Less than a month ago I launched iAdd for iPhone, a productivity app based on the Assess – Decide – Do workflow. The feed-back was overwhelming. As I type this, the app has 13 reviews with a general rating of 4.25 stars. I also had a few bugs slipped with the initial version so there’s no surprise that you’ll see a 1.1 version in the AppStore, although the launch was less then a month ago.

Since launching iAdd, many people told me that they had a little bit of difficulty understanding the concepts behind it. Is this a ToDo app? Is this a notes taking app? Is this a GTD app? None of them and yet, a little bit from each one. They say an image is worth a 1000 words. That’s true. But how many words a movie will save me, then? You do the math, while you watch this very short demo of the Assess- Decide – Do workflow, using, you guessed, iAdd for iPhone.

If you enjoyed this video feel free to spread the word, using the links at the end of the post.

Oh, and one more thing: the iPad version is in the works as we speak. Not to mention that I’m preparing some new awesomeness regarding cloud syncing. That’s right, the next major version of iAdd will bring an iPad version and cloud syncing so you’ll never lose your data again.

iAdd for iPhone is available in the AppStore for only $2.99.

It seems Apple is rolling out some interesting additions to its mobile app shop. One of the most recent additions is iTunes Mobile Connect. Any iPhone developer knows what iTunes Connect is, but for those out there who don’t know that yet, will say it again: iTunes Connect is Apple’s platform for submitting, auditing and monitoring apps to App Store. In other words, you know how your apps are doing in the App Store only via iTunes Connect.

The mobile app allows you to use this platform directly from your iPhone.

In my experience there are still a few bugs (try to Cancel your login after you already entered your credentials) but the app is more than usable and useful at the same time. The fact that you have to login each time you acsess the app may be a little annoying, but I guess it will also help cure your potential addiction to stats. As a stats junkie myself I know how this works

You can also have a look at your statistics based on the type of your product: sales, updates, in app purchases and so on.

One interesting screen is the one about markets. If you have products targeted for a specific market / country, you can quickly see how they are doing.

And for those of us who have more than 20 products in the App Store there is also a Search functionality. Just in case you don’t remember your app names .

iTunes Mobile Connect is available as a free download in App Store.

The GPS facilities of the iPhone were long time praised before they actually got used at full capacity. Location based services in iPhone appeared long before full fledged GPS navigation apps and iPhone users perceived this hardware feature as just another cool way to see the nearest pizza restaurant.

Well, during the last few months, things have changed. Introducing Navigon, one of the first iPhone GPS navigation apps available on App Store.

iPhone Navigon Basics

First of all, Navigon is a very expensive app compared with the general price on the APP store. A few months ago, when I bought it, it was 99 EUR. And that was Navigon Europe, which includes, as you may imagine, only the maps for Europe. There are several other flavors of Navigon – read it: other maps of the world – including Australia, North America, Eastern Europe and so on. The price of this editions is around 70 EUR each.

Second, keep in mind that Navigon is a hungry app. Not only it will eat up to 1.5 Gigabytes of your precious storage space, but it will also slow down significantly your iPhone. The overall experience of using it is a little bit slower than using just a vanilla GPS.

And third, Navigon works directly with your GPS receiver in the iPhone, which means you don’t need internet access to make it work. This is a huge feature, as data roaming costs are still horrendously unaffordable. In other words, this is an app which makes the GPS receiver in the iPhone actually useful.

iPhone Navigon Interface

When you start Navigon this is what you get:

iPhone Navigon GPS Interface

And this is pretty much all it does.

Enter an Address – will allow you to enter a city, a country and then a street and number. As you may imagine there is an autocompletion feature helping you chose faster from pre-populated fields. After that, you can chose “Start Navigation” and it will actually start to navigate just like any other GPS device you know.

Search for POI – this will allow you to search for a Point Of Interest around your current location. POIs includes restaurants, hotels, gas stations and so on. Data seems pretty accurate, at least for the Europe map, which is the only one I bought.

Take Me Home – this options allow you to specify a “home” address and then take you directly there. It’s kind of a shortcut. Works pretty well.

Show Map – will do exactly what you expect, showing you the current map, something like in the image below

iPhone Navigon GPS Show Map

The toolbar allows you to access your Favorites addresses (other than your Home address)

iPhone Navigon GPS Favorites

and the Recent addresses

iPhone Navigon GPS Recent Addresses

Navigon also gives you access to a lot of options, including speed limits, GPS options and so on. There are so many options there and to be honest I just used the route profile one (specifying your speed: pedestrian, car or boat).

iPhone Navigon GPS Options

The latest version of Navigon includes voice guidance, exactly as you have it in a standard GPS device.

iPhone Navigon Conclusions

If you’re going to travel a lot, have different transportation systems (car, pedestrian or boat) and love having your iPhone with you, than Navigon is a must. It’s by far one of the slickest ways to find your way around, if you don’t care too much about your battery life. Maps seems also pretty accurate and as a Navigon client you will have access to free maps updates. As for the actual navigation interface, this is a little bit simpler than I’m used to, but I guess this is, up to some extent, a feature.

On the bad side, Navigon have a pretty high price, but still lower than a decent GPS standalone device. The battery consumption is absolutely insane. I’ve never been able to keep it running in the GPS mode for more than 2 hours before the battery went completely dry. And one thing you must keep in mind is that on a standard iPhone (not an Iphone 3 GS) the interface can get really slow. I suppose on an iPhone 3GS things will be a little better.

All in all, provided you are a traveler and an iPhone lover at the same time, Navigon is a really good iPhone app.

Twetdeck has quite a strong position among the desktop clients for Twitter, but up until recently (meaning yesterday) they didn’t make any move on the iPhone market. Introducing TweetDeck for the iPhone, a free Twitter client that made quite an impression on me.

I’ll start with saying that I’m quite a fan of Twitterfon and have sporadically used Tweetie, and back at my iPhone first experiences I was quite satisfied with Twiterrific. As you can see, I followed a “from complex to simple” path and I still feel that’s the normal path a Twitter client should go.

Well, TweetDeck is not the simplest Twitter client out there, but surprisingly enough is making up on this at the usability chapter. TweetDeck is not only a very intuitive app but also has some very cool, unique features. Let’s take them one at a time.

Twitter Column Browsing

Remember how you browse through your Safari opened windows on your iPhone? Well, TweetDeck does exactly the same, only instead of web pages, you’ll be browsing through so called “columns” which are in fact different versions of the Twitter timeline.

You get by default your timeline, your mentions and your direct messages. You can add more columns, but more on that in a moment. You can navigate from one window to another by hitting the big “+” sign on the toolbar, or you can swipe left to right. For your convenience there are also some buttons to be tapped on the lower right and left corner of the interface, just above the toolbar. Here’s how my “Mentions” column is looking like:

Interesting thing about that toolbar is the effect of the “+” button, which stays a little bit bigger, I think the exact name for this effect is fish-eye.

Twitter Groups

In TweetDeck you can add more columns to the initial ones, just like in the desktop app. And identically to that you can create groups of tweeterers or you can create a specific search. Here’s how the set up screen for groups is looking like:

As you can see it’s pretty simple to add a new group.

Enhanced Tweet Screen

TweetDeck features an enhanced tweet screen, with less intrusive links for actions (retweet, dm or reply) but with more space for the content. One thing that I liked is the ability to email a tweet if you find it interesting. I’m gonna use this coz I think is much more reliable than bookmarking or faving.

Other than that, TweetDeck is multi-user (though you can’t combine two users on the same timeline) and, as its brother on the desktop, always shows the number of API calls so you know anytime how much you have left.

Although the interface is one of the best usability examples on the iPhone, I do think there can be improvements. Especially the messages you get when you synchronize the main screen are a little bit strange, I don’t really want to know instantly how many new messages I have in each column. If I set up 6-7 columns then those messages will take out all the space in the main screen.

At the first look TweetDeck behave pretty good, I had no crash whatsoever, which is impressive if you take into account the complexity of the app (and the associated memory management hassle).

TweetDeck is a free app in the AppStore.

It’s already there for beta testers and, as one of them, I can tell you that this new 3.0 SDK is something really, really interesting. From the ability to send email from within your application, up to the new Store Kit API, there are tons of improvments and new features. In the following article I will outline the goodies that attracted me the most.

In App Payment

With this feature you can set a selling object in your application and allow the user to buy it. The pruchase is made through App Store, and the buyer will use the same credentials as for his iTunes account. The selling object can be anything: a game level, an unlocked feature, anything. I really think this will open a whole new stream of revenue both for Apple and for iPhone developers.

Push

The long awaited feature is here: now your application can have PUSH notifications via a programable API. What does this mean: you can set up a web server, link it with your iPhone app and then send from that server to your iPhone app various notifications, without the need for your app to be running. The service is using a special layer in the iPhone architecture that allows for unlimited listening capabilities. You can put whatever events you want in your PUSH container from email notifications to various reminders.

Peer To Peer

I think this will really transform the world of gaming. Using this API you can create a peer to peer connection via Bluetooth (or any other protocol, if you want to) and ask for an available peer to join you. He can join in a game, in a collaborative app, in whatever you dare to think and invent. The API is looking clean enough and easy to use. That’s a huge breaktrough.

If you put together In App Payment, Push and Peer To Peer, you can tell already that the next generation iPhone apps will surely be interesting, To say the least.

There are several others novelties, like copy and paste API, but these are really just natural improvements. Specifically for copy and paste, this functionality was already implemented by several respected apps in App Store. Also, one thing that will remind you about Spotlight (yes, this is for you, Mac users) is the ability to search the entire iPhone from within a single point.

All in all, iPhone SDK 3.0, even still in beta, is filled with jewels.