July 13, 2009

And now that I’ve blown an entire evening, some initial thoughts on the shiny, shiny iPhone goodness!

The interface is a win although I will need to take a bit to get used to typing on the virtual keyboard. I’m still kind of slow and pokey at it. I don’t think this’ll be a problem even if I remain slow and pokey at it, just because when I write, I oftentimes get ahead of my fingers when trying to compose the prose. Being forced to type slowly may well help me think things through better.

Definitely grooving on the variety of apps available. I installed a lot of them tonight and very much like QuickOffice’s ability to let me mount the device as a drive over Wi-Fi and drag and drop files across. Not as elegant as an actual file sync, but the various options I’m aware of for that don’t appeal to me right now. So I’m pondering if I can do something clever with rsync whenever I have the device connected. The one minus to this app is that I discovered it doesn’t actually do RTF format, just DOC, so I’ll have to jump back to writing in DOC format. But that’s okay.

Meanwhile, I also installed Amazon’s mobile app as well as the Kindle one (and tested the latter by buying an actual Kindle book I was thinking of getting just because the new style of cover on the series annoyed me and I didn’t want to look at a physical copy of it), the Facebook app, the Touchterm SSH app, the WordPress app, and Stanza.

Stanza turns out to be a bit of a problem, I fear. Most of the ebooks I currently own are in PDF format, and Stanza is not terribly clever about rendering PDF files. Fortunately, however, QuickOffice turns out to solve this problem for me quite nicely because it can read PDF files. Which means I can finally read all the Drollerie Press ebooks I’ve bought. Yay!

I got all my music and podcasts and audiobooks and videos and such synced onto the thing, and broke it in as is right and proper by playing “Ordinary Day” as well as my video of Russell Crowe’s surprise GBS show encore of “Folsom Prison Blues”. <3

All in all I do believe this device and I are going to get along nicely. Now I just need an appropriate icon to convey my feelings of “oooo shiny”.

Shiny new iPhone goodness is mine! I picked up the lovely thing this morning and am endeavoring to keep from playing with its shiny, shiny, candylike buttons while I’m at work. This is not, however, keeping me from pondering what apps I want to slap onto it the moment I get home.

I know I’ll need QuickOffice, for compatibility with Office files and ability to write on the device. The ability to mount the device as a drive over Wi-Fi and then to drag and drop files back and forth will be very helpful.

I will also need an ebook reader of some sort. Stanza seems highest priority on this, as that’s the one I keep hearing about, but I’m willing to be swayed to other suggestions if folks want to chime in? Note that almost all of the ebooks I have right now (free ones yoinked from various places) are in PDF format, but I have a couple of Microsoft Reader ones as well. Chances are high that I’ll probably buy further books either from Fictionwise or from Amazon’s Kindle store, and I know Stanza in theory talks both of those formats. Anybody got any counterarguments on appropriate apps?

And I’ll need a Sudoku app. Just because I use the old iPaq pretty much only for playing Sudoku these days and I will clearly need to be able to do that on the iPhone. Although I am wondering how you’ll do a proper Sudoku game with the iPhone’s touchscreen.

Just about everything else I’ll be doing on the iPhone will be functionality that comes with it. But talk to me, people; are there other cool apps out there that you cannot live without? If so, tell me about them!