GPush is the first app for the iPhone that will send you a push notification any time you get a new message in your Gmail inbox.  It’s a fairly simple app that tackles a fairly simple problem, and it works.  After a simple username and password set up, you’ll receive a push notification whenever a new message pops into your Gmail account.  The push notification is similar to any text message you might receive.

One of our earlier complaints about the app, and one which we intended to focus on here was the inability to access your new mail directly from the notification.  This was addressed in a recently released update to the app, and we couldn’t be happier.  Now when you receive a new push, whether you’re in a application or not, you’ll be given the option to view the email or close the push notification.  If you choose to view the email you’ll be kicked out of your current application and taken to GPush.  Once there, GPush will take you to the new Gmail tab where it loads up a mobile-friendly version of your Gmail inbox that’s identical to the one seen in the Google Mobile App.

This new view feature is a great addition and well appreciated, but that doesn’t mean it’s not without flaws.  Clicking view only brings you to your inbox, not the email itself.  For folks like myself who much prefer using the iPhone’s built-in Mail app, having to use the web-based Gmail mobile feels a little too slow and clunky.  And the view option doesn’t work in every circumstance — if your device receives a push notification in standby you won’t have the option to view or close.  Instead sometimes you’ll be forced to open GPush the next time you unlock your device, and sometimes you won’t.  It’s flaky and inconsistent from the standby state, which is a fairly significant stumbling block when it comes to using the feature properly.

There are other annoyances with the app as well.  Many folks have multiple Gmail addresses for business, personal, etc.. but GPush only allows for one account.  And speaking of Gmail, why only the one client?  Sure Gmail is the biggest freemail provider out there, but does that mean users of Yahoo, Hotmail and Live need to be left out in the cold?  Or how about server based emails?  I happen to use several addresses, both Gmail and otherwise, and would have been delighted to have an app that could cater to all my push notification needs.

Despite our nitpicky complaints, GPush sets out with one thing in mind and it does that one thing incredibly well — it keeps me from bringing up my inbox every 5 minutes.  If it can accomplish that, it can probably accomplish anything.

GPush is available from Tiverias Apps on the iTunes AppStore for $1.99.

The point of Flickery is to move all of the functionality of Flickr to your desktop. So, of course, you can upload photos with it. All you do is go to the Upload item in the sidebar, and either drag some photos onto the window, or use the Make Screenshot button to create and upload a screenshot. You can also click the Open button to choose some files to upload. These can be either pictures or videos. But, to make things even simpler, you can record a movie to upload directly from Flickery. Once you have chosen some images and/or videos, you can then add titles, descriptions and tags to them. However, from this screen, you can’t choose what photoset it will go into when uploaded.

Once a picture or video has been uploaded, you can still edit its information just by clicking Edit Info. To add a photo to a photoset, you just have to click the Add to Set button, and then choose one or more photosets. However, the sets it is already in don’t appeared as checked (in the window that pops up), so you can’t really tell if it’s already in one. This also makes it hard to delete it from a photoset, because you can’t uncheck the box. You can also show comments, tags and descriptions of anyones photos by clicking the Show Details button when a photo is selected. I really like the crumpled paper look of this screen, but it really doesn’t match the rest of the UI, so it seems a little awkward. To view a larger size of an image, you just double click on it. Or, you can click the Fullscreen button to view the image in fullscreen.

Flickery also supports easy downloading of any picture or video. If you’ve ever browsed on Flickr.com, you know it’s always annoying to download an image or video. But Flickery makes it just the click of a button away. You just select an image or video, and hit Download. A downloads window will then appear, allowing you to manage multiple downloads. Along with this, you can also add any photo to your iPhone library (not Aperture though). You just click the Add to iPhoto library. I’m not sure why you’d want to add someone else’s image to your library, but you can.

Like Flickr.com, Flickery allows you to Explore. Exploring is just a cool way to find all images that were taken on a certain day. You can also perform and save searches right in Flickery, which is really cool. You can also see all of your contacts and their photostreams by just clicking on their name in the sidebar. However, you cannot manage contacts directly from Flickery. I assume this is an issue with the Flickr API, and not the app though.

Flickery is a great desktop version of Flickr.com. It has almost all the features the Website has and a couple extra. You can buy it for about $20, and download a 15-day free trial from their site. Anyone who uses Flickr frequently, or who wants a better image search engine should definitely try out Flickery.

TwitPic for the iPhone lets you log in to your twitpic account, upload any photo stored on your device, comment on it and tweet it…  and that’s it.  Essentially TwitPic is a twitter client for twitpic photos only.  In a world where Twitter clients offered zero photo functionality, this would be a godsend.  But that’s not the world we live in.  In fact, most iPhone Twitter clients not only offer image uploading features but allow you to pick from a list of hosts including twitpic.

The developers behind this app couldn’t have been oblivious to this fact, and yet their design decisions suggest just that very thing.  Adding in twitpic specific features such as browsing your photo history or the photo history of other users would have added something fresh and new here, but such features are conspicuously absent.  Going one step further they could have added in features that have been glaringly omitted from the site like a search functionality, but again, this app functions as little more than the image uploader you already have in a client.

Even as an image uploader, it’s far from perfect.  Once you enter the portion of the process where you “comment” on your photo, giving the tweet text, you’re officially locked in.  If, say, you change your mind at the last minute and decide you’d rather not post the image for whatever reason (logged into the wrong acct, don’t want to embarrass your wife, etc..), tough beans.  There’s no way to cancel at that point.  Even worse?  Logging out of the app will then force your pic to post when you boot it back up.

If you’re looking for a quick way to pop your photos on to Twitter without booting up your Twitter client for whatever reason, this is definitely going to be a handy little tool.  The problem?  I can’t imagine anyone who that situation might apply to.  It’s like entering the word processor market and offering a fantastic app for backspacing.  No matter how good it is, it doesn’t matter — every app already does that.  And this app?  It’s a sub-par backspacer at best.

Considering there are so many options that already exist for uploading photos to twitpic, this app feels completely edundant.  Had they added in some basic features like the ability to browse your twitpic acct or search through the photos of others, they may have had something worth checking out.  As it stands though, TwitPic for the iPhone offers a tiny set of features that you’ll already find built into the vast majority of Twitter clients in the App Store.

TwitPic is available for free on the iTunes App Store.

Facebook and Instapaper Integration: One of the biggest problems Shovel faces with the current lack of a fully-featured Digg API (coming soon!) is how difficult it is to bookmark stories for reading later and how tough it can be to share a good story with friends.

With the current version of Shovel you can email a story to yourself or a others, but that’s hardly a convenient solution.  Shovel 3.0 will introduce Facebook integration thereby allowing you to post stories to your wall for all of your friends to enjoy.  And if you want to simply bookmark something for future reading and not share it with the rest of the world?  Shovel 3.0 will also integrate with Instapaper, a fantastic web-based app that allows you to quickly shove web pages into a “I’ll read it later” file.  Instapaper also offers a free iPhone app (as well as a paid Pro version) that will let you access your temporary bookmark list on the go.

Built-in Email: Prior to the release of iPhone OS 3.0 it was incredibly difficult to compose an email in an app without simply triggering the Mail app, which in turn would close the program you were using.  Now that 3.0 is here, Shovel is more than happy to adapt with the times.  This means no more exiting and re-opening every time you choose to use the e-mail option.

Improved web browser: Again, Shovel 3.0 is all about keeping up with the Joneses.  New features introduced in OS 3.0 didn’t just automatically appear in third-party applications, which means that the current version of the Shovel browser (Shovel doesn’t simply open Safari for a host of navigation-friendly reasons) is lacking new features like cut and paste.  Except Shovel 3.0 to rectify that.

Story Search: A feature suspiciously missing from previous versions, story search will take Shovel from an app that acts as a browsable diggtionary to a full fledged search for stories of interest.

The One Way Mirror: You still can’t digg stories.  You can’t comment.  You can’t submit.  All of these things are coming just as soon as Digg releases their new API.  But what about what what other Diggers are doing?  All of the data on users in available in the current API, and Scott saw this as an opportunity to bring a touch of the social experience to the current platform;

“It’s always interesting to see where a person is coming from, and Digg comments are no exception.  By clicking on a person’s username you are taken to a profile view where you can browse their previous comments and get a feel for how they feel about various other topics.”

Again, until the new API is released this is entirely a way one street.  It’s not unlike engaging in a conversation as a mute.  You can hear what everyone else is saying, but you can’t make a peep of your own.

The Sticking Point: All of these improvements will come at a cost – literally.  Shovel has been available as a free app since it’s original release, but as it rolls into 3.0 users will have to choose between a free version and a new paid version.  While the free version will feature a number of basic enhancements over it’s 2.0 predecessor (e-mail, browser, and story search improvements) the two biggest additions, Facebook and Instapaper integration, will be exclusive to the paid app.  A newly introduced landscape mode will also be exclusive to the Pro version.

While no price has been announced, we should find out soon enough as the Pro version is expected to hit the App Store in the next few weeks.  The free version of 3.0 will be following at a slightly later date.  User’s of the current version should experience a seamless transition from one free version to the other once the update is released.

How will it all pan out?  Make sure to check back here for our review once it becomes available.  In the mean time, be sure to check out the current free version of Shovel.

We reached out to Sprikit Software’s Scott Fitzhugh, developer of the iPhone app Shovel, for comment.

As a developer you’ve  been fairly vocal about wanting Digg to open up to third-party applications such as yours.  Will the introduction of this new API mean that users will be able to login, vote, and comment from Shovel?

YES!  As a programer, one of the most difficult things to accept is that something simply “can’t be done.”  We’ve been hard at work on the newest version of the Shovel and the foundation is there.  I can say without hesitation that as soon as Digg makes these features available, they will be featured front and center in Shovel.

Has Digg directly reached out to your or other notable developers in the Digg marketplace to encourage adoption of this API?

Digg has been very responsive to thoughts and suggestions about the new API.  There’s no release date yet so they haven’t quite moved on to that phase of things, but it’s nice to know that someone is listening.

Do you have any concern that this may somehow lead to Digg developing their own iPhone app?  Does the release of this API make that possibility more or less likely in your eyes?

Yes and no.  We’ve definitely had this discussion.  But I get the feeling that Digg, in general, prefers web-apps over native apps.   With or without their public API, I suspect if they wanted to be in the iPhone app business they would have done so already.

Digg has clearly lagged behind other social networks in terms of third-party involvement.  Why is this?

One word.  Spam.  The Digg community hates it with a fiery passion that could consume a thousand suns, and the developers there have gone to great lengths to eradicate it.  Creating an API that allows for programatic submission of comments, stories, and Diggs is likely to result in bots that automatically submit mass amounts of advertising.   I’m sure they resisted the move as long as possible for this reason.

With no anticipated release date available for Digg’s new API, what can we expect to see from Shovel in the near future?

Shovel 3.0 is due out sometime in the next month (assuming the app review process goes smoothly) and will come in both free and pro flavors.  It’s been recoded from the ground up, includes a story search, Instapaper integration, Facebook integration, has built-in email, a much more full-featured built-in browser, and is far and away a MUCH more rich experience than the current version of Shovel.  We’re really excited about it.  The free version will of course be a free (seamless) update for our existing users.

Interested in checking out what Shovel has to offer?  Click here to download ver 2.0.1 absolutely free of charge.

1Password is an incredible application. Once installed, it automatically installs a plug-in into every browser. Any time a new password is entered, it gives you the option of saving it in 1Password. This seems similar to the password managers built in to many browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, until you realize that the passwords saved are available from any browser. Switching back and forth between multiple browsers, a common occurrence especially when testing out new websites that may not be complete, is made super easy with 1Password.

The application stores all passwords, as well as credit card information, license codes for software, pretty much anything that a user might need but would prefer to keep hidden. This is all accessible through an easy to use interface (primarily the aforementioned browser plug-ins), once a master password is entered. This password only has to be entered once per session, and then a keyboard shortcut is used after that to enter any password or login. 1Password gives you the option of creating new, super-secure passwords for any new web services that would be impossible to remember, but because of how the program works, it is not necessary to remember them.

One of the best things about 1Password is how easy it is, once a password is saved, to put it into a form. The user simply has to press a keyboard shortcut, and it automatically enters the login info into the provided boxes. This is not only easier than remembering your various usernames and passwords, it is also incredibly fast. 1Password also has the option of auto-submitting the information, so you don’t even have to click a button. This is true not only for login information, but also for billing addresses, credit card numbers, and so on.

1Password is not a perfect app. There were a few sites (although not the majority) that it didn’t notice when I was entering in a new password, and so didn’t take it up into its memory. Also, it is extremely difficult to enter a new login from the application itself, rather than from one of your browsers. Oddly, one of the reasons it is so difficult is that the program keeps reminding you that it is easier from a browser. 1Password consistently warns you about things that may compromise your security (using Apple’s built-in keychain software instead of the Agile Keychain), which is helpful, but can get annoying when it stops you from doing something you know you want to do.

The user interface of the application itself could be more aesthetic, like AllSecure’s, for example (a similar program). But, since most interaction is done through a browser, this is only a minor detail. Another issue I had, which is more an issue of usage than the actual program, is the suggested password. If a generated password, 16 random characters long, is used for an online banking site, that is fine when it is being accessed from the user’s computer, but it is impossible to get in from another computer, since the user does not actually know the password.

However, despite these flaws, 1Password is a great tool to streamline the internet—especially shopping and banking. It is available for $39.95 (with a money-back guarantee) from the Agile Web Solutions website.

The Twitter Phenomenon – some call it the death of journalism, some call it the rebirth of useful communication. No matter your feelings on Twitter, it’s likely that you have an account, or will get one soon enough.

Now when tweeting (verb: the act of updating your twitter) you have many options. The robust Twitter API allows you to post from just about anywhere with any internet or mobile device. There are hundreds of Twitter clients for you to choose from! Today we’ll go through the many different clients you can holster in your Twitter Toolbelt!

The AIR Clients:

AdobeAIR, for those of you that don’t know, is a runtime environment developed by Adobe for building powerful Internet applications that can be deployed as desktop applications. (They’re mainly composed of Flash, HTML, Javascript, and AJAX). Many Twitter apps have been developed in the AIR environment, making them all cross-platform, but with drawbacks. If you’re a Mac person, and you like your standard OS X Application Interface, then be warned. The AIR apps are great, but may not be right for you. Personally, I’ve tried many of them, but found that they reacted like web apps, when I wanted them to react like desktop applications. This is not to say they’re bad apps! Many are fantastic, but personally I don’t want them on my desktop.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is arguably the most popular AIR client, with an attractive dark, multi-column interface and integration with tons of popular URL shortening services as well as TwitPic and YFrog. TweetDeck also taps into the Facebook API to allow you to update Twitter and Facebook Status Updates. The app allows users to link more than one Twitter Account, something not seen in all clients.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desktop almost seems like a cousin to TweetDeck, but is a little bit less cluttered. Seesmic also takes the multi-column approach, but looses the icon-only-based navigation. The app has a great sidebar to organize your Tweets (and yes, Facebook integration in this one too), and just has a great user experience in general. I was impressed once again to see all of the external Twitter services such as URL shortening, photo uploading, and a handy “shrink text” feature to help you squeeze the most into of your Tweets.

Tweetr

Tweetr is about as straight up as you can get with a Twitter client. Its no-nonsense, “tell it like it is” layout works quite well for beginning tweeters. It shows tweets from people you’re following, your own tweets, @mentions, and direct messages all in the same list. Now if you follow hundreds of people and get thousands of @mentions a day… might not be the best app for you, but for a beginner Tweetr is great. It offers a number of excellent features such as URL shortening, uploading images right from your Webcam, and a basic layout.

The iPhone Clients:

Of course, “there’s an app for that.” There is a plethora of Twitter clients of the iPhone, and quite frankly it’s hard to find a bad one! The iPhone seems to have been built for Tweeting, it’s just so natural on the device. A few apps lack features in one or two areas, lag, or a just a bit ugly, but all-in-all the majorty of them are great. The following are considered some of the best:

Tweetie

Tweetie is an excellent app with a number of  features. Landscape keyboard, light-weight, and a well organized user interface make Tweetie stand out from the crowd. With support for multiple accounts, bit.ly and TwitPic integration, and a native iPhone feel, Tweetie is easily worth the $2.99 price tag, and is my favorite paid iPhone client.

Developer Screenshot

Twitterfon

Twiterfon is another great client, but it comes for the best price: $0. Twitterfon is the only free client on our list, and for good reason. Even though it’s sibling Twitterfon Pro offers a ton of great features, for the thrift shopper at the App Store, this is the best buy. It’s just a solid client, with features like conversation view, and a similar interface to Tweetie. Though freebie downloader beware: Twitterfon is ad-supported. It’s really not to invasive, but it’s kind of a pain. I’m personally too cheap to drop $4.99 on Twitterfon Pro, when I can get a great client like Tweetie for $2.99 with almost all of the same features. If you’re looking to spend nothing, and get almost all of the great features you’d expect in a paid app: look at Twitterfon.

Developer Screenshot

Twittelator Pro

Twittelator Pro is the heavy-weight in this category. This is for the Power Tweeter! You’ll be amazed at how many features are packed into this mobile app, you might even feel claustrophobic. It’s an incredible app, but it quite frankly it has more features than anyone will honestly ever need. It goes into a depth that is subterranean, but if you’re the kind of person that wants to put dingbats and Greek symbols into your tweets: this is your app. As seems to be quite common with these iPhone apps, they all seem to have agreed on the same basic interface to work from, so using one is like using another, only the features and colors vary.

Developer Screenshot

The OS X Native Clients:

These are by far my favorite type of Twitter apps! There’s nothing like a good ol’ native application in OS X. There are a number of advantages to a native client including Growl notifications, noticeable speed differences, interface responsiveness, quicker launch times… you get my point. Many of these are in their infancy, in early beta’s lacking a few of the features of the AIR clients, but they feel much studier.

Nambu

Nambu is my personal client of choice. It does exactly what you hope a Twitter client would do. It has a great sidebar for sorting tweets, it has multiple view modes, it has conversation view, it has that Mac OS X standard search in the upper-right corner, it has integration with tr.im and pic.im, and it just works. It can collapse itself into a Tweetr-esque interface, then sidebar view, or a TweetDeck-esque layout for those interested in seeing 3-4 columns of content. Best of all: it’s native. It feels comfortable, intuitive, and sturdy. It’s still in beta, but coming soon: Facebook support! AIR clients: meet your closest competitor.

Lounge

Lounge is a promising client, and a great one for people who like color coding. Lounge has a handsome OS X interface with cutesy color coded icons and tweets to help you distinguish all of the various details. My favorite feature of Lounge is how it handles TwitPic photos. If it sees a TwitPic link in a tweet, it loads a thumbnail of that photo next to the tweet. It’s really nice to have the mystery taken out of “what is this a photo of?” when clicking through to a TwitPic. Lounge also features a great multi-account system with each switching in-between. Another unique feature of Lounge is how it displays your followers/following feeds as mini-profiles.

Twitterpod

Twitterpod is an enigma. I should preface this by saying I strongly discourage readers from downloading this app. In all honesty when I first launched this app, I wondered if the developer was tripping. Users are greeted with what would be a standard Twitter client design except for the psychedelic multi-colored header scrolling your subscribed tweets in a pretty trippy way (there are three views in this app, one being full on trippy tweet scrolling). The top navigation of the client uses icons that are much too small, and require screen zoom to analyze their purpose. I can’t help but wondering if this is a joke of some kind: it’s that bad. There’s nothing particularly useful about the client. I only throw it into this mix as a warning, and because there are only 3 native OS X Twitter clients available. The other two are so innovative and unique from their AIR competitors, that I feel they make up for this pointless little… odd app.

Other Methods of Tweeting:

SMS

For those of you who have yet to convert to the iPhone, or prefer a different device there’s always tweeting by text message. Sign up on Twitter.com with your mobile number and start tweeting your heart away to shortcode: 40404. Also, you can subscribe to get mobile SMS updates when you subscribe to other Tweeters.

Blackberry

TwitterBerry is a popular app for RIM Blackberry devices. I haven’t used it personally, but I’ve heard it’s a decent client from a number of people.

μTorrent sports a handsome native cocoa interface

Users are greeted with a somewhat-vacant main window when they load .torrent files, but a well organized one. Windows users who have used μTorrent on XP or Vista will recognize the interface, but miss a few of the more robust features available for the Windows client. One major feature of this app that sets it apart from some of its other Mac competitors is its ability to load multiple torrents and manage them well (I realize that Transmission does this, but when downloading 2 or more files it gets difficult to manage).

I frequently download new Linux ISOs when they’re first released, ranging from 700mb to 2gb. Now getting the entire thing down can be a game of cat and mouse with the seeding ratio and upload/download limits, but μTorrent handles the connections quite nicely. Many users (including myself) have noticed significant down speed increases with the new μTorrent client. I was a Transmission user for a few years, but even when configured identically downloading the same torrent there’s no question that μTorrent is faster.

The preferences panel is well organized and gives users control
over all aspects of their Torrent experience

The app is great for downloading torrents and configuring network settings and preferences, but it doesn’t go much further than that. There is a search that launches to Google for searching, and some control of bandwidth priority, but overall in feature-set the client is rather light. It is quite quick, I found launching and quitting significantly faster than Transmission. All in all it’s a great client, but I found myself missing the RSS torrent download features available to Windows users. I used to be able to let μTorrent stay on top of the latest Ubuntu releases, but now I have to track down a number of different distributions from different pages. I hoping in future releases more of these features are integrated, but in all fairness the app is still in beta. Transmission users, trust me: it’s worth the switch. For now it functions as a solid client, just bare of some of the creature comforts that come with other apps.

Star Walk shows you all its information based on the time of day and your location. Using Apple’s location services, you must only allow it to find your current location, and everything else is automatic. If you would like to change the time of day you’re looking at, simply click on the Clock icon (in the upper-right corner) and you can change it. To navigate around the map, you just use pinching and dragging. There are even four markers for North, East, South and West so you know exactly where to look for a specific constellation. There is also a red line for the horizon making it, again, even easier to see where something is.

Star Walk is cool enough with just the ability to look around a virtual map. But, it also adds some other features. When you press on a constellation name (in the virtual sky), you will see a white drawing of it with the stars. This feature is great for showing to kids (and for helping one find the constellation). While the name is still selected, if you hit the “i” button, you will get more information. A “W” button will also appear allowing you to see a Wikipedia article on it.

Constellations are not the only things Star Walk knows. If you click on any star or planet on the screen, you can also hit the “i” button and get more information.

What I would say is one of the most important features that Star Walk carries is its search. If you hit the search button (lower-left corner), you can search for stars, constellations, planets and messier. If the object is visible to you, its name will be in white, if not, they name will be grayed out. When you click on one, it will take you there on the map. This makes it so easy to find what you want.

Star Walk also includes some nice preferences. The first one is night mode, which basically turns everything into a red-ish color. There is also the ability to turn of the pictures of constellations and sounds. And finally, you can adjust the brightness of stars, planets, etc. All of these can be accessed from the button in the lower-right corner.

Star Walk costs $4.99 in the App Store and is the International Year of Astronomy 2009’s official product. It is extremely intuitive and also provides many features for amateurs and even pros. Anyone who likes watching the stars (and has an iPhone or iPod Touch) needs this app.

Songbird’s interface look familiar? A ghost from iTunes Past?

The most interesting thing about Songbird is the open-source code it’s built off of: Firefox. That’s right! The folks over at Pioneers for the Inevitable have built the entire thing on top of Mozilla’s popular browser, which brings me to my biggest complaint: my TI-84 graphic calculator could load my music library faster! Songbird’s Achilles heel seems to be it’s speed. It’s like trying to play streaming video on dial-up. The slow start times and rendering speeds that seem to plague the Mac version of Firefox get even worse in Songbird. I’m relatively impatient when it comes to app responsiveness and loading, but others I’ve spoken to agree: Songbird can be a bit of a clunker.

Songbird integrates Last.fm in a very classy way

Aside from my quips about speed, Songbird can be fun to use. Through extensions and themes (called “Feathers”), it has a number of fantastic features, and room for expansion. iPod support, Last.FM integration, QuickTime FairPlay integration, as well as the benefits of a built-in tabbed-browser (which I’m using right now to post this review). I know I was harsh on the developers earlier for using Firefox because of the speed, but it’s also my biggest compliment; browsing the web with your music elegantly placed in the same window is quite nice. Besides, the built-in web browser allows for easy integration of other Mp3 stores, and easy searching for legal music downloads on the web.

Firefox users will be met with a familiar preferences panel

Other features such as a Mini-Player, the ability to re-order your music window panes, song ratings, easy library search, and organizing features puts Songbird in contention with iTunes. It really is an intuitive program, and such an easy switch from iTunes, that you may not notice the difference (apart from the speed of course). Songbird will even import your iTunes library complete with music, playlists, and playcounts. If there isn’t a feature available built into Songbird check out their add-on’s page, where a number of incredibly useful plugins are available for download.

I do have one last issue to take with Songbird, and it’s video. When I imported my iTunes library, it brought in all of my video podcasts and integrated them into my music library. Songbird doesn’t support video playback, but will play the audio in a video. Putting my library on shuffle, I found it incredibly annoying to have to constantly stop and delete video from the library. Plus because I had Last.fm scrobbling enabled, I had to dig through my recent plays and pull them out. If the software isn’t going to support video, it shouldn’t allow it to import into the library.

All in all, Songbird makes a fantastic attempt at an iTunes replacement, but a number of short comings make it impossible for me to jump ship. If you can handle the slightly sluggish interface and you’re looking for an alternative to iTunes with support for other music stores, and iPod support; Songbird might just be your match.

The purpose of Prizmo is to scan without a scanner. So, you can scan anywhere (so long as you have a digital camera [no, a film camera will not work]), on-the-go, at anytime. And, it only takes about three steps: Take the picture, open Prizmo and load the picture, and select the part of the picture you want and do a little bit of tweaking.

When you open Prizmo, you are presented with a nice animation telling you where to drop your image. But, there’s also a button that allows you to choose an image from a camera that’s connected to your computer or your iPhoto or Aperture library. Although Prizmo will accept most image types, I have had issues when feeding it RAW files, so you may want to convert to JPEG first (if you shoot in RAW).

As soon as you find your picture and drag it into Prizmo, you will so the editing window. This is where you will put the bounding box around the object you would like to ’scan.’ The bounding box gives you four points to put at the four corners of the thing you are scanning. If you’re trying to scan a triangle, or a five-and-more-sided-figure, then you’re out of luck. Here, you will also find options for crop, lens distortion and processing. The crop tool just allows you to choose a size to constrain to. Processing just gives you options for brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation.

Now for lens distortion. This can be a problem when trying to scan objects, because it, well…Distorts your images. Not many people will know how much to pull the distortion sliders, and Creaceed thought of that. They allow you to calibrate your camera, and even get data from other users’ calibrations. If you click the Search button, Prizmo will look through its online database for calibrations from people with the same camera (and lens for DSLRs). But, if it doesn’t find any, you can do it yourself. Just go to Tools>Calibrate Camera… (Command-K) and you will be presented with an assistant for calibrating your camera. Because no data was there for my camera and lens, I decided to do this. After following the directions and taking some pictures, it failed to recognize the checkered pattern on any of them. I was doing it in RAW at the time, so that could have been an issue. Then, though, I converted them to JPEGs and tried to add them, but they wouldn’t add. It seems there needs to be some fixing in the calibration.

Prizmo retails for $39.95, and you can download a free trial from the site. My results were great, despite not being able to calibrate for lens distortion, and it could definitely act as my only scanner. But, it really isn’t only a scanner, it can be used on anything. If you see a movie poster or an ad that you like, and would like to have documented, just take a picture, and Prizmo will help you with perspective, cropping and everything else.

Project Gutenberg contains over 28,000 free titles that you can access from your computer, and now your iPhone too. Eucalyptus is really just an app that allows you to download and then read books from Project Gutenberg. And it does this very well. You can look at the “Picks” or search by author or book. The Picks are good if you are looking for a very classic book, or just don’t know what you want to read. Once you have selected a book you would like to read, you just click Get Book, and a nice animation shows you that the book has gone to your downloads. The only possible improvement for downloading books would be the ability to browse by genre or alphabetically.

When Eucalyptus downloads a book, there are two parts: The actual downloading and the structure analyzing. The downloading is straightforward, and when it says, “analyzing structure…” it basically means that it is analyzing and converting the book to be read with Eucalyptus. There is even a two-part progress indicator to show you how much of each step has been completed. The longer the book, the longer this whole process takes, so be prepared to wait a few minutes for a long book.

Your library of books is sorted in two ways: By title and by author. The Authors tab allows you to see books by specific authors (and also just see what authors you have books by), and the Books tab allows you to see your books alphabetically. There’s not much more to it than that.

As if its huge library of books, and the ease of downloading weren’t enough, the reading experience is outstanding. There are three ways to go through the book: The slider, flipping pages and the “back” view. The slider allows you to traverse through the book very fast, and also shows you what chapter the new location will be in. Sliding between pages is my favorite. There is only one other app that even does page turning similar to Eucalyptus, and I must say Eucalyptus even puts that app (Classics) to shame with the animations. An app like Classics uses static images to flip from page to page, which creates a great animation. But, Eucalyptus seems to use a real 3D engine. The shadow changes based on where the page is, and the page will even wiggle if you drag back and forth very fast. I really love this part of the app. You can also use the arrows at the bottom to go from chapter to chapter (but not page by page).

Another way to get through the book is the “back” view. You can get to this by clicking the icon in the right of the top bar (when in a book). Here you can simply click on a chapter (or other section), and Eucalyptus will bring you there. It also shows you the current chapter (or section). This basically brings a table of contents to the book, that is accessible without having to flip to the beginning of it.

Eucalyptus costs $9.99 in the App Store, and you can easily see the amount of polish and work put into it. It has become my favorite book reader instantly. And because of its huge library, you’ll always find a book to read. However, it is very expensive compared to other readers, but in some of those, you have to pay for books, or you only get a few. Anyone looking to read classic books on the iPhone must at least check out Eucalyptus. I might even say it is one of the most polished apps in the App Store.

The user interface is what separates TwitterFon from the rest of the class. When new tweets are downloaded it will auto scroll to the beginning of the new tweets and shade all new tweets in blue. I prefer the visual difference between old tweets and new tweets. Many of the other applications auto scroll down to the last read tweet but dont identify the new ones visually. If you follow many people, as i do, you see many tweets per day. Occasionally I’d like to go back to one that referenced a link to a web page. TwitterFon has the ability to mark a tweet as a favorite with a gold star which will allow you to quickly find it from the favorites screen at a later time.

Another feature that I use and find fascinating is the search screen. Of course one can search for words but by using the GPS in the iPhone you can search in a defined radius from your current location. This is a great way to find people and activities in your local area. There is a trends feed within search that will show you what is most talked about on twitter at that moment. The search screen could use some refining and is a little confusing. The trends button toggles to the profile button when clicking in the search field and using the GPS for a search could be a little clearer. Perhaps the developer is trying to pack too much into one screen. I would prefer a little more real estate to input the search and hide the search criteria when the search results appear. Overall the app is very solid and doesn’t crash, the user interface is attractive, and the application is free with a small banner ad. Its worth a try.

If you don’t have a remote, Hulu Desktop also allows control via keyboard and mouse. Another great feature is the ability to link it into your Hulu account, allowing you to access your que, subscriptions, and viewing history as well as change settings such as closed captioning and video quality.

Unfortunately the app requires an Intel Core Duo processor (at least 2.0 GHz), at least 2 GB RAM, and at least a 2 Mbps internet connection, so this leaves out some Mac users. During the beta period, Hulu plans to “plan to gather and incorporate user feedback to improve the service.” I think this desktop app is a great step forward for Hulu and with their willingness to incorporate user feedback, this app has a lot of potential. Hulu Desktop can be found on the Hulu Labs website. Look for a review soon!

When you start up LittleSnapper Touch you will see a large wheel. Simply spin this wheel to select the different options. You can choose to upload images from your library, your camera, or you can take a websnap. Unlike LittleSnapper for Mac, however, the websnap will only be of what is currently showing on your iPhone’s screen. You can also add and delete accounts and visit the QuickSnapper website from the main menu.

Once you have a picture to upload you can enter the title, rating, description, tags, and type. Then just choose an account and tap share. The image will be uploaded and you will have the option to share it in an email or on Twitter. If you choose to share it on Twitter it will open up the Twitter application on your phone (Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Twitterfon are currently supported) and have the link in a new tweet.

While LittleSnapper Touch is great for uploading images, there are a few issues with the application. Other than uploading images, it doesn’t do that much. There isn’t anyway to annotate your images and, as mentioned before, the websnaps do not capture the whole page (obviously due to the iPhone’s limitations).

If you are expecting a full version of LittleSnapper for Mac on your iPhone, this is not what you are looking for. If you want a simple application to upload pictures to QuickSnapper, however, this is just for you. LittleSnapper Touch is currently on iTunes for $2.99.

Tweetie’s UI is quite similar to other Twitter apps; showing tweets in a long list style form, but on the left side of the app is the sidebar. Here you can switch between accounts by clicking the account avatar, and switch between the timeline, mentions, messages, and search. Sections with new tweets will have a blue icon on them. In the timeline you have multiple options. You can double click a reply tweet to view the entire conversation, you can reply to tweets with a small icon in the top right of the tweet, and you can click on a user’s avatar to view their profile. From the profile page you can view their timeline, replies, favorites, and basic information. As you dig through the timeline the bar on the top of the screen shows you were you are, and you can click on it to go back to certain locations.

Tweetie’s direct messaging feature looks a lot like iChat. Messages are sorted based on who the conversation is with and how recent the latest message was. When you click on a name you will see what looks like the iChat speech bubbles displaying messages. You can click reply in the top right to send a direct message reply. Tweetie also has the ability to search tweets. Just click the search icon and type in what you want to find. You can also click on a word marked as a tag (#) in a tweet. The search pages automatically refreshes to show new tweets and you can open searches in a new window to keep them separate from Tweetie. If you click the magnifying glass in the search box you can view a list of popular trends.

Finally, posting tweets. Tweetie handles new tweets a bit differently than other Twitter clients. When you want to post a new tweet a new window will pop-up. This lets you tweet even when the Tweetie window is closed, and is a great way to avoid some distraction. You can post a new tweet by clicking the button in the bottom right corner or Tweetie, click the reply icon in tweets, or just hitting a quick hot-key. In this pop-up window you can also drag and drop images from Finder. Tweetie also has a bookmarklet to tweet a website that you are browsing. Tweetie uses command-enter to submit the tweet to avoid accidental tweeting.

Tweetie works great for most people, but it lacks some features others would love to have. There is currently no way to save searches or sort people into separate groups. There is also no way to delete tweets or set a time interval for auto refreshing. Tweetie runs in both the dock and menubar, which could be annoying for some users.

Tweetie is currently available from the atebits website. You can purchase a license for $14.95 until May 4 when the price will be raised to $19.95, but there is a free ad-supported version available.

The Iconfactory has recently released a teaser at their Twitterrific website showing us a preview of the next version of Twitterific for the iPhone.  Twitterrific was one of the original mac twitter applications out there, but really hasn’t been as full featured as a couple other competitors out there such as Tweetie.

From what we can tell, Tweeting will be completely different with a full pane dedicated towards submitting tweets in normal, @reply, and direct message form, as well as a new profile view displaying more information and quick access to tweet the currently viewed person.  It looks as if Twitterrific for the iPhone is getting a complete interface-lift.

Rumors from various sources have pinpointed the release date to a possible April 30th!  Check out the preview page at http://twitterrific.com/.

GV Mobile is one 3rd party app that aims to solve this problem.  Developer Sean Kovacs created the app to take over where the old GrandDialer left off.  GrandDialer was an app that allowed users to have GrandCentral phone them on a number of their choice, then connect the call to your intended recipient.  The service used VOIP so if you were using a landline, you’d accrue no long distance charges.  When the change was made to Google Voice, GrandDialer died.

Google, the sleeping giant?

So Kovacs created GV Mobile to fill this gap.  Before we look at the app, let’s get the big elephant in the room out of the way: won’t Google make their own app for this service?

Kovacs’ answer: That is a very good question. While Google does have a couple apps on the App Store, I don’t imagine them creating something specific to Google Voice or incorporating it into an existing app. I see them focusing more on the Google Voice service and web sites (normal and mobile). I’ve very competitive, so if Google or any developer wishes to create a similar app, they will have some stiff competition.

Fair enough, you’ve got to applaud that kind of can-do attitude.   This app was submitted to Apple’s App Store and eagerly waits for approval.   Now, on with the preview:

The app at work

Upon first glance, it would seem GV Mobile would be a carbon copy of GrandDialer: a keypad for telling Google Voice to phone you and then connect you to your party and a history of calls.  GV Mobile accesses the iPhone’s contacts just as GrandDialer did and replicates GrandDialer with equal functionality.

But there is more, way more.  GV Mobile goes beyond old functionality and takes advantage of Google Voice’s newest features.  You can SMS right from the app,  listen to voicemails left to you on Google Voice and you can change your Google Voice settings on the fly oh-so-easily.  The functionality is awesome.

The SMS feature is pretty great as it allows you to send SMS with absolutely no fee from Google or AT&T.  Simple click on the SMS tab at the bottom, type in a number or hit the “+” to access your contacts.  It couldn’t be much easier and your Google Voice number is displayed as the sender.  The only downsides are SMS’s sent to you are not accessed by the app; instead GV forwards them to your cell number, where you’ll pick up the charge.

Changing settings requires nothing more than a tap to change phone numbers to forward calls to numbers to call from, adding phones and changing log in info.  It is all very slick and well done.  Having this ability is quite handy when you are on the go.

More from the developer

Here is a bit from my Q&A with Kovacs:

I understand you’ll have two versions of the app.  What features add in to the $2.99?

Kovacs: You have the $2.99 version – the free version is a GrandDialer close – you have the keypad and settings.

In voicemail, Google Voice transcribes the messages and displays that info on their website in your inbox, do you plan to show the transcribed message if available?

Kovacs: I can’t discuss future plans at this time.

I’ve been playing with the Skype app, do you see Google creating an over WiFi skype-like app?  Is that something you would pursue?

Kovacs: See above comment.

And finally, what will background notifications do for GV Mobile in the 3.0 software?

Kovacs: I get this a lot – in order for me to setup some kind of background notification, I would need to create a program to run on a server that would monitor user accounts realtime, sending out notifications when they come in. I would need access to your account information – while it would be unknown to me, not sure how that would go over with people. This would be something Google would implement in some kind of app they make. Would cost me too much to run…maybe I could do this with a per month cost to offset the cost of the servers it would run on.

How does it work?

Simply put, doubleTwist is constantly updated with drivers and software designed to work with all of the latest gadgets and gear that stores all of your digital media assets.  Because of this, doubleTwist makes it as easy as plugging in your device, and dragging and dropping in your media files to and from your devices.

The Interface

DoubleTwist’s interface makes up a good part of it’s feature list.  DoubleTwist takes after a longtime design principal commonly found in iTunes and iPhoto.  In the right section of the window, you’ll find a sidebar filled with a list of sources where you’ll find your media content.  The sidebar is divided into four sections:  DoubleTwist “aka sharing information with doubleTwists’s own sharing service”, Library “used to access the media on your computer’s hard drive”, Devices “used to access your digital device’s content”, and Friends “which also works with DoubleTwist’s own sharing service”.

The right side of the app is where you view and interact with your content.  This side of the app changes based on what you have selected in the sidebar.  When viewing the “My Feed” section, you get at consecutive list filled with notifications.  Inside of these notifications are thumbnails of pictures, movies, and music which you can view at anytime.

When looking at any of the the Library sections, the right area of the app shows a simple browser interface designed for the one purpose of finding your media, and dragging it onto your device.

Which brings us to the Device section.  Clicking on the device itself shows a progress bar depicting how much storage space you have available.

PSP and Video!

One thing everyone always gripes about is video conversion.  Well gripe no more because doubleTwist automatically converts your video for you no matter what device you are using.  This is a big plus for PSP users.  Just drag in the video, and doubleTwist does the rest.  Thumbnail and all!

Sharing Online

Besides integrating with your digital devices, DoubleTwist also integrates with FaceBook, Flickr, and YouTube allowing you to share your captured media online.

DoubleTwist also has a sharing service built in.  This allows you to easily share your media with all of your friends.  When you receive a photo, video, or audio file, doubleTwist will automatically update your feed.

Final Thoughts

DoubleTwist is still very new, meaning the compatible device list is a little sparse however, because doubleTwist is an ongoing project, the developers are hard at work making more and more devices compatible.

In terms of performance, doubleTwist does not disappoint.  Depending on how much memory you have as well as the speed of your Intel processor, the time it takes to transfer and convert video will vary, however testing on a 2nd gen aluminum iMac I found that doubleTwist is quite fast and will not disappoint.

DoubleTwist is available for the Mac (Leopard only) and PC at http://www.doubletwist.com/ for the unbeatable price of free.

You may know dashcode to be a really useful tool to create dashboard widgets – but what are dashboard widgets but miniature web pages.  I’ve chosen this tool because it’s simple and free to download.  Here is where you can find Dashcode:

Like Xcode, Dashcode is free to those who have an Apple Developer Connection membership.  Go to http://developer.apple.com/mac/ and look at the paragraph at the top to sign up.  You then can click log in.  Once you are logged in, locate the download Xcode section halfway down the page.  Yes I know it says Xcode, but Dashcode is bundled with it.  Depending on your connection speeds, this might take a while. Open up the disk image “if it hasn’t already opened” and click on the Dashcode package installer.

In the Finder, create a new folder that will contain all of your web page’s files so that you can locate them in one convenient place.  Now, download the following template.

This will be used as a template which you can use to start creating any web page with.  Notice that it’s called “index.html”  By default a web browser looks for a file with the name “index.html” to display first as your web site’s home page.

Once you’ve downloaded the file, drag it onto Dashcode’s icon.  Be sure to also double click the file in the finder so that it opens up in your default web browser.

Switch over to Dashcode.  Notice how Dashcode automatically formats the code giving different “tags” a specific color. Dashcode, as well as many web development apps these days, does this making it easier for you to parse through your code.  Double click on a red tag and hit the escape key.  Notice the Dashcode brings down a popup menu with a list of tags in it.  This is a way that Dashcode helps you so that you don’t need to remember every single aspect of HTML.  This is known as auto completion.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand any of the code we’ve typed so far or any of the suggestions that Dashcode is giving in the auto completion feature,  We’re going to delve into HTML and all of it’s glory in the next installment.

Dashcode is a very easy to use program.  Though it is mainly used for developing widgets, Dashcode’s built in features like auto-coloring specific tags, and the popup menu that helps suggest the correct HTML syntax, are useful in any form of developing for the web – and best of all, it’s free!  Unfortunately Dashcode won’t allow you to create your own HTML files without them being part of a widget BUT because this series implements example files, you won’t need to worry about creating them from scratch.  Stay tuned for our next installment which will talk about Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML for short.

The install process of Safari 4 was smooth with the only hiccups being the requirement of the latest security update and the Windows-esque reboot at finish. Upon first opening the app you are greeted with a very Apple looking ‘video’, which according to the Twitterverse, was done almost entirely using CSS and images. Once completed, you are dumped onto the new ‘Top Sites’ feature, it is a very Matrix looking method of looking at the sites you visit most, with screenshots of each individual site. This page is also very configurable, allowing you to remove certain sites, pin others, and change the size of the screenshots.

Tip: To make ‘Top Sites’ your home page, just type ‘topsites://’ into the Home Page field of Preferences.

Using the new Nitro javascript engine, Apple claims Safari is now 6 times faster at executing javascript when compared to Internet Explorer 8 and 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1. In the column of functionality, Safari now has a pretty extensive search assist feature. When typing into the search field you are now presented with 10 suggested searches and 10 of your most recent searches. In my testing, Safari did a superb job of judging exactly what I was going to search for and did it at an impressively high speed. A feature similar to this is also now a part of the address bar. The history page now features Cover Flow, not a huge new feature, but it does come in handy when skimming for a certain page.

This update to Safari is also chock full of user interface tweaks, the first and most recognizable being the new location of tabs. Previously, the tabs for the various sites you currently were surfing was beneath your address bar but not anymore. Now the tabs are located at the very top of the window, in line with the close window buttons. The tabs also pack a feature that was perviously missing, the ability to pull off into a separate window. Simply pull the tab down and away from the other tabs and it will open into it’s own window (present in Safari 3). Personally, I am a big fan of the move as it adds a bit of vertical screen real estate but it comes with one big flaw. In order to reorder your tabs, you have to click on the far right corner or else it moves the entire window. I understand completely why it is like this, but it is a bit annoying.

Little UI tweaks are also visible when looking at drop downs, such as the search suggestions. These now have more rounded corners and just feel a bit cleaner than before. It is also worth noting that in this current beta, the progress bar that once was a part of the address bar has been replaced by a simple spinner.

In conclusion, I think that the Safari 4 beta is most definitely worthy of an install and it has currently overthrown Firefox as my default browser. It’s fast, clean, has that Apple polish that we all have grown to love.

To start off this series, I’ve decided to talk about some of the many popular tools web developers use every day to create their own websites.  This post is divided into two parts because there are two kinds of web development apps out there: W.Y.S.I.W.Y.Gs and Text Based apps.

W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G Apps

In case you’re puzzled on what that means, here’s an explanation.  WYSIWYG is an abbreviation for “what you see is what you get”.  It basically means that whatever you see on the screen, is what your web page will look like when you publish it.

Let’s take a look at some of today’s popular WYSIWYG apps for designing websites.

RapidWeaver

Created by Realmac Software, RapidWeaver is one of the most popular 3rd party apps designed to create beautiful webpages with just a couple clicks.  With 40 themes included, all you have to do is enter in your content whether it’s text, images or both, and RapidWeaver will format it so that it fits with your selected theme.  To find out more, check out our review here at MacApper.

iWeb

iWeb is Apple’s take on a WYSIWYG web app.  Literally, what you see on the screen is what you’re going to see when you hit the big “Publish” button.  Insert and drag around text boxes and images to make your web page exactly the way you want it without having to type a single line of code.  iWeb is part of Apple’s iLife Suite of sofware apps including iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand.  You can find out more via iWeb’s product page.

All of the apps have a price tag but also have a demo in which you can download and see which one you like best.  If you’re looking for a little more control over the design and content of your web page, try the other type of web development app:  Text Based apps.

Text Based Apps

These apps are exactly what the title suggests – Text based meaning that in order to achieve your goal of the perfect web page, you’re going to have to stretch your fingers.  The plus side is that with these apps, every element of your page is customizable making the result exactly like the image in your head.

Here’s a small list of popular text based apps out of the countless selections available today.

Coda

From Panic inc. comes a one-windowed web development app designed to have all the tools you need at your fingertips.  Coda takes a bunch of separate apps and incorporates them and their features into one nicely designed package.  Top feautres include a text editor with auto-complete for most of the many popular coding languages, a built in FTP engine which is used to transfer your files onto your web server making your page accessible to the world wide web, and a CSS editor.  If you don’t understand a bunch of these terms, stay tuned.  Everything will be explained in time.

Dashcode

Some of you might have not expected to see this app in the list.  Dashcode is Apple’s way of making the development process of creating “widgets” a lot easier.  But did you ever think of Dashcode’s code editing features?  Auto-complete, text coloring, and what’s more?  It’s Free!

Textmate

This one’s a biggie.  This text editing giant is from a company known as MacroMates.  You name it, Textmate’s got it.  Besides the standard ability of editing and creating files for the web, Textmate’s expandability in terms of plugins makes it truly a universal text editor for the Mac.  To find out more, check out their site or look at our review here at MacApper.

These are just some of the many amazing Text Based web developing apps available.  Be sure to check out Apple.com’s downloads page for a larger list.

There you have it!  If you have any more quetions about the apps, feel free to look them up and find a review here at MacApper.  Stay tuned for our next installment which will talk about using Dashcode to start developing your first webpage.

The Snow Report (Free)
The Snow Report is The North Face’s snow report app. Like Ski Lodge, it has maps built-in. It also allows you to see the weather, Website of the resort and the position of the resort in Google Maps. However, none of these are built-in–They take you to Mobile Safari or Google Maps. You can see the conditions, temperate and a mini weather report of the resort in the app. The buttons it uses can be very confusing–They don’t even look like buttons sometimes. One cool feature it includes that none of the others do is the ability to change the background. They have many built-in backgrounds shot by professionals. However, you only really see the sides of the background, because the resort info is over the rest. Overall, for a free app, it’s very nice.

Grade: B-

Snow and Ski Report By REI (Free)

Snow and Ski Report By REI is REI’s snow report app (kind of obvious). It has a unique interface–It uses a kind of Cover Flow. It also takes a different approach to finding resorts–You cannot search. You must know where it is, which can be a bit annoying at times. But, unlike some others, all the information you get is built-in toe app. This means you don’t have to leave the app to get Webcams or a weather report. It also shows you how many lifts are open and closed, and weather the resort is open or not. For each resort, there is a unique image that, I assume, is from the actual resort, which is very cool. Overall, this app provides a pretty nice interface and a lot of information, putting it up there with some of the paid apps.

Grade: B+

Snow Report ($1.99)

The Snow Report takes a minimalist approach at reporting show conditions. First of all, you cannot add favorites. So, you have to find the specific resort each time you open the app. Well, it does save where you were, so you’ll still be at the same region. But, that means you can only have 1 favorite at any time. Secondly, it only gives a little bit of information. You can only see 24 and 48 hour reports, the base depth and what the surface is like. This does mean that it’s faster, though. Like REI, you cannot search, you must know where it is. If you want minimal info, with faster loading, you may want to look at this, but I don’t think it’s worth it.

Grade: C-

One of the greatest blessings that Apple has given us developers is documentation. And not just documentation, but in-depth, clear, and understandable documentation. There are also lots of sample codes and coding guides. And when you install the SDK you automatically get all of this free of charge. You can even access it all right from Xcode; just go to Help>Documentation. You will then be presented with the documentation window. Based on whether or not you have the iPhone SDK installed, you will see Mac OS X and iPhone sections. You can search through certain sets (like OS X 10.5, or iPhone 2.2) or search them all. If you have the iPhone SDK installed, though, you will want to search by sets so you don’t accidentally try to put Cocoa Touch in Cocoa. If you click on a set in the sidebar, you can view its main page, which can help you find what you need if you don’t know what its called. The documentation is going to be your best friend as a Cocoa developer. You are never expected to remember those long delegate methods like tableView:targetIndexPathForMoveFromRowAtIndexPath:toProposedIndexPath: or even short methods like initWithCoder:.

Another great tool that can be used for remembering methods or blocks of code is Code Collector Pro (which we have previously reviewed). Code Collector Pro allows you to create code snippets and then sort them by tags, description, language, etc. It is very useful if there are large chunks of code that you use very often. You could use something like TextExpander, but Code Collector Pro is built for coders. It even has syntax highlighting.

One of my personal favorite tools is Class-Dump. Class-Dump allows you to feed it a binary file, and it will give you all the header files associated with that binary. This is great for finding private header files in things like UIKit, or if you just want to see the header files of your favorite application. The basic syntax for it is class-dump -H /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes. Before you run it you may want to call mkdir ~/Dekstop/headers and then cd ~/Dekstop/headers. This is just to make sure you don’t end up with 100+ header files in your home folder.

The final tool (or tools) I will leave you with are websites. These are my favorite websites for finding tutorials and answers to my questions:

• CocoaDev
• iPhone Dev SDK
• Cocoa Dev Central
• Cocoabuilder
• Cocoa-Dev lists

Although WebnoteHappy integrates with Delicious, it does not require you to use Delicious to store or view your bookmarks. So, you are not required to sign up for anything. You just download and go.

WebnoteHappy’s best feature is its ease-of-use. You can either use shortcuts or the application itself to add new bookmarks. By default, the shortcut to add a webnote (bookmark) is Command-Shift-D. Of course, for you to use this shortcut, the app must be open. When you hit that shortcut in almost any web browser (or any major web browser), you will see a popup that allows you to add a description, tags, a title and where to keep the webnote. If you choose to Share Via Delicious and you don’t already have Delicious set up in WebnoteHappy, a sheet will appear on its main window that asks you for your username and password.

As said above, you can also add a new webnote in the application itself. To do this, you just have to click the New toolbar item, and you will get a popup where you will insert the relevant information (all the information mentioned above, plus a URL).

WebnoteHappy also has organizing capabilities. You can create both folders and smart folders to keep certain webnotes in. It comes with two already made smart folders: Last 24 house and Last 7 days. To add a new folder, just go to File>New Folder, and to add a new smart folder, go to File>New Smart Folder. If you are creating a smart folder, you will then be asked for the conditions that need to be met for a webnote to be in the folder.

Along with sharing bookmarks to Delicious, WebnoteHappy also allows you to import from Delicious, Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb and XBEl and export to HTML and XBEL. To do this, just go to either File>Import from, or File>Export to, and choose the relevant format.

My only real gripe in WebnoteHappy is its interface. It looks slightly outdated. With just a few changes such as: different toolbar icons, bigger +/- buttons and different folder icons, it could look amazing. Also, if Cover Flow browsing was added, or at least previews, that would be a big plus as well.

Happy Apps‘ WebnoteHappy retails for $24.95, and you can get a family pack for only $5 more! You can also download a free, 30-day trial from their Web site. Although it has an outdated interface, it is extremely simple to use and very fast. However, if previews or Cover Flow was added, the import/add of a webnote time would probably increase. But whether you are a social bookmarking lover, or just want a nice database of your bookmarks, WebnoteHappy can help you.

The first step is getting familiar with Internet Sharing.  As mentioned above, you need to navigate to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet Sharing (which is an option listed on the left).  Once on the Internet Sharing option page, you need to setup exactly what you want to do before you proceed to turn it on.  As you can see, you need to select where you want the shared connection to come from and then where you are going to output it.  So, if you want to turn your Mac into a wireless hub, you would select “Share your connection from: Ethernet”…”To computer using: Airport”.  You can mess around with any configuration here including Airport to Ethernet, Bluetooth to Ethernet, etc.  In order to enable it, you must click the check box next to internet sharing.  You can now turn your Mac into any sort of internet hub that you want it to be.  This works great when you are somewhere such as a hotel which might only have one Ethernet plug but you have 4 laptops.  You can create a wireless hub for everyone else in the room to connect to.

One of my favorite uses for this feature is sharing my MacBook’s Airport connection with my Xbox 360 through an Ethernet connection.  I have been doing this for years, and it has saved me the $100 I would have had to spend on a wireless adapter for my 360.  Here is a step by step guide on how to setup your Xbox 360 to share an internet connection with your Mac:

1. Enable internet sharing as described above in System Preferences.  You will want to select sharing from Airport to Ethernet.

2. Connect your Mac to your Xbox 360 using an Ethernet cable.

3. Open up Terminal on your Mac by going to Applications > Utilities.

4. In terminal type “ifconfig en0″ (that is a zero)

5. In the terminal screen, you need to look for the line which displays as “inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”.  Write this number down.  For example, mine is currently 192.168.2.1

6. Also get the IP Address of your wireless router.  This can be found in System Preferences > Network> Select Airport > Advanced> TCP/IP Tab > Router.  Write this number down.  Mine was 10.0.1.1

7. Start your Xbox and get to the Network Settings menu.  You will now have to put some numbers in manually…

8. For IP Address you need to enter the inet number you found in your terminal but with the last number being 1 digit higher.  For instance, mine would be 192.168.2.2

9. For Subnet, enter 255.255.255.0

10. For Router/Gateway enter the inet number from earlier.  Mine was 192.168.2.1

11. For DNS (both primary and secondary) enter the IP of your router.  Mine was 10.0.1.1

12. You need to leave PPPoE and advanced settings blank (default was off and automatic).

13. Test the connection and enjoy having a shared internet connection to your Xbox from your Mac.

If you need any help with this, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

FlightTrack’s coolest feature is definitely the Map View. This allows you to see where a flight is during its flight; and it works very well. It uses a service called FlightView to get the data, which can be used without the app. To get to the Map View, one only has to click the Map tab item in the navigation bar when a flight is selected.

Another big issue in flying is baggage claims. A number of times the airport tells you to go one place when your baggage is somewhere else, or maybe you just forget what claim number it is. With FlightTrack you can easily check baggage claim numbers; gate numbers; and scheduled, estimated, and actual departure times. Just create a search, find a flight, and see all of its info. You can also shake the phone to pick a random flight. I’m not sure exactly why you might want to do this, though. If you want to save a flight for later, just click on the Save button. You may find that some other flight-tracking apps have a few more features, like creating itineraries, or more general searches.

As said above, FlightTrack allows you to do searches. You must know at least some information about the flight to do a search, unless you just shake the phone. I find that the search is good if you know what you want, but it can get a little annoying. Sometimes you just want to see a list of flights out of a certain airport instead of searching for specific flights. But this also means that your list will be vary narrow after you search. And, with its 751 included airlines and 4530 included airports, maybe seeing a list of flights would just be overwhelming.

FlightTrack retails for $4.99 on the App Store and there is no Lite edition (I don’t know how there could be anyway). For a frequent traveler it is a great tool and gives you a fair number of features. Even for an infrequent traveler it can be a nice tool to have, just in case. And hey, $4.99 wouldn’t even buy you a meal at the airport that you had to buy because you didn’t hear your flight had been delayed 5 hours.

It’s possible that Twitter is the killer app for the iPhone. Or maybe the iPhone is the killer platform for Twitter. Either way, the two go hand-in-hand — I don’t know any iPhone owners that aren’t Twitter addicts. It’s no surprise, then, that there are so many Twitter apps in the App Store. One that’s gained a lot of popularity recently is Tweetie, from atebits LLC.

Since buying my iPhone, I’ve used Twitterrific almost exclusively. While reviewing Tweetie, I couldn’t help but compare the two. Both are excellent apps, but written for different Twitter users.

Tweetie allows you to read and manage multiple Twitter accounts from its easy-to-use interface. In fact, except for changing your personal account settings, just about anything you can do on Twitter you can do from Tweetie: follow and unfollow, search, view user profiles, and more. Many of the things other Twitter clients send you to the Twitter website to view, Tweetie presents in a user-friendly, iPhone native way.

The main screen in Tweetie is your timeline, which shows the most recent tweets from people you follow. There are also separate screens for your @replies, direct messages, and favorites. As I mentioned, you can search directly from Tweetie, and see keywords that are currently “trending” on Twitter.

Posting from Tweetie is easy, just tap the post button in the upper right-hand corner. If you want to post a photo, you can take it from within the app or use a picture you’ve already taken. Photos are uploaded to the popular TwitPic service and the URL is attached to your tweet. The URL isn’t shown so it doesn’t clutter the screen while you’re writing, but this does limit how much control you have over placement of the URL in your post.

The one area I found Tweetie lacking was in the reading experience. Every time you open the app it starts fresh, loading the most recent tweets from your timeline. It has no concept of where you left off reading previously, it just starts you at the most recent tweet. This makes it more difficult to read from oldest to newest and to follow conversations. Also, while you can see from the timeline that a tweet has a link or a photo, you can’t visit those directly from the timeline. You first have to tap to go to the tweet detail screen, then tap again to visit the link. And when you’re on the detail screen, you can’t navigate your timeline in that view, you must go back to the timeline view to keep reading. And when you favorite a tweet, a modal dialog pops up that keeps you from doing anything until the favorite is saved. This seems like something that could happen in the background so you can return to reading.

The way Tweetie shows you TwitPics is nice — it scrapes the page and just shows you the image. I’ve always thought TwitPic should have iPhone-optimized pages. I wonder, though, how long it will be before TwitPic (which is advertising-supported) asks atebits to stop doing this.

Overall, if you’re a power user — someone that monitors/manages multiple accounts and wants all that Twitter has to offer in a single interface — Tweetie is probably the app you’ve been looking for. If, however, you’re a power reader — someone that doesn’t want to miss a single tweet, and wants to process those tweets quickly — Tweetie may not be for you.

Tweetie is currently $2.99 and available in the App Store.

Sometimes people don’t care enough about the text in their documents. Then, when you have to clean it up, you have to do the same task many times, like converting double spaces to single spaces, or changing case. It is very tedious, which is exactly why some developers have created software to do these tasks. One of the more notable ones is Unmarked Software’s TextSoap.

TextSoap looks a lot like TextEdit, except for the drawer on the right side and the toolbar at the bottom. The three buttons in the lower left-hand corner of the window allow you to choose what type of line endings to use. Unless you know what line endings will do to your text, I would stick with Unix. Now for the buttons in the lower right-hand corner: The one that says 100% just changes the zoom. The graph button next to it allows you to see stats, like the number of paragraphs, words, characters, etc. The paragraph button allows you to see formatting like new lines, tabs, spaces, etc. The fourth button simply allows you to toggle the drawer. With all of these buttons, the interface can look complex, but in reality it isn’t.

The main point of TextSoap is to clean your text, and this is what the drawer is for. At the top of the drawer you can choose what set of Scrubs to see. Library will show them all (100+), but the most useful (for the average user) are going to be found in Standard. When you click on one of the Cleaners in the list, it will preform that action on the text. These Cleaners are great, but they are just the base of TextSoap — the real power lies in custom Cleaners. Custom Cleaners allow you to create Cleaners that preform more than one task. To edit your Custom Cleaners, just click on the Edit Cleaners toolbar item. You will then see a window with all of your custom Cleaners on the left and the workflow for the selected cleaner in the middle. On the right side, there are about 25 actions that you can drag onto a workflow. When you drag one onto the workflow, there will usually be some fields that you need to fill out. If you need help with Syntax elements, Characters, and more, just click the RegEx Help button at the top of this window. Custom cleaners allow you to create complex workflows for things you do with text all the time. One of my favorites is a Blog post archiver, which grabs the text, changes the font, and even runs an AppleScript to download the images. My point is that you can create the simplest or the most complex actions with this one tool. There is only one minor issue — if you edit a Run Automator Workflow’s workflow, and there are no workflows in Automator’s actual workflow folder, then the popup box will not popup, which may make you think that TextSoap has frozen.

One feature that makes using TextSoap even easier than it already was is its OS X Service menu support. What this does is add a TextSoap item to your Services menu (found at [Open Applications Name] > Services), where you can apply TextSoap’s built-in Cleaners and your own to text. You may be thinking that you can only apply it to text in editable fields, but this is not true. You can actually change text on a Website in a (non-editable) Mail message! Well, it only stays that way until you refresh, and, of course, no one else can see it. But, nonetheless, this is awesome! So, if you just use the service to clean a Mail message in Mail.app, and then copy the text to your clipboard, it is clean! No need to even open TextSoap. To enable or disable this, just go to the OS X Services pane of TextSoap > Preferences.

Another feature that integrates TextSoap into your daily workflow is its plug-in support. TextSoap comes with plugins for BBEdit, TextWrangler, Mailsmith, Coda, and Eudora. In the Plugins pane of TextSoap > Preferences, you need only click the checkbox by the plug-in you want installed, and it will install! In an application such as Coda, TextSoap will appear in the Plug-ins menu for even easier access. Of course, you are limited to these applications, but hopefully the developer will add plug-ins for other applications too. But you can always use the Service menu.

One feature that would be nice to have is a System-wide keyboard shortcut. Yes, the Services menu is easy to use, but to have shortcuts for different cleaners would be really cool and make this much easier to use. It would also be cool to have droplet files, where you would drop a file, or some text, and it would created a new file with a certain Cleaner applied.

Unmarked Software’s TextSoap retails for $39.95, and you can download a free trial from their site. It is a great tool that allows you to save a lot of time by not having to do tedious tasks. And, since time is money, in these times, this means that TextSoap will save you money.

From what we can see from the public beta so far, Espresso can easily be divided into 3 sections: Editor, Project Organizer, and Publisher. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Editor

Espresso shares CSSEdit’s tabbed editor window. Making a tab is as easy as going to File > New Tab or Command + T. Once created, users can re-arrange them or drag them out of the tab bar to make them separate windows.

When typing in code, Espresso automatically changes the style of the text to better understand and differentiate your code. Colors can be customized by making themes located in Espresso’s preferences. Users can create themes and share them online with other developers. Espresso also allows you to visually navigate through your code via the “navigator” tool located on the right-hand side of the editor window. This tricked out list view shows all of your tags and elements much like the way CSSEdit does.

Espresso is able to recognize your code with something called “Sugars“. Sugars are pre-packaged files that contain all of the information needed for Espresso to work with your code. All one must do is simply double click one to install it. What’s more is that developers can create their own Sugars making Espresso’s editor extremely versatile.

Project Organizer

Espresso organizes all of your files in groups called projects. To create a project, go to File > New Project… or press Shift + Command + N. Espresso manifests your projects in folders located wherever you save them. Each project folder contains all of your files along with Espresso’s project file recognizable by it’s “.esproj” extension.

Espresso’s project interface is made up of one window divided into two parts: the sidebar and the editor. The editor is the same editor we talked about earlier with the exception of the sidebar being attached to its left. The sidebar is where you access all of your files and servers. The first part of the sidebar is entitled “Workspace”. Simply put, the workspace is where Espresso puts all of your currently open files. Think of them as tabs, only this time they’re located in the sidebar as list items. You can still reorder them and drag them out of the window to make separate individual windows, however Espresso puts them there by default to keep things together.

Publisher

You’ve created your files, organized them into a project, and now you’re ready to get them online. Luckily for you there is nothing to worry about because Espresso has a built in FTP client that supports FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 services. Espresso handles uploading files a little differently from the average FTP client. Yes, you could simply drag your files in and out of the window, or you could use the Update, Merge, and Mirror features. Clicking these toolbar items when your server is selected does exactly what they say they do. Clicking “Update” checks the files on your computer to see if any of them have been changed. Espresso then shows you which files need to be uploaded and replaced. All you then need to do is hit “Publish”. Clicking “Merge” syncs the files on your computer and the files on the server so that both have the most recent information. Clicking “Mirror” checks your files and deletes any information on the server that isn’t in your local project.

Finishing Thoughts

Espresso is very much still in BETA form. MacRabbit is right when saying that Espresso is buggy and is by no means perfect. I myself have discovered a problem of Espresso not recognizing my files as updated when it checks through to see what files need to be updated, however this convenience is not needed. I can simply drag the files onto the right place and manually transfer it like a normal FTP client. All of the previewed content above is based off of Espresso version 1.0b1. Espresso’s preo-rder price is 59.95€ ($84 USD) and is available now for download at Espresso’s Product Page.