I never really started following Apple and it’s leader until the first iPhone started making its initial buzz throughout the industry, but since that time I’ve keep a keen eye on them. One of the things that strikes me most impressive about Steve is that the more I follow him and the more I go back a read his old articles or interview, the more I like him and come to understand what a true genius he is.

Think about that for a minute. How many heroes in your life, whether they be politicians, sports stars, celebrities or CEOs, do you actually like more throughout the passage of time and when going deeper into their life and beliefs? So often we uncover areas where we disagree or they do something that tarnishes our opinion of them. Not so with Steve. The more there is to read about him and how he influenced others lives, the more I come to respect the man.

One of the more profound things he said that I try to keep in my daily life was about how he chooses to spend his time. He mentioned that each morning he will look in the mirror and ask himself if he is doing today exactly what he wants to be doing. If he goes few days in a row without being able to answer yes to that question, he stops what he was doing and starts again on what he wants to do. Although Steve Jobs’ time on earth was much too short, there is no denying that with that philosophy he accomplished more in 56 years than most would with 200.

Consumers lost their biggest advocate yesterday. And while he was still such a visionary that his touch on emerging technologies will still be felt for a few years, I’m very sad to see what a Steve Jobless world is going to be like a decade from now. How does the world find a replacement for someone who is one is six billion?

If you’ve never taken the time to look back on Steve Jobs life, there is no better time then to take the time a do so now.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

After graduating from high school, I had a summer project before heading to college in the fall. I had been saving money from my part time job to built my Dream PC. My graduation money gave me enough to finally start ordering parts and to begin assembling. The pride and joy of my new machine was the cream of the crop video card at the time, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. This week my 9800 Pro crunched its last pixel, rendered its final image and drew its last watt.

R.I.P.

The summer that I built my computer ATI was at the top of their game, while its main competitor, NVIDIA, was struggling badly. I remember the 9800’s predecessor the 9700 had been the previous graphics card leader for months. After months of hype, followed by delays, NVIDIA finally released their latest flagship graphics card in hopes of reclaiming the pixel pushing throne.

After all the benchmarking was done, that new card did in fact perform better, albeit slightly, than the 9700 did, but not without some serious deterrents. Not only did that card start at an outlandishly high price, but the main critical failure of this card was that it generated so much heat that it required a separate heating unit so large that the card took up two slots on the motherboard. None the less, the NVIDIA card was now the fastest graphics card available on the market. ATI took the crown from off the 9700’s head and handed it to NVIDIA, but why does ATI have such a smug look on their face.

The week after losing the top graphics card place to NVIDIA, ATI quietly revealed their newest flagship card, the 9800 Pro. It crushed the latest NVIDIA card in every area. The NVIDIA team must have completely demoralized by its appearance. The 9800 Pro was the new graphics card king and remained unchallenged for almost a year.

As I began planning the components for my Dream Machine, I had a pretty open attitude about what components I wanted in my machine. I began researching chipsets and motherboards with no bias towards Intel or AMD, for Asus or GigaByte, for Crucial or Corsair. The only piece of hardware I knew I wanted from the beginning was the Radeon 9800 Pro for my graphics card.

The week had come when I finalized all my computer specs and placed multiple orders to vendors around the web. The days were full of pent up anticipation while checking the my various packages’ UPS status. After all my hardware arrived I spent the next day bringing my creation to life. I still remember that sensation of seeing that first Windows icon while loading XP. The hardware was running smoothly and after a couple more hours of service pack and driver updates, my computer was finally finished.

The first thing I remember doing was running the graphics demo on the ATI driver disc. I sat in my broken, wooden chair watching a 3D rendering of a sports car spinning around in awe. The details were so crisp as the car’s paint color transitioned as the light source reflected around the vehicle.

I was so happy to be the wielder of such power. No game could slow it down. I got to spend the next year bragging about my frame rate to my friends. When they had to turn down their game settings to be able to play, I mocked them while I turning mine up. Their eyes would widen when they learned that I had the audacity to play games with shadows on.

Alas, the glory days are long gone and now I must find a replacement graphics card if I want to keep the old girl still ticking. So I went by Fry’s today and it pained me to find a graphics card that is better than my 9800 Pro was for $45 when I originally paid $450 for it. But that’s the price you pay for getting the latest technology; it’s obsolete in three months and in the bargain bin in six.

The 9800 Pro was my first and really my last piece of tech that I purchased that fits the geek stereotype of paying way too much for tech just to say you own the latest and greatest. Shortly after building that Dream Machine I was off to college and now married, so college bills and mortgage payments make it hard to justify these types of purchases now. I won’t lie though, being ostentatious with tech was a good feeling, and I miss it.

So since everyone, myself included, seemed to enjoy the hyped version of the Apple tablet better, I’d like to take a moment and assemble a new Apple tablet that I’m dubbing the iPad Pro. Now mind you when I say ‘pro’, I don’t mean what Apple has come to mean by ‘pro’. Apple decided to add the ‘pro’ moniker to almost all of its notebook line so as not to make the lower quality ones have low self esteem issues. When I say ‘pro’, I mean professional, like it’s loaded to the gills with stuff that most non-pro people would not need.

The iPad Pro fulfills the goals that a tablet computing device should. A perfect middle man; solving problems for situations that need a larger screen and more computing power than a smartphone, yet also require more mobility than a notebook.

Here’s what my fictitious, yet truly magical, iPad Pro contains:

Incremental Upgrades

The iPad Pro will have all of the hardware specifications as its lesser sibling, but some areas will be improved to be bigger, better, faster. Firstly, there will only be one version of the iPad Pro. None of that six options garbage. The iPad Pro comes with 128 GB flash drive and 3G built in. The screen resolution will be 1280×720p to give it a 16:9 aspect ratio for watching high-def video. Although reports say that the 1.0 GHz processor on the iPad is very fast, the iPad Pro will be 1.2GHz just cause it can. Also the battery life will be extended from 10 hour to 12 hours.

Oh and it will be able to do this radical, mind-blowing computing thing called multi-tasking.

Cameras, with a ‘s’

One of the major groaning points with the iPad is it lack of a built-in camera. The iPad Pro will have both a back and front-facing camera. The back camera will be 5 megapixels and capable of video. The majority of all quality images/video will be done with the back camera. The front camera is mainly for video conferencing or skyping and it will be a 3 megapixel camera.

Credit Card Reader

Apple should either build this themselves or acquire Square and have them add their tech to the iPad Pro. The card reader will be built into the device, not an external dongle like the current Square device is.

Doing this alone will wipe some egg off of Apple’s face by having all Apple Store employees use an iPad Pro to process customers purchases instead of the Windows Mobile devices they carry now.

While average consumers might not have much use for it, apart from the serious yard seller or the Avon lady, businesses could do some impressive stuff with one coupled with a custom app.

Graphic Pen Stylus

Steve Jobs is noted as to saying he hates styluses. What he really hates though is a simple plastic stick that you have to keep up with. The iPad Pro’s stylus will be valuable in and of itself.

What I’m envisioning for this is a mashup of the pressure sensitivity of the Intuos4 with the microphone of Livescribe’s Smart Pen.

This pen’s capability opens up some nice tablet functionality right out the gate. Apple can either commission Adobe to create a Photoshop app that lets the tablet be used like most graphic artists use a Cintiq. Or they can stick it to Adobe (a trending topic at Apple lately) and develop their own Photoshop killer for the tablet.

Next, they can use the microphone capability and do exactly what Livescribe/Pear Note do. Record audio along with pen writing to sync what is being said with what is being written.

I’m sure Apple and it’s legion of App Store developers can come up with numerous more uses for an uber pen.

Finger Print Scanner

I throw this one on here basically as a ‘Why Not’ feature. Some laptops have print scanners used to log in, so a majority of this feature will be used for that. But the most brilliant thing to come of the iPhone revolution is the app store and its ability to solve problems for things most people didn’t know existed.

Adding a finger print scanner to the iPad Pro will produce 1000 different apps that use it for things I wouldn’t have imagined. I can see police officers or DMV workers being able to find a use for it off hand. Maybe you start to couple credit cards with finger prints for an added level of security.

Outputs/Inputs

This section can be summed up with you can plug anything into the iPad Pro and anything can be pulled out of it. The iPad Pro will have your standard array of MacBook inputs, USB, firewire and SD. Those, plus the obligatory proprietary Apple, you will only ever need this input/output port until we tell you the same thing with our next computer release that uses our newer, non-backwards compatible, port that you will only ever need, port.

For output, the main deal will be an HDMI port so that play your videos/slides on large HDTVs. A VGA/DVI output would be nice to use for hooking up to a projector, but they are just so fugly that I don’t blame Steve if he pukes at the thought of it.

Meeting Manager Mode – M³

That’s right, the iPad will come with its own new mode that has a cool branded name with a superscript number. I can see the swimming pool of money already.

Basically, here’s the idea behind this concoction of my mind. When thinking about the iPad Pro, I tried to visualize who the true target users are. It will be the people who either have enough money to afford such an outlandish object, or people don’t actually have to pay for it because it gets written off as a business expense. The target user is also very fond of having new computer technology before most others get it even though they understand very little about the device or have very little use for it. And they enjoy flashing their new tech toy in front of everyone especially their peers.

What that user analysis boils down to is that the people most likely to own an iPad Pro are managers. So why not give them something that could actually validate their need to own it. Hence, Meeting Manager Mode or M³ if you’re feeling hip.

The general idea of M³ is seamless information sharing among iPad Pro users within proximity or SISAiPUwP for short (I kid). The scenario is a meeting room with 5-10 managers all with iPad Pros. As discussions are going on, the managers can share information being discussed among each other quickly and intuitively. Sally is going over the company’s financials, but Billy can’t find the e-mail with the spreadsheet. Sally (or anyone with the spreadsheet open) can quickly click a button to share the spreadsheet, click Billy’s name from the list of iPad users within proximity and immediately send the file to Billy.

The idea can also be scaled up to something like screen sharing capabilities. So if a projector isn’t available in a conference room, a presenter can share his or her screen with the Keynote slide and everyone in proximity can view right along on their own iPad Pro.

I’m sure there are many more uses for the idea of easy proximity sharing, but I’ll end it with those.

Although if managers still aren’t sold of the idea of M³, the iPad Pro will win them over with its ability to generate pie charts from random data sets to show off to other company employees. Gantt charts and Venn diagrams are also available.

Conclusion

Thanks for letting me air my ideas and thanks for making it to the end. To Steve and the Apple Execs who read this and found the advice invaluable, you’re welcome. Just put a $1200-$1500 price tag on this baby and you’ll start making billions faster than Steve Ballmer can break out into a sweat. You can just paypal me my share.

I’d love to hear any ideas you might have to improve the already practically flawless iPad Pro. What are some other things that would be useful from a device that is bigger and more powerful than a smartphone but more mobile than a laptop?

Let’s Giddyup

Initial Opinion

Disappointment. With all the hype that this device got I realize that it is was going to be very hard for the actual device to meet it. Apart from the eBook reader angle, the iPad just feels like a bloated iPhone. Don’t get me wrong, I think it will be a device worthy of replacing a coffee table book, but it’s not going to be replacing anybody’s laptop for things beyond reading e-mail.

Since the eBook aspect doesn’t appeal to me (I’m an audio book kinda guy) the only ‘feature’ that surprised me was the price.

The Price

The announcement of a $500 price tag was very surprising to all. And it wasn’t just surprising from people like me who pull opinions about Apple out of their hindquarters, most all of the Apple ‘experts’ were shocked by the low price as well.

I see the price though as brilliant for two reasons.

1. At having an iPad model at $500 they don’t get the bad press for charging $830 for the only model that qualifies as being the perfect balance of laptop power with smartphone mobility. Personally I think they should have taken it further and made an 8GB model for $399. That low priced model isn’t there to make a profit or even really be sold, it’s there to counter the high price argument.

2. Another reason for the $500 model is to make potential Kindle owners scratch their heads a bit and weigh their options. For $260 I can get a 6” screen that is only for reading books. For $500 I can get a 10” screen that is mainly for reading books. Or, for $500 I can get a 10” screen that can read books, browse the web, play games, check e-mail and play video. Hmmm.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Jeff Bezos’ office this week. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Amazon execs decide to switch up the Kindle to start following the razorblade model around April.

The Size

Another surprise to me was not only the size of the disk space but also the number of options for it. For the tablet device that is sitting between an iPhone and a MacBook I expected the hard drive space to sit in between them. I expected a 64GB and 128GB version.

But instead of the two options I expected, we got three lower spaced options. And not only are there three different hard drive space options to choose from you can also choose to pay extra for a 3G capable iPad.

Having six iPad model options is too many and is what UX types like to call choice paralyzation. If you give people too many choices they often don’t choose either for fear of picking the wrong one.

If were up to me, there would be three iPads, a 64GB, a 64GB 3G and 128GB 3G. You’re welcome, Steve.

Where’s the Innovation

Apples ability to innovate on computing is the main reason I was hesitant to bet against them. Steve Jobs has an ability to predict what the market needs before they realized it was ever a problem to begin with. He gives us a product that makes us say, “How did I live without this before?”

I was looking forward to what the Apple engineers were going to show us. I expected at least one killer feature to be revealed that truly validated this device’s existence in the not as mobile as a smartphone, but not as big as a laptop spectrum. But instead of innovation we got a very obvious device with actually a step back in a few areas.

What happened to this great American company that gave us such wonderful devices as the iPod, iPhone, iMac and MacBook Pro?

Here’s why I believe they iPad seems to lack that Apple innovation: Apple is good at redefining how we think of current computing devices.

They took a music industry that was in shambles with different music player makers pushing different formats on bland hardware and used that industry’s failures to craft exactly what the industry needed.

Rinse and repeat with the smart phone industry.

Apple’s innovation comes through when it has to introduce a product into an already saturated and mature market. Which is why I’m eager to see them bring a video game console to fruition.

This tablet, tweener computer, industry is basically nonexistent. Apple is the company that has to start this middleman computer market. Instead of getting to be the fashionable late, party crasher, they now are the host.

Playing it Safe

Perhaps Apple has lost its small company vibe and feel like it can no longer be the loose cannon, take big risk company it was of yesteryear. Now it tries to make the safe decisions and only make incremental increases to hardware. They’ve got this phenomenal success with the app store, so why not just release a product that can generate more app sales and get developers cranking out more apps. Just sit back and take the 30% off the sales to the bank.

I’m really hoping this isn’t so.

Final Thoughts

It appears as though the same thing that kept me from switching to the iPhone in the first two versions of it is going to be the same thing that keeps me from being an early iPad adopter: It has obvious hardware needs.

• No camera. Front or Back.
• No USB. How can you hope to get people to justify this thing as a possible laptop replacement when there’s no USB port?
• Hard drive space. This device looks as though it could be the best movie player of all. It’s small, it’s lightweight and it’s screen is just the right size. Parent will eat this up to avoid changing Dora DVDs every 20 minutes. But if it only holds 16GB, then space will become issue quickly when we’re talking video.
• 4:3 aspect ratio. Again back to the perfect movie player image getting blown up and the backwards step in innovation. The 4:3 aspect ration was so 2003. Going back to it is synonymous with putting my Chariots of Fire cassette into my Walkman before going on a run.
• HDMI Out. Again with the movie thing, I know! The iPad should let me plug it into my home theater HDTV and play the HD movies I got from iTunes.

Until the obvious hardware things are changed in the iPad I can’t justify owning one. I’m fine with owning it with obvious software issues (like the lack of multi-tasking) because they can always be fixed later and added via updated. I am not fine with buying this device to have some hardware shortcoming upgraded 2 months later, leaving my device obsolete.

So you’ve heard my ranting, what’s your opinion of the iPad. Are you going to get one? I would love to hear your opinion.

Also, I’m still not done talking about the iPad, but decided to cut short to not make this post monstrous. If you’d rather strike up a conversation via e-mail feel free to.

Although all of the news about such an unofficial device can be overwhelming, I also think it’s not necessarily unjustified due to how influential Apple and its products have been in the past decade. So with that I’d like to quickly share a few ideas/opinions in my head about the iTablet.

The tablet is for current Apple people only.

It seems to me that Apple is needing another device toopen the wallets of their truest fan base. They need to give the people who already own an iPhone, Macbook Pro, and iMac one more reason to purchase something Apple. I say this because I don’t believe that someone who doesn’t already own a MacBook or iMac would buy this. If I had the $600-$1,000 that this device is supposed to cost, I would much rather purchase a full computer.

So since this device’s immediate appeal will be for those who are accustomed to paying the “Apple Tax” I believe the tablet will be released at a high price point, probably the $1,000 mark. Then, just like with the first iPhone, it will receive a sharp drop in price a few months later. So perhaps around a $800 price tag for the Christmas season.

The first shipments will be full of software/hardware bugs.

When Apple first started getting crazy popular a few years ago, the main complement about them was how rock solid their devices were. As the company has grown and added more and more devices to their lineups the Quality Control has also slipped. The recent 27 inch iMac had large numbers of DOA, some screens arrived broken and the wrong software was on them that reintroduced an error that caused problems with Flash Player. The iPhone is a 3 year old product, but I’ve had to take the one I purchased 4 months ago back twice already for hardware issues.

As the scope of the company gets larger, its ability to control the details gets harder and quality suffers in lieu of quantity.

Betting against Apple

I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about why Apple is introducing this device. I have tried to think of good reasons for wanting a tablet and I really can’t think of any that out way the cost. I mean this device surely can’t replace needing a laptop so it isn’t an everyday computing device. Yeah it will be a great e-book reader, but I believe e-books are in for a very bumpy road this year due to DRM problems. Until there is a generic e-book format that can be read on all e-book devices people are going to be forced to choose which company to buy e-books from. Right now the smart bet is on Amazon. Apple has a good bit of catching up to do if they want to go toe-to-toe with Amazon for that market. Also the Kindle gets punished for being too expensive at $400, so good luck with something twice as expensive.

The only area that the iTablet that has me excited for is comic books. I would love to have this device cause an industry shift and have comic books distributed digitally. I don’t purchase comics regularly because they run around $3 a piece and I don’t want to drive to a comic book store full of unbathed individuals playing with miniature figurines to get one. Give me an iTablet with any easy way to find and purchase one-off comics or to subscribe to a years worth of a certain line. The price should be cheap since there is no printing or shipping and the comic would actually look better on a high resolution screen.

Even though I can’t find a really practical reason for carrying this device around, I’m still hesitate to bet against Apple and call the tablet device a flop. Apple is full of some really smart guys who have just been knocking the ball out of the park lately. Apple has a history of redefining how people use certain devices. They didn’t just make another MP3 player or phone, the revolutionized how we think of music and cell phones. I’m assuming the tablet is going to be heavily leveraged with the App Store which will increase the devices ability to succeed immensely. Crowd source the work of having to come up with and create useful applications for this device to the world and just sit back and get your 30% of the profit.

So since I couldn’t come up with any good reasons to need this device, I guess I’ll just have to wait til Wednesday to have Apple tell me why.

Well that pretty much clears my head of what’s been floating around it the past week. Thanks for sticking around and reading it.

Page 3 – Food and Fitness

Starbucks[iTunes link] – Make your own overpriced coffee. This app shows where Starbucks locations are around your current location. Finally, there are descriptions for the various Starbucks coffee blends.

DailyBurn[iTunes link] – Track your workouts and calories. This is the iPhone app for the larger dailyburn web app. The iPhone app makes it easy to find and join workout programs with others. There is a exercise finder feature to see a list of exercises for different body areas. The exercises have descriptions of how to do the lift and some have a video demoing the lift. The Nutrition Log is also a great feature to help track all your calories conveniently. It gives a dashboard view of your daily calories along with the breakdown of fat, protein and carbs. If you are needing a good fitness app, this is it. It beautifully marries workouts and calories to deliver exactly what one needs when getting serious about losing weight or getting buff.

Nutrition[iTunes link](paid app) – I bought a while ago when my wife was doing Weight Watchers. It’s as massive collection of the nutritional information from restaurants, mainly US. The DailyBurn app usually finds the item I’m looking for so I rarely have to use this one. One feature that it has over the DailyBurn is that it doesn’t require an internet connection. Personally, I’m sticking with DailyBurn because it has the workouts with it and because I can track my info through a main webpage.

SixPack App[iTunes link] – A collection of exercises you can do. Each exercise shows pictures of how to do it, what muscles it uses and what to be careful not to do during the exercise. It’s free because it’s heavily ad supported, so that can get in the way.

Lose It[iTunes link] – A calorie tracker. Input the food you ate and the exercise you did. It doesn’t add anything over what the dailyburn app does. After doing these reviews I decided to delete it since it’s just duplicate functionality.

RunKeeper Pro[iTunes link](paid app) – RunKeeper uses the iPhone GPS to track your running. It has been pretty accurate from my limited trials. There are audio cues along the to way let you know how you are doing on distance and time throughout your run. One thing that recently got added was the ability to track your treadmill running with this app also, so you can get a complete idea of how much you are running each week. The app is pricy, but if you are a runner, then it’s worth the price, so long as you have good GPS coverage where you run. I hope the app improves mainly on its options for audio playback during a run. Currently you can only pick from a playlist in your iPod. When you start your run the playlist stops, but when you stop your run it keeps going. Also, I would prefer to listen to an audiobook while I run instead of music, so I wish the app could run in the background so that I can use my audiobook app, Bookmark, while running.

UrbanSpoon[iTunes link]– Helps finds restaurants by giving options around you and letting you filter by price or cuisine type. A good app for those times when nobody will make a decision on where to eat. Just let the app pick.

All Recipes[iTunes link] – All Recipes is a fantastic meal finder app. Search for meals and get the recipe, nutritional info and reviews of the meal. Another nice feature is what the app calls Spinner. You search for a meal based off of three criteria: Dish Type(entree, appetizer, etc.), Ingredient(Beef, vegetable, etc.), Total Cook Time. After the three criteria are chosen, the app returns meals based off your criteria.

What’s Fresh[iTunes link](paid) – View fruits and vegetables that are fresh around the county. Great for people who like to eat/cook food that is in season. It lets you choose different months and states to see what comes in season then.

Harvest[iTunes link](paid) – Harvest gives descriptions on how to select and store produce. Don’t get caught bringing home an overripe avocado again. A very useful app for people who do lots of cooking and want to learn more about getting the best from fruits and veggies.

Grocery IQ[iTunes link](paid) – This is a grocery list app. Add your items to the list and the app will organize the list by items found in the same isle. You can reorder the isles based of which grocery store you are visiting. This app is ok for what it is, but I was hoping for much more. It contains a good selection of products in its database so finding the food to add to the list is easy enough. The app makes adding these items and checking them off the list pretty effortlessly. My problem is the way it handles stores. This app makes you add items to a store list, such as Publix, then that Publix list can be customized to organize the aisles that the store is arranged in. So if I add my items to my Publix list throughout the week, and then happen to be near a Kroger, my list is out of order. I would much rather add my items to a general “grocery list” and then when I walk into a Publix, the app is smart enough, through location-based services, to recognize I’m in Publix and organize my list for Publix. If I went to Kroger then the list organizes for that store. The app is still worth the price, and I know that it would be a pain to develop what I’m asking for, but it is something that would make the app more intuitive and useful.

Locavore[iTunes link](paid) – Locavore is similar to What’s Fresh, by giving a list of what foods are in season near me. This one also has a Farmer’s Market angle by giving a list of Farmer’s Markets that are around my current location, so that I can go get my fresh foods. I purchased this one before I bought What’s Fresh. Had I bought What’s Fresh first, I would probably have just stuck with it. The two are very similar with What’s Fresh being slightly better.

Page 4 – Mostly Designer or Freelancer Related Apps

Pandora[iTunes link] – Streaming Internet Radio. A good selection of stations, all seem to be of good quality.

Shazam[iTunes link] – Hold Shazam up to some music that’s playing and it will tell you the song being played and give you some options to purchase it.

DropBox[iTunes link] – Dropbox is a cloud-based storage service. Install dropbox on multiple machines to give them a dropbox folder. Whatever you put into that dropbox folder is available to the other machines with dropbox on them. With the iPhone app, now I can see those files on my iPhone. The app does what it’s supposed to do, but since most of my stuff in my dropbox is more backup type items, mainly code, I rarely ever have a need or ability to view them from my iPhone. The app would be fantastic if it could allow my iPhone to be treated as a mountable drive. I know there are a few apps that do that already, but having that tied to my stuff in my dropbox would be exactly what I’d want. If it could do this, then I’d put my must have executables in a folder on it so that I can always get access to them.

Flickr[iTunes link]- View others Flickr streams. Upload and manager your own Flickr stream.

Sketches[iTunes link](paid) – A glorified doodle app. The app provides a decent selection of brushes and colors to make doodles with. Overall, the app feels overpriced to me. I would consider buying it’s main competitor Layers[iTunes Link], but I use this one so infrequently that I doubt I’d use the other one more.

WordPress[iTunes link] – Control your blog from the palm of your hand. This is the second version of the app. The first one was mediocre, by not provided an interface that felt designed for iPhone usage. The second version is a huge improvement in that area. Controlling comments, posts and pages is now intuitive. Personally I wouldn’t want to write a post from my iPhone, but I would use it to make a typo correction or if I needed to publish/unpublish something. This app is perfect for managing comments though. If you’re a WordPresser, then it’s a no brainer.

Skype[iTunes link] – Make skype calls with your iPhone. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t be of much service in the review department.

What the Font[iTunes link] – This one is definitely more for the designer types. Snap a picture of a font, upload it and it will try to tell you what typeface you are looking at. I’ve tried it a couple times, but it didn’t work well for me. I’m not positive, but it seems as though most of the typefaces it recommends are ones that must be bought from a foundry. So perhaps this app gets some affiliate money if people buy the typeface. If it’s doing that then the list of possible results is going to be limited. It’s a free app and fun to play with at least. Hopefully its accuracy will improve.

Evernote[iTunes link] – The app version of the popular note taking/tracking evernote.com. This app lets you take voice notes, text notes or picture notes. I’m not a note taking person, but I do use this app to help catalogue inspiration for me. Since evernote uses tags for the notes, I will snap a image of something that inspires me, such as a texture or pattern, and tag it with whatever I associate with it.

WHERE[iTunes link] – WHERE is essentially a dashboard of pertinent local information. Start up WHERE and it will show you things like recommended restaurants, current weather, gas prices, news and traffic updates. The app is a good example of the power of harnessing multiple data feeds and presenting them in a useable manner.

Mill Colour[iTunes link] – Mill Colour allows you to alter the color and tonal values of images. It’s a very powerful app considering it’s free. If you can’t or don’t want to take your images into Photoshop for minor color correction, then Mill Colour is your guy. It comes with a nice collection of preset filters. You can also get very granular and tweak individual controls such as, lift, gamma and gain.

Photoshop Mobile[iTunes link] – Adobe’s official Photoshop iPhone app. This app is similar to the Mill Colour app, but provides a few extra things. The app will let you crop and rotate image. You can adjust the exposure, saturation and tint of images. The app also provides a couple of filters to give your image a sketch or soft focus effect. The app is a quality free app and a good complement to the Mill Colour app. Hopefully Adobe will update the app with more filters to choose from.

MiniBooks Lite[iTunes link] – MiniBooks is an app that lets you manage and use your FreshBooks account. FreshBooks is a popular online accounting and invoicing service. This lite version lets you do most things you’d desire, such as make an invoice, view client information or input timesheet details. The lite version doesn’t have a way to track expenses. The app is not officially supported by the FreshBook group.  It hooks into your data by using FreshBook’s puplic API. Give this app your API key and you’re good to go. A useful app if you are a frequent FreshBooks user.

Page 5 – The Apps I never use but can’t delete, expect for Bump

Bump[iTunes link] – Bump your iPhone with someone else who has Bump to exchange contact information with that person. The app works well and lets you choose what information you’d like to share with others. I never use it, but you never know when someone might wanna bump. I don’t want to be embarrassed by not being able to bump back with them, so I keep the app here.

That’s it for the app reviews. I still have to do my iPhone accessories review and then you’ll be free from the iPhone related post for the foreseeable future.

All of the apps listed are free unless otherwise noted.

Page 1- The Once a Day Apps

Calendar – I have never been a daily planner person, but since the iPhone I find myself putting all my meetings, events and birthdays in it. I used Google Sync to keep all my mail, contacts and calendar in line so I have cloud-based syncing for my stuff. Now I keep a Google Calendar widget on my iGoogle frontpage and am doing a much better job with remembering people’s birthdays.

Snapture[iTunes link]](paid app) – This application enhances the iPhone’s build-in camera. It adds things like zooming, a larger shutter button, and a level. It also takes three pictures, back-to-back, to ensure that at least one turns out well. I chose this app over some of the others because I wanted an app that’s main concern was taking better photos, not doing post processing. If there is a picture that I like then I’d rather bring it into Photoshop to do my post proccessing. My one qualm with this app is that there isn’t a way to select my area of focus as there is in the native app. So if I’m getting particularly artsy with my depth of field I have to use the native app.

Maps – Not really a review, but simply a statement that I love never being lost anymore.

The Weather Channel[iTunes link] – All the weather you’d expect and need in an app. You can get four different timeframes for weather; Current, Hourly, 36 Hour and 10 Day. It provides a weather video of your area. And also gives severe weather notices.

Fieldrunners[iTunes link](paid app) – This is a tower defense game. I played this game every free moment that first week. The artwork is well done and the game play is perfect for an iPhone game. After I beat each level on easy that first week though my playing really slacked off. The game seemed to get too difficult to complete on the medium setting and there aren’t any noticeable incentives for me to beat the game on the medium difficulty. If the hope of new levels or added towers, hung like a carrot in front of me then perhaps my love for this game wouldn’t have waned so much. I still play it on occasion, but get quickly frustrated by level 20 if my defense isn’t flawless.

AppBox Pro[iTunes link](paid app) – This app is a collection of many smaller utility style apps. It holds things like a level, currency converter, tip calculator, ruler, translator and more. This app is worth the price even though you can get most of those things in free apps simply for the screen real estate efficiency it provides by having all of those within one app.

TweetDeck[iTunes link] – This is my current twitter app. It works well for me with a few crashes from time to time. I’m not a huge twitterholic so paying for something like Tweetie isn’t worth it to me yet. I find myself clicking on more links from people because I often use TweetDeck when I’m bored and wanting something to do, so this app has helped me engage in the twitterverse a bit more.

Facebook[iTunes link] – This app is the only reason my facebook status gets updated. I quit logging into the main page a few months ago, so I like keeping a better consistency with my status updates now. The app makes it very easy to mange most of your facebook life with in. I don’t feel as though I’m missing any real functionality by using the iPhone app over the actual website.

Dictionary[iTunes link] – This application gets used more than most all my other apps. I love trying to learn new words and incorporate them into my vocabulary and this app has a nice Word of the Day feature that I can learn new words with and it also provides sentences to use them in. Along with the dictionary and word of the day, this app also is a thesaurus. Another nice thing about this app is that it doesn’t require the Internet. An entire dictionary and thesaurus is downloaded with the app, so I can quickly get the definitions I need without waiting on a slow internet connection to provide them.

Bookmark[iTunes link](paid app) – In my previous iPhone post I mentioned being frustrated with the iPods inability to remember my spot in my audiobooks. This is the application I purchased to mend that problem. This application does have a few griping points though. Mainly is that it can’t run in the background. If I’m listening to a book and the author uses a word I don’t know, I can’t simply hide this app and look up the definition with the dictionary app without stopping the audiobook. The other problem is that this app is just a front end to the native iPod app so if I were listening to a podcast at 2x normal speed, then my audiobook zips right along at that speed. Hopefully these issues can be remedied soon.

Page 2 – Timewasters and Quick Reference Apps

Amazon[iTunes link] – This application lets you do almost anything you’d like to relating to your Amazon account. You can search for products, view recommendations, purchase items, track purchases and view wishlists. Another feature that works well for the iPhone app is Amazon Recommends. Snap a picture of an item you like, upload it to Amazon Recommends and within minutes you get an e-mail detailing what the item is and link to purchase it on Amazon. I’ve only used this feature a couple of times, but it works well. I feel that the app could be greatly improved if it worked on its browsability. I visit the Amazon.com website sometimes just to wander aimlessly to find things to add to my wishlists. This app doesn’t make doing that easy, so I’d like to see some improvement in that area.

Yelp[iTunes link] – Yelp is a Point of Interest(POI) application. Yelp.com has been a longstanding website used for people to give reviews of everything such as restaurants, bars, banks and gas stations. Take those years of people rating and reviewing different locations all over the US and give it some location awareness and you’ve got a fantastic application. No more, “What’s there to eat around here” or “Is there anything fun to do in this town”.  The ability to find top rated locations and get direction from where you currently are to where the location is within a few button clicks makes this a killer app.

Layar[iTunes link] – Augmented reality is probably going to be the buzzword of 2010 and this app is a proof of concept for it. Yelp has an augmented reality view also called Monocle. The iPhone uses augmented reality to show in what direction POI are through the camera. So if you are looking for restaurants in a certain direction, layar will show you which restaurants are in that direction. As you turn your view, the display updates with new restaurants in your new view. Layar appears to be more open then what Yelp is. More databases of locations, such as apartments, can be added to give more layers of views to augment reality even further.

Showtimes[iTunes link] – This is the app I chose to get my movie times and reviews. It does what you’d want it to. It shows theaters around you, with their movies and showtimes. It also shows what movies are new and upcoming. The app itself tends to be on the slow side when pulling its data. I might give the Fandango app a try to see if it is any zippier.

Mint[iTunes link] – Mint is a controversial website where you can track all your financial dealings in one location. Give mint all your login info to your bank accounts, credit cards, loans and 401k and it will pull in all your account information into one spot. If you’re like me with several accounts to manage it is a huge timesaver for my monthly budget to have all this information in one location. The app lets you view all your account transactions, track your budget and gives alerts if there is any noteworthy activity going on in your accounts. The app works well, but it is a tad clunky. Button presses can take a few seconds to register. I would also like a setting in the app to not get alerts. If you’re already comfortable enough to give mint.com all you information, then there is very little reason not to have this app on your iPhone. For added security can give the app a 4 digit password and login to the app each time.

IGN[iTunes link] – IGN.com is a very popular video game review website. This application holds their latest game reviews and ratings. You can filter by gaming systems to see only games reviewed on that system. You can also search for game reviews by genre.

Cartoon Wars Lite[iTunes link] – Yet another tower defense game. You send your stick figure minions against his stick figure minions. Get gold to upgrade your units. The lite version is enough for me. I didn’t find anything compelling enough to purchase the paid version.

FishFrenzy[iTunes link] – You are a small fish in a big, big ocean. Eat smaller fish to grow bigger. Avoid being eaten by larger fish. Keep eating until you’re at the top of the ecosystem. I lose interest in this game after five minutes. My wife, however,  is apparently trying to set a Guinness Record for how long someone can play this game.

JellyCar[iTunes link] – This is a quirky time trial car game. You are a squishy car than can bend to get through obstacles. You are also given short bursts when you can grow to 10x your normal size. The levels are challenging to get through and require some good timing in places.

Fox Sports[iTunes link] – I am one of the few males on this planet who cares very little about setting aside hours of my week to yell at a screen full of little men in colored uniform hoping that if they would just hear my poignant remarks and analysis of the situation then they could win the game and bring joy and hope to the hearts of the people they love. This app helps me connect better with those types of people if I choose to by giving me all the latest scores and news from all sports.

Wikipedia[iTunes link] – Search Wikipedia. The content is laid out well for the iPhone and makes finding stuff pretty simple.

Daily Deviations[iTunes link] – This application displays featured pieces of artwork from the popular deviantart.com community. The pictures are presented in an easy to view fashion and can be saved to the iPhone. A great app to get inspiration from and see the beautiful pieces from the community.

RedLaser[iTunes link]](paid app) – This is a barcode reader app. Scan a barcode and it will try to find the Amazon price and it will do a Google Product search. This application isn’t quite what I was hoping for. Being able to scan an item in a store to see what it sells for on Amazon is of little value to me. If I didn’t mind waiting a week to get something then I would buy it on Amazon for a lower price normally. But if I’m in a physical retailer and planning to purchase something, I’d like to see what other local retails have this item for sale at. Then I could travel there and get my item today, or use that to haggle for a better price at the retailer I am already at.

PhoneFlicks[iTunes link] – View and manage your Netflix queue from your iPhone. The app provide a good interface for finding movies, but with one major flaw. I can’t filter just instant play movies. I very rarely use the DVD mailing aspect of Netflix. All of my Netflixing occurs through my Xbox 360. If I’m at a restaurant with friends trying to find a movie to watch with them later I need the ability to see just instant movies and determine if there is a movie worth watching on Netflix or if I need to go rent one.

That’s it for part one. Expect iPhone App Reviews: Part 2 shortly.

As I write this review of sorts I’m going to stay away from elaborating on any of the normally lauded features. If you’re anything like me, then you know what big item features comes in an iPhone 3GS. This post should give a more personal understanding of what owning this device is like to someone who only has read about the iPhone.

As I think about what words best describe my iPhone experience thus for, the best description I have is subtle love.

Over the past few years I’ve started to learn how to cook and I’ve discovered that the most important ingredient in any dish is love. You can taste the difference in a dish when the chef actually cares about the meal. The dish isn’t prepared simply for the paycheck at the end of the week, it’s prepared so that the diner can enjoy the meal. That difference is quality is shown in the iPhone. It doesn’t feel as though it were designed purely for money, it was made to make my life easier, better even. It doesn’t show that love with any one killer feature. It’s the collection of smaller things that are refined and melded together that make you realize what an amazing device it is. Each area of the device received equal attention so as not to make one area more dominate than the others. This ideology is what makes the completed project feel closer to perfection.

The best example I have for this point, is the toggle switch on the side of the phone used to put it into silent or vibrate mode. It doesn’t get mentioned in press releases or featured in keynotes, because it’s a lowly switch. But its design shows exactly what subtle love is. That switch understands why it’s there and knows in what circumstances it will be used in. You put a phone into silent mode, when 1.) you are going to be in a situation where a phone ringing would be a disturbance or 2.) you are already in that situation. When I’m in a silenced phone setting, I slip my hand into my pocket and switch it to silent mode. It was designed to be discreet, which is exactly the situation you’re in when your phone needs to be silent. I could see someone designing the silent mode switch in software under the phone app, which might appear to be a logical place for it. But that would require one to pull the phone out, slide it unlocked, tap the phone app and switch the phone into silenced mode. Too many movements, plus very rude to appear to be playing with your iPhone when the manager is giving his presentation. It wouldn’t be discreet. It wouldn’t be subtle.

Also of interest is that it is a toggle switch, not a button similar to the lock button on top of the iPhone. A toggle switch seems like an odd mechanism for control. When I first found it I knew there had to be a reason for it, although it wasn’t immediately obvious. I didn’t give it much thought, until a day later when I found myself in a silenced phone situation. I reached into my pocket and felt that the toggle switch was not flush with the volume control buttons, meaning the phone was already in silent mode. If the iPhone had used a button instead of a toggle switch, then I couldn’t be 100% sure of which state the phone was in. Perhaps those things are minor to most and I’ve overanalyzed it, but that level of thought and design speaks volumes to me.

Another area that doesn’t get as much attention as some of the other features is the SMS. Having conversation threads with people I’m texting is the way SMS should be. I can follow the conversations. No more confusion over what a random “Yes” or “Only on Tuesdays” mean if I’ve forgotten what they were in response to. No more backtracking through my log of messages to find the previous message to that sender to remember what I was asking of him/her. It feels like Apple did for SMS with the threads, what Google is trying to do for email with Google Wave. Taking something that is old or familiar and revamping it to become more useful and inline with modern practices.

Visual voicemail is another area that is revamping old for modern practices. Selecting which message to play, regardless of order they were received, and being able to skip to certain around in the message just makes sense for a modern interface. It’s subtle, but shows the love for making a better, more useful device.

I was surprised as to how well I adapted to the touch screen keyboard. I know most people cite that as I big reason why they aren’t interested in purchasing an iPhone, but I believe I’m actually faster on it. Granted I’m coming from a 9 button keypad and not a full keyboard like a Blackberry might have, but so far I haven’t had many issues. Most of my typing mistakes get corrected properly by the autocorrect. And after adjusting to some of the features that are designed to speed your typing, such as after typing an apostrophe the keyboard switches back to the letter keypad, my typing increased. Basically, you just have to learn to trust the iPhone and its greatness. Trust that it knows exactly what you want to do. And if it doesn’t do what you expected it to do, then your expectations are wrong and you should thank your iPhone for showing you the error of your ways.

I was pleased to discover that the iPhone even accounts for my terrible use of the popular Southern vocabulary words y’all and ain’t. Never would have guessed that it would have an entry to autocorrect yall to y’all and aint to ain’t. Perhaps the rest of the world has given up on trying to correct our backwardness and decided to cater to us. Ain’t that sweet of them.

The iPhone from a hardware and software aspect feels seamless. I can’t think of any situation where the phone failed to provide options to achieve what I wanted to do based off of context. When I receive a picture message, I can easily make it bigger and save it to my phone. When I’m using a bluetooth headset and receive a call I can easily switch my audio sources if I need to. When I’m listening to an audio book and receive a call, the audio book immediately starts back when the call is over. The iPhone understands context better than any other device I’ve owned. It shows the hours of testing that went into understanding how a large number of people use this phone, not just how a small test group does. I’m sure there are a few places where the iPhone fails to understand the context, just none of which were so poignant that I can recall right now.

One final feature I’ll mention is the ability have and rely on the Internet at all times. I knew that it was going to be huge, but I failed to understand to what degree it would affect my day to day living. Now I can get the answers to trivial arguments I tend to find myself in daily. If I hear a vocabulary word that I’m unsure of its definition, it’s easily had. Weather, sports scores, movie times and all kinds of daily things that have questions without typically receiving immediate answers are now just an app away. The ability to get real-time answers to all my questions is a massive game changer to how I go about my day.

The only frustrations I can really list is that I wish the iPhone had some way of multitasking. I don’t like having to close my current app, open Safari, find what I need, close Safari and reopen the original app. That process get’s very frustrating if you’re in a situation of needing to switch like that very frequently, such as trying to find a good map strategy for Fieldrunners[itunes link]. To their credit, most apps remember where they were when closed and since I have the speedier 3GS iPhone there is minimal waiting, but it’s still an area that needs improvement.

Another area where the native iPhone OS failed me was in the listening to audio books. The iPhone lost my place too often and I grew tired of trying to keep up with each chapter and time position I was on. Luckily this was easily fixed with the app, bookmark[itunes link].

I have had an amazing first week experience with the iPhone I believe for two main reasons:

One, Apple simply made a killer device. You can’t own the phone for more than a few minutes to realize that. Many talented people spent years of there life refining this product to make it as perfect as they could. They also developed a system where people in mass could develop for the device to cheaply fix many of the foibles.

Two, I purchased a mature product. I did not have to suffer from growing pains that early iPhone adopters had to. All of the major complains like copy/paste, weak camera, no video, and MMS were already fixed by the time I purchased the iPhone. Also another major groining point for people on the iPhone is the AT&T network and its lack of coverage and reliability. I lucked out in this case also. Three weeks ago most iPhone owners in my area, and especially at my work, complained of limited 3G coverage and only getting a few bars of cell service. But two weeks ago our area must have received some more cell towers or whatnot, because most now get 3G and at least 4, usually 5, bars of coverage.

I’ve been having nothing but a positive experience with my iPhone thus far, although that might change a bit when I get the first bill.

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to say this so I’m just going to get it over with. You know band-aid style, right off.

I’m breaking up with you.

As you and I are both aware, my two-year contract ended with you today and I’m leaving you for someone else.

It’s not that anything was particularly wrong with you or your service. You and I have had a good four years together, but I’m needing something more in my cell provider relationship these days. When we first got together coverage was all that anyone could need from a provider, but over the past few years that’s changed and people are needing more. I still care about coverage, and you’re still the best in that area, it’s just that I’m a geek and I need much more robust handsets. More robust than anything you’ve been giving to me. Other networks are getting cool things like the iPhone or android phones when you’re still trying to sell me “feature” (read: dumb) phones. I need a network that can give me more than just coverage. It’s a big deal to me and you don’t seem to care.

Yes, I got your e-mail yesterday that was trying to tempt me into signing a new two-year contract by giving me a great deal on the Samsung Knack. But that’s exactly my point. I’m hours away from being free from a cell phone contract and the best you have to show is a phone that even your users give it a 3/5 stars rating. I know about your Blackberry Storm and I’ve also heard that you’re very likely to be getting the Palm Pre in the upcoming year, but it’s too little, too late. Neither of those are worth getting locked into another two years.

Who am I leaving you for, you ask.

Well if you really want to know, I’m switching to AT&T, or more accurately the iPhone. I know that the AT&T network is nothing compared to you, and that most people on AT&T are unhappy with their service, but the iPhone is worth the hassle for me. I’d much rather have the iPhone and your service, but since you rejected the iPhone when you had the chance that’s telling me that you didn’t care enough about this relationship to try. To be honest, I even gave you an extra year to try to impress me. I was fully prepared to break my contract with you last year, but decided not too because I wasn’t fully satisfied with all of the iPhone 3G’s hardware. In this past year though, Apple has impressed me with the upgraded hardware in the 3GS, while you on the other hand have done nothing to impress me.

Chin up now, don’t get a long face, I have a feeling I’ll be back in two years so long as you start caring more about other customer needs than coverage. I’m hoping with the upcoming LTE networks and the inevitable demise of the AT&T iPhone exclusivity that you will be easily able to tempt me back into your service with a brand new iPhone LTE HD in 2011.

Well, I guess I should go. I’m almost to the front of the line here at the Apple store and I don’t want to be rude talking to you while I’m buying my new phone and accessories.

See ya in a couple of years,

Jeremy