrong - this is iPhone-only, not for all of iOS. Eagerly awaiting the iPad version!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Wish List - A Better App Store

Why is the App Store the most poorly-designed app on my iPad?

Among the problems:

No back button - I follow a link to an app from a web page. While in the store, I notice that I have updates, so without thinking I switch to the update screen. Crap! Now I have to go back to the web browser and click the link again to get back to the app I was checking out. This and a dozen other common scenarios would be far less annoying with a simple back button.

100,000 apps, 20 categories - Browsing by category is useless when there are tens of thousands of apps in each category, and no subcategories to divide them! I understand that when the app store launched on the iPhone, they had no idea what a runaway success it would be and these categories were probably sufficient for a while. But by the time the iPad launched, and certainly by a year later, they should have figured this out. I go into Education and the college economics study guides are right next to the ABCs apps! No subcategories for age/grade level or subject. What's even stranger is that games do have subcategories listed once you're on the game's page.... But this information is not used at all in the app store itself.

Limited and inconsistent sorting and filtering - Once you're in one of those categories with tens of thousands of apps, you get three options: sort by release date, name, or popularity. (Unless you're in the Games category; then your choices are only Featured or Release Date.) So if a really great app whose name starts with W was released several months ago and never caught on, it probably ever will because no one will ever see it. If you search, you can't sort but you can filter by paid/free, customer rating, and more. Why can't you sort within those filtered results? Why can't you filter within a category browse? Who knows! I guess that would just make it too easy to find what you want.

Leaving the app to download - This is just nonsensical. Every time you download an app - or even an update to an existing app - you're pushed out of the store. Because it is simply VITAL that you view the little "waiting" icon, amirite? And nobody wants to buy more than one app at a time!

Stupid Genius - I have yet to see the Genius recommend an app I actually want. Some of the recommendations seem totally random, unrelated to the app they're based on.

No zooming - As with their calendar app, Apple somehow completely forgot about those great multitouch gestures that they pioneered when designing the app store. No swiping between apps isn't such a problem, but no zoom? When the text is fairly tiny and the screenshots are miniscule?

The app store is both a major revenue stream in itself an a main driver of the popularity of iOS devices - you would think that Apple would want to make it as easy as possible to find and buy the apps you want. And yet it suffers from such basic usability problems that it seems to have been designed by a summer intern rather than Apple's famous software design team.

Did I miss your biggest app store pet peeve?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Week Cal HD - Gone!!!

WTF, Apple?

After I spend all these posts drooling over Week Cal HD both before and after it was released, it looks like I was lucky to grab it when I did - it's no longer in the app store! What's more, the developer claims that Apple pulled it without ever telling them why... But Apple's new calendar coming in iOS 5 apparently seems to have suspiciously incorporated a lot of the features that many of us bought Week Cal for, such as weekly and year views and tap/drag/drop functionality (all things they really should have had from the start, IMO).

First off, iOS 5 isn't widely available until fall - why deprive users of these features for several more months?

Second, and much more importantly, if this is really why Week Cal HD was pulled, this is just horrible behavior from multiple standpoints. It's a shitty way to treat an app dev, a popular one with a high quality product at that, when Apple's big market advantage right now is more and better third-party apps thanks to devs like Utilitap. Plus, it's rather anticompetitive - the company who owns the distribution channel shutting out those who compete directly with their (future) product? Super fishy in a way that the DOJ doesn't tend to like, if it's done on a large enough scale.

I love OS X because it's a terrifically-designed GUI over a Unix heart. iOS gets the first part, but Apple's lockdown of things like the file system just annoy and frustrate me (and make me look forward to the day that the iPad 2 gets jailbroken). If these allegations are true, it's further proof at apple is going too far with the lockdown of their mobile system - which I'm sure does make it more stable, but eventually will cause people (even loyal Apple fangirls like me) to turn away from it if a competitor can offer the same level of UI experience with more freedom.

Two apps I like better than the websites

It seems like nearly every website has its own free app these days. Now, I'm sure many of these make sense on an iPhone, where regular web browsing isn't ideal. But I soon discovered that on the iPad, these are often extraneous at best and far inferior to just loading up the web page at worst. A couple of examples in this category are the Amazon shopping app and the iPad Forums app - in both cases, I'd much rather navigate the web page than bother with the app.

But there are definite exceptions. The Weather Channel Max app has me grabbing my iPad every time I want a weather update - even when I'm sitting at my computer where I have both the weather widget and weather.yahoo.com bookmarked to my city. The key is that it gives me super-easy access to two things that I always seem to have to poke around for on the web: hourly forecasts and animated maps. And maybe I'm imagining this, but it all seems to load faster and more seamlessly than on their website.

The other is the GasBuddy app (sorry, having trouble getting the direct link right now). Even though it's only an iPhone app, the loss in resolution at 2x doesn't detract from its usefulness. Like the weather channel, it loads more smoothly and quickly than the website, particularly in map mode, which is nearly the only way I use either the app or the site. Plus, it's easier to find map mode to begin with - sometimes the web page can be a bit much to navigate. Overall, it's simply a much more pleasant experience than on the web, yet every bit as useful. And, of course, this is one app that is truly useful to have around on the go!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Yaaaay, Manage got updated!

I mentioned before that I have a To Do app that I really like, Manage.

Well, it got updated today, and some of the issues I mentioned in my post (and others I'd noticed but didn't mention) have been addressed! And the dev claims they'll be addressing some others in future updates!

Specifically from my previous post, the problem with moving items containing subtasks when rearranging a list has been fixed. Excellent. Also, for some reason it would only add new items to the beginning of a list, and now you can choose beginning or end.

In addition, they've added syncing with Toodledo, which I've never used but is apparently a very popular To Do website, as well as themes if you don't like their basic brown leather design. They are also working on improving the writing (which is functional but not as smooth as it could be) and making more items writable, such as the notes for different tasks and also subtasks (I think... specifically it says "fully scribbled task lists," which I assume/hope means scribbling subtasks since this is the only part of the list you have to type now).

If you want to write instead of type your To Dos, go spend the $2 on this app right now! With devs this responsive, I'm sure it will go from great to stellar in no time.

Need a good calendar app

So, I really don't like the calendar that comes standard with the iPad. It just never behaves the way I expect it to - I think swiping will change the month.... Nope! I try to enter a new event by tapping the start time... Nope! I'm sure I could get used to it eventually, but I'd rather find something I like better.

Unfortunately, what appears to be the best contender doesn't actually exist yet. Someone on the MacRumors forums (where I get most of my iPad advice) pointed me to an iPhone app called Week Calendar. The devs, Utilitap, are working on an iPad version right now. They've been posting updates and screenshots on their twitter feed, and it looks like exactly what I want - basically iCal for the iPad, which for some reason the built-in calendar isn't at all.

But I can't have that yet, and they don't even seem to have an estimated date for it. In fact, there is no mention of iPad anywhere on their site or blog - you'd never know it was being developed if you didn't check their twitter. Which to me suggests it might still be a while and they don't want to get people's hopes up. :(

Another one suggested to me is Cozi, a family calendar with an online version that links to the mobile versions. There is also an ad-supported free version that I downloaded to check out. So far, I am not impressed. It doesn't really have either a monthly or a good daily view - it seems you're always stuck in a week-or-so-ish view that just shows as many appointments for as many days as it can fit vertically on the screen. Eh. Not impressed.

One that I have not yet tried is CalenGoo, which is made (AFAICT) to look like, act like, and sync with Google Calendars. Which probably means it's good, but I don't use google calendars so I'm not really prepared to drop $7 on it to try it out. Maybe I'll try google calendars first and give it a shot if Week Calendar takes too long.

Further calendar suggestions are more than welcome! Of course, I have a To Do app (Manage) that I am quite happy with, so integrated to do functionality is not really needed, but I know that some to do apps do have a good calendar so I'd be willing to consider them - as long as they're worth the purchase price for just the calendar even if I don't use the to dos!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad