I seem to have fallen behind on my weekly picks, Christmas, $work and life in general have kept me very busy lately, but I’ll try to get back to my weekly schedule again.
This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner in your pocket. While DocScanner isn’t the most pretty or well designed iPhone app, it certainly doesn’t lack in the feature department.
Notable features include both really good edge detection, OCR and WiFi sharing. There exists quite a few scanner apps on the App Store but this one is definitely the one to get.
On a recent business trip I used DocScanner to keep track of all the receipts I accumulated during the trip. Back home I exported them all to one huge PDF file and emailed it to our accounting department. No need to fiddle with those old school analogue receipts anymore.
My wish list for future versions of DocScanner are: A cleaner user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.
Update: As of version 3.0.3 DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!
I have blogged about this weeks pick before but I never made it a pick of the week before. The recent update to Tweetie rocks, so if you are into twitter I suggest you head over to the App Store and pick up a copy.
The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.
Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished and it quickly grows on you.
The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites: Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.
Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @twitter: You may release now!
Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!
This weeks pick is a mac app called Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a lightning fast image editor for the mac – kinda like a Photoshop lite but unlike Photoshop, Pixelmator really feels like it was build for the mac. Pixelmators feature set is some what smaller than its big brother but most of the time it will get the job done.
I have been using Pixelmator for a litter over a year now, and Pixelmator just keeps getting better and better with each new release. The latest release brought the long waited slice tool which is of great use when creating graphics for the web.
Another great thing about Pixelmator is their tutorial section on their website. There the creators of Pixelmator shows you how to use it to create all kinds cool effects.
Pixelmator costs just $59 and is truly “Image editing for the rest of us”.
A recent tweet by @drwave from Pixar prompted me to check out SketchBook Mobile from Autodesk, and boy am I glad I did!
I have always wanted to get better at drawing, but I have never set aside the time it takes to master this creative skill. As with all creative disciplines the winning formula for getting better is 10% talent and 90% effort and with this little app I always have my drawing tools with me, so I can doodle away anytime I’m in the mood for it.
SketchBook Mobile is loaded with features, and still manages to have a very non intrusive user interface, it just stays out of your way so you can concentrate on sketching.
SketchBook Mobile makes really good use of Apples Multi-touch technology both for drawing and for zooming and panning around your sketch – Oh, and it has undo too!
SketchBook Mobile is available in the App Store for just $2.99
This weeks pick is another iPhone app by the name of Prowl. Prowl promises to bring Growl from your desktop to your iPhone. When I first heard about Prowl I thought that this was surely the stupidest app ever! – Why on earth would you want your Growl notifications on your iPhone? The answer is you won’t – Prowl has an extensive API that will let you write scripts in numerous languages, including my all time favorite perl, and this is where Prowl gets really interesting. This means you can get push-notifications from practically anything you can think of.
I once wrote an IRC notifier for Irssi that will message you via XMPP whenever someone highlights you or sends you a private message while you are disconnected from Irssi.
It worked ok, but what I really wanted was a way where Irssi could connect directly to Growl and notify me whenever something interesting happens.
With Prowl all I need to send a push notification to my iPhone, is a small piece of code that looks something like this:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
| #!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use WebService ::Prowl;
my $ws = WebService ::Prowl->new(apikey => 'your personal apikey');
$ws->verify || die $ws->error();
$ws->add(
application => "Irssi",
event => "Query",
description => "Joe: I like coffee",
priority => 0 ,
); |
So based on my old notifier program, I quickly whipped up an Irssi Prowl Notifier program 
So now I get notified with a push message whenever something interesting happens on IRC. There is even a Wordpress plugin that will notify you whenever someone posts a comment on your blog.
Anything you can think of, Prowl can notify you about.
Recent Comments