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.

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.

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.

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!

Unimpressed with Google+ on the iPad

I can't wait to see what the G+ iPad app (supposedly just waiting for Apple's approval) looks like - because so far I am far from impressed with my browser experience.

The "mobile" version is ugly and clunky like most mobile websites, and also like most mobile versions, totally unnecessary given the ipad's screen real estate. Worse, it's hard to use - while the desktop version turns adding people to circles almost into a game, on mobile you have to edit each person's circles individually. Slow and tedious. There also does not seem to be any way to edit your profile on mobile.

Luckily, there is a link at the bottom to switch to desktop mode - unfortunately, there is no link back. Which is a pain because although desktop looks nicer and is better for many things, it won't let me type comments or posts! Plus, scrolling (two-fingered) on the circles screen is very awkward and difficult to achieve without accidentally selecting someone.

Overall, neither site works great on the iPad, and adding people to circles is particularly annoying no matter what. I sincerely hope that they show a better understanding of the affordances and constraints of the iPad UI in the design of their app - I'm worried that it will simply be a standalone version of the mobile site, as so many websites' unnecessary apps are.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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

Pocket Frogs

It would be downright irresponsible of me to talk about the iPad without talking about the one app that uses half its battery life right now:



Pocket Frogs.

To my surprise, my husband, who rolls his eyes at the mere fact that I own an iPad, is possibly more addicted to the game than I am. Above is an actual screenshot of our nursery, where I am letting some serpentis babies grow up to sell for a tidy profit.

It's just a simple collecting-and-breeding game. I've never played a pokemon game, but I assume it's kinda like that but without battles (especially given that the name is clearly a reference to pokemon's pocket monsters). You could just breed what you like, or there is a list of over 200 awards to serve as your goals to guide your play. Being the anal sorts that we are, my husband and I are going for these goals.

(Psst- by the way, this game is FREE!)

My frogs:



One annoyance, which you might have noticed in these screenshots, is that the game only runs in portrait mode. It does not rotate when you rotate your iPad. WTF?

The main minigame involves jumping around a pond to catch flies, find new frogs to breed into your collection, and find presents. This game seems a lot easier until you a) try to grow a baby frog, whose tiny size makes it harder to catch anything, into a adult via fly-eating and b) realize that only the largest (and fastest) flies are worth XP. At first it's nice that you can speed up a frog's maturation by catching flies, but now I'm at the point where one fly per minute (approx, other than large flies) + a frog that takes 10+ hours to mature + the difficulty of fly-catching with a tiny baby frog leads to an annoyingly long time tapping lily pads in that pond. So more and more I'm just letting the babies sit there and grow on their own - which, with limited habitat space, slows things down a lot. But that's probably a good thing, because it also means I can't sit there and play with the frogs for hours on end!

Now, endless fly-catching isn't the only way to speed things up. There are potions to grow your frogs and stamps to make items in the mail arrive faster. Potions are much more useful than stamps, IMO, and accordingly are harder to come by. Of course, if you're the type to spend real money in-game, you can buy packs of potions or stamps (as well as other useful goodies) in the in-app store. Clearly NimbleBit is taking the Zynga route to game profitability - get people addicted to the free games, sell them bits and baubles to make the drug stronger. :)

There are also racing and puzzle minigames, but I haven't been too interested in these so far. The main attraction really is setting and meeting those breeding goals, along with finding the occasional particularly pretty frog to keep in your collection just for fun rather than for strategic purposes.

If you like collecting sorts of games, and like FREE apps, this is a must-have.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Manage (To Do app)

One of the thing I miss the most about my old-school Palm iiix (and I really miss that old thing) was my to do/list app. (Can we call Palm OS apps apps? We didn't call them that back in the day, but same diff, right?) The combo of Graffiti (miss it so much!) and nested lists was everything I've ever wanted.

So when I got my iPad, finding the perfect to do app was a high priority. I wouldn't say I've found perfection, but Manage (by Kerofrog) manages a few important features without being loaded up with things I won't use.

Pros:

- Stylus input!!! This is the biggie that, as far as I have seen, is unique to Manage. By hitting the "scribble" button rather than the usual "add task" button, you can write in a task with your stylus. Similar to many of the note taking apps, you get a large space to write in that then gets shrunken down to a normal writing size. You can also edit a written task later. You can also write on typed tasks and type on written tasks.
- Nested subtasks. A lot of to do apps offer this now, but not all.
- Easy to reorder tasks in a list, either according to priority or due date, or manually (unless there are subtasks). You can also move tasks between lists easily.
- Simple and nice-looking interface, no integrated calendar or extra features that are centered around GTD or any other specific organizational system. This may not be a pro to you, but I just want my to do list to be a to do list. I'm not looking for a whole organizational system.
- I haven't used these features yet, but there are tags as well as the ability to set repeating tasks. I'm guessing I will appreciate these as I use the app more.

Cons/Wishlist:

- Only one layer of subtasks. I like to break things down, I want sub-sub and sub-sub-subtasks!
- There is some kind of bug when it comes to manually rearranging lists that have subtasks. You can't manually move tasks that do have subtasks, and while you can rearrange subtasks under a task, whether or not you can move the subtask to another task depends on what order things are currently in. This is clearly broken.
- While you can move tasks between lists, you can't copy them. This would be nice for using a bigger list to populate a smaller list.
- You can only type in subtasks, not write in. If you're writing a list, it's a bit annoying to have to switch between typing and writing constantly.
- One other feature I'd like to see is a way of organizing lists themselves, whether into folders, with tags, etc etc. (Currently tags only apply to tasks, not entire lists.)

Hopefully these issues (especially the second, which is clearly buggy and not just a missing feature) will be addressed in a future update- but honestly, the app in its current form was well worth the $2 (just went up to $3 but I still recommend it at that price) for me and I'd gladly pay another $2 for an update that addresses all of this.

According to the developer's blog, an update should be out soon that allows syncing/backup to ToodleDo - which I have never used but might give a try as a backup source. Also themes, for those who don't like the current brown leather look. It's odd, I hate that look on the built-in iPad calendar but like it just fine here. The dev looks eager for input, so hopefully that means that remaining issues will be addressed in future updates.

Overall, this is an A- app that could be A+ with just a few tweaks. If you know of a to do app that you think beats it - particularly that takes stylus input and not just typing - please let me know!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

BlogPress

Just downloaded BlogPress, a $3 app for posting on blogs. I was choosing between this and Blogger Plus, but BlogPress's interface looked nicer and it had a lot more reviews, even though it was a dollar more. One minor annoyance was that although I have three Blogspot blogs all tied to one Google account, I had to log into that account three separate times to add each of them. Well, at least that should be a one-time issue.

Other than that it seems to be working nicely enough. Although I prefer to use a plaintext editor and enter HTML by hand as I type, the hard-to-reach < and > on the iPad keyboard make me appreciate BlogPress's button to insert common tags.

Let's see what happens when I have it insert a photo from my camera:




That is Valentine, one of my two bassets.

So let's post this and see if it works!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad