HazelMail take the pain out of sending postcards

However, if there were an App that let me choose one of my own photos, lay it out, compose a message and upload it and that card would be physically printed and mailed, well I'm all over that! That's exactly what HazelMail allows you to do. My colleague Jill was telling me about it and at first as she started I assumed it was a simple upload/email service, but when she said a "physical" postcard gets mailed she got my attention. So I downloaded it on the spot. The way it works is that the App is FREE. You're paying for the actual cards you (they) send out for you. The photos can either be photos you've taken with your iPhone or ones in your library. You'll get to compose your message using a variety of fonts. The cost of sending a single card (front and back) is $1.50. You fund your account with a credit card or PayPal. As an added plus you can enter your Delta Skymiles account number in your profile and earn bonus miles for every postcard you send (it's the circle of life or travel)

The App works great! My only issue is that while you can rotate and choose a background color for your photos, there is no proportional zoom. The zoom that's in the app will fill the card, but it will stretch your photo to do so. For me that's unacceptable. So I'll have to use a background color for the photos that don't match the exact proportions of a postcard. The iPhone shots seem to almost fill the card, where as the ones from my DSLR do leave a little more white space. 

With that said come back tomorrow for a review of a similar app called Postino.

Pear Analytics Website Analyzer Can Check Your Site and Report On It

I have a few websites and web traffic is important to me. This is my hobby, so I want to make sure that my sites are being seen. I've been looking for a good way to tell if my sites are optimized and I ran across an App for that. Pear Analytics is a FREE app that can analyze your site and give you an instant report right on your iPhone or iPod touch and then email you a more detailed report. The report lists the problem areas and gives you suggestions on how to correct them. I'm glad that I got this App because all of my sites can use some work!

The Bottom Line

SEO is important and this is an important App. No reason not to have it if you have your own website. My only issue is that if your site is slow in loading, the App may timeout before generating a report. 

Paper Toss now gives you a way to take this experience with you everywhere you go

I had resisted this game for months now. When a friend first showed it to me I knew right then and there that I would spend hours playing with it. Luckily I'm very busy with work at the moment so I don't have a lot of time for games in general. However, I could see this thing sucking several minutes a day out of my life The concept is simple. You're sitting at your desk and you use your finger to flick the paper towards the waste basket. However, to make it more challenging with each turn there is a desk fan blowing your paper. So you have to compensate the angle of the toss so that the fan blows the paper into the basket. There's even an Airport mode for us frequent travelers to simulate the time we waste waiting for our flights.

The Sound effects are cool too including angry office workers

The Bottom Line

Paper Toss is fun! It's Free and therefore no reason not to try it. I know that some of you have a real problem with ad based apps. So if you don't want to see ads in your game you can download the Ad free version here for $0.99.

Interface Design

Marketcircle specializes in productivity apps on the Mac with iPhone versions of the same ones. Billings is one of their big apps (with productivity suite, Daylite, being the other) and they have definitely taken to the iPhone platform and understood the function of good user interface design.

Launching Billings Touch brings you to a home screen with easy (and elegant) buttons to add different types of slips (time or fixed) as well as milage, expenses and item quantities or to use a blueprint for the new slip. Underneath that, you see a graph that you can have show either the amount of money you have logged in the week, or the amount of time.

The other areas of the Billings Touch interface are equally smartly designed, mixing the normal view modes of the iPhone OS with custom design (as the home page), making the interface truly gorgeous.

Managing Clients

If you need to add a new client to billings while on the go, you can add one either fully from scratch or by using a contact as the base, pulling the information out from the correct address book card of your choice.

If you sync it, it will have already pulled over your contacts and contact groups, but if you find that you need a new contact group, that is also easily created.

Managing Slips and Projects

If you sync to Billings on the Mac, all projects and slips will already sync over, but the app is fully useful on its own. Even if you sync, the ability to create slips and projects on the go, is of course important.

After locating a client, you can add a new project that you can give all the data that you can on the Mac version, due dates, start days as well as hourly base-price can all be set. You can of course add notes as well.

When a project has been added to client, you can start adding slips to it. These are essentially different parts of the projects, whether it is tracked time for certain parts, the charge for driven milage or a product that you are selling.

Making Invoices

A limitation in Billings Touch is the invoicing capability. While you can create full invoices from the slips, set invoice dates, the terms and due date, as well as add notes, you can only select form the pre-built styles. This also means that you cannot make your own invoice style, nor will the ones you have in Billings on your Mac sync over to Billings Touch.

Even though this is a limitation in the iPhone OS, with a lacking PDF creation engine, the invoicing feature is not as useful to me, as I want my invoices to be sent out in my own style that I have designed.

Syncing with the Mac

The syncing with the Mac version works very well and this is far from surprising. Marketcircle has great experience under their belt with syncing, with their Daylite application syncing over the internet using server technology. Happily for the individual with no server setup, Billings Touch sync easily through Wi-Fi syncing.

This works without any problems for me, every time I sync, as syncing rightfully should do.

Conclusion

Billings and Billings Touch in combination is in my opinion the best combination when it comes to tracking time, both on your Mac and your iPhone together. With powerful project and slip features, as well as account and invoicing built right in, Billings Touch work great for both the individual designer as well as the large agency.

Adding the gorgeous interface into the mix and you have an application that could really only improve vastly by figuring out a way to make custom invoicing styles available.

Money Meter

In Pennies, you have a main “money meter” as the base of the app. You set a standard monthly budget and then as you get expenses, enter these into the app (more on that later). A meter, that looks just like a gas meter in a car, clearly shows you how much you have left, in a graphical fashion. Above it is shown the actual amount. A very nice graphical touch!

Functionality

Pennies is just about tracking your expenses. If you are looking for an app that track both income and expenses, this is not the one for you. In fact, this is why I like Pennies so much. It gets a bit troublesome sometimes to keep the financial app in sync with your bank account, in which case you can just look at the bank account statements.

With Pennies, all you do is enter the expenses in a number of pre-defined categories. My wish here is to be able to set up your very own categories, even though that it is clear that the user interface is built around the pre-built ones. I just want to have some items in more precise categories than what exists.

I would also very much like to see the ability to change the date of an expense as I sometimes remember that I forgot to add an expense a day later, in which case I want the date to be accurate.

Adding New Expenses

As you have probably guessed by now, adding expenses within Pennies is not hard either. There is a clear button on the front screen that reads “Add Expense”. This takes you to a simple and to-the-point screen with the listing of the built-in categories and a numerical keyboard that lets you type in the amount of the expense.

Thanks to the simple interface design here, adding a new expense does not take very much time and can essentially be done while putting down a receipt from the store in your wallet.

Expense History and Exporting

You can at any time go back to previous months and view your history, as well as view the current month expenses in a more organized list, where you can also add comments to the items. The interface for this is very stylish and a breeze to use which is a major plus.

You can export your expenses from Pennies into a CSV (comma separated file) that the app sends to an email address of your choice. This means that your expenses are not just stuck within Pennies, props to the developers for the good thinking there!

Conclusion

Pennies for the iPhone or iPod Touch is the killer app if you only want to track expenses and not your income as well, which for me is the combination I am after. Pennies user interface is among the top ones in the apps I have on my phone and makes it a breeze to use. I would like to see some additional customization features added and more advanced budgeting and editing capabilities in order for this to be a super app.

A must have for international travelers

If you travel internationally roaming can be very expensive. Even with my corporate discount and having an international plan on my iPhone, it costs 99¢ a minute to use my iPhone abroad. Even though my company is paying the bill, that's too much money to call home to shoot the breeze and catch up. So I rely on VoIP solutions to make calls that are either FREE or very very very low cost. With my Vonage Softphone account I get a dedicated number with 500 minutes/month ($9.95/month 3.9¢/minute over 500 minutes) and I can call home/the US from ANYWHERE that I have an internet connection at no additional cost. Yes, I'm sure you can even beat those prices nowadays, but the Vonage service has worked well for me over the years and yes I use Skype too Of course Vonage isn't the only VoIP service using the SIP protocol. There are tons of them out there. Here's a list I found within 2 seconds on  Google.com. WeePhone allows me to use this account from my iPhone with ease. Just fire up the App and start making calls. You can access your iPhone's Contact list too for easy dialing. One thing that I really love about WeePhone is that it also works with my Jawbone ICON bluetooth headset. Having Bluetooth headset support is icing on the cake. 

Great call quality depends on your connection

Although I've had really good luck with this App, I have to remind you that your VoIP sound quality is only going to be as good as your Internet connection. A slow or bad connection will cause your sound quality to drop and you may not even be able to make calls. Also depending on your connection to the internet, SIP ports may be BLOCKED by the provider. In that case you wouldn't be able to use the App. Luckily this latest version also works over 3G! So it could be cheaper to use it over your data connection than roaming (I have an unlimited data roaming plan, but calls are 99¢/minute – go figure) or using up your minutes. 

Push Notifications and Incoming calls

If the App is running and someone dials your number, the App rings and you can answer the call. However, if the App is not running WeePhone does have Push Notification and if the VoIP provider you're using is compatible you'll get a notification that an incoming call is happening. However, event then you can't answer the call. You'll have to call the person back, but at least you'll know that they were trying to reach you. Honestly, I don't worry about incoming calls. Anyone that's trying to reach me can call my iPhone number and I can either take the call or deny the call and call them back via WeePhone.

The User Interface

It's not a pretty App.  It works, it works well, but it's not pretty. It could definitely stand some upgraded imagery. It looks like the keypad, displays were designed by an engineer, not a UI or graphic designer. However, I'll also say that this latest version looks a LOT BETTER than the previous one! So progress is being made for sure.

Vonage Softphone Configuration Settings

I had to figure out how to set this App up to work with a Vonage Softphone account, so I'm going to save you the trouble by giving you the settings right here:

SIP User/#: 15552221212 <-your vonage softphone number and yes you need the one first
Password: Softphone password, not the account password
Server/Domain: sphone.vopr.vonage.net:5061
Proxy:
STUN server: stun.domain17.net:3478
Use STUN: ON
Push Notify: ON
Auth User:
Media/RTP port: 51988
SIP Port: 5060
Force address:
Call tgt domain: OFF
GSM code: ON
DNS SRV lookup: OFF
DNS Cache sec: 30
Echo Cancel: 90
Voice Detect: 10
Handset V Detect: OFF
DTMF length: 2240
#Prefix/Length:
Replace X/Y: +/00
Ring Sound: 1

The Bottom Line

With the variety of VoIP solutions out there it just really doesn't make sense to pay the phone company rates anymore. This App helps you use just about any SIP based VoIP service and even works on an iPod touch too. If you need to make low cost or free calls and have a compatible service, this is your App.

There are more prizes available as well, including iPods and iTunes gift certificates and in order to enter, you will have to use the paid version of the app, which is currently available for $0.99.

Foto Brisko delivers shot suggestions in a slick and easy to use interface

The mission of Foto Brisko is to show you possible shots based on your current location or by searching a location that you're headed to. It then populates that area of the map with a minimum of 20 shots (provided that many exist) that you might want to capture while you're there. See a thumbnail you like and just click on it to see the shot larger in the App. If you really like that shot you can immediately add it to YOUR shot list as well as share it on Twitter or Email it. 

You can even dig deeper into the shot and see any camera EXIF data (camera settings) that the photographer made available. This goes a long way in helping you even further towards getting the shot you saw.

I want more

While this App works as advertised, and I long for an App that promises to take the guess work out of location finding, Foto Brisko needs more. While it's great that I can find a shot and add it to a shoot list, it doesn't offer much more than that. For example, where exactly is that place? I still have to figure out where exactly the location is? If you really wanted to take this App to the next level, it would also provide information about the location itself like best time to shoot, fees and permits required if any, etc. 

The Bottom Line

Foto Brisko is a great start and offers a cool interface to looking at Flickr.com shots by location.  I would love to see it do more!

Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile lets you participate in online meetings from just about anywhere

I've actually been beta testing this App for a while now and I'm thrilled that's now available to everyone. I can remember when we used to actually make jokes about how cool it would be to attend "that meeting" from some far away tropical place. Well now it's possible. No laptop required! Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile is a FREE companion to the Acrobat Connect Pro Service offered by Adobe Systems, Inc. I attend several Connect meetings a week and now it's cool that I don't always have to be in front of my computer to do so. The app brings all of the important features right to the palm of your hand including seeing the presenter's desktop via screen sharing, seeing their webcam and hearing their audio over VoIP. You can even see and participate in the text chat all at the same time.  Now of course the experience is going to only be as good as your web connection and of course the size of your display, however as we get closer to the shipping of the iPad, I'm even more excited about the possibilities that this App will give us.

You can sign up for a trial account for Acrobat Connect Pro here. Even if you never have your own meeting room or meetings, it's still cool to be able to participate in meetings hosted by others for FREE with this App.

You can click the Full Screen icon in the upper right corner to maximize your display with the presenter's desktop. Here I'm showing editing in Photoshop CS4 Live over Connect to the iPhone.

Now there's no excuse to miss my next meeting or presentation

Sex Offenders Search solves the mystery of "is that guy a creep?"

Unfortunately, there is an App for that. It's actually not unfortunate that the App exists, it's unfortunate that we need it. Luckily convicted Sex Offenders are required to register and this App allows you to find them based on your Location. You can see their picture, their address and even the crimes that they were charged with and to be very honest with you, it was pretty disturbing to see the number of pin points appear on the map in my area. If you have kids, a wife, sister, mother, cousin or girlfriend, you need this App!

The Bottom Line

Don't second guess it. Just download it!

There is a light version too that doesn't give you as many details for searches further away, but it is free and you can get the light version here:

You can search by address, zip code or even near your contacts in your Address Book!