Earlier today I review the SplashID Key Safe hardware based USB thumb drive for storing your passwords and other sensitive files (see the review here). It was during the review process that I quickly learned that they also have an iOS version of their App. Many of you may already be familiar with 1Password Pro as it has been one of my favorite Apps for a long time. SplashID Keysafe for iPhone is very similar in that it allows you to securely (via encryption) store your passwords, credit card numbers, bank accounts, web logins, software serial numbers and just about anything else that you want to keep under lock and key. With that being said there are some differences. The 1st difference is one that I really like. You can lock the App with a Password or Pin as you would expect, but you can also lock with a custom Pattern (see the image below). There are 9 pins and using your finger you draw a pattern connecting the dots. That's how you unlock the App going forward. It's much easier than having to key in a secure password containing letters, numbers and symbols. The app is also a bit more visually appealing offering nice icons for the various categories. However, the biggest difference is that it allows direct wireless syncing with the hardware key. This has it's advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that your data is never sitting on someone's cloud that could be hacked. The downside is that it's on you to then make sure that your data is backed up.

Use it stand alone

Although the App syncs with the desktop versions and the Key Safe App, you don't have to have any other software or hardware to use this App. The App can work in a stand alone fashion and you can simply use it to store all your passwords safely. Once you have your web logins entered you can actually use the Apps in-app browser to bring up the site you want to access and the user name and password will be inserted if possible and if not will at least be display on the bar above the page in the app.

The Bottom Line

You should not be using the same "easy to remember" password on all of your sites. I know that having a single password makes life easy, but it also puts you at great risk that if someone figures out that password they can keep trying it on other sites to do more damage. The answer is different passwords on each site you log into and more importantly passwords that are strong containing letters, numbers and symbols. Since these more secure passwords are harder to remember an App like SplashID Safe comes in very handy!

You can get it here for $9.99 from the 

Over a year ago, I wrote about a product by Aji, LLC, iRead PDF. At the time, this sweet little free PDF reader, along with its sister product iAnnotate, were the only iPad apps that used tabbed viewing to navigate through open documents. Aji LLC understood early on the importance of using tabs instead of having you open/close documents to get from one to the other. Easier to use and the options of having more than one file open at a time was priceless, especially to my teaching workflow.

Shortly, after my iRead PDF review, I switched over to the full-featured iAnnotate PDF, because I realized that I also wanted to (pardon the pun) annotate my PDF files on my iPad. I’ve been happily using it ever since. iRead PDF has since been discontinued.

Timing is everything and in the past year, iAnnotate PDF has seen two major revisions that have made it an even more indispensable app to use. How important is this app to me? Well, it’s on the first page of my iPad and not in a folder.

Just this month, one of those major updates occurred. The entire UI was updated, so I had to discard the images that I was going to use for this article. But, I forgive them.

So, let’s take a look at some of the many features iAnnotate PDF has to offer. Let’s start with the feature that won me over, tabbed viewing. As many as eight tabs can be open at one time. The reason I say tabs and not documents is because any one of those tabs can be additional views of one document. This is great so that I don’t have to flip through a long document to get from one desired page to another.

The iAnnotate interface allows quick access to pages in the Navigation Panel by:

Document thumbnails

Document Table of Contents

Markup Annotations

Search Criteria

The Navigation Panel is accessed by a swipe to the small drawer pull at the left middle edge of the UI. Faster than the previous flow of clicking on a small icon the top left of the screen.

A multitude of Tools are accessed by swiping a small drawer pull at the right middle edge of the UI. You can add as many Tools or Toolbars as you like (double arrow icon at bottom of Toolbar) and show or hide them with just a swipe.

Previously, in a few cases, having many Tools on the screen would get in the way while working with the files, this new change takes all of that way.

The Tools used to display in full color, but now only colorize when they are selected. I didn’t think that I would like this. It feels too much like the Lion UI with its monotone look of the Sidebar, which I’m not a fan of. But, I found this pleasing with iAnnotate. They seem to have found the right balance of monotone/color to keep the focus on task.

When a Tool is selected, a tooltip panel also displays a description and other attributes of the selected Tool. Depending on what Tool you are using with text, you may even see a magnification glass display on the document.

In addition to marking up the document pages with features such as highlighting, bookmarks, stamps, lines, quick document navigation, shapes, callouts, text; you can delete pages or even add blank pages to the open PDF. You can add photos (existing or taken with the iPad camera) and audio clips. I hope creating or adding movie files are next. See the accompanying “All Tools” image to see other features not listed here.

An annotation like a signature created with the pencil tool can be turned into a custom stamp, directly within iAnnotate, to use over and over again. I can also connect my iPad to a projector and place iAnnotate in presentation mode to work in real-time during a training session.

In the Library Panel files can be sorted into appropriate folders and files filtered when searching for documents. The accompanying images will give you insight to some of the other features available while in the Library Panel.

Getting files into iAnnotate is relatively easy.

Web download

iTunes

Dropbox

And Aji PDF Service

While I have used Dropbox and Web download for getting documents, I’ve exclusively used Aji PDF Service (a free app for your computer) for processing my PDF files into iAnnotate. Files I typically transfer to my iPad are book size and going through AjI PDF service processed them better and just seemed easier. But I understand that this service will be gradually phased out for a more direct sharing service in the future.

My only feature request is that text alignment in the notation tools be set to left justified and not center justified. Or at least give the options to set which alignment we prefer. Center justified is really awkward when entering multiple lines of text.

iAnnotate is a fantastic app to use for PDF use and annotation on all levels. I find it to be indispensable to my workflow and I’m sure, once you use it, yours too.

You can get iAnnotate PDF for $9.99 here from the 

A week or two ago Google made everyone jump for joy when rumors surfaced that a Gmail App was close to being released for the iPhone just to let them down with a bug that made the App unusable from launch. They immediately pulled the App from the App store and have been reworking it to get rid of the bug. a couple of days ago they released the "fixed" version, fulfilling what we've all been asking for since the launch of the iPhone; push for Gmail. I have been using the App non stop with my Gmail account for two days now, and I am happy to report that they have done a pretty good job.

Functionality

The iOS Gmail App is very similar to the web version of Gmail so it will feel very similar to those of you who use the web version. Opening the App displays the first 20 messages in your inbox, with a "show more messages" button at the bottom to display more. New messages have bold text, while read messages are a light grey.  Just like on the web version of Gmail, there are check boxes next to each message allowing the user to select multiple messages for different actions ( deleting, moving to a folder, etc.).

A left to right swipe, or a tap of the menu button displays familiar folders, filters, and menus. Any folders that you may have created under your Gmail web interface will appear within this menu. Drilling down into the folders and sorting your content is easy and intuitive with this App.

Searching your content is simple with a tap of the hourglass in the top right corner. This icon is directly to the left of the new mail icon in the right corner. One notable function of this App is the attachment of items to mail. Unlike the native mail App on both the iPhone and the iPad, to attach an item to a Gmail email you must click the paperclip icon within a message. This will allow you to email that item (photo, pdf etc.).

Push

If there is one thing that I wanted this App for over anything else, it is PUSH messages. I know that there has been a hack out there using enterprise server to get Push for Gmail on the iPhone, but this is truly an integrated, working package. The Push works really well. I did a few tests and messages seem to come through faster on my iPhone than they do on my web account. Push is the biggest plus side of this App in my opinion

Something I'd Like To See

If there is one thing that I really, really want to see, it's support for multiple accounts. I currently have three Gmail accounts, so I picked the one that I get the most incoming mail on to use with the Gmail App. Google Says that there are improvements and added features on the way, including multiple account support.

The Bottom Line

Besides the initial bug contained within the original release of the App, this is a great first offering. I really hope that they continue to build on this and offer multiple account support in the near future.

You can get Gmail for the iPhone and iPad from the iTunes store for free here:

Although I have a great App (Desktop Connect) to remote control my computers from anywhere on the internet, what I didn't have was a simple way to connect to my home file server to grab a file. Yes, this could be accomplished with Desktop Connect and even some of my other Apps, but it would require more steps. There are times where I'm out and about and I want to pull down a file from my Mac OS X Server at home and either work with the file on my iDevice or send the file to someone that needs it. This is what led me to search for a more direct way to access AFP, FTP and SMB servers/NAS boxes remotely. 

Files Connect does what I need it to do

As you might expect there are a few different apps that do this. Some ranging in price of $20 and others costing less. Files Connect proves that you don't need the most expensive App on the App store to get the job done. I grabbed it and within about 2 minutes I was securely connected to my OS X Server and able to see all my files and folders. Not only could I download files from the server to my iPad or iPhone, but I could easily print them or share them with others. Perfect! Since I have the necessary ports open on my router to be able to access my server from the internet, I now have access to terabytes and terabytes of my files from anywhere I happen to be in the world all in the palm of my hand. 

An Added Benefit

Files Connect works in the other direction too. You can turn your iDevice into a file server for others to access your content. I really don't have a need for this, but it's nice to know that it's possible if I need to do it. Files Connect also supports Bonjour, this makes it easy for the App to discover available network resources on your LAN without having to know the specific IP addresses. The App is also rather speedy. It seems as fast if not faster than accessing the same folders using my Mac. I really like the Bookmarks folder to drag commonly accessed nested folders to to speed up access.

It sees your printers too. Not only does it support iOS native printing, but it sees your CUPS printers too.

A cool test that worked

As a photographer I store my RAW files in Adobe DNG format. This format isn't natively supported on the iPad therefore there's really no way to preview them natively. However, there are apps that will open and work with DNG files like Photogene. I used Files Connect to download one of my DNGs from my Server and used the Open In command to open it in Photogene for iPad. It worked! Very cool! Files Connect will of course preview the files that are supported natively such as JPG, MOV, PDF, etc. It even has a movie player built-in.

The Bottom Line

If you have a file server running SMB, AFP, FTP, SFTP, or webDAV protocols and you want to access those files from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, then this App is for you. The only thing stopping me from giving this app a 5 star rating is that it did quit a couple of times upon launching. Otherwise it works very well.

You can get Files Connect for $7.99 here from the 

Before I get in to this review, let me state that OmniFocus is available on the Mac, iPhone and iPad. Because of the different layouts in the iPhone and iPad client, I have chosen to review them separately. For a few years, I have been using Things as my todo list. Only recently, I have begun looking at a system which is slightly more powerful, offering more advanced sorting of tasks etc. OmniFocus lets me do this. Firstly, OmniFocus on the iPhone is very neatly designed using tall the common iPhone User Interface Elements that we are all so used to by now. They have quite successfully managed to cram (and I mean cram in a positive way) most of the features from the Mac app into the iPhone. As a result of this, the app features all projects, contexts and custom perspectives that you’ve set up. Additionally, you get a few extra features on the iPhone such as the forecast view and the nice Map view. You link a context to a pin on a map and you will be able to see, graphically, how far you are to this context where you can do your tasks.

Conclusion

Overall, OmniFocus for iPhone is a brilliant app if you require a feature-rich system that allows you to do a lot of managing with your actions. Naturally, the app shines when you are using it together with OmniFocus on the Mac (with which it syncs over the cloud for free) but can be used nicely by itself, maintaining the high-performance environment.  

OmniFocus for iPhone 

OmniFocus for iPad

Wacom, the maker of the best graphics tablets on the market have taken their designs skills to the ever growing mobile touch screen market. Wacom introduced their own Bamboo Stylus for iPad (see my review here).  To compliment the New Bamboo Stylus Wacom has also released a New iPad App. The Bamboo Paper App is a virtual notebook for your iPad offering the ability to create an endless number of handwritten notes and sketches. Bamboo Paper is a off to a good start, but it's entering the App Store at a time where there are several Apps in this category. 

The Good

First off you're greeted with a nice 1st page of instructions on how the interface works. From that point on you can go from page to page creating drawings and/or hand written notes. The basics are there such as changing pen color, and stroke weight. You can undo and redo as well as clear the entire page. There's an eraser for erasing only part of what you drew/wrote. You can share pages or the entire book as a PDF as well as print individual pages or the book. You can change things like the color of the book cover as well as choose between a variety of paper styles such as lined paper, grid paper, etc. 

Room for Improvement

Like I said, this App is off to a good start, but there is room for improvement especially when compared to other apps in this category. Let's start with the book concept itself. While you can rename your notebook, there doesn't appear to be a way to add multiple notebooks. It appears that they intended to go in this direction because the App has a "Library" button. Currently your notes are limited to only what you do with your stylus or finger. In other words there is no input for voice or images. Speaking of images, it would be nice to be able to bring in an image and sketch over it. While I'm certainly no artist I could see using an app like this to take handwritten notes. Some of the other Apps in this area take this into consideration by allowing you a "wrist rest" area on screen so that you're not accidentally making marks on the page. Lastly the App only works in portrait mode. 

Currently the App is FREE and well it's hard to beat FREE. If you don't already have a favorite sketching/notes App then I would certainly grab this one. I imagine that Wacom will continue to improve it and it's good to get in on the ground floor for free while you can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgByFtjYotQ

You can get the Bamboo Paper App for FREE (until the End of June) here from the 

you can get the NEW Bamboo Stylus for iPad for $29.95 here.

As much as I love using my iPad and iPhone 4 the one thing that usually sends me back to my MacBook Pro is having to type long messages with the onscreen keyboard. Sure I have a bluetooth keyboard for those times when I travel with just the iPad and iPhone, but there are many times where the external keyboard isn't handy day to day and on the go. This means that I want to minimize the amount of onscreen typing that I have to do as much as possible. This is where TextExpander comes in. The concept of TextExpander is simple. You set up lists of your own abbreviations like "tw" = "Terry White". The expansions can be complete sentences like "omw" = "I'm on my way and will see you soon." or "iam" = "I'm in a meeting right now. I'll get back to you as soon as I can."  I've used similar utilities in the past for things like responding to SMS messages. What has me leaning towards totally switching to TextExpander is two things: The first is that it's integrated directly into several iOS Apps including my preferred Google Voice client GV Mobile+. This is great because unlike my other App, I don't have to first go to the TextExpander App before using my snippets. I can just fire up a supported app and key in my abbr. and it expands to the full text right in the app I'm using. The second reason is that lists you create on one device can be sent wirelessly to another device. I created a couple of short lists on my iPhone and sent them to TextExpander running on my iPad. If you're really into you can get the Mac version too.

Works great, but I want more

This productivity tool is awesome! However, there are a few more things I want. First off I want it integrated into MORE 3rd party Apps. The list is impressive, but I'd like to see several more apps included like Gowalla, Foursquare, TextNow,  etc. This is not the developer's fault as each 3rd party App has to integrate TextExpander support themselves, but I'd like to see this app become as popular as Dropbox among other 3rd party Apps.  If you need to insert text into a non-supported App you can just fire up TextExpander and copy the text from there. However, this requires at least two taps once you're inside TextExpander. I would like to see a one tap "copy to the clipboard" option. TextExpander does allow you to fire up a new Mail message or SMS message directly from within the App as it would be unlikely for Apple to add direct support. Otherwise, this is a great boost to my personal productivity and any time I can save a few keystrokes on the go is very welcomed. 

Bonus Tip: One of the uses for this is to setup multiple email signatures and you can just copy the one you want as needed or you can start the email from TextExpander with the appropriate signature already in the body.

You can get TextExpander for $4.99 here from the 

Finding a good system for notes has been very hard for me in that most systems have been too obtrusive, requiring me to go through a process of organizing and sorting, each time I just wanted to jot down a simple reminder note.

This one requirement has ruled out solutions like Evernote, who have a superb note system in place but just take too long for me to work with. Enter Simplenote, a much quicker option.
Simplenote is a text based solution, with no RTF in it by default, it is just plain text. For many, this might be a downside, but I find it to be just what you need most of the time. If you, however, require the features to be able to style your text using a simple editor as well as insert images, Simplenote is not going to be for you.

What Simplenote does best however, is give you the clean way for creating notes. The app is available for free both on the iPhone, iPodTouch and iPad and works in a very simple way. Just launch it and tap the plus sign to begin editing a note. Even though the app and service has support for basic tagging, I find it much easier to implement this as part of the file name. For example, instead of adding a tag, I just prefix my note with say: “bas:review”. When I start searching, I can filter down as far as I want, first to bas, which will show me all notes containing that keyword, then if I want the sub-group. Finally, I get the title of the note. Simple!

Another major requirement for a notes application is that it shall be very easy to get your notes off the system and not locking you in to the iPad or iPhone client. In this case, Simplenote syncs with their online service (free with a premium option available), where you can also access your notes. Although Simpleviewer does not have an official Mac application, there is a very popular one called Notational Velocity (keeping with the simple trend) available for free.

If you just want an application that lets you insert plain text and organize it into quick notes, Simplenote is going to be your friend. Should you however need something more advanced, I advise you to look further. For what it does, Simplenote does it very well and it is hard to fault this application. If I were to add something to my wishlist for an upcoming version, it would be support for a Markdown and MultiMarkdown preview and export.

Do you ever get a phone call from a number that isn’t in your phone book and wonder if it’s a telemarketer, or possibly a crazy ex friend from the past? For better or worse, my number is all over the internet which causes me to get lots of phone calls both from telemarketers, as well as people with Photoshop, tech, or Photography questions. If I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer it. With that said, I still like to know who it was that called, especially if they don’t leave a voicemail. There are other services and Apps out there that offer reverse number lookup either as their primary function or as one of the services built into their phonebook App but Mr. Number is by far the best I have tried yet. It is a dedicated reverse lookup App with a great UI (user interface) and a large directory of numbers. Even though it is touted as a “one purpose” App, it still has a nice extra little feature that I use on a regular basis.
 

How it works

The functionality of Mr. Number is pretty strait forward. You input the number (including area code) that you want to look up and hit GO. The App will search its database of numbers and brings back your results. The developer claims 50% return rate on cell phone numbers, and 90% return rate for landlines. I have no way of verifying this claim, but I can tell you that there have been very few numbers that I have searched that weren’t in there. Once it finds the number, you will get an information screen showing you the person, or business’ name, how many times that particular number has been looked up, as well as how many times it has been reported as spam. It really works well.

From the main screen you have four options, first is to look up a number, second is your search history, both of which do exactly what you would expect. Next you will see a “ME” tab which is optional. From this tab you can add and manage your cell phone and personal information on the Mr. Number database. The last option at the bottom of the screen is the settings tab. This tab contains you’re my account, and the backup and restore option. The last of which is the little extra feature that I like and use often.
 

Backup and Restore

Just as it sounds, this section lets you backup and restore your entire contact list from the cloud. I backup my iPhone through iTunes but it’s always nice to have another option for added security.
 

Cost

Normally we just list the price right by the download button at the bottom of the review, but with this App there is a continual charge so I thought it should have its own section. The initial cost of the App is $.99. Your first 20 lookups are FREE! After that, each lookup is $.05. Not too expensive. If you have looked the number up in the past, there is no charge; If Mr. Number doesn’t have the number in their database, again no charge.
 

Conclusion

When it comes to doing reverse lookups, there are plenty of options in the iTunes store but none work as well as Mr. Number. It’s a must have App for anyone that receives calls from lots of strange, unknown numbers.

You can get Mr. Number for the iPhone for $0.99 here from the 

The iPad is a popular gadget amongst graphic designers. With SneakPeek it just became a whole lot more useful. SneakPeek for iOS allows you to preview your Adobe InDesign CS5 and Adobe Illustrator CS5 directly on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. The concept is really quite simple. Both InDesign CS5 and Illustrator CS5 now have the ability to save embedded "previews" in their respective file formats. SneakPeek can use those previews to display on your iOS devices. This is extremely useful for viewing artwork from Illustrator, but it becomes even more useful because InDesign CS5 can now save ALL of the pages in the preview as well. With SneakPeek you can thumb through an entire InDesign document right on your device. The next question becomes: "how do I get these files into the App?" SneakPeek takes advantage of the "Open In" command found in Apps like Safari, Mail and yes…..Dropbox! I just wrote a post the other day on "5 Ways To Take Advantage of Dropbox" and now we have a great 6th way. 

How does it work?

The first thing you have to realize is that while this App does what it says, you still have to change a preference in InDesign to take advantage of it. InDesign CS5 by default will only save a "medium" quality preview and only of the 1st 2 pages of the file by default. You have to change your InDesign Preferences to save a larger preview (if you want it to look good on the iPad) and enable the All Pages option. Yes, this will make your InDesign files a little larger, but it is soooo worth it.

For Illustrator CS5 just make sure you have PDF Compatible File enabled in the Save dialog box.

Now that you've made your file the next question is "how do I get it on my iPad?" You have a few options. You can email it to yourself and use the Mail Open In command to Open the attachement in SneakPeek. You could post the file on a website and do the same command in Safari. Lastly and probably the best way is to put the file in your Dropbox  (get a FREE 2GB Dropbox account here) from your Mac or PC. Then using the FREE Dropbox App you can select the file and choose Open In SneakPeek to view it. Once the file is open you can just swipe through the pages and pinch to zoom. Awesome!

But wait, there's more

Seeing the file is cool, but you could do that already with a PDF version of the file. So SneakPeek takes it up a notch by also allowing you to see which fonts were used in the document, which images are linked as well as which colors and swatches were used.

The Bottom Line

This App is a must have for the InDesign and Illustrator users out there. It's also an Art Director's dream come true. While it does work there is one thing I'd like to see added in the next update and that is DIRECT support for Dropbox. Instead of having to open the document in the Dropbox App first and then move it over, I'd love to see the ability to log into my Dropbox account directly in the App. This is possible because I have other Apps that allow this. No need to stop there either. Might as well add direct support for MobileMe and FTP too. These direct connections would definitely earn a 5th star from me. However, there is no reason for a Creative Suite user not to grab this one immediately.

You can get SneakPeek for $9.99 here from the