Adrenaline Apps

I love it when new ideas can be funded by the general public and through social networking become wildly successful. No longer do you need to work for someone else to make your own start up a reality.

Recently, I’ve been supporting ideas from a site called Kickstarter.com. I’ve already helped fund one idea and now it’s an awesome product called Tik Tok – a cool wristband for an iPod Nano: http://kck.st/g5PMCe

Now, there’s a new idea that I love on Kickstarter called WALdok: http://kck.st/eRSMgC

Can’t wait until this one becomes a reality. Time to think about my own idea…

Having been a Blackberry hard-keyboard junkie, transitioning to the iPhone has been frustrating. Luckily, attachments like Boxwave’s Keyboard Buddy (http://bit.ly/hUXG4b) are starting to hit the market. It’s not perfect but meets 80-90% of my expectations. Here are my key notes after using it for 3 months…

Thumbs Down:

• Must hold down shift key for upper case, doesn’t recognize upper case  while holding key down so for letters on the left side of the keyboard, you have to take your right hand off the iPhone
• Doesn’t recognize double-space is period
• No back-lit keyboard for typing in the dark
• Apps with no landscape mode makes keyboard hard to use

Thumbs Up:

• Good quality with decent feel when typing – not as great as the Blackberries but still very nice
• More accurate typing
• Great for power texting when you don’t really care about upper case, spelling and exact punctuations
• Adds a little weight and width, but I actually like it but don’t expect to be able to slip into your iPhone into your pocket anymore

So, is it worth it? Yes…. until a better one comes out or if the iPhone 5 has a slide-out keyboard!

<— Click here to go to the app!

If you’re like me, I’ve given up my point-shoot camera and use my iPhone for most of my picture taking. But the problem is is that unless you spend a lot of time in iPhoto or on your PC organizing your pics, the iPhone Photo app is  basically one, huge photo folder that’s sorted chronologically – not very easy to zero in on the photo/s you’re looking for if you have hundreds.

I been using this app called Photo+Folder (Pic+Organize+Video+Secret). For photos that are important, you can put them in folders that you name. Not only do I use it for vacation photos and projects, but also for work where I take pics of the whiteboard where we’ve been brainstorming ideas and other meeting notes. What I also do is create an “important documents” folder and take pics of our driver’s licenses, passports, insurance policies, mortgage statements… anything where you know you can access information immediately and have a virtual copy of them for safe keeping. The app has a password lock capability for any folder you want to keep private.

You can also share photos directly to Facebook or Twitter, move photos and folders around easily and last but not least, back up files wirelessly. It’s a sweet app.

If you know Photoshop and want to get into designing mobile apps, Tapptics is what you need to get started!

Tapptics is a collection of design files and step-by-step training created to help designers, developers and idea people save time and money creating mobile apps.

<— Click here to go to the app!

A lot of people with iPhones have asked me which To Do List is the best. Having used over a dozen, I’ve stuck with Todo by Appigo. It has the cleanest and most intuitive interface. Entering tasks is fast and you can easily sort tasks in folders as well as prioritize the most important ones with their “Focus” category. It also syncs with my iPad version through their cloud website which is really convenient.

It supports GTD “Getting Things Done” method which “rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.” Thank you Wikipedia…

Honorable mentions are:

Toodledo – To Do List

2Do: Tasks Done in Style