follicle²

I don't play a lot of games, but I get good value from the ones I do. One that gets a bit of use on my iPhone is Subway Shuffle. It's simple to learn, looks good, and is quick enough to play when I have that 10-minute wait for the wife to turn up, or at least for the levels that require under 50 moves. A couple of levels still have me stumped. That or I can't work out how to get them in the "optimum" number of moves. The concept is very similar to the parking lot games where you have to remove your car by moving all the others around. In fact the disused mathematician in me suspects the games to be isomorphic.

In case you're wondering, the aim is to move the red train to the destination with the big red circle. You can only move each piece along a line with the same colour. Deceptively simple.

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With the demise of further development of Google Notes, I didn't seriously think for long about implementing my own web notebook. Instead, I've persevered with Evernote and it's gradually infiltrating my daily habits.  

Me, I like lists, so I've captured some thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses.

For

• Web access means ubiquitous access
• Native iPhone app means it suits the limited UI
• Native Windows and Mac apps, mean that clipping and saving both native and web content is easy
• Accepts rich formatted text, pictures, PDF attachments
• The free version is pretty capable (for now)
• Text recognition on images, so the text is searchable.  This is pretty clever

Against

• Lack of decent text editing. I hate making something a heading by selecting bold, and upping the font size. I want styles, or at least HTML-type headings (h1, h2...). 
• Searching on iPhone is a bit painful, although very flexible. Why can't I just go to a home page with a list of all the notebooks?
• Lack of rich text editing on the iPhone, so you can't edit most of the docs you create
• Can't select Google Mail as my email client on any platform

What I am getting used to is having all this information at my fingertips, wherever I am -- work, home, or out and about. It's a GTD inbox for one. I also keep a shopping list on there, so when I have an idea, it's quick to add, and when I'm in the supermarket, there it is.  Same with books to read when I'm in a bookshop, DVDs to watch when I'm in the video store and so on.  I have some favourite recipes on there so I can think about what to cook when I'm at the shop and know what ingredients I need to get.  And so the list of uses goes on.

Some have suggested that Evernote is a killer app for the iPhone. That's overstated, but it's certainly a good example of how a ubiquitous network and multi-platform client can make your information more mobile.

Another example I talk about: I was in a café one Saturday morning reading a magazine, and saw a recipe that was worth noting down. I could have quietly (and selfishly) torn it out of the mag, I could have tried to find it on the Internet, or I could have typed it into my iPhone, but no, I photographed it with the iPhone and uploaded it to Evernote using the app. Some time later it got OCR'ed and the text is now searchable. That's pretty neat.

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With the near ubiquity of web access through my iPhone, when I look at a serious productivity app, a high-priority requirement is to have useable access from both laptop/desktop and iPhone. If offered only through a browser, rarely can the one interface work on both devices well.  Even simple navigation events like a double-click or scrolling are problematic on an iPhone, not to mention the lack of Flash. 

So, web app developers that want wide acceptance need to either introduce an installable client for the iPhone and a decent API, or provide an iPhone-friendly web interface that can be accessed safely over Safari.  For some apps, only one mode of access makes sense (GPS-related mapping for example), but for others it's a major turn-off.  This isn't just limited to iPhone of course: Android and (soon) Palm Pre users will have the same requirements.  And it's not going to go away. Increasingly, more users will be accessing apps through a smartphone than a laptop.  If nothing else, any web app should have a good public API and let the market come to the party with different ways of accessing and manipulating the content.

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Having had an iPhone for a couple of months now, it does everything I'd imagined, and there are still new apps coming out that take it even further.  In keeping with the form factor, a major limitation is the keyboard (and the missing copy/cut/paste functionality).  Someone has already hacked a Bluetooth keyboard, but I can imagine a compact Bluetooth keyboard+screen device, similar to the stillborn Palm Foleo, that let's you type a bit more seriously.  It would also open up the scope for iPhone apps that allow more capable document or presentation editing.  Something very slim, with a minimum of external connections, probably power (to recharge the batteries), and maybe USB 2.0 for a mouse. How slim and light could that be, I wonder?  Something you could pull out of your bag when you have space and time to sit and edit stuff (airport, plane, cafe, hotel lobby...).

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The Free42 port to the iPhone is getting closer. Screenshots look nice -- see below . I've never owned an HP-42S but it's my calculator of choice on my laptop and my old Palm, and often regarded as the best HP calculator ever released.  I'm making do with the i41CX for the moment.

Update 12-Jan: It's now available on iTunes.

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Future novel iPhone apps.
 
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/4898/augmented-reality-on-the-iphone.html

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