Marketing Director

Showing posts with label apps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apps. Show all posts

The Essential Apps for iPad & iPhone

Apple due for a correction but going strong
The iPad has hit the world and adoption is high for an expensive tool. Not to mention being locked down in AppleLand (see: MappyLand) but to be fair I'm happy being 'locked in' to Steve Jobs' world. For now.
Apple Fanboy Since '91 still seeing PC
The design of these products is unmatched. Apple's dedication to put user experience first has been ahead of it's time since the beginning. It is only now that the majority are catching up after spending years frustrated by Windows and PCs with cheaper parts in them that broke down more often. At first when I got my iPad I could only marvel at it's design and the art of it's construction. Thin, light, sleek and minimalist the iPad is seeking to move towards a time when we will interface with nothing but a screen.

The best thing I have found with my iPad is that because I cannot open tons of windows and tabs and programs I am more able to concentrate on the work at hand and get it done. Although most of us love to think that doing 10 things at once on a computer makes us more productive the reality is that all of this switching from one application and task to another ends up making things take significantly longer than they should.

For now I will go with what works best and the convergence of some features is making working on multiple platforms nearly seamless. Here is my list of apps that make my iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro world work together. I could link to these through iTunes and get some resi

Information
Good Reader - This is a great tool for collecting and downloading PDFs to your iPhone or iPad. You can easily download any PDf if you have the URL you can also import PDFs from emails and from the safari browser.
Instapaper - Read things later saves links to a cloud bookmark system with an app for iPad and iPhone as well as an online version this is a great way to save stories from your day for reading at a more convenient time.
NewsRack - RSS Reader
Amazon Kindle: still kicking iBooks butt
Free news apps: NYT, Globe and Mail, etc.

Productivity
iThoughtsHD - Mind Mapping made easier. Still not totally simple.
ToDo: Currently $5 for iPad + $5 for iphone (originally $10 for iphone)
Pages, Keynote, Numbers
Screenshot: Hold home and press power. Grab any image from any tool (video, web, etc.) Then trim it for use in Pages or Keynote
There are better apps for trimming screenshots but CropforFree is free and works.

Social
Twitter - Choose your poison:
Twitter: It's now a native iPad app but it performs well and feels kitchy blown up on iPad.
Hootsuite (New iPad App coming soon) although the iphone app performs much better on ipad. on the iphone it's too much information in a small space for me and I only used it to schedule tweets once in a while.
Twitterific: Native good free for one user and has ads.
Tweetdeck: Native, Unstable but awesome looking and good for devotes\es

Facebook - iPhone is ok but there are only sad alternatives for iPad
Facebook hasn't released a native iPad app although the imitators are hitting the app store hard right now

Entertainment
TuneInRadio - The best Radio app for English stations. Every major city's radio stations from Canada are available.
Netflix - For $8/month and a nice, not huge selection of on demand movies, tv and documentaries it's perfect for me. Requires either or all of: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, PS3, Wii, AppleTV and soon Xbox360.
AirVideo - watch video from your computer on your iPhone or iPad.
Games - that's a whole other post!

I missed tons of great apps and I want to know what you love using on your iPhone or iPad. Please drop me a comment with your favourite apps!

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Marketing & Porting iPhone Apps

Marketing iPhone Apps
NOTE: best to take this slidedeck to full screen.


Scott Michaels, is a man who knows his craft. As the VP of Marketing for Atimi, possibly the largest custom App house around, he has learned to stay ahead, to be nimble and to work with companies whose wealth of knowledge, experience and success enhances and enables his products' successes. The "Technical Pedigree" section of the companies website is an amazing thing to see. The slidedeck above is about Marketing iPhone Apps while the one embedded below is about Porting Apps from one platform to another an essential strategy for the future success of any growing application development outfit. Keep watching this blog hopefully for a future interview with Scott Michaels subscribe by email on the right or by RSS on the right below.



NOTE: best viewed in full screen
Porting: Lessons from the Trenches



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4 Reasons why Twitter > Facebook







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  1. THE STREAM: The Twitter stream is open to all. All tweets are part of the public domain and stream of consciousness, there is not a lot of privacy on Twitter (people with protected updates choose to tweet only with friends or just don't get Twitter).

  2. DISTANCE: The lack of privacy on Twitter is balanced by user control of 'distance' and by distance I don't mean how far apart we are. I mean how far users can place your personal information from your profile. Twitter allows for anonymity for users who desire it. For some, Facebook tells the world too much about us. Google: Fired Facebook Photos.

  3. OPEN SOURCE: The stream allows the community to grow through the needs and wants of its users free of system-based advertsing which can cloud the social media brand of a website. SEE: Facebook. The open source community will hopefully continue to evolve free of tradtitional advertising.

  4. APP & INTEGRATION: This leads to the Twitter apps can be run in many different ways and they don't have to exist within the confines of Twitter (unlike 'closed' Facebook).

    Apps like TweetDeck from Adobe allow users to view both Twitter and Facebook Status Updates at the same time without even opening a web browser. This format damages Facebook's revenue model but leaves Twitter in good shape, without a revenue model, yet. Read a hilarious fake news story about Twitter's 'NEW' revenue model.
Ultimately, Facebook relies on people coming to the Facebook site to view friends profiles, see updates and maybe less than 1% of the time to click an ad. If people continue to use outside programs which integrates all social media into one stream of updates like meebo's new iPhone app, and TweetDeck Facebook's revenue model will start to lose traction. This is one possible way Facebook could lose it's crown. For now Facebook is king of the castle and myspace like geocities before it is fading form the mainstream.

ADDITIONAL READING: "The War of the Social Networking Giants" BY: Sandra Charan

...the next step of social media is full mobile/smartphone integration of personalized streams of information. The winner of the race will be the simplest, user-friendly mobile integration not necessarily the first.


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