MWC '09 - My 2009 (Touch OS 3.0) Wishlist!

Mobile World Congress is running from Feb 16 thru Feb 19 in Barcelona Spain. Apple does not plan to have an official presence at the world's largest mobile communications trade show, but there are sure to be announcements that will either directly or indirectly impact the iPhone user/market. For instance, Dataviz is rumored to be set to announce the availability of Documents To Go for the iPhone. Documents To Go is essentially Office for handheld platforms. I used it extensively on the Palm OS and have been anxiously awaiting its arrival on the iPhone (or for Apple to release iWork for the iPhone). Besides a usable office type application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint compatibility, editing and syncing), what else would is needed to boost productivity with the iPhone in 2009?

My wish list for 2009, peripherals and Touch OS 3.0:

• Copy/Cut & Paste. Several applications have included this functionality within the application. The iPhone Spreadsheet "Plus" has copy and paste and it is a pleasure to use.. Apple we need Copy & Paste at the OS level across applications.


• HomeScreen/Application Management. Ever try getting from the homescreen to screen six, seven or eight quickly? No a lot of fun. I am not sure what the answer here is, maybe nested icons that open a new screen directly from the main homescreen. Hopefully Apple has some UI magic up its sleeve to provide the iPhone power users with a better experience.


• Text to Speech at the OS level. I mentioned this in a previous post, since then Amazon has announced the Kindle 2 with text to speech. The idea of opening an article in Instapaper, Safari, AP Mobilenews or having newsfeeds/twitter posts read with the touch of a button is very appealing, perfect for the car or gym. Hopefully the Amazon Kindle 2 will push Apple to a degree.


• User Selectable background processing. This is one rumor that is making the rounds with regards to Touch OS 3.0. The idea is that you select one or two additional applications that are allowed to run in the background, similar to Apple's mail.app, the iPod application or the Nike+ application on the Touch G2. I hope this rumor has some substance behind it! I would use it to set Trails to geotrack my location when shooting photos, and not have to worry about the phone state.


• External Peripherals - Blue tooth or via the dock connector. Specifically an external portable keyboard, either wireless or connected to the dock connector! I have no problem with the onscreen keyboard for emails, texting or twittering. But the idea of editing an Excel or Word document in Documents To Go with half of the screen real estate occupied with a onscreen keyboard is not appealing. Palm had a fold able portable keyboard that connected with their Tungsten series of PDAs in the early 00s... I wish Apple would follow suit! Soon... Increased screen real estate for editing and true touch typing! Leave your laptop at home.
• System Settings Profiles. The ability to create & save profiles with specific system settings, for instance: dim screen brighness, shut down wifi and shut down the cell radio all with one selection. The current state, a user must go into Settings and set each item separately, and then reset to the prior state.

Geotagging, Creating Location Aware Digital Images!

How to leverage your iPhone to geotag (add GPS location data to digital images taken with your point & shoot or dSLR [note: the iPhone 3G automatically geotags images taken with the iPhone]) your digital photos and save yourself $100.

• Install a GPS datalogger application on your iPhone 3G, I can recommend using "Trails" ($2.99). The data logger is used to create a GPS track of your movement, placing the data into a GPX file.


• Make sure to sync your camera's clock to the date & time on your iPhone.


• Launch the datalogger on your iPhone, the iPhone will have to remain in "awake" mode to track your movements, I suggest shutting down wifi, 3G and dimming the screen brightness to save battery life if you are planning to shoot for several hours.


• If you are using "Trails" touch the "+" to create a new track, place your iPhone in your pocket and...


• Start shooting digital images as you normally would, you can pause and re-start datalogging at anytime. Keep in mind, as long as Trails is logging your location to a track and you are simultaneously taking photos, the GPS data can then be synched up to your images.


• When you are done shooting, halt your GPS tracking in Trails and email the resulting track file (GPX) to yourself.


• The last step is to sync the GPX file with your digital images, resulting in location aware digital images. There are a few applications out there, HoudahGEO ($30) is very popular, I use Maperture Pro beta (currently $0) as a plugin for Apple Aperture. If you are an Aperture user, I recommend using Maperture Pro as it fits in nicely with Aperture workflow, you import your images (RAW or jpeg) as you normally would, then you select the images that you want to geotag. Then launch the Mapeture Pro plugin and drop the GPX file onto the Maperture Pro interface... and presto your images are updated with location information. No need for a separate $100 GPS data logger.


• In conclusion: 3 easy steps... 1. TRACK (iPhone 3G with Trails) -> 2. SHOOT images(your camera) -> 3. Sync GPS data to Images (HoudahGEO or Maperture Pro).

What can you do with you location aware digital images? With Aperture or iPhoto you can display your images on a google map and sort/organize by location. Additionally, there are a number of photo sharing web sites that support displaying geotagged images on a map such as Picasa Web Albums, Smugmug, Flickr and Panoramio.

Serendipity! The Spice of Life!?

In a round about way I found http://givemesomethingtoread.com/. It goes something like this: I switched from Twitterific to Tweetie, then installed Instapaper on my iPhone to maximize the Tweetie feature set, fell in love with Instapaper and purchased Instapaper Pro. While reviewing the Instapaper blog I saw mention of the "Give Me Something To Read" website. This website is now an icon on my "news and information" homescreen and I visit this website daily for unique reading.

Instapaper and/or Instapaper Pro are must have applications if you are a reader of web articles, for an overview of Instapaper functionality... see the excellent Macworld.com review. Briefly, Instapaper Pro is my "go to" application for reading any web article longer than a couple of sentences. Tweetie has built in functionality for sending a web article to Instapaper, NetNewsWire has Instapaper compatability coming soon and with a simple addition of the "Read Later" bookmark in mobile Safari you are seconds away from loading article upon article into Instapaper for review at your leisure. (Note, the $9.99 pro version is worth it for the "tilt scroll", switchable black background [great for bedtime reading] and marking your place in the article if you have to exit Instapaper mid-read)

The "Give Me Something To Read" website leverages the back end of Instapaper, collecting article selections from among the most frequently bookmarked articles... this is kind of like Digg without all the childish gaming! There are traditionally 5 articles added per day, and I usually find at least 2 or 3 articles that are of interest. Each article has a link to the original article, a brief 2-3 sentence teaser and the "Read Later" button, if the article is of interest just touch the "Read Later" button and send it to Instapaper for reading at your leisure.

I really enjoy the mix of topics, with recent titles such as: "Technology is Heroin", "How to Save Your Newspaper", "Obama's Vietnam" and "Eminem: The fall and rise of a superstar" to name just a few. From sources ranging from the Boston Globe to the UK Independent to nymag.com, you name it! As you can see the topics cover just about every gamut from tech to politics to religion to light fare! If you have a curious hunger for serendipity... Give Me Something to Read is a website worth checking out.

#3APPS

On Monday 2/9 Veronica Belmont posted on Twitter asking her followers to tweet the 3 iPhone/Touch applications that they could not live without. There are currently over 5oo replies, the results are interesting. See for yourself, go to http://twitter.com use the search link at the bottom of the page and then search "#3apps".
Veronica posed the question, such that a majority of the replies do not include games, you get a sense of the productivity/social/communication applications that iPhone users are using. In my opinion,cutting through the junk apps the clutter the "top tens" on the App store. I think the results are probably skewed with regards to twitter applications, since the survey was conducted exclusively with twitter users. Other than that, To Do applications are big: Things, Remember The Milk (RTM) & Omnifocus all have a presence; Facebook is on a lot of lists, again many people see a real value with Evernote!
I found it worthwhile to browse the replies.. looking for Apps I may have overlooked, you may too!

Update: iStayFit is Improved with Updates

In early January I suggested using iStayFit as a tool to track your workouts and motivate you during the New Year resolution hoopla. Since that time there have been several significant updates that provide an even better user experience.

IStayfit is now at version 2.4 and has added the following enhancements:

• Workouts and exercises are now fully customizable, with exercises you can create your own data entry scroll wheels to collect whatever data (numeric or text) you feel necessary for the given exercise (go to http://lootiinc.com/ to view the video). As an example, if you ride a stationary bike you can setup a scroll wheel that collects time, miles, average speed, and percieved exertion level (light medium, hard, crazy!).
• You can now add exercises to a workout in real time - ultimately allowing you to modify your workout on the fly!
• The ability to email your logs and import into Numbers or Excel for further analysis is now available. This email export function allows you to selectively choose via date range the workouts to export.
• The developers have also added a rest period stopwatch that you can customize to your preferred length of time for each individual exercise and if you so choose you can have the timer beep when it is time to start the next set.
• You can now track your weight in iStayfit and view a graph from within the application (note: the developers promise additional graphing in future releases).
• Additional sets can be added to an exercise on the fly by double tapping the "next set" arrow, thus if your exercise is setup for 3 sets and you decide to do an extra fourth set - recording that set is now possible.
• iStayfit tracks your workout time and workout progress via a pie chart (for example: 6 of 11 exercises are complete) displayed on the set entry page.
• Bottom line, this application is all about recording your workout/exercise session in real time. With each release iStayFit becomes more customizable to your workout needs, true some of the new features are bloat.. such as weight tracking and graphing. But overall, in my opinion this application is many times better than carrying around a notebook at the gym, you always have the results from your previous workout at your finger tips! You can always push your self to top your previous best!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED... after 2 solid months of use!

1.5 Million Books on your iPhone for FREE!

Big news, Google has created a mobile interface for Google books. Go to http://books.google.com/m with your mobile web browser to see for yourself. On the opening page you are presented with a search field, a few featured books and several categories such as Adventure, Business & Economics, History, Political Science and Travel to name just a few.

The opening page or home page as Google refers to it will also display a list your recently viewed books.

Choose a topic, let's browse History...

While browsing you are presented with title, author, year published, number of pages and a thumbnail of the book cover. Once you select a book you are presented with the reader interface and book content.

Considering that this is a web application (note, internet connection required to read, thus reading Google books on a flight will require prior planning, such as loading into Instapaper) the reader interface is sparse but acceptable, the navigation bar provides a contents button and page numbers (forward & backward navigation). The text is readable, touch once on the paragraph to see the original scan from the actual book. Photos and diagrams from the original text are also included and displayed via the web interface.

As noted earlier, you have access to over 1.5 million books, the texts are all public domain books, thus most of the texts are rather dated, you aren't going to find Grisham's latest here. But you will find many of the classics from authors such as Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and Nikola Tesla. Once again, another great reference for your iPhone, be sure to bookmark it in Safari or add as an icon to your home screen.

RECOMMEDNDED

iPhone App - Wishlist! Text to Speech!

What do I really want/need on my iPhone? Text to speech! I want text to speech built in at the OS layer, so that every application has access to it! Wouldn't it be great to launch Instapaper or Tweetie or NetNewsWire or USA Today or AP Mobile News (Ok, you probably get the idea) and touch a button and presto.. text to speech, your iPhone is reading content to you! Make it an open API so that third party developers have access and choose how to incorporate this functionality into their application. This is killer functionality...while driving or at the gym... Apple.. are you listening? Please... add to Touch OS 3.0! Please!!