iPhone App of the Week: Awesome Note

Monday, August 30th, 2010

If, like me, you’ve got a memory that makes a goldfish look like a Mastermind champion, the iPhone’s Notes application is an invaluable aide mémoire, but it’s no overstatement to say it has fewer features than a pen and pad.

Enter the not-so-modestly titled Awesome Note. This £2.39 application combines to-do list and notes duties in one smartly presented app that boasts enough features to satisfy the habitual note taker.

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iPhone App of the Week: Instapaper

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

If, like me, you often end the working day with a dozen open browser tabs full of articles you meant to read later, Instapaper could be just the ticket.

This delightfully clever service installs a “Read Later” button in your PC browser’s bookmarks bar. Click this when you stumble across an interesting read that you haven’t got time to plough through, and you can read it on the way home from work on your iPhone/iPad.

Instapaper doesn’t just save a copy of the page. It strips out the page furniture and advertising, and pops the text and images into an easily digestible page that doesn’t require any zooming. Occasionally that formatting goes a little awry – pages are sometimes stuffed with links or HTML gubbins, or articles are sporadically chopped off before the end – but by and large it does a fine job of discriminating between wheat and chaff.

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iPhone App of the Week: Dragon Dictation

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Speech recognition software may have long since lost its “next big thing” reputation on the PC, but could it finally have found a vocation as the alternative to awkward software keyboards on smartphones?

Nuance’s Dragon Dictation on the iPhone certainly suggests so. This highly impressive app transcribes spoken messages that can be quickly exported to SMS, email, Facebook or Twitter updates at the touch of the button.

As with the voice search built into the Google iPhone app, the hard work takes place on the company’s servers, not the iPhone itself.  Voice messages are recorded and sent to Nuance’s servers, and the transcript arrives back on your handset a few seconds later – provided you’ve got a data connection. Not only does utilising vastly more powerful server hardware allow Dragon to improve the accuracy of transcriptions,   it keeps the app nice and lightweight at only 4.4MB.

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iPhone App of the Week: Firefox Home

Friday, July 16th, 2010

A few of us in the PC Pro office, myself included, have replaced Firefox with Google Chrome as our default browser. Firefox Home is an innovative reason to consider going back.

Mozilla claims Apple’s App Store guidelines prevent it from bringing a full version of Firefox to the iPhone, but Firefox Home is the next best thing.

It sucks up all the Firefox bookmarks and web history stored on your desktop computer and makes them accessible from the phone’s default browser. Better still, it knows what tabs you have open on your desktop browser and makes them available on the iPhone, meaning you can continue browsing where you left off if you suddenly have to rush out of the office, for example.

The iPhone app also includes a search facility, so you can tap in the name of that site you visited last week without having to remember its URL.

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iPhone App of the Week: TVCatchup

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

It might seem a bit incongruous to launch our iPhone app of the week blog with a service that isn’t a strictly an app, but TVCatchup is infinitely more useful than much of the gubbins cluttering up the App Store.

Point Safari at TVCatchup’s iPhone site and you’ll be presented with an app-like interface, sporting icons for 28 British free-to-air TV channels, including all the major players (with the notable exception of Sky). Fill out the simple registration form, and you’ll be granted access to live video feeds from each of the channels, allowing you to watch the World Cup finals or even a full-length movie on Film4.

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