Review: iMovie for iPhone 4

This won’t be a comprehensive review, because those exist elsewhere (best of breed here), but I have put this app through its paces and have a few points to make about it for those on the fence about whether to buy or not.

Things that annoy me:

• Location services must be on to use the app. Why? You can geotag clips, but I don’t want to be FORCED to do so.
• Only video clips shot with an iPhone can be used.
• Added text lasts the entire length of the clip and takes up a big portion of the frame.
• Audio can’t be moved at all, and when it ends, it ends.
• You can trim video from both ends by using handles, but it’s difficult to see what you’re trimming (easier to trim and then import).

Things that I like:

• It’s relatively easy to cute-ify video clips.
• You don’t have to have a desktop computer to join clips on the fly.
• You can pick what size to export, and it includes HD, which looks good (way to make use of the new iPhone 4 video-recording capabilities!).
• You can add video and photos, and you can do the Ken Burns thing with photos. Result: quick-and-dirty video that looks pretty polished.

I spent a half hour messing with this software and slapped together a project of my trip to Italy (see on YouTube). Keep in mind this video was shot with a 3GS—not in HD).

Screenshots:

Ken Burns effect

Choosing image transitions

For $5 this is a fairly sophisticated app. For people who shoot a lot of video clips and like to share them, it’s probably a should-have (eg, people with kids or active blogs). For people who shoot longer videos or videos with multiple devices, it’s probably best to stick with a desktop video-editing software. Beyond a few minutes of editing, iMovie on the iPhone’s limitations just get too frustrating.

Mac app review: PhoneView for iPhone

iTunes backs up your iPhone and iPad, but mere mortals usually can’t figure out where it puts stuff or how to get it back out of the backups. Additionally, sometimes you just want a way to get stuff from an iPhone to your Mac (eg, you lost all your photos and didn’t have a hard drive backup, but they’re on your phone; you’d like to see all your text messages to the person you’re arguing with over whether she REALLY said she’d buy you lunch next week; you want to copy music off a phone….). PhoneView [link; ecamm software; US$19.95, with free trial period] is a handy Mac app that does all that, by which I mean it provides a usable backup, plus helps out with other housekeeping tasks, such as mass-deleting texts and keeping call logs. It automatically logs and archives everything when you launch it and have an iPhone or iPad attached, and you can set a preference so that it launches each time the iPhone/iPad is plugged in. See the screenshot, left, for all the stuff it gives you access to on an iPhone (obviously the iPad doesn’t have Voicemail, Call Log, or Messages).

For folks like me who don’t want to open Apple Mail to dink with notes, PhoneView lets you do the dinking in its interface. Just click on Notes, add or modify what you need to, and click “Apply Changes.” PhoneView syncs the changes. If you’ve got an iPad, PhoneView syncs all notes among your Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. For those of you who tried earlier versions of PhoneView, have good cheer: it no longer requires a reboot to sync notes. You can also drag and drop text or PDF files onto PhoneView and the resulting note will be synced to your device. Most happily for me, you can format notes in PhoneView. I used Palm devices for years and relied on the easy text-editing capabilities that synced easily. Now I’ve got that on the iPhone. Yes, I use Evernote, but you gotta have Internet, and I don’t like everything to be in the cloud.

Disk mode gives you storage, but I’m not too excited about this feature because you can’t see the stuff you drop there from your phone—only from PhoneView. A thumb drive is a better way.

You can play music from an iPhone through PhoneView, the usefulness of which is not obvious at first because if you’re at your computer you can play it from iTunes anyway. But you can hook up someone else’s iPhone to your computer (after disabling autosync) and listen to that music through PhoneView; you can also copy non–copyright-protected music to your computer via this method.

I haven’t needed to use it to restore photos (which would be the smaller iPhone resolution anyway) or other media, but I’ve been glad on several occasions to have access to every text message I’ve ever sent and received on both of my iPhones (it also backs up MMS messages). I text more than I e-mail, so I really need those messages sometimes. I can’t overemphasize the handiness of mass-deleting texts, either. For those of us who text a lot, it’s a major pain in the rear to go through manually and remove them from the iPhone. (“Delete all,” Apple? Pretty please?) Text messages can be exported in a variety of formats. I export mine every few months and e-mail them to my Gmail account for true searchability nirvana.

PhoneView automatically archives voicemail messages and plays them within the app; it will also send them to iTunes, although I can’t get too excited about that. Perhaps others receive more interesting voicemails than I do. The call log has come in handy a few times, though.

At first blush $19.95 sounds expensive. I got this app through a MacHeist bundle, but I would pay the $19.95 regardless. Usable backups and the data-handling mechanisms make it extremely useful.

qStatus for iPhone

Those of us who use several social media sites can find ourselves doubling or tripling our status updates from time to time. I hate doing anything extra, so I have tried a lot of methods for getting the job done in one fell swoop. There are several ways [link to Mashable article] to update your status across multiple networks at once; this review covers qStatus for iPhone [$0.99; iTunes link]. I—like most people who update more than one status at once—focus on Facebook and Twitter, and qStatus updates both or either.

qStatus doesn’t stop with status updates. It allows inclusion of media (images, video, and  and geotagging), thus saving that precious 2 seconds otherwise spent waiting for a Twitter client to load for a status update. The media services qStatus will post to include TwitPic, TwitVid, yFrog, and Posterous. I was excited to see Posterous on the list, but unfortunately updates sent there are autoposted to all Posterous services, and that probably makes it useless to most folks. However, the other three work as you would think, and you can set photos and videos to different services if desired. Cross-posting photos to Twitter and Facebook creates a Facebook album called qStatus photos.

You can also tweet the current song playing on your iPod app. This tweets the artist, song, and a link to an Amazon MP3 download page with a “Your friend is sharing their music with qStatus for the iPhone and iPod Touch” banner link.

In the bells-and-whistles department, qStatus allows a custom background and “sent” sound. However, it lacks a landscape mode, which I’d rather have. It does allow longer status updates (>140 characters). As shown in the screenshot, a long tweet lets you choose between using the qStatus service or TweetShrink. The tweet contains as many characters as possible followed by a link.

Other handy features include draft and multiple-account support. In addition, tapping the @ button and typing the first few characters of a Twitter username quickly brings up a directory and allows autofill.

I keep qStatus in my dock and find it extremely handy, particularly with the draft support. With just a few taps it’s fast and simple to choose which accounts and/or networks to update, geotag the update, and include or take a photo.

Awesome Note

I have used a ton of to-do systems, mostly recently Remember the Milk (RTM), but they have never really fit the way I needed to remember things. RTM in particular is overkill for what I need. Awesome Note ($3.99 in the App Store; free “Lite” version available) for my iPhone [iTunes link] combined with Evernote and Google Calendar have finally, I think, filled the bill for me. A review of Awesome Note follows, but first here is a quick description of my system. I created a new Google Calendar called “My Tasks” for tasks that absolutely have to be done on a certain day (repeating tasks like “take out the trash”). They send SMS or e-mail reminders to me. The e-mailed ones are automatically tagged “To Do” in Gmail. Yes, I use my inbox as a to-do list, and I feel fine about it. It works for me. I look at it constantly and feel an innate drive to get rid of those to-do labels. Inbox Zero is not in operation in my life.

It’s the other to-do items and notes that have floated from one system to another for me. I’ve even used paper because dang, these electronic systems get too complicated. I use Evernote to capture a lot of stuff, but it’s not fast enough to suit me for capturing quick to-do items, and you can’t create to-do’s from the iPhone. It’s great for reference material, though, so I wanted to keep it in my system.

Therefore, Awesome Note has filled a gap. It lets me create categories and combine notes with to-do items in ways that are intuitive to me.

Read more about why Awesome Note is… well… awesome.

iPad: Answers and Challenges

First off, yes, I am writing this on the iPad.

As an “executive summary,” I’ll just say this: it is what everyone thought it was. And the answers to both of my questions in last night’s final preview article have been revealed. The short answer is that while the iPad is a great piece of hardware, and a lot of fun, it’s going to take some work to make it fit in to a business environment.

So let’s jump in and look at what works, what doesn’t and the challenge that lies ahead.

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The Last iPad Preview Article

So at this point, with iPad pre-order deliveries less than 12 hours away, you’re either sick of hearing about it, or so excited you can’t stand it. Put me in the latter category. Much like a kid on Christmas, I doubt I’ll sleep much tonight.

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iPhone in Italy

Our friend Megen is an ER nurse by trade, but a Mac and iPhone geek for the sheer fun of it.  She got her first Mac in 1995.  She enjoys blogging about medical stuff, Macs, iPhones, and productivity (and how to squander it by messing with productivity tools).  Her reviews of iPhone apps and usage in particular are excellent; thus with her permission we plan to start re-posting them here.  Enjoy!

In case anyone missed it, I just spent 10 days in Italy, and I did a ton of research before going about using my iPhone over there. It was hard to piece everything together. Here’s my own experience.

In a nutshell, unless you put the iPhone in airplane mode and resign yourself to being cut off for the time you’re there, it costs big bucks to use the iPhone overseas. Digest that, and then read on for ways to minimize the pain. Read the rest of this entry »

iPad: Did Apple revolutionize us again?

Long time readers of my blogs might remember in 2007 how elated I was to be sitting at Moscone, watching Steve Jobs just 20 yards away from me introduce the iPhone, a product that in my mind was no doubt going to be a slam dunk. I said at the time, “I don’t care if this thing is $1000, I’m going to have it on day one.”

Today was not like that.

Today was more like 2001, the day the first iPod was introduced. Like many others, I thought, “what, an MP3 player?” And like many of the less-than-crazed-Apple-fans, I didn’t get one the day they shipped. In fact, I didn’t have my first iPod till months later. But once I had one, got to experience it with all of the design nuance and interface touch that Apple is so well known and (at least by me) appreciated for… well, even then, I had no idea that it would take 70% of the market and completely up-end the music industry, but I knew I liked the product and would never have another MP3 player.

That’s how iPad is going to be for a lot of people.

Its appeal is not immediately obvious. I’ve talked to a few people who said something to the effect of “So what? It’s a big iPod Touch.” And they are right – when you get right down to it, that is indefensible. There’s no USB, no optical drive, no Ethernet. It runs the iPhone OS, not the full fledged Mac OS X that runs on a Mac. So that means no third party apps running in the background, and the only place you’ll get said third party apps is from iTunes.

That said, it’s set apart from iPod Touch because of the size and its 1GHz processor. That point is understated: you ever read a book or watch a movie on a Touch or iPhone? I have; it’s…difficult. Heck, even writing this article on my iPhone is slower than had I been at my desk. iPad won’t have these problems based solely on it’s size and speed.

It won’t compete with iPhone because you can’t make calls with iPad, and it has no camera.

Apple never made an eBook reader like the Sony product or the Amazon Kindle but I have to believe it destroys both of those. (Unless the unique screen of the Kindle appeals to you, and I could see why it might.) And with iTunes selling books to go with iPad – this thing could be a hit all on it’s own just doing to books what it did to music. Imagine every kid in school having one these instead of textbooks.

But how does it compare to a MacBook, which is what I think the disappointed groups were hoping for? I think the addition of iWork apps to the platform (on top of the other productivity apps like QuickOffice) in addition to the ability to use a Bluetooth keyboard (or the iPad dock with keyboard that essentially makes it a little workstation) mean that this could substitute for a computer for office work. Apple took the Netbook concept and made something in that same vein but without using a slow, awkward mini laptop. Yet at less weight and a smaller form factor than MacBook Air, iPad is certainly a road warrior’s dream.

Back when iPhone 3GS was released I postulated that a fast capable mobile device with the addition of 7mbps 3G cellular data would marginalize a desktop or laptop computer. iPad is the next logical progression of that theory.

The only question is, can it do everything a typical business person would need it to do? I’m very much looking forward to finding that answer when I get one this summer.

Apple’s Game-Changers

A few weeks ago, Apple announced some pretty big overhauls to their product line with new iMacs, new Minis, new MacBooks, etc. Maybe I’m just jaded from my time in retail, but new product announcements from Apple rarely excite me anymore. I doubt anything is going to top the pinnacle: witnessing the revelation of the iPhone in person a couple years ago and getting in line to get one on the first day. Something simple as the new mouse? Yawn. (To be fair, now that I have a Magic Mouse, I really, really like it.)

But as the title of this blog post alludes, there were a couple of items that gave me cause to do a double-take.

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Video/Audio Playback

Have you ever tried to download a video from the internet just to click on it and have Quicktime tell you “Unsupported Video?” Or have you clicked a movie and seen picture but no sound? Well my mac loving friends, there is a solution. Instead of downloading tons of audio and video “codecs” to get your files to play, there is a one stop shop media player that will play anything you throw at it. VLC player is “the [ultimate] cross-platform open-source multimedia framework, player and server.” Here you can find out more information about specific types of media that it supports, as well as download it if you like.

From personal experience i have never found a format that VLC handle and that includes video straight off my DVR! If you like to use a lot of different types of media this is a player that offers it all; and its free! Give it a try, you wont be disappointed.