My iPhone apps today
One of the groundbreaking differences between the iPhone and all other cellular phones is the App Store. You can bet that RIM, Nokia, et al are hard at work on a similar system.
Here’s the app’s I’ve got loaded today:
- Flashlight – Turns out to be fairly useful when lost in the dark.
- Bloomberg – more detailed stock info than the built-in app.
- Monkeyball – Fun, but the motion sensing is not well done. These guys should talk to the Labyrinth guys to see how to do motion sensing properly.
- Shazam – This is just cool.
- Weatherbug – OK app. Better weather forcasts than the built-in weather app.
- WordPress – cool – but it would be pretty difficult to type a REAL blog entry here.
- WritingPad – Interesting to see people inventing new input paradigms. This one is so so.
- Remote – Cool, but it would be great if it worked with FrontRow on my TV’s Mac Mini.
- Jott – Jott is a very cool service, and this app is well done.
- AirMe – I LOVE what this app SHOULD do, if ONLY it did it reliably. I’m hoping they release a new version soon.
- Labyrinth – THE COOLEST APP. This is what I show people when they wonder what the fuss is about.
- TouchCalc – OK.
- SpeakEasy – Nice audio recorder but doesn’t upload yet – which is functionality I’d love.
- Tuner – Nice to have a radio in your phone.
- AccuFuel – Bit of a pain to enter the fuel info, and a pain to configure. Km’s vs Miles vs liters per km, etc.
- ezimba – Interesting. The basic need I had was to crop photos, and I couldn’t find it after quite a bit of searching. I know it MUST be there…
- eReader – I had an account already so this was a no-brainer. I WISH I could override the motion sensor so I could read while lying in bed…
- VNC – Cool just because you can.
- Enigmo – Nicely done app. Another showcase app.
- Holdem – I’m not into poker enough to appreciate this app.
- Dice Bag – This app sucks. I was hoping for a nice simulation of dice rolling. All it does is display a number in the corner of the screen. TRY HARDER GUYS.
- Crash Cart – Cool. My kids love this app – but the motions sensing is not as nice as I’d like to see.
- OneTap – Very nice movie finder. Lots of nice features.
- Remember The Milk – Not strictly an iPhone app, but SO WELL DONE that I’m including it. Nice.
- Scrabble – I play this more than anything. The first version sucked HUGELY and crashed EVERY TIME you used it. The recent update is much improved. Also, they’ve improved the load time – but it’s still spending WAY TOO LONG showing me logos and startup screens.
- Audio Rec. Guitar Toolkit – Nice app.
- WeightTrack – Nice enough – but my phone isn’t near my scale.
- NetShare – I’m AMAZED this is allowed, and that this works. I downloaded it immediately, before it’s deleted from the App Store. Hopefully Rogers can’t detect that I’m using this (of course, I never do.)
- Exposure – Nice app – I wish I could upload from the phone to Flickr using this.
- Sketches – It would be nice to be able to have larger drawing surfaces. Nicely done.
Things my iPhone does to piss me off…
iPhone 3G
Doesn’t work as a phone – I received a call from my wife last weekend. Pulled the iPhone out of my pocket, and stared at the completely BLACK screen of my ringing phone. I tried pressing every button, dragging across where the “answer the call” slider is, but NOTHING worked. Then, she called again a minute later – and the same thing happened. Rats.
Apps that don’t work – I LOVE the idea of the AirMe application. This is a terrific app that lets you take photos, then automatically geotags them, weather tags them, then uploads them to Flickr – all with one click!!! WOW! Too bad it only works for one or two photos in a row, then crashes. Lots of apps crash – and I understand completely the issues that face the developers – we’re facing them ourselves.
TERRIBLE battery life – I’ve been a Blackberry user since the first year they were available. My FIRST blackberry would last for over 2 weeks on a charge. Then they added phone capability and colour, and it lasted about a day and a half. BUT, the iPhone does not even last one day! After charging all night, it’s dead by supper time. I have to charge it at work, or during supper if I’m planning to head out at night. Sucks.
NO coverage at my cottage – yes, not the iPhone’s fault – TOTALLY Roger’s fault. But is sucks that my Bell Blackberry gets 4 bars of signal strength, whereas my iPhone gets NO SIGNAL, except if I go outside, and hold the phone in one special location, angled JUST SO. PLEASE improve your coverage Rogers…
And, I love this thing. Go figure.
An interesting observation about GPS receivers
We do a lot of highway driving every week. It’s amazing how many cars are now using GPS devices! I’d say it’s about 1/4 to 1/3 of all cars on the highway are using them – closely following the on-screen routes to their destinations.
Garmin Nuvi 650
What’s interesting is that the algorithm used by these devices doesn’t always keep you on the big highways. I was quite surprised that our special back-roads route to our cottage (devised over YEARS of trial and error, backtracking and testing) was the route that our Garmin GPS chose – without any prompting on our part. It chose this crazy route through the back roads of Quebec to bring us from Ottawa to St. Sauveur.
And, on a recent trip to the Maine coast, our GPS brought us on a beautiful shortcut route – which was a couple of minutes shorter than the highway – but was a route you would NEVER choose unless you were a local. It was just one step up from a dirt road – lots of crazy twists and turns around huge boulders in the highway!
So, what’s happening is that people along these tiny, middle of nowhere routes must now be experiencing a huge increase in traffic!
I’ll bet that if you measured the traffic on this tiny road in Maine this year, compared to last year you’d see a huge increase in traffic! And I’ll bet the highway engineers and designers have no idea this is happening!
An unexpected side effect of the growth of GPS receiver use.
Hurry up and wait at the iPhone App Store!!!
We’ve been hard at work on some iPhone applications – and we’re ready to get them online – but like many other developers we’re stuck waiting in Apple’s queue’s.
First there’s the long wait to simply be accepted as iPhone developers. We signed up on the first day – but still haven’t been accepted as full-on developers.
THEN there’s the wait to get your app approved by Apple. Apparently the process is pretty sketchy at this point. Applications are being turned down for no reason, or for very ambiguous reasons. And, once your app is approved and up on the site, it can take weeks for updates to your app to be made public.
The beta process is pretty difficult too. We’re allowed to trial an application on up to 5 devices – so every application has a pretty small beta group. Sort of explains why the apps are so buggy.
The final thing we’re struggling with is a pretty restricting API. While we agree the apps have to be sandboxed to protect the functionality of the phone, it’s pretty restricting. We wanted to create a power management application – a REALLY easy way to put the phone in low power mode – and switch back to high power mode when you want to do some surfing, for instance. Unfortunately the power API’s are not available to us – and some early hacks by third party developers don’t work with the 2.0 API.
And, so we wait…
Meanwhile, if you are looking for a pretty hot iPhone application development shop – we’re READY!!! We’ve got quite a bit of experience, and are looking for some more cool work in this area.
Dale Gantous profiled at Red Canary
The Red Canary web site recently interviewed our CEO Dale Gantous, and has published a very nice profile of Dale and her career.
Wat to go Dale!!! We too think that you “ooze personality” and keep us all happy and excited about our cool work.
Dale Gantous, InGenius CEO
Our CEO Dale Gantous – Top Woman Entrepreneur in Canada!
We’re thrilled to announce that Dale Gantous has recently received the Sara Kirke award. This award, presented by CATA, is given to the top female entrepreneur in Canada.
To quote the CATA site:
The Sara Kirke Award for Woman Entrepreneurship is presented to the woman who has shown the most outstanding technological innovation and corporate leadership — leadership that has significantly expanded the frontiers of Canada’s advanced technology industry. The purpose of the Award is to celebrate innovation, entrepreneurship and create positive role models for women.
Sara Kirke is considered by many to be North America’s first entrepreneur. Sara Kirke arrived in Newfoundland in 1638 with her husband David Kirke, who was soon recalled to England. Sara, however, continued to reside in Avalon, and conducted business as usual from the Pool Plantation. Lady Kirke was a remarkable individual as she managed affairs at the Pool Plantation and became one of the most successful merchants on the English Shore — and was almost certainly North America’s first and foremost woman entrepreneur.
The Selection Committee of the Sara Kirke Award is made up of members of CATA’s Women in Technology Forum National Advisory Board. The chair of the Sara Kirke selection committee is Dr. Barbara Orser, Deloitte Chair for Women’s Entrepreneurship, University of Ottawa.
CATA’s WIT (Women in Technology) Forum is a new community network launched by CATA designed to boost women’s participation and advancement in the high-growth technology sector.
In judging the nominees for the award, the Selection Committee is looking for women leaders who demonstrated consistent innovation and leadership skills, resulting in the creation and international acceptance of significant world-class products and/or the establishment and development of a major advanced technology company or companies that have withstood the test of time.
More details here.
