Evernote' s New version 3.0 iPhone Application

First off, the landscape notes view in Evernote 3.0 is stunning, you can scroll through icon sized images of all your notes with a few flicks of the screen.

The first thing you will notice when you open Evernote 3.0 the first time is that all of your notes load in a "All Notes" modes, no more loading and scrolling through 25 notes at a time. In portrait view there is an "Index Bar" floating on the right side of the screen (the index bar is along the bottom of the screen in landscape view), the index bar can be configured on the fly to group notes by: created or updated date, title (alphabetically), city or country (assuming your notes are geo-tagged), or by notebook. I have 300+ media rich notes and resorting by the grouping took less than 2 seconds - very impressive. To select the grouping press the "i" icon to the right of the search field. I found the notes grouping to be a good default view for the iPhone - mimicking the desktop view.
Search and advanced search have had their interfaces cleaned up and advanced search now offers an "Other" category that lets you filter by source, such as "Emailed to Evernote" or mobile, etc.
All is not perfect with this upgrade though, you still can not edit notes on the iPhone that contain "stylized text" or images - hopefully Evernote will find a solution for this with the new tools provided in iPhone os 3.0. Also, the voice note functionality has been reworked, the new interface is nice - fewer clicks to begin recording, but the sound quality of the recordings is poor. To compare, I used Apple's new Voice Memo application and emailed the recording to Evernote, the sound quality was superior to the recording from within Evernote - noticeably superior.. so much so, that I plan to use Voice Memo and email the audio file to Evernote, until the quality issue is addressed within the Evernote application.
For your notes that are geo-tagged, such as notes created on your iPhone 3G, you can now view your notes on a map. This feature is acccessible by pressing the push pin left of the search field. I am not sure how useful this will be for me, time will tell.
All in all, Evernote 3.0 is a great upgrade - highly recommended, I look forward to using Evernote 3.0 on the 3G S - the increase in speed should improve productivity, not to mention the improved autofocusing camera!
If you are already an Evernote user, there is no reason to skip this upgrade, if you have not used Evernote, now is the time to jump in! Evernote on the iPhone is like carrying a room full of filing cabinets in your pocket! In a word.. AWESOME!

QuickOffice Suite 1.2 Upgrade

This weekend saw the release of Quickoffice 1.2, an upgrade that addressed many of the usability concerns of the previous versions of Quickoffice. Such as: Auto-correction (predictive text) in Quickword, auto-capitalization, find text; in Quicksheet - copy & paste of cells, columns and cell ranges, landscape editing and set/remove cell borders to name just a few.

There is a complete listing of the new features in the description on the app store. Copy/paste in Quicksheet and predictive text in Quickword are the features I have been waiting for! Combined with the absence of Documents To Go from Dataviz has me pulling the trigger on the $19.99 purchase of QuickOffice as soon as I am done typing this post.

The ability to edit DOCX & XLSX (2007 MS Office format) files is promised for the next upgrade, as is access to iPhone email attachments.

It looks like the developers of Quickoffice suite have been busy.

Update iStayFit continues to improve!

The last time I mentioned iStayFit on this blog, version 2.4 was the flavor of the day. Since then there have been 4 releases, culminating in version 3.0 being released last week...

• Version 2.5 added 34 new stretching exercises... a good place to start if you want some ideas for stretching.
• Version 2.6 added the ability to change the log date in order to enter previous workouts
• Version 2.7 added the ability to create free form workouts on the fly. Thus, if you are wandering around the gym, you can create your workout while you are at each station. This feature was requested by users on the iStayFitClub forums and the developers responded quickly to the request. I can vouch, free form workout, leveraging the ability to search across all exercises from one list works well. The only issue I had was that the onscreen keyboard used for searching sometimes obscured the bottom search result and I could not find a way to dismiss the keyboard.
• Version 3.0 saw the addition of a scheduling function. Allowing you to setup a workout schedule. The scheduling function is full featured, allowing up to 2 schedules per day, thus you can separate out your cardio and weight workouts. Setting up a workout schedule is straightforward, see this link for more information.

The addition of free form workouts and scheduling are two big items that add to iStayFit's usefulness.

Interestingly iFitness ($1.99) seems to be the big seller, as it is usually in the top 5 in the Healthcare & Fitness category, I have not used iFitness since my initial trial (Dec 08), but from researching the current reviews and the iFitness website, it appears that iStayFit maintains the lead in functionality and flexibility for the gym rat or the novice! Maybe the lead that iFitness maintains it is price driven.

iStayFit v3.0 Highly Recommended