David Jack Wange Olrik » iPhone

Public transportation in Maps.app

davidolrik — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:01:52 +0000

Public transportation in Maps.app is so much nicer than Rejseplanen.

via tweetie

Pick of the week: DocScanner™

davidolrik — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:08:23 +0000

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 weekly¹ schedule again.

This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner² 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 versions³ of DocScanner are: A cleaner⁴ user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.

Update: As of version 3.0.3⁵ DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!

Please don’t kill me if it isn’t precisely weekly.
and a whiteboard scanner and just about any other kind of scanner you can think of.
and they release new versions quite frequently – About once a month.
and by cleaner, I mean more iPhone-ish
Released on January 30th 2010

iDont care either…

davidolrik — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:14:08 +0000

Nice response to the Droid teaser from Motorola. Should I care? I have yet to see Motorola create any kind of usable phone, but I welcome the competition.

The price of Tweetie 2

davidolrik — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:09:58 +0000

I have written about App Store pricing before, and I still fail to understand the “We want free upgrades for life” and “Anything more than $1 is too much” mentality that apparently rules in the App Store customer base.

Tweetie 2 for both Mac and the iPhone have just been announced and the iPhone version will be a separate app from the “old” Tweetie. The fact that you’ll have to pay $3 again for Tweetie 2 made some people go bunkers and some even threw a hissy fit. Guess what… You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to! There are numerous other Twitter clients on the App Store – take your pick!

Tweetie 2 contains a ton of updates and new features and the “upgrade fee” is certainly reasonable. If Atebits was charging for bug fixes that would wrong, but as you can see in any of these blog posts this is clearly not the case!

Apple has an office suite that costs considerably less than the competitors offering, and each year they release a new version with more features that costs exactly the same as the previous version. – Where is the outcry about that?

I don’t get that people are complaining about $3 for all those new features – for all the effort that Loren has put into Tweetie 2. Tweetie 2 costs less than a Grande Cappuccino at Starbucks, do you also complain to Starbucks that you can’t get a free refill the next time you visit them?

Matt Legend Gemmell said it best when he tweeted this yesterday:

Annoyed you’ll have to pay $2.99 for Tweetie 2? If you’re willing to meet me in person, I’ll give you $5 and hit you in the face.
@mattgemmell

Seriously people, wake up! There are more dire and important things wrong in the universe that are worth getting this upset about!

I for one will buy Tweetie 2 when it gets approved on the App Store!

Americans: Welcome to The Future!

davidolrik — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:50:22 +0000

Welcome to The Future and congratulations on finally getting MMS on the iPhone.

I really don’t get what all the fuss is about – I first used MMS way back in 2000¹ or 2001² and haven’t really used it since.

Just to sum it up for those who don’t know what MMS is:

MMS gives you the ability to send an image from one phone to another, just like email except that it is a vastly inferior and limited version of email.

I can access my email from any where, on the web, on my phone even on my television set, so why would I want to send a snapshot to someone in a crappy resolution that is constrained to just one single device? MMS even gives the carriers one more thing they can charge you for, postponing the moment where each carrier³ realizes that they are just “the pipe”.

Enough ranting – Enjoy your new toy, I predict that you will use it once or twice and then forget all about it…

This is the year The Future stated, as can be seen in any movie about the future – it’s always in the year 2000-something.
It might have been earlier, but my memory is a bit fuzzy there…
There are some carriers that have realized this, but they are few and far apart

Speech unrecognition

Pick of the week: Autodesk SketchBook Mobile

davidolrik — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:25:06 +0000

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% effort¹ and with this little app I always have my drawing tools with me, so I can doodle away anytime² 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!³

SketchBook Mobile is available in the App Store for just $2.99

Anyone who tells you different should go listen to a couple of talks from Merlin Mann: Toward Patterns for Creativity and Doing Creative Work – Seriously, go! now! – And then go make stuff!
This is the effort part, the more you do it the better you get.
A much needed feature that my analog drawing tools is sadly missing.

Pick of the week: Prowl

davidolrik — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:00:51 +0000

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?¹ The answer is you won’t² – 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 Irssi³.

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:

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#!/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.

Don’t get me wrong I love Growl and use it extensively.
Well at least I won’t – I feel the Growl desktop notifications belong on the desktop.
I run Irssi inside Screen so it will persist even when I logout of my account.

Irssi, Jabber & Adium

Pick of the week: My iPhone

davidolrik — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:19:11 +0000

This weeks pick is late, so late that it is actually a pick for both this week and last week. As you might have guessed from the picture it’s my iPhone.

While on vacation in northern Jylland my MacBook Pro died . So for the past 2 weeks my iPhone has been my primary “computer” for Instant Messaging, Twitter, Email, Web browsing and all that stuff that I usually do when I am online. I have previously written about using the iPhone as a laptop replacement when going to conferences, but this is different – this is everyday and for everything.

The iPhone actually did quite well when you think of its relative small size and small keyboard¹. For most tasks I can say “There is an app for that”, I even upgraded this website using nothing but my iPhone. The only task I really missed my MacBook Pro was for programming, so my secret project is a bit behind schedule. Oh, and I did miss out² on the online launch sale for the iPhone 3GS, but I think this was mostly due to the fact that 3.dk didn’t scale under the pressure of the danish iPhone fans desperate to get a proper carrier with a 3G network that actually works.

One thing you have to remember though, is to always bring your charger and your USB cable as there will be some days where you’ll drain the battery and that little extra juice³ you can get from a quick charge here and there is a lifesaver.

If you thought that I was attached to my iPhone before the “Jylland incident”, think again – that attachment has been taken to a whole new level…

My precious…

I find that the keyboard on the iPhone is no better or worse than any physical keyboard of the same size. You just need to get used to it. – Actually I find it a little better
I have ordered a 32 GiB iPhone 3GS – Now I’m just waiting…
A couple of months ago I ordered a Juice Pack Air from juicepack.co.uk but I have still haven’t received anything from them – quite frustrating…

Pick of the week: BeejiveIM

davidolrik — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:37:45 +0000

This weeks pick is all about communicating, and it’s an iPhone app¹. With Apples release of iPhone OS 3.0 we got push notifications² – a clever way to avoid having apps running constantly on the iPhone, thereby draining the battery. With Push Notifications a whole new world opened up to developers, and Beejive was one of the first to take advantage of it.

Beejive is an Instant Messaging app with support for all of the most popular protocols³ and on top of that it has a really nice user interface. Last Tuesday BeejiveIM version 3.0 hit the App Store with a bunch of cool new features like Meta contacts, UI improvements and of course Push Notifications.

Unfortunately the BeejiveIM 3.0 release is somewhat buggy and crashes quite often. The app is still usable though and a bug fix release has already been submitted to Apple.

Beejive seems determined to create the best mobile Instant Messaging app and they have setup a feature request forum where users can ask⁴ for new features. A feature I’m really looking forward to is Off-the-Record Messaging which Jim from Beejive says they are looking into.

My only caveat with Beejive is their way of communicating errors and server failures to their customers. If you follow them on Twitter, then there is no problem – but they do not advertise their twitter account on their website⁵, nor do they have a systems status feed on their blog or on their support pages. They do report some problems on their forums, but they drown in traffic.

All in all this a really great and useful app; it has made me rediscover and utilize Instant Messaging once again⁶, and it’s on sale for only $9.99⁷.

Beejive also get extra credit for the Office Space references in their screenshots.

And a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app – but who cares about these legacy platforms anyway…
I still wish for a way to have apps execute a piece of code periodically, something like a Cron daemon
AIM®/iChat®/MobileMe®, MSN®, Windows Live®, Yahoo!®, Facebook, MySpace, GoogleTalk®, ICQ®, & Jabber
I asked for meta contacts and got it just 2 days later – guess they were already working on it
I couldn’t find it – and it should be on their front page as this is the only channel they report problems to.
I have been on an Instant messaging break for the last couple of months while working for a client that doesn’t allow this kind of dangerous traffic on their secure network
Down from $15 – And before you get all “damn thats expensive”, take a step back and think about it – Isn’t a multi client messaging app worth more than a large Pizza and a big coke?

Pick of the week: 1Password

davidolrik — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:28:23 +0000

This weeks pick is an tool that is usualy the first thing I install on a new computer¹. It’s an app that keeps my personal information safe. It’s an app called 1Password that totally replaces MacOSX’ build in Keychain.

So why would I want to replace the build in Keychain? While the build in Keychain is pretty sweet, 1Password just that much sweeter! You only need to remember one password, and this one password will let you access all your stored passwords.

You can choose to use the build in Keychain as storage backend, but I recommend that you use 1Passwords own Agile Keychain format.

These are the features² you’ll gain when using 1Password instead of the build in Keychain:

Store and provide easy access to more than one account for any website.
Correctly handle financial websites which often disable storing passwords in Safari’s AutoFill.
Integrate with multiple browsers, including Safari, Fluid, Firefox, DEVONagent, OmniWeb, NetNewsWire, Flock, Netscape Navigator, and Camino.
Eliminate the need to synchronize your data between browsers.
Support multiple identities, such as personal and business identities. You can even create fake identities for websites you do not trust.
Fill credit card information with one click.
Import information from a multitude of sources.
Integrate a strong password generator directly into the browser for quick and painless generation of super strong passwords.
Sync your information to the iPhone/iPod touch, as well as Palm³ devices.

The killer feature of 1Password is the ability to bring all of your passwords and credentials with you in a safe and secure way on your iPhone⁴. And with the recent 2.0 upgrade of 1Password touch the syncing part just got a major overhaul, and it is now incredibly easy and hassel free that you’ll want to sync it all the time.

Later this year Agile will release 1Password 3.0, which is a completely rewritten version of 1Password based on the new Agile Keychain – I can’t wait for it to be released!

And by computer I mean Mac
I totally ripped the feature list from this page in the 1Password online documentation
But why would you want to do that?
or other mobile device, but why would you want a mobile device that is not an iPhone?