Corvus Consulting

Meetings of any size suffer the moment a laptop comes out; the open screen creates no end of distractions pulling participant attention between shared and private contexts. For that reason alone, I’m a paper notebook guy at meetings. But the iPad seems a way to have the benefits of a digital device without the weird social barrier that laptops create, so I’ve been on the hunt for a note-taking app that could replace the Moleskin.

It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.

After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.

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A week into having an iPad in my tool (and toy) lineup I’m still sussing out what aspects of work this new beast can take on, and what parts are still best suited to my main workhorse, a 15″ Macbook Pro. As my work involves a fair bit of wireframing, I was keen to see if the touch interface could serve as an effective design tool.

Two early contenders have popped up in the App Store to meet that need and I’ve spent a few hours with each of them, with some mixed results that other iPad early adopters may find useful: Omnigraffle and iMockups.

The reviews here have been updated to reflect recent developments.

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About six weeks ago Apple kicked out a little preview party for the iPhone’s upcoming 3rd anniversary, complete with a big slice of Beta Cake for app developers. Most commentary so far seems split between speculation on somewhat vanilla, incremental hardware improvements and the overdue-ness, the zomg-ness of the decades-old desktop computing staple: Cut+Copy and Paste.

Copy and Paste is good to have. Its absence hasn’t bothered me much, but that’s me and I recognize it’s a pain for many, especially around URLS (though the explosion of shorteners, midwifed into necessity by Twitter, alleviates that). And the way Apple is implementing the feature in a touch-screen looks good in the video.

Engadget offers a tidy marquee feature list:

Besides adding oft-requested (and much needed) copy and paste functionality, the company also tacked on MMS, A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) support, peer-to-peer connectivity, unlocked Bluetooth support for the touch, and a brand new global search called Spotlight.

What I think reviewers are missing can only be seen when the iPhone is viewed part and parcel with the iTunes App Store and the changes coming with 3.0. Those changes, I believe, will have 3 big outcomes:

• Halt the ghettoization of the App Store as one ruled by the $0.99 price point, and radically tidy up the inventory to make app discovery and browsing much easier.
• Expand App Store revenues with a massive opportunity for developers to generate new and ongoing sales.
• Neutralize the threat posed by Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader by turning it into an Apple product.

The short version of why: iPhone 3 makes every app a potential store. Here’s how.

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Last week Garrett Murray’s commentary on the state reviewing culture on the iTunes App Store reviews circulated through the the blogaverse, catching my eye by way of Lachlan’s Pool Room.

Garrett’s application, Ego (iTunes Link), lets iPhone users check in on their Google Analytics stats on the go. A snafu with Analytics caused his app to be blocked, but in true web spirit Google and Garrett worked out the problem, and an update to Ego was submitted into the App Store’s approval process, which takes about a week.

Meanwhile, on the App Store and Get Satisfaction, Ego customers reacted badly, giving rise to the Garrett’s two core grievances on how commenting on the App Store and elsewhere works:

• Reviewers can be quick to criticize and don’t read every detail before doing so.
• The App Store doesn’t give developers a way to respond to specific comments, or comments in general.

These are fair criticisms, one rooted in problematic human-computer expectations (and if we acronymize that to HCE, we can go on speaking tour), and the other in the design of the interface at the App Store. Along with people commenting on Ego’s problem, we have Google Analytics and the App Store not coming off very well. But there’s a fourth leg in this interaction dance, which is how the Ego app itself handled the unexpected use case of being blocked by Google. Read more »

Can I get an amen? I tried to think of more to say in a first-day review, but it really comes down to this: Tweetie for Mac isn’t just a Twitter client with a focus on posting. If anything, it’s a Twitter browser, giving primacy to following the threads of interest and conversation that make Twitter compelling. So far the best surprises have been a built-in search on any given hashtag, and natural conversation threading.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the beta unfolds into a 1.0 release. From this point, though, as with the iPhone so with the Mac: Tweetie is a welcome entry into an already busy category.

Have you visited Twistori.com? If not, do so only with a few minutes to let slip away to wherever minutes go while we’re pleasantly distracted. Simply put, Twistori is a keyword browser that sits on top of Twitter posts, presenting what it finds in way not unlike watching water flow by in a stream; it’s somehow engaging, every changing, and meditative at the same time.

I liked, but often forgot about the Twistori website in moments that would have been perfect for it, so finding that a desktop app for Mac had been launched into beta was welcome news. While in beta, a license for Twistori Desktop can be had for just $12 (after beta, the price goes up to $16), and that sounded good to me but I recoiled at the only payment option: Google Checkout. And that’s how $12 started to turn into $25…

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Among the many rumors of products that Google would one day ship, a home-spun operating system has been among the more persistent and esoteric. What would such an OS look like? How would they ever get it into OEM hardware? Would it be sold or ad-supported? As with Android, the answer is not so much the arrival of what’s expected (g-phone, anyone?) as a reveal that re-frames the original questions.

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