New Trent Stylus for conductive touch screens

I've been looking to get a stylus to use on my iPad over the last month but kept forgetting to look at the options available when I've been to the shops. I'm glad I did forget too as a couple of days ago I decided to look on amazon and see what was available. I initially looked for the fine tip stylus’ (assuming that's the right word for more than one stylus) as I want it for drawing when road situations when teaching my learner driver pupils. After reading many reviews which seemed to range from good to bad. That is until I saw the New Trent Stylus. The lowest review score out of 5 was 4. And there were over 70 reviews. That's a good start and I can say I can now appreciate why.

The New Trent Stylus had one general complaint (albeit a minor one) which is to do with the overall length of it. If you have big hands then you may find it a little on the small size. For me however it's fine. It's not as small as those pens you get in a bookies though so its not that bad.
The main point that makes it so good is the touch screen tip. Instead of being made of the usual rubber spongy stuff, it's made of a micro knit conductive fibre. So unlike its rubber tipped brethren, it doesn't require much pressur on the screen at all. Also the micro knit glides effortlessly across the touch screen. We all know what it's like when you have warm hands and your finger doesn't always glide smoothly across the screen. Well not the case here. I have screen protectors on both my iPad and iPhone and it’s only slightly less responsive than my finger and I really do mean slightly.
The tip isn't as small as some of the fine tipped rubber stylus’ out there but on have a go at drawing on Sketch Book, Penultimate, and the game Draw Something I found it to be very accurate. I think this because you only need very light pressure to use it.
In addition to the superb touch screen stylus end, the other end has a twist or pen nib which apparently takes standard parker refills, I've not used the pen end yet but the other amazon reviews said it was surprisingly nice to write with.
The only negative point I can make about the stylus is the lack of inductions it comes with. I did have a quick look to see how you open it to refill the pen end but didn't want to be too heavy handed. The construction of the product seems sturdy and well made however it is also quite light. Not as light as the cheap plastic bodied stylus’ or a Bic biro but not as heavy as a good quality writing pen either. So this is where some sort of enclosed leaflet would have been nice.

So in summary, I would completely recommend this product. Especially as it is currently retailing for £5.99 on amazon! Great all round product that really does do what it says on the tin and at a ridiculously cheap price compared to other lower quality products.


Stylus image as shown on most shoopping sites released from New Trent.

iA Writer for iPhone and iPad review

Text Entry View as shown on itunes store

Last week I saw iA Writer On the features screen in the app list on my iPhone. I had a nose to see what it was about and decided maybe I should look into writing apps to write my blog with. I read the reviews of iA Writer as well as some of the other top rated writing apps. They all seemed very similar and all had generally good reviews with a few complaints.
Now it's important I mention at this point that I'm very new to writing in a simple stripped down environment. Previously I've just written straight to the blog site either via my PC or an iOS app for the blog. And those apps do work quite well it has to be said.
So coming back about iA Writer. After reading the reviews and way up the options, I decided to go with iA Writer. The two factors it came down to were price at the time of purchase (iA Writer on sale at 69p for the multi platform app) and the fact that the biggest iA Writer criticism stemmed from the iPhone app not being as good as its iPad and Mac counterparts. I'm writing this review on the iPhone version for convenience but if I were sitting on the sofa or sitting up on bed I'd most likely be using the iPad.
The main differences between the phone a tablet version are the lack of focus mode in the phone version, which is were the app darkens out all about the last couple of lines of text to minimise distraction, and the keyboard layout. There are more of the shortcuts along the top of the keyboard in the iPad version than in the iPhone and they are quite useful.

iPad display shot as shown on itunes store

Unlike some other users, I've had no speed issues with syncing between devises via iCloud or Dropbox. Maybe if you have a novel to sync it will take longer but for my blogs so far it's been more than speedy enough. The only niggle I have with the syncing is on dropbox. If you don't manually hit the little disk icon on the bar at the top before exiting the app or letting your phone auto lock, you lose you work which I find really annoying as it happened a couple of times. Once earlier today on my iPad when I lot my wifi connection (it's a wifi only tablet) and had to exit the app to reistablish the connection. I've written to the devs about this and now start off writing everything on iCloud which does auto save as you go. I then move to to Dropbox when complete in case I want to access from my PC as I'm not a Mac user and they don't have a PC version of the app :(
Those are the only issues I've experienced and read about so far.
So moving onto the writing experience. It's great, I wonder why oh why didn't I write this way before. It really does help concentrate and the writing job at hand when you have a really stripped down simple writing app in front of you. I now understand why book writers use program's like notepad to work. That's essentially what iA Writer is doing, it's taking away the options and fancy looks, whistles, bangs special fx’s and replacing them with minimalist elegance. And the aforementioned extra row on the keyboard. That row adds and helpful left and right arrow to move your curser for editing, hyphen, comma, colon, question mark, full stop and apostrophe.
I've now switched over to writing on the iPad version to list the extra buttons it adds with the larger screen space and keyboard. Here you also get a speach mark button, open close bracket button and two more buttons to move the curser for editing in addition to the arrows for next word/previous word, making it even quicker to skip back and correct a typo.
So to summarise, I don't know why I didn’t look into better ways to write before but I can definitely say that using iA Write makes writing my blogs a far more enjoyable experience than before. And as a result of getting iA Writer, I'm now considering writing a novel, it's always been on my ”someday” todo list but now it's an active project for me that I'm currently researching. While its at 69p on the app store I think it's an absolute steal and a must have app to make any kind of writing a better experience.

4.5/5 for me.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Things for iPhone review

I recently decided to review my to do app for iPhone and I’ve always liked the look of Things which has always had good reviews but I've held of buying it due to price. I should probably cover a bit of my to do history at this point. I started off using Todo which is a simple straight forward app that has an inbox where you can dump ideas for later review when ready. Very much like Things except it doesn't default to inbox and also didn't explain the point of the inbox. As a to do newbie that would have been helpful to me 2 years ago. Todo worked well for me but I wanted something with a more informative calendar after a few months, so it would show days I already had tasks for to avoid putting to much in to each day. This lead me to 2Do. A very pretty app with the extra functionality but the lack of the inbox. I could have created the inbox as a folder but that felt too fiddley to me and back when I started out using to do’s I wasn't using the inbox anyway. In fact I initially thought "why would I have a to do app pull in my email". I continued using 2Do for about a year before finally read up on to do management and discovered the point in the inbox. On this enlightenment I immediately moved to to using Todo. Things were great until Todo started playing up and randomly deleting items out of checklists so back to 2Do I went.
I then discovered Due via the app store featured list. This is a great simple nagging to do app and one I still use today (I also reviewed Due separately) as its great for those things that must be done at a particular time.
I wasn't happy using 2Do however found myself not getting the more complex multi part to do’s done or even added. I then realised it’s due to the unnecessary and more complex to do creation process of 2Do. I don't need location based reminders or the ability I set numerous alarms for something. Due does the alarm thing better and I don't want gps eating my battery life.

So now here we are, finally biting the bullet an buying Things. And wow, I so wis I had just got it 2 years ago. It's easy to use with its simple but balanced to do creation. It's well organised and pleasurable to use. To quote the devs, it is a to do management app that doesn't get in the way of to do management. For me they have struck the right balance of options and simplicity to use with quick event creation to the inbox and more complex project creation for the more complex things to be done.
Things has one alarm option that you set to go off at the best time for you in the day then it sounds the alarm if you have items due today. The iPhone vid on the devs website really sums up the app quite well. The only point the video can't get across is how nice Things is to use.


I still think Things is a bit on the expensive side considering you have to pay separately for the iPad app which is about double the iPhone app price. If it were a universal app I'd give it 5 stars but considering everything else and the cost I'm going to give it 4/5. I still feel it’s my to do app of choice and would recommend it to anyone serious about to do management.


- Veiledbunneh

Images from Culturecode wedsite, developers of Things.

Tweetbot review for iPhone and iPad

Tweetbot Timeline view for iPhone

Since getting an iPad in January, I was enjoying twitter on the big screen but found it annoying to pickup where I had left off on my iPhone or vice versa. This prompted me to look into a better app for my iPad than the standard free twitter app. I tried a few of the free trial apps but wasn't in a better situation. I then found out there is this clever service call tweet marker. I could have been a bit behind the game with this but until I got the iPad I was tweeting 99% of the time from my iPhone. On googling tweet marker, the site I found (http://tweetmarker.net/) listed the apps that support the service. Tweetlogix (previously reviewed here http://vbiphoneblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/tweetlogix-for-iphone-review.html) already supported the service but didn't offer an iPad app. So after much deliberation I decided to try Tweetbot which seemed very popular in the app store and had some rather good Internet reviews. I can say I'm not disappointed either. In fact I liked it so much I decided I would purchase a copy for my iPhone even though it isn't quite a feature packed as Tweetlogix. You may think I'm crazy for doing that but the thing is, Tweetbot is such as joy to use as a twitter app with its intuitive use of the touch screen and swiping and the ease of navigating around the app. The only thing I really miss from Tweetlogix is twitlonger but I still have that installed on my iPhone if I need it.
Coming back to the above mentioned swipe controls, swiping a tweet left to right allows you to see the conversation chain it relates to, so if someone replied to one of your tweets but you forget what it was you said last it's are really easy to refresh your memory. Swiping right to left allows you to see a list of all the replies to a particular tweet which can also be very handy.
The look and feel of Tweetbot is as mentioned what made me purchase it for the iPhone too. It's clean and crisp to look at and has clean, well executed sounds that perfectly fit the apps look and name. It's also super fast to update the timeline on a wifi connection and slick to browse through it and the other views unlike some apps which can be a bit laggy to scroll through and change screens on.
So in my opinion, if you plan to splash out on a premium twitter app for more functionality, I would be surprised if you were disappointed with Tweetbot.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Images borrowed from Tapbots website