Utilities
It is not often that I come by an app that appeals to me so much that I just had to get it, especially not at the $9.99 price point. Textastic however is one of these apps that is a must-have if you like me are a web designer and developer.
This is the first app that I have seen on the app store that lets me write and edit code files right on my iPad! This is a very important thing because it leaves one less thing that I have to bring my laptop for on shorter trips for example. It also means that wherever I am and have my iPad with me (which is very often), clients can have their sites fixed immediately, should something happen.
File format support
In terms of file formats, Textastic supports a ton of them, from HTML and CSS via PHP to formats like PDF files, if you like to code them yourself. All of these syntax definitions supported by the app have full syntax highlighting enabled, making it easier for you to read the code. Missing however is any type of code auto-completion. Even though that might be asking a lot of the iPad, it would of course be very nice. Don’t worry though, there is a workaround. Textastic supports Text Expander which has a built-in library of both HTML and CSS snippets for you to use to code quicker. It’s something to help, albeit not exactly the same.
There are plenty of iOS apps out now to control your Mac. Most of the ones I've used do a pretty good job of giving you access to your system on both the iPhone and the ipad. but the app I'm going to walkabout today – Remote HD – is very unique, and has some features I haven't seen in other apps. It's almost like one of those late-night informercials – "but wait! There's more!"
First off, unlike many of the other remote control apps, Remote HD requires you to download a (free) helper application for your Mac (or PC).It's pretty unobtrusive – I have it set only to show in the Status Bar, but you can have it show there, in the Dock, or nowhere at all. It takes up 42 MB of memory – not a lot, but if you're already on the edge, you might care. The upside is that the helper app allows Remote HD to do more than many other remote control programs.
The helper app can automatically configure your firewall for you to open a connection to the outside if you like (it doesn't by default). If you don't have "Back To My Mac" available (because you don't want to use it or you're not a MobileMe member) and you aren't handy with firewalls and/or setting up your own VPN, this can be a big help.
The app is universal, and has been optimized for both iPhone and iPad. The iPhone version can use upgraded Retina Display quality graphics (but you can turn this off if you like to get the speed up). The iPad screens are optimized to take advantage of the much larger real estate available.
Here's what it looks like on the iPad:
Tapping on the monitor icon in the upper-right of the iPhone version brings you to a full-screen view, as does hitting the double-arrows in the upper-right of the iPad version. Once you're there, you can bring up arrow keys to move about menus or just touch with your finger to use it as a mouse. It does all those things you'd expect from a remote control app, so I'm not going to detail them all here. I want to focus on the unique things Remote HD does.
You can get Remote HD for $5.99 here from the
Last week, Jason wrote a great roundup of 5 Alternatives to the iPhone Alarm Clock. Today, I want to review and share with you an app along the same lines but at the same time entirely different. It is called the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and is as the name implies an alarm clock to help you wake up in the morning. What sets this app apart from other alarms, is that it uses the built-in accelerometer in your iPhone to analyze your sleep cycles and wake you up at the time when you are the most awake, within a time window.
What are sleep cycles?
To fully understand what this app does, you need to understands the basics of human sleep. Contrary to common belief, sleep is not just a state of just lying still in your bed, waiting for the next day to come. Sleep is a much complex subject and quite fascinating as well. When you are sleeping you go through a series of phases that simplified is from Awake, through Lightly Asleep down to Deeply Asleep.
In a typical night, you move back and forth through these phases a few times. If you have found yourself being easily woken up in the middle of the night by a noise but not your partner, chances are that you are in the phase where you are closest to being awake although your partner is not.
How does all this apply to an iPhone app?
Aha! I knew you would ask me that. You see, in these phrases we move around differently. When we are awake we tend to move around more, even if it is just twitches it is something that can be senses and analyzed.
What Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock does is that it tries to analyze in which phase you are during the entire night by tracking your movements throught he built-in accelerometer in the iPhone. Before you go to bed you hook up your iPhone to the power cord and put it under the sheets of your bed facing down. You’ll also set the time you want to be woken up by and the app will analyze your movement to best wake you up within a half an hour (default setting) prior to the time you set.
I think Safari on the iPad is actually pretty good. However, there were always things that I missed from its desktop counterpart such as real tabbed browsing and file downloads. Best App Site reader "Bill" suggested that I try this App and he felt that it was a "Best App" candidate. OMG! Bill was dead on. Although iCab Mobile is a Universal App for all iOS devices it really sings on the iPad. When I use iCab it feels like I'm running the features of full Safari on my iPad. iCab Mobile has it all:
- Tabbed Browsing
- File Downloads
- Dropbox Integration
- Auto Form Fill-in
- Full Screen Mode – maximizing your view and hiding the UI
- Guest Mode – something that iOS desperately needs
- Ad blocking
- and more
The most important things to me were the tabbed browsing and ability to do a file download right in the iPad browser as you would on your desktop. You can then send that file to a compatible app on your iPad to view or process. For example, I was able to download a .ZIP file from one of my sites and then send it over to AirSharing HD which unzipped it and gave me access to contents. Sweet! One of the things you obviously won't have is automatic syncing of your Safari bookmarks on your desktop. However, iCab Mobile offers you a clever way to get them on your iPad. Using your free Dropbox account you can export your bookmarks from your desktop browser (it doesn't have to be Safari, I used Google Chrome) to "Bookmarks.html" in your iCab Mobile folder in your Dropbox folder and then import them into the App. It worked great!
Once I moved beyond the couple of features I was interested in I began to explore the iCab Mobile browser further and I discovered an awesome number of preferences that the user can control. I also quickly fell in love with full-screen mode. One of the other cool features is that you can set a "Browser ID" preference to emulate one of the proper desktop browsers. This is great for getting past sites that insist upon serving up certain pages based on the browser they think you're using. For example, even Apple's on MobileMe (www.me.com) is not accessible via Mobile Safari. They insist you use your built-in Apps instead. By setting iCab Mobile's Browser ID to emulate Safari 5 on the Mac I was able to sign in to my MobileMe account via the browser with no problem.
This browser has it all and it has replaced Safari on my iPad dock as my go to browser from here on out. If there was a way to set it as my default iPad browser, I would! It makes the Safari mobile browser feel very "basic".
You can get iCab Mobile Web Browser for all iOS devices for $1.99 here from the
Before we left the hospital after my twins were born, my wife and I were presented with small books similar in size to a passport for each of our children. Inside each of these books there were places to keep important information such as the child’s name, age, weight, height, etc. We were also told that we would need to purchase new books every 6-12 months to keep them current. The intention of these books is twofold. First, it’s a great place to keep all of the pertinent information about the children for filling out doctor, insurance, and all of the (what seems like) thousands of papers needed for a new child. The other (not so nice to think about) intention is a place to keep information about the child in case (god forbid) the worst should happen and the child is abducted. It is a place to quickly reference all of the info about the child for the police. The major issue I always found with these books was the lack of update potential. They were bound books so adding pages wasn’t an option. That along with the limited space on each page (remember they were the size of a passport) left me buying new books what seemed like every couple of months. Enter Kid Safe. This wonderfully designed, well thought out App takes all of the information from those books and puts it in an organized, easily updated application for the iPad. This is one of those Apps that made me say “why in the world didn’t I think of that”.
What Makes It Great
When you fire up the application for the first time you are asked to enter all of the pertinent information about the child. It asks for their name, nickname, address, birthday (it then auto calculates their age), height, and weight. It also asks for a picture. (A quick note about the pictures: the space provided for the main picture is 480X480 pixels and currently the App attempts to squeeze your image into that box no matter what the orientation, or size of your image. I suggest resizing your image in Photoshop to 480X480 pixels so that your image doesn’t look distorted.) After you enter the basic information you can then proceed to enter more specialized information about the child. For example there is a section for Friends and Family (which also by the way has a 480X480 box for each friend and family member), medical information, School and Activities, and more photos. I found each section to be well thought out and very thorough. For example in the Medical section there are all of the things you would expect: blood type, allergies, medications etc. but there is also a section for special words. At first I didn’t put anything in this section but after a little thought, I realized that there are in fact special words that my children say, especially my daughter that would aid a specialized doctor or speech therapist etc. if she ever needed to be seen by one. This (in my opinion) was a very good addition. Each section has hidden gems like this and is what makes me applaud the designer for really thinking this App through.
A Few Tweaks…
While I really enjoy the items that I wouldn’t have thought of adding to this App, there are a few things that need to be added. First deals with the second use for “the books” or this application. If something was to ever happen to one of my kids, and they were missing it would be helpful for the police to have a copy of their finger prints. Now I know that the iPad doesn’t have a camera or a scanner of any kind to input the finger prints directly to the app, we do have traditional finger prints that I could do pictures of for input to a “finger print” section. Next is in the School and Activities Section. I would like to see a spot for an image or two of each activity for reference purposes. I realize this isn’t a “photo album” App, but it would still be nice to have. When it comes to information input for each child it would have been nice to have a “copy” or “same as other child” option. I know that not everyone has twins so not all of the info is going to be the same for each child, but information such as the name, address, and phone number of the child’s doctor would probably be the same. This also applies to the friends and family section. Having to manually input their mother and father’s (me) information twice is tedious. Two things that I would also like to see are slated for addition in the February 15th ver. 2.0 update. They are cloud (secure server) backup, and printing directly from iPad. The developer has indicated that he will also be adding the option to scale, or crop your images in this update which should fix the image distortion issue.
Best App
Even with a few small tweaks still to be made, this App has earned a place in my favorites. It has solved the problem of having to constantly update and buy new books for my twins. It has given me the peace of mind that I have all of their important information with me (almost) all of the time and that the information contained is the most up to date possible. With this App making sure that I have an updated picture easily accessible any time that it should be needed, along with all of the vital information about each child at my fingertips makes it a must have for me. If you have children you need this app.
You can get Kid Safe for $.99 here from the
It takes a lot to get me to look at another App in a category that I've already made a choice in. It takes even more to get me to switch to another App in the same category. However, if such an App comes along I'll gladly switch even if it means paying for the App and setting it up from scratch. On my iPhone I use the great Occasions App to manage reminders for birthdays and anniversaries. I use Nice List as a Christmas List App. I've been toying with Gifts HD as a Christmas Gift Management App on the iPad. Now I'm thinking of replacing two if not all three of these Apps with Gift Plan. The reason I say two and not all three is that I use Occasions as a reminder for lots of birthdays that I don't necessarily buy gifts for and I'll have to think about having all those contacts in the one App (Gift Plan). However, for any kind of Gift List management, Gift Plan just about nails it. The UI (user interface) is GORGEOUS and is very well thought out. Unlike the dozens of Christmas List Apps out there, Gift Plan makes sense to use all year long for any occasions that you buy gifts for. To get started Gift Plan can automatically pull in your Contacts from your iOS device or Facebook if they have birth dates filled in. As a matter of fact those are the only contacts it will see (more on that in a minute). You can of course add gift recipients manually. Once those contacts with birthdays have been imported you can then assign them to any other lists you want (Christmas, Anniversaries, Graduations, etc.). You can create any holidays or occasions you need. They can be annual or one time.
Gift Plan went beyond my expectations
I figured the usual stuff would be there like adding names, gifts, costs of the gifts, checking them off as you buy them, etc. However, I was pretty impressed by the attention to detail such as the ability to add SIZES, Likes and Dislikes. How freakin' convenient to have the person's various sizes for clothing right there on the spot. Also things like favorite colors, gifts they like and gifts they don't like. (please don't buy me another tie EVER. Please! 
). There is passcode protection to keep prying eyes away. The App does push notifications (very key) as reminders come up and visually does a good job counting down the days till an event is here. There's also a nifty calendar view built right in. They thought of just about everything. However, there is one thing keeping me from giving this App a 5th star. It's actually the thing that drove me crazy about it and it's so simple (I'm sure they'll put this in an update right?). You can't import any of your contacts unless they have a birthday filled in! I guess for many this wouldn't be a problem, but here is where I ran into it as an issue: I have a few contacts that I buy annual holiday gifts for. These are business contacts and quite frankly I don't buy them birthday gifts. I wanted to add these contacts to my Christmas List, however they wouldn't even show up until I went in and put fake birthdays in their contact records. Sure I could have added them manually, but then I would have had to find pictures for them too. They are already in my contacts. I shouldn't have to enter them manually. The App should allow you to import ANY of your contacts whether they have a birthday filled in or not. I should be able to say Add Contact and choose it from the list just like all the other Gift List Apps do. (Please tell me I'm wrong and that you can already do this. If you can I can't find it). Other than that I can't really find anything wrong with the App. It rocks! My other wish is not a show stopper, but I would not only love to see an iPad native version of this App, but I want it SYNC with the iPhone version. Giving me an iPad version that doesn't talk with the iPhone version is useless. I want to be able to manage the lists I have on either device and have them update in the cloud with offline viewing of course.
You can get Gift Plan for $1.99 here from the
A little while ago I reviewed VLC for the iPad. At the time it was the only app that I used to play my .avi’s and Divx formats. Since then I have completely ditched VLC in favor of CineXPlayer and I bet you will too!
Why the switch?
So why was I even looking for a new app for my video playback? The reason is twofold. First, I review apps, that’s what I do, so I’m always checking out new apps for you guys (and girls). Second (and more importantly) I was having issues with HD playback with the other app. Sometimes I would get random freezing mid playback and the app would completely crash. I have been using CineXPlayer for a couple of months now and not once has it even stuttered during HD playback. So that’s why I was testing CineXPlayer, but there were other huge advantages that have made me happy. Transfer time for the video files to the iPad is faster. I performed an unscientific speed test where I transferred the same video file to CineXPlayer, and then to VLC. It took twice as long to transfer to VLC as it did to CineXPlayer. Secondly while the code isn’t a universal binary (same app working on both iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad) there is a version of CineXPlayer for the iPhone. It has the same UI (user interface) feel and plays back .avi videos just as well.
Make the UI Attractive!
If I have any complaint at all about CineXPlayer, it’s that the UI is bland. You get rows with your video titles, no option for thumbnails or previews. With the introduction of Airplay in iOS 4.2 I’m waiting for streaming integration to be added to this app. Other than that, this app has everything that could want.
You can get the iPad app from the iTunes store for $2.99 here from the
You can get the iPhone app from the iTunes store for $1.99 here from the
When the iPad came out there were a few Apps that Apple didn't port over. For example, on the iPhone and iPod touch you have a built-in Weather App, Stocks App and a Calculator. For whatever reason Apple chose to leave those Apps off the iPad and needless to say 3rd party developers didn't waste any time filling the void. There are several weather apps for the iPad. There are also several calculator Apps available. I've gone through three so far. Keep in mind that there hasn't been much in terms of revolutionary features of a calculator in the last 20 years. They do what they do. So why go through three of them? Since they all pretty much do the same basic things, I'm looking for aesthetics and bells and whistles that go over the top. I liked my first two because they filled the screen. The second one I tried had a multiple skins that you could choose from depending your color choices and lighting conditions.
Why I like Calculator HD for iPad
I like this one because you can not only configure which calculator you get in portrait and landscape orientations (basic, scientific, basic with tape, etc.), but you also get the added benefit of a electronic "paper" tape. When adding a list of numbers an on screen tape is a handy way to know that you didn't miss anything. While there's also a Note Pad mode that puts a scratch pad to your right, I probably wont' use that feature much. It's nice to have though. The only thing I would like to see is the ability to have the calculator fill the screen. There is a lot of fluff around the edges with pretty pictures and while I do appreciate pretty pictures that space could be used to make the whole thing bigger (as the other calculators I have do) and therefore making the buttons easier to press and the display easier to read. Don't get me wrong, the current interface certainly isn't small, but it could be bigger is all I'm sayin'.
You can get Calculator HD for iPad here from the
One of the first things I do when I setup a new iOS device is set a passcode to prevent someone from having easy access to my information if my iDevice is either lost or stolen. The second thing I usually do is create a custom wallpaper image that displays my contact info when you wake up the device. This wallpaper image usually has my name, phone number and email address so that if my device is found by someone honest enough to return it they will know who it belongs to. I usually create this image using Photoshop from one of my photos and then add the photo back to the device using iTunes.
SecureLock makes it much easier to do it right on your iPad
I use Photoshop everyday, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate things being easy! That's where SecureLock comes in. SecureLock allows you to use one of its built-in wallpaper images or one of your own images from your albums. You can then put text on the image anywhere you want using standard text boxes in the App. You can choose colors and themes as well. The App also allows you to put an optional banner on your image stating that the device is being tracked. Of course this is just an image and the physical tracking takes place in MobileMe (fi you subscribe) using the "Find my iPad" feature. Nonetheless it's a nice touch that I hadn't thought of. I also added a "Reward if found" line. Once you get the text in that you want just save the image and it appears on your camera roll. From there you can assign it as your lock screen.
The Bottom Line
You're crazy if you don't secure your device with a passcode. Having a custom identity wallpaper screen that displays on wake takes it up a notch. While this app performs exactly as advertised I'd like to see it at $0.99 instead of $2.99. If you're not graphically inclined or you haven't mastered an image editing app then SecureLock is a no brainer.
You can get SecureLock for $2.99 here from the
Update
#1 The Developer lowered the price to $0.99! Woohoo! That's the right price for this app!
#2 Apple just announced that Find my iPhone is now FREE for all iOS devices and this makes SecureLock's "this device is being tracked" banner a reality for a lot more people!
Ask (almost) any iPhone owner what their biggest complaint about the web browsing experience in mobile Safari is and the most common answer you’ll get is inability to play Flash videos. Since the first iPhone Apple has chosen to exclude Flash content in favor of the HTML5 format. I have no preference to either format. In my opinion there are pros and cons of both and this review isn’t about which is better, it is about Skyfire and how it will make your mobile browsing a whole lot better.
Why it’s so popular
When Skyfire Labs released Skyfire mobile browser for the iPhone on Wednesday November 3rd the demand was so great that the app had to be temporarily pulled because Skyfire’s servers were being overwhelmed from the influx of iPhone owners that couldn’t wait to start viewing all of the content rich Flash videos on the web. Here’s how it works; traditionally when you would visit a website from the mobile Safari web browser that contained Flash videos there would be a small box (usually blue) that would display where the video should have been, or there would be a still frame from inside of the video displayed but the video would be unable to play. When visiting the same site with Skyfire an icon at the bottom of the screen appears in the form of what appears to be a piece of film. Clicking on this icon will show you the video or videos available to view on that page. You select one of the video clips you would like to play by tapping with your finger. Skyfire then recodes the video on their servers or “cloud” if you will and transmits the video in h.264 right to your phone. Upon installing the application I went searching for a few sites that I knew had Flash video clips to give it a test run. I’m not a big sports guy, but I knew that there would be plenty of clips available over at http://www.espn.com so that was my first stop. I was pleasantly surprised. Video loaded quickly, playback was managed well and the buffer stayed full. I attribute the great playback and lack of video pause to the compression performed by Skyfire’s servers. They compress the video to allow for constant, uninterrupted playback even in lower 3g service areas. So far I haven’t found a video clip yet that didn’t play back smooth and without pause. After visiting ESPN I headed over to http://www.CNN.com to try out some of their video. Again, same result. Video playback was smooth, un-choppy and pleasant to watch.
What else I found
After working my way through the app, I found some other interesting items that make life easier when surfing the mobile web. One of the first things that you find in the settings menu is the option to view mobile or desktop versions of websites. For the most part (and because of Apple) mobile sites are devoid of Flash video. Most sites, especially the larger ones don’t want to turn away the iOS users with error messages so they choose to remove the content rich Flash. Because of this, viewing in the desktop mode is almost always advisable if you intend to view the Flash content. Another feature that I find especially handy is the “similar content” icon at the bottom of the screen. This icon will show you like sites containing similar content of the site you are currently visiting. Think Stumbleupon built in to your browser. Of course Skyfire has the options you would expect from a mobile browser; bookmarks, multiple pages, and safe search.
Some things to make it perfect
Skyfire is a really good browser. It does the Flash video really well. Playback thus far has been phenomenal and I felt right at home with the interface immediately. I did however compare the load time between Skyfire and mobile Safari on the exact same page that didn’t contain any Flash video. Skyfire takes about 10 seconds longer on pages that don’t contain any Flash video. It takes an even longer amount of time when it’s loading sites with video. There is a reasonable explanation for this, the Skyfire servers have to analyze the content and see if there is any video to be converted. This accounts for the difference in load time of regular sites that don’t contain Flash. Once it determines that there is Flash video, it then has to re-encode and compress it. This accounts for the extended time frame for sites containing video. This isn’t so bad, and is actually acceptable in my mind, but still may be a disappointment to some. What I would like to see is autofill. I was really surprised to see that there was no option for autofill with Skyfire. This is a huge selling point and feature to me, and I hope to see it in future updates. While you are able to play Flash video on Skyfire, because of the way that it encodes the video and then resends it to your browser there is a limit to what you can do. Interactive Flash, the kind that you find over at http://www.hbo.com still doesn’t work. Flash games don’t work either, and as of right now Hulu isn’t allowing playback with Skyfire.
Would I buy it?
Absolutely! I bought it, and thought so much of it that I gifted it to a few good friends. This app really does flash video well, and while I still can’t interact with some flash based websites, I’m able to view a whole lot more content than I was able to before. Do I use this app as my primary browser? No. The biggest reason for me is the lack of autofill. If Skyfire contained autofill I would use it exclusively. If autofill isn’t important to you, then you may very well switch to using the Skyfire browser exclusively and never look back. Unfortunately Skyfire IS NOT a universal binary so you’ll have to view in the 2x mode on your iPad if you want to experience flash video playback there, however Skyfire inc. is claiming to be working on an iPad app (release date not announced yet). Grab the Skyfire app and enjoy flash video on the go!
You can get Skyfire for $2.99 here from the
