Those of you that have an iPhone know how hard it is to get anything onto or off of them, it's a real pain. Well Goodreader has fixed that for the iPad at least. I believe there is a version for the iphone, but as I never used my iPhone as an actual phone, it hasn't seen the light of day since I lit up my iPad on Saturday...
In any event this little application allows you to download from a web site, email, google docs, you name it... With a built in word, PDF, excel viewer, it even supports .mov files. The ui is a touch confusing, and there are times when I am not sure what I need to do and where, but once you get the hang of it, it's really a must have app. The price is incredible for what you are getting as well.
Setup was simple, I already had a google docs account, and to be honest, if you don't have one your missing out on something.. If you ever wished you could share documents with a friend or family member but didn't want to have to deal with large email files or your own personal FTP server, then google docs is for you. The tool automatically browses the google docs site, shows you all your folders and files and even let's you create your own new folders. Downloading a file is a synch, just click it and you have a local copy. Once done, copy and paste it back up and you are all set to go.
Our corporate mail does not allow smtp or pop protocols, bit of a pain, but since you can browse from within the tool, you just click the link in the email, and tell it to download the attachment, problem solved. Now I can walk to my meeting with the agenda, PDF attachment, and summary from last meeting, all without having to kill a single tree...
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
iPad: Bento reviewed
Bento is basically an over powered todo list. As I am not a Mac user, and didn't get much mileage out of my iPhone this has been my introductions to the application and I must say u find it really useful. The ability to create as many fields and classifications as you want is really useful, don't like their format or fields, create some of your own, no problem.
I'd want to be able to automatically hide completed tasks, ideally, or like msn contacts be able to group them together by two fields, either who the task is assigned to, or it's status... Having completed tasks around is handy because I am often skef, when did we finished such and such project,,, if I an using bento to track that, I would have to delete the task in order to ensure that I can tell which tasks are which.
It's easy to use, and for anyone with any experience wih vb, access, or those basic web design tools, creating or updating the screens is fast and simple as well.
I'd want to be able to automatically hide completed tasks, ideally, or like msn contacts be able to group them together by two fields, either who the task is assigned to, or it's status... Having completed tasks around is handy because I am often skef, when did we finished such and such project,,, if I an using bento to track that, I would have to delete the task in order to ensure that I can tell which tasks are which.
It's easy to use, and for anyone with any experience wih vb, access, or those basic web design tools, creating or updating the screens is fast and simple as well.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
iPad: Castlecraft reviewed
Also from the Freeverse family Castlecraft follows in the footsteps of Age of Empire, only you don't get to choose where you want to start. You are a medieval prince/ess and are tasked with rebuilding your empire after a devastating attack.
The interface well thought out. Commanding your army is pain staking, and a little strange in that you can only send out one army at a time. That army can be 10 people or 1, and once they capture whatever they were sent for, you cannot use that army to capture something else. You have to recall them back home, and then send them out again.
The hardest part of the game is managing your resources. I found that two lumbermills and three gold mines allowed me to keep up with everything. If you complete the quests in a logical manner, and check what they yield as rewards, you can progress very quickly to the point where you have to subscribe or quit. The game starts out free, but for 4.99 a month (5.99 for 3 months, there is a 12 month plan but the cost eludes me) you can take advantage of all of the benefits of the game.
The Good:
- The graphics are interesting.
- Resource management is always a fun challenge, but if you blow it you are going to wait a long time to get it back.
- You can sell something for exactly what you paid for it, a level of recycling that far exceeds the time frame... This does however come in handy as you can build farms as a bank of sorts to store money and avoid the cap.
- Its an MMO! The first (as far as I know) MMO for a mobile device, so its bound to have its wrinkles, but this brings a level of complexity and diversity to the game that no developer can ever match.
The Bad:
- Expanding your empire is almost impossible, one of the larger quests is to take over a neighboring city! However, you can't attack another player and win. While this is a positive, since you can go away from the game for a week and come back and your city will still be there, it makes some of the game a little pointless. There are NPC cities, but you can't tell them apart from the players.
- Dragon crystals are a blatant money grab, while they do form naturally, and are used to excelerate building/research, they are hard to come by. Naturally you can buy them for additional funds, but since you can't lose your city you could just wait it out.
- Being able to attack only one thing at a time limits game play and makes it more of a turn based, attack and come back later game, than a real time strategy.
NPC activity should exist, presently there isn't any. You never get attacked by a dragon, or wandering evagilist...Add a traveling merchant with strange wares for large sums of gold to add some spice.
- Its an MMO! I know I said this was a positive, and it is, but since we are all stuck with Wifi only iPads right now, you can only play it in hot spots.
I liked this game at the start, but it started to wear on me. I have reached the point where I have to subscribe or quit and I haven't decided if I will take it further. Timo, one of the developers of the game, was online taking comments from us all so they are definately working hard to develop it and expand it, and it is a relatively cheap game, but...
The interface well thought out. Commanding your army is pain staking, and a little strange in that you can only send out one army at a time. That army can be 10 people or 1, and once they capture whatever they were sent for, you cannot use that army to capture something else. You have to recall them back home, and then send them out again.
The hardest part of the game is managing your resources. I found that two lumbermills and three gold mines allowed me to keep up with everything. If you complete the quests in a logical manner, and check what they yield as rewards, you can progress very quickly to the point where you have to subscribe or quit. The game starts out free, but for 4.99 a month (5.99 for 3 months, there is a 12 month plan but the cost eludes me) you can take advantage of all of the benefits of the game.
The Good:
- The graphics are interesting.
- Resource management is always a fun challenge, but if you blow it you are going to wait a long time to get it back.
- You can sell something for exactly what you paid for it, a level of recycling that far exceeds the time frame... This does however come in handy as you can build farms as a bank of sorts to store money and avoid the cap.
- Its an MMO! The first (as far as I know) MMO for a mobile device, so its bound to have its wrinkles, but this brings a level of complexity and diversity to the game that no developer can ever match.
The Bad:
- Expanding your empire is almost impossible, one of the larger quests is to take over a neighboring city! However, you can't attack another player and win. While this is a positive, since you can go away from the game for a week and come back and your city will still be there, it makes some of the game a little pointless. There are NPC cities, but you can't tell them apart from the players.
- Dragon crystals are a blatant money grab, while they do form naturally, and are used to excelerate building/research, they are hard to come by. Naturally you can buy them for additional funds, but since you can't lose your city you could just wait it out.
- Being able to attack only one thing at a time limits game play and makes it more of a turn based, attack and come back later game, than a real time strategy.
NPC activity should exist, presently there isn't any. You never get attacked by a dragon, or wandering evagilist...Add a traveling merchant with strange wares for large sums of gold to add some spice.
- Its an MMO! I know I said this was a positive, and it is, but since we are all stuck with Wifi only iPads right now, you can only play it in hot spots.
I liked this game at the start, but it started to wear on me. I have reached the point where I have to subscribe or quit and I haven't decided if I will take it further. Timo, one of the developers of the game, was online taking comments from us all so they are definately working hard to develop it and expand it, and it is a relatively cheap game, but...
Monday, April 5, 2010
iPad: Warp gate reviewed
Day four of iPad ownership, other than going to Medieval times last night with the wife and kids (where I was spotted with the iPad and generated some interesting nerd envy) I have pretty much spent all my time on the pad. I played a couple of games from Freeverse and will review them here. The first one I picked up was warp gate.
When demonstrating the iPad to people who come into my office asking, "So? What do you think, was it worth the wait?" this is the game I pop open. The graphics are amazing, the UI is very intuitive and the buttons placed so that when holding the pad in two hands your thumbs can hit all the critical buttons.
The Good:
- The games graphics are amazing.
- The brief tutorial at the beginning of the game takes any guess work out of what you need to do.
- The starter quests are interesting and lead you down multiple paths allowing you to develop your character in one of three directions.
- The mining is genius, for anyone who played eve online in the early days, and wondered why they were paying 14$ a month to sit with a puny laser aimed at an asteroid 24 hours a day, you'd love this. You basically deploy a bot on the asteroid, and it mails you gold wherever you are in the galaxy. Might actually be too easy, and they should think about limiting the number of droids you can "control" to 10 or something...
- The news feature allows you to run trade routes and scope out deals.
- If you are horribly impatient, for 1.99$ you can buy an advanced ship with higher capacity for armament and cargo, and yes, I did buy it though there was a problem in shipment and I have yet to receive it.
The bad:
- The starter quests dead end pretty quick and you are stuck trying to get to systems that you can't access because their warp gates are locked for unknown reasons.
- The battle sequences are very short and automated. You basically have the ability to fire your weapons, but your ship does everything else.
- The bad guys hit really really hard.. making most fights last less than 5 seconds. Ideally a battle should last 30 seconds, giving you enough time to think, you know, maybe I should run from this fight...
- You're alone... Horribly, Horribly alone... This would be a very interesting game if you could get into a section that was MMO and fight it out with a friend. Of course the positive side of that is that it doesn't need an internet connection to play.
All in all, this game has me captivated, so much so that I interupted a raid in WoW last night to regale everyone about how cool it was, what? I was dead at the time? Warp gate is a cross between Eve for the graphics, and Trade Wars (does anyone even remember that game?) for developing trade routes and finding the deals that will make you the most money with the least number of jumps. I just have to remember to put the game down and review Castlecraft for tomorrow.
When demonstrating the iPad to people who come into my office asking, "So? What do you think, was it worth the wait?" this is the game I pop open. The graphics are amazing, the UI is very intuitive and the buttons placed so that when holding the pad in two hands your thumbs can hit all the critical buttons.
The Good:
- The games graphics are amazing.
- The brief tutorial at the beginning of the game takes any guess work out of what you need to do.
- The starter quests are interesting and lead you down multiple paths allowing you to develop your character in one of three directions.
- The mining is genius, for anyone who played eve online in the early days, and wondered why they were paying 14$ a month to sit with a puny laser aimed at an asteroid 24 hours a day, you'd love this. You basically deploy a bot on the asteroid, and it mails you gold wherever you are in the galaxy. Might actually be too easy, and they should think about limiting the number of droids you can "control" to 10 or something...
- The news feature allows you to run trade routes and scope out deals.
- If you are horribly impatient, for 1.99$ you can buy an advanced ship with higher capacity for armament and cargo, and yes, I did buy it though there was a problem in shipment and I have yet to receive it.
The bad:
- The starter quests dead end pretty quick and you are stuck trying to get to systems that you can't access because their warp gates are locked for unknown reasons.
- The battle sequences are very short and automated. You basically have the ability to fire your weapons, but your ship does everything else.
- The bad guys hit really really hard.. making most fights last less than 5 seconds. Ideally a battle should last 30 seconds, giving you enough time to think, you know, maybe I should run from this fight...
- You're alone... Horribly, Horribly alone... This would be a very interesting game if you could get into a section that was MMO and fight it out with a friend. Of course the positive side of that is that it doesn't need an internet connection to play.
All in all, this game has me captivated, so much so that I interupted a raid in WoW last night to regale everyone about how cool it was, what? I was dead at the time? Warp gate is a cross between Eve for the graphics, and Trade Wars (does anyone even remember that game?) for developing trade routes and finding the deals that will make you the most money with the least number of jumps. I just have to remember to put the game down and review Castlecraft for tomorrow.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
iPad: Abc app reviewed
Ok, now granted it's the second day, but some aps hit the mark and some missed ever so slightly... The abc player is cool, let's you watch your shows on abc! Wis hulu had one, since abc is one of their share holders you wonder why they don't, but anyways the application it self is cool, quality is very good, it acts
Just like their web site and allows you to review the shows, find one, watch it etc. Once you start watching it let's you switch to landscape format but there are a couple of thugs wrong with it..
In full daylight it doesn't. Compensate at all like the native iPad does, it's impossible to watch tv in sunlight on that particular app... Maybe all of them, stay tuned...
The commercials were pixilated, who cares right? Well they should, makes them look cheap and wrong on such a crisp clean device... It was actually very distracting when watching them, to the point where I don't remember the commercial at all, just the pixilation. Now this is something I have also noticed on hulu, so it might just be a symptom of new technology and apathy on the part of the advertising community...
If you have to leave the show for whatever reason it remembers where you are, but unlike hulu I can't tag a series as something I care about so that I can be reminded when I come back later that there is a new episode... I have a horrible memory, for just about everything, so having something remember what shows li like and show me when there is a new episode so I don't have to remember...
Over all a good app, does the minimum it should and I am sure with later versions they will make it a little friendlier to use.
Just like their web site and allows you to review the shows, find one, watch it etc. Once you start watching it let's you switch to landscape format but there are a couple of thugs wrong with it..
In full daylight it doesn't. Compensate at all like the native iPad does, it's impossible to watch tv in sunlight on that particular app... Maybe all of them, stay tuned...
The commercials were pixilated, who cares right? Well they should, makes them look cheap and wrong on such a crisp clean device... It was actually very distracting when watching them, to the point where I don't remember the commercial at all, just the pixilation. Now this is something I have also noticed on hulu, so it might just be a symptom of new technology and apathy on the part of the advertising community...
If you have to leave the show for whatever reason it remembers where you are, but unlike hulu I can't tag a series as something I care about so that I can be reminded when I come back later that there is a new episode... I have a horrible memory, for just about everything, so having something remember what shows li like and show me when there is a new episode so I don't have to remember...
Over all a good app, does the minimum it should and I am sure with later versions they will make it a little friendlier to use.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
I will spare you the sordid details.. But my ipad is here
After what seems like months my iPad finally arrived today. For those that know me well they will know that this is like three or four Christmases rolled into one, you see I am a self procrlaimed geek, though I am sure others hold that opinion as well....;)
The first thing I noticed About the ipad was that it wasn't as big as I was afraid it would be... It's smaller than a magazine, the screen is amazingly sharp. I was just outside playing with it in the full sunlight and there were no problems seeing the screen. Typing on it is also next to natural, the landscape keyboard is very natural feeling! Even the portrait one is easy to get used to. You do have to put it down if you want any kind of typing speed, and my pinky keeps hitting the enter key but other than that it is really amazing. The adaptive text, it probably has a real name but thats what I will call it, is also amazing, it allows you to keep typing and guesses the word that you meant to type, for sausage fingers here, that's a good thing because I don't always hit the right keys..
I downloaded a bunch of apps so I I'll review them as I get more familiar with them, started out with some of the free ones, but there are all kinds of terminal emulators (geek speak for, I can remote control my computer downstairs if I want to and watch hulu since the ipad doesn't support flash.) and other software. One thing that I have found so far is that iPhone apps, while they might work, are very pixilated and I am not sure I would bother buying any of them if I were you.
The speaker in the pad is amazingly loud, for those of you with a first gen iPhone, its nothing similar, you get at least 5 times louder than the iPhone which makes it a good media device for sharing with people... Please share responsibly, last thing I want to hear is someone elses tv show while I am trying to sleep right jenn?
The first thing I noticed About the ipad was that it wasn't as big as I was afraid it would be... It's smaller than a magazine, the screen is amazingly sharp. I was just outside playing with it in the full sunlight and there were no problems seeing the screen. Typing on it is also next to natural, the landscape keyboard is very natural feeling! Even the portrait one is easy to get used to. You do have to put it down if you want any kind of typing speed, and my pinky keeps hitting the enter key but other than that it is really amazing. The adaptive text, it probably has a real name but thats what I will call it, is also amazing, it allows you to keep typing and guesses the word that you meant to type, for sausage fingers here, that's a good thing because I don't always hit the right keys..
I downloaded a bunch of apps so I I'll review them as I get more familiar with them, started out with some of the free ones, but there are all kinds of terminal emulators (geek speak for, I can remote control my computer downstairs if I want to and watch hulu since the ipad doesn't support flash.) and other software. One thing that I have found so far is that iPhone apps, while they might work, are very pixilated and I am not sure I would bother buying any of them if I were you.
The speaker in the pad is amazingly loud, for those of you with a first gen iPhone, its nothing similar, you get at least 5 times louder than the iPhone which makes it a good media device for sharing with people... Please share responsibly, last thing I want to hear is someone elses tv show while I am trying to sleep right jenn?
Friday, March 12, 2010
I went and did it....I pre-ordered an Ipad.
For the past 5 years I have been wanting a tablet computer, the thought of an always on PC that fits in your hand has had me mesmorized forever. What I proposed about 10 years ago was a portable hard drive that had a docking station, you grab your hard drive, and it automatically saves what you were doing and shuts down. Walk to work, slap it into the docking station, back up you come…. Going to a meeting, grab the hard drive, walk to the meeting, slap it into the docking station and so on… It was a little more than a hard drive, but you get the idea…
So when the Ipad came out I was intrigued… if you read my blog you know that I was looking at the archos for awhile, but all of the reviews I have seen say that the archos is slow, doesn't work very well etc… This is the problem with taking a computer based operating system, and trying to dumb it down to fit it into a less powerful device… Apple did the reverse. They took their admittedly amazing iphone OS and gave it more processing power. It can't help but fly…. Now before you poo poo it, yes its not a computer. Yes it won't do everything a computer can do… but other than surf, and write emails and the occasional note while in a meeting, I don't need it to do anything else… If someone comes up with a remote desktop app for the ipad, you'll never hear anyone wish for a computer again….:)
To be fully effective at work I would need:
1. Ideally, remote access… failing that.
2. Emails
3. Oracle client
4. Putty
5. Winscp
6. Office type suite.
So lets see, I can winscp and putty from my blackberry, office type suite is out of the way, so really all I need is a light oracle client and I haven't checked the app store yet to see if one exists….:)
This won't be a device for all, and when I get it, I'll blog all about it, from it…:) So if you're unsure of its usefulness for you, wait it out… if you're a fan boy, buy one, if you’re a Mac hater don't…. I'll post unbiased first hand accounts of what the thing is like. I own an iphone, I really don't like Mac PC's, not my comfort zone… So decide if you want to take what I am saying as fanboy praise or honest to goodness review of a new type of device.
The makers of the ARM processor that runs most of our phones and all of the tablets on the market have said that they are expecting 50 different tablet devices to come out over the next 18 months, could be their own marketing people trying to sell more processors and make computer manufacturers panic, but hey…
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