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.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a huge fan of Woopra real time analytics app. I’m using it on 5 blogs now and I’m very happy with it. If you didn’t know that, Woopra is a super fancy service which track your blog visitors in real time. It comes packed with tons of features, like real time chat with your visitors (may be kind of spookie at times), referrals, real time alerts, filters and a lot of custom reports.

In a recent post on Woopra blog, the team behind this service gave us the first sneak preview of the upcoming Woopra iPhone app. There’s  even a 7 minutes video which shows a development version of the app. From what we can see in the video, things are going pretty well, the app looks polished and have a decent set of features (at least for a mobile platform). You can see a real time flow of your visitors, follow their links and locate them on a google map.

At this time there are no plans for developing an app for another platform, so we’re locked into iPhone (not that I don’t like that).

There aren’t yet any information regarding the price. One could speculate that the iPhone pricing could follow the same structure as Woopra paid accounts: the app may be free for a limited number of pageviews and after this limit you may either get it as a “bonus” if you’re a premium member, either pay a small fee for the app in the AppStore.

According to Daily Record, Apple has filed for an interesting patent. Presumably named iKey, the technology would replace a ring of keys with only one iPhone. The device could be used to dial a PIN which will in turn allow yourself to enter a protected space: a home or a car. Of course, the home and the car should have installed compatible locks.

The interesting thing about using this type of device is that will make the iPhone a much more close tool than just a phone. Opening your house or car door is a matter of security and it usually gives you a completely different emotional response than just a simple communication. As strange as it may seem, this patent could push Apple into a very promising area: the intelligent home.

The patent will be similar with what car manufacturers are using right now and it’s based on a technology called Near Field Communication, which allows electronic devices to transmit information between each other when close together.

But then again, it could just be a dead end, since Apple has filed a lot of patents in the past which led nowhere. But, to be honest, this type of intentions is what makes me look at the iPhone, iPad and the whole Apple thing extremely careful .

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.

Browsing the net the other day I stumbled accross this new SDK called Corona, at anscamobile.com. It’s basically a superset of functions and libraries which allows you to (allegedly) speed up your development process for the iPhone. So far, it seems to be an SDK geared towards game developing on the iPhone.

I downloaded the package and installed it without problems. Corona comes with a built in iPhone simulator which allows you to test at least the apps shipped in the tutorial. One of the most interesting things about this library is its language: lua. I know Objective C can be a little strange, but pushing lua as a programming language for the iPhone is quite a bold move. I don’t really know hoe many people know lua, and I also don’t know the size of the lua communities on the web, but compared with other alternatives, I suppose lua has quite a limited set of adopters. I never tried lua before, so there might be some advantages in using it, such a simplicity in deploying and / or maintenance.

It seems that the library is already used by a number of developers, some apps are already on the APP Store (Fishies, the app featured in the Corona Simulator picture below, is one of them).

There a lot of things missing from this SDK, such as how you can test your apps on the iPhone simulator, how you can deploy them using iTunes Connect and so on, but as a phenomenon, I do find this pretty interesting. I didn’t play with it extensively, other than testing the examples, and this is manily because my lua knowledge is pretty limited at the moment, but it does look as an interesting thing.

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.

After the initial hype of the new iPhone 3GS launch, it’s time to assess the reasons to upgrade in silence. As we already know the iPhone 3GS would be available starting with 19th June in several countries. followed by several other launched up until 9th July. So, why should I upgrade to the new device?

iPhone 3GS Hardware Features

The most important feature in the new iPhone 3GS seems to be the digital compass. Android has one, iPhone must have one to. For the iPhone developers this was something really natural, since the iPhone SDK already have some functions for determining not only the orientation, but the speed too. So, it was something expected.

The second most important feature, at least for me, it’s the speed. According to various sources, the iPhone 3GS processor is running now at 600 Mhz, which is around 25% faster than the actual iPhone 3G. To be honest, I like my iPhone 3G speed. I don’t do things extremely processor intensive, I don’t try to calculate PI in less than a second or stuff like that. I’m just using my iPhone to make phone calls, keep in touch with my tasks, watch movies and check twitter and email from time to time. For what I do, the processor it’s fine. Really.

iPhone 3GS Software Features

Apple has seeded the iPhone 3.0 OS GM release to the developers, which seems to be the final release before the launch. I already tested iPhone 3.0 on one of my iPhones and it’s great. It really is. I mean search “a la Spotlight” over the entire iPhone, cut, copy and paste between applications to name only the things I was able to test immediately, are great. There are also tons of goodies available to developers in the iPhone SDK 3.0, like Peer to Peer connectivity, In App Payment or In App Mail. Some of them I was able to test while I was prototyping my iPhone apps, and I’m telling you these are revolutionary stuff.

But, what I forgot to tell you is that I was able to install iPhone OS 3.0 on my iPhone 2G device without too much hassle. Yes, I know Apple says you can’t, but you can. Anyway, I did it for testing purposes only. The main point is that iPhone OS 3.0 doesn’t have a lot to do with iPhone 3GS. It would be available to owners of iPhone 3G also, starting with June 17th. So, why should I bother?

Is It Really Worth To Buy An iPhone 3GS Now?

The answer is: I don’t know. From a very narrow standpoint, I will say “no”, definitely. I can do my stuff with iPhone 3G just fine, without a digital compass and a 600Mhz processor (which may have some heating problems, I suppose). Since iPhone OS 3.0 would be available to all iPhone users there won’t be any issues.

From an iPhone developer standpoint, I will say “maybe yes” and that would be for testing purposes. It is important to see how an app is working on a genuine device, so a 3GS would be a must have.

Will see about that.

As spotted by AppleInsider, one major European phone retailer has been updated its stock with four new iPhone models:

As you can see, there are at least two brand new placeholders for both black and white iPhone with 32GB memory.

That could hint us for a new, larger memory iPhone, which was in fact long time awaited. The next version of iPhone is expected early this summer, following Apple’s habit to launch new products during the annual Apple developers conference. Along with the iPhone SDK 3.0, larger memory could bring a significantly better user experience and much more space to run appplication on the new SDK.

An update to the mind-mapping software for the iPhone called iBlueSky (made by Tenero Software) was recently made available on the AppStore. I can call myself a power user of iBlueSky, being among the first reviewers when it was launched. I always liked the simplicity and great usability of this tiny yet extremely powerful iPhone app.

What I saw at a glance in the new version is a new translucent side-bar and bottom-bar when in editing mode, which appears on tapping on the current view. This makes the appearance a little slicker and elegant. Another thing that popped out was the size of the canvas, which seemed almost huge. Compared with the 1st version, it was huge, anyway. Remember, in the version 1.0 any time you hit the margin of a canvas with one of the child branches you get an iPhone vibration, sort of notification. In this version, it’s very difficult to get to that point, unles you’re having a really, really huge map, maybe hundreds of childs.

Another widely expected improvement was the ability to import other mind maps. iBlueSky decided to partner with Nova Mind, so they will support only their format (apart from the OpenSource Free Mind format). So, if you want to import your desktop mind map into iBlueSky on your iPhone, you have to this on the web. There is no direct link. Yet. There is a detailed explanation on how to import your mind maps at http://www.tenero.co.uk/import so you’d better go read at your leisure.

iBlueSky costs 7.99 EUR in AppStore.

All in all, iBlueSky remains one of the best productivity applications on the iPhone, although the niche is starting to get crowded with new players.

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.