Geekulous » iPad

iPad App of the Week – Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock

Josie S. — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 03:58:28 +0000

This week’s featured app is brought to you by the developers at LightPillar. The Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock is by and large the best alarm clock app out there for both the iPhone and the iPad. Recently I did some redecorating in my room, which allowed me to clear my laptop off of my nightstand. With all that empty space I figured it would be the perfect spot for my shiny new iPad which wasn’t getting nearly as much use as I had originally anticipated. I also decided to have my iPhone (which was my alarm clock) next to my laptop at night to allow it to charge and sync. With my old alarm clock on the other side of the room I figured I would investigate alarm clock apps for my iPad. I came across the Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock and it was love at first site. Read on to hear why…

Simple Layout

I love the simplicity of the layout of this clock, you can view it in landscape or portrait mode and can, to an extent, adjust the font and layout of the clock itself. While the display is simple there are many options and configurations to allow for full customization. The display is divided into three sections and with different viewing options for each line you can customize your clock to show as much or as little detail as you like. For example, at the very top of the screen you can set your clock to display the time for your next alarm and the amount of time left until that alarm goes off. Need to know what time it is in another time zone? You can set that bar to show the time in whatever time zone you choose. If you prefer a more simple display you can keep the top part of the display blank. The middle section is the actual clock, you can adjust how the time is displayed by scrolling trhough the preset designs. The bottom section is dedicated to showing the date in whichever format you prefer.

Night Mode

I prefer to have my bedside clocks lit all night so I can turn over and get the time at a glance, but one thing I’ve always hated about the traditional digital clocks is the bright light it casts in the room. Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock has a night mode to prevent just that. You can adjust the brightness in night mode and it’s activated with one tap of the screen.

Speaking Clock

Well with a name like “Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock” you would expect the clock to speak right? Well not only does this app speak but you can also adjust how and when it speaks to you. One of my favorite settings is ‘tap to speak’ where all you have to do is tap anywhere on the screen and a nice male computer voice tells you the time. You can even set how he tells you the time i.e., “the time is 10:30 pm” or “the time is half past ten”. So now I don’t even have to open my eyes when I need to know the time, I just tap and I hear it. You can also set the clock to speak at hourly, quarterly and half hourly intervals, it can speak the time when your alarm goes off and you can silence the “speak time” option when the clock is in night mode to prevent unwanted wake ups. One thing I would ask the developers though is that there is an option of a female voice.

Wake Up Test

Probably one of my favorite features of this app is the “wake up test”. The wake up test feature requires you to follow a set of simple instructions to turn off the alarm. How many times have you found yourself accidentally turning off your alarm in your sleep? I’ve done that far too many times to count. The wake up test actually requires me to wake up by requiring me to tap numbers in various spots on the screen in order to dismiss my alarm. While I can easily go back to sleep after passing the test that requirement wakes me up just enough to prevent me from falling back into a deep sleep.

The Touch LCD Designer Speaking Clock has a plethora of features, far too many to discuss here, if you would like to see a full list of features check out their site (which includes a link to a pdf users guide). I have to thank LightPillar for creating such a great app, I look forward to more apps from them soon.

Do you use Touch LCD? What’s your experience? Do you love/hate it? Let us know in the comments.

iPad App of the Week- Midnight Inbox Touch 1.0

Josie S. — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:00:24 +0000

Selena Narayanasamy is extensively involved in all things technology, social media, blogging/writing, entrepreneurship and productivity related. When she’s not dabbling in any of the above mentioned things, you can find her drinking her life substance (coffee) and blogging on Search Engine Journal and her website, Esvienne. Follow her on Twitter- @esvienneand @selenavidya, and like her on Facebook.

Midnight Inbox is the epitome of self organization. So much so, that I’m still learning to use it. I’ve chosen to make this iPad app of the week (and soon, iPhone app of the week- it’s in production) because it really gets down and dirty when it comes to collecting, organizing, reviewing and completing tasks.

Midnight Inbox is not only available for the iPad… ohhhh no it’s not. It originally started out as a desktop version (which is what I’ve attempted to learn on) and I just realized that they pushed it onto the iPad too. I must admit, I like the iPad interface much better. Mainly because they updated the icons so they’re pretty and colorful like this:

What does it do!?

Midnight Inbox gives you the ability to record any kind of thought you have, organize it in any way you want, and acts as a check and balance system to make sure you’re completing them. Asking questions like, “is this actionable?” helps Midnight Inbox decide whether to incubate your task or put it in for review to make sure it’s complete.

I think the best thing about Midnight Inbox is the fact that is organizes your brain for you. If you’re thinking about something really quickly, you have a section where you can write a note and incubate it. It treats it like a backburner idea.

There are so many different screens and features that I can’t possibly fit all of them on here without you completely losing interest. The screenshot above shows a calendar where you can set daily reviews- which will go through tasks day by day to make sure you’re completing them. There’s also a weekly review, which will occur… *gasp* weekly! I know you’re on to this so I won’t go any further.

It also has the ability to separate different task lists- so you can have a review list running for the office, one for home, one for school… or whatever you need it for. This way, you don’t have everything clumped on one calendar. I don’t know about you, but having all my tasks staring me in the face with no distinction from one another makes me want to rip my face off

Do you have a yak?

The “yak timer” has to be my most favorite feature. I must admit that I’ve never been yelled at by my electronic devices until I started using this program. On that note, I’ve never been asked if my attention is elsewhere because I’m shaving a yak.

…I wonder how long it would take one to shave a yak? Perhaps I should put it in my midnight inbox for a fun saturday task.

If you want to organize your face off, you can find Midnight Inbox for your awesome iPad in iTunes for 1/2 off – it comes to $14.99. The desktop version is currently at $35.00, and the iPhone version will be released shortly.

3 Productivity Apps for your new iPad – Guest Post by Ric Dragon

Josie S. — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:46:39 +0000

Ric Dragon is an artist/painter, jazz drummer, and CEO and chief strategist for DragonSearch, a provider of internet marketing services to Loehmanns, Steuben, and many other clients. You can read more at his company website, his personal website, on twitter @ricdragon, LinkedIn, or on Facebook.

Just last week my business partner, Don, was telling me that I needed to acquire the iPad. “Remember how the iPhone changed your relationship to Twitter? Well, the iPad is going to do the same for other things”. I knew that I had a vacation coming up, and that vacations in general can be the best time to get accustomed to new gadgetry. And, when Don talks with that certain conviction-in-the-voice, I know to listen, and heh, who really needs to have their arm twisted to get a new gadget? So, I got one.

Before I left for vacation, I chatted with Jim Edelstein from 33Oxclove, a neighboring company that produces all of the websites for a major New York museum. As part of his job, Jim spends an incredible amount of time in meetings with museum curators, vendors, and employees. You might even say he is a professional note taker. Jim suggested that I get an app called “Note Taker HD” along with a stylus. He demonstrated how simple it is to take notes, and send them to others at the end of a meeting.

The stylus actually ended up being difficult to purchase – they aren’t to be found at your local Best Buy, and I didn’t have time for an overnight shipment. Fortunately, there was an Apple store in Holyoke, a town we’d be driving through on the way to Cape Cod. I purchased a Pogo Sketch Stylus for just about $15. Any cool points I might have gotten were offset by the fact that the only available color that day was pink – entertaining my son to no end. While all three of the apps I discuss can be used without a stylus, with it, they are the proverbial “killer apps”.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

The first app I downloaded, though, was Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro, a drawing program. As an artist of over 30 years, the Sketchbook Pro/iPad/Stylus combination is the first piece of technology that has really gotten me excited. It’s one thing to sit at a desktop with a drawing tablet, another to be able to sit on a park bench and draw. This is the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees, and the best thing since sliced bread. Oh, and did I tell you, I really like it.

The majority of functions I’d consider to be de rigueur in any graphics program: different brush tips, color selectors, and of course, the ability to erase. But Sketchbook Pro also has layers, allowing you to build up different parts of an image, and maintain the ability to go back. The only change I would request on this app is that the user be able to switch more easily between drawing and erasing.

A side note: My vacation is being a houseparent at a summer camp my son is attending for string quartet musicians. I can tell you from past experience, drawing at concerts is not usually embraced by musicians – at least not when they can hear that pencil scratching away. The stylus on the iPad is perfectly silent.

iThoughts HD

I love mind mapping. I have filled many a whiteboard up with mind maps. I think there is an element of “media determinism” about it – that is, the media invokes a way of thinking that nothing else quite does. In mind mapping, you start with a central idea. From there, you stub out associated ideas – and do the same with those “sub ideas”, repeating until you run out of associations.

I could use the Sketchbook Pro tool to draw mind maps, but a real mind mapping tool does something a little different. That’s why I find iThoughts HD to be so useful. First, it’s easy to move elements around. There is also a built-in hierarchy of elements, while sometimes limiting, helps me to clarify my thinking. Also, with this app, you can collapse entire nodes, and focus on other nodes.

The ability to change colors adds a dimension that can be used for a variety of concepts – such as urgency.

Note Taker HD

This is the app about which Jim was telling me and one that he uses daily. Since I’m away from the office, I haven’t had a chance to field-test this in an actual meeting. I am, along with most people I know, a consummate note-taker. With me, it’s the activity of writing notes that helps me, somehow placing those thoughts in a different part of my brain. On the other hand, it could be nice to reference notes – something I often have a great deal of difficulty doing. Note Taker HD has a few extra features… notably, an edit screen where you can see the overall sheet of notes (thus rather small), while writing into a close-up view area. If you work in the close-up view, you can just click “advance” to the next section of the note.

For me, the iPhone really was a game changer vis-à-vis social media. Tweeting from the desktop was never going to make sense for me – I’m always too wrapped up in other activities. With the iPhone, it became something I could do in those little moments in-between. Add the camera to that, and you’ve got a veritable social media device. The iPad lacks a camera, keeping it from being a social-media-killer- device– but with apps like the ones I describe above; it should prove to be a work horse nevertheless. My problem now is I’m burdened with several devices. Perhaps I’ll pull out the mind map app and figure this out.

What are your favorite iPad apps? Do you use these apps, what’s your experience with them? Let us know in the comments.

iPad App of the Week – Reeder

Josie S. — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 06:31:00 +0000

As a blogger and avid tech junkie, I find myself reading lots of articles to keep up on all the goings on in the tech world. In doing so I’ve found an immense need for a good quality feed reader. I stumbled upon the app Reeder for iPhone and it wasn’t long before I was head over heals for it. The app on the iPhone was stylish, minimalistic and clean, just the way a reader app should be. Once I got my iPad and installed Reeder for iPad my love the for app grew even stronger.

So what’s so great about Reeder for iPad? Well all of the wonderful things that could be said about Reeder for iPhone can be said for the iPad version, it’s sleek, intuitive and extremely user friendly. Reeder syncs with your Google Reader account and social networks. After entering your login info, Reeder will automatically sync all of your folders, starred items and unread feeds. When you fire up the app you are presented with “stacks” of your feeds, you have the option to create stacks based on your individual feeds or folders. This depends on how you have your feeds organized in Google Reader initially but you can change the view from within Reeder as well. For example, if you have all of your feeds organized in folders the stacks you will see in Reeder will represent each of your folders. Each stack indicates the number of unread items they contain. Simply tap on the stack of feeds you’d like to read and you are presented with a list of the feed items. One of my favorite features of Reeder is the ability to pinch and zoom to expand a stack of feeds or collapse them. Just pinch your fingers and move them apart (as if zooming on a webpage or picture) and that stack will expand to show each of your feeds within that stack.

Reeder’s user interface is clean and easy to navigate, making reading your unread articles more pleasurable. The developers created Reeder with the iPad in mind, utilizing it’s space and speed. One of the features that add to the user-friendly status is the slim navigation bar on the right of the screen. When you’re viewing the app in portrait mode all you have to do is tap an up or down arrow to scroll through your articles. If you’re reading in portrait mode you will be presented with a list of articles, tap on the articles to read them in full screen mode, when reading your articles you can tap on the titles to view the web version in the app. When reading in landscape mode you get a list of your unread articles with a preview to the right of it. In both landscape and portrait modes, when you’re viewing your list of articles you can easily mark them as read/unread and starred with the swipe of a finger.

But what good is a feed reader app if there’s no way to share the articles you’re reading? With Reeder, sharing an article is a snap. There is a convenient “share” arrow at the top of each article, tap on it and you’re presented with a list of methods of sharing the article. The number of services you can send the article to puts Reeder above the rest of the other reader apps available. You can share the article to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Pinboard, Instapaper, Google Mobilizer, Instapaper Mobilizer, you can add it to your Read it Later list, send it to Safari to view, you can copy the link, you can email the link, and last but certainly not least, you can send the entire article via email (for those who may not want all those options you can customize your “share” menu through the apps settings). One of my personal favorite features comes when sharing an article via Twitter. You are presented with a window to type your tweet with buttons to automatically enter the title of the article and the link.

As of now, Reeder is my most used app and with my Google Reader account touting 200 feed subscriptions, 40% of which are updated multiple times a day, it will probably continue to be my most used app. Thanks to the developers for creating such a great app. Need a feed reader for your iPhone or iPad? Check out Reeder (for iPhone or iPad), you won’t be disappointed.

Are you using Reeder? What do you like/not like about the app? Let us know in the comments.

Why I love the iPad

Josie S. — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:09:00 +0000

Well Mondays are usually dedicated to my iPhone App of the Week articles but I had to share the good news. I finally bought an iPad! It’s funny, I had been waiting years for the iPad to be released, I knew it would be the perfect device for me as soon as I started using my iPhone. Then, after waiting for what seemed like eons, Steve Jobs finally gave us a look at the invention we’d all been waiting for. My initial reaction disappointment, where was the front facing camera (or any camera for that matter)? What about multi-tasking? Video camera? How long do we have to wait to get the WiFi+3G model? Then I realized, oh yes, this is the first generation, seemingly devoid of all the features we’ve been waiting for on the iPhone and strangely similar to the feature set in the original iPhone. Of course, the iPad was bound to follow the same progression as the iPhone. ‘OK’ I thought, ‘I’ll just hold out ‘til the next generation’ I figured since I wasn’t going to get the experience of waiting in line for the initial release and was able to wait a few months to even get my hands on a 3G model why not just wait a few more months for the next gen iPad? Well I underestimated the wait, it wouldn’t be another few months, it would be a complete year at the least, before the second generation iPad was released. There was no way I would be able to wait that long. I finally walked into an Apple store and put my name on the reservation list, 7 business days later I received my email letting me know my iPad was at the store waiting for me. It was love at first bootup.

So, why do I love this thing so much? Well for all of you who say it’s just a big iPhone lacking the phone capabilites I would have to agree with you, but that’s exactly what I wanted. So many times throughout the day I’ve found myself looking at my iPhone’s small screen trying to stay up to date on all the goings on in the tech world. The iPad makes it so much easier, it’s so easy on the eyes, the screen is beautiful and the apps that are being created and updated specifically for the device are, in a word, stunning. The iPad has not left my side since I brought it home from the Apple store. As new apps are added I’ll be sure to review them and any other accessories I get for my new toy. So that’s my take on the device stay tuned for a iPad App of the Week article coming soon. What about you? Do you have/like/love/hate the iPad? Let us know in the comments.