My Thoughts on the iPhone 5

I'm just going to talk here about my views on the new iPhone 5. If you read my previous blog re my thoughts in the iPhone 5 rumours you'll probably have a pretty good idea what I'm going to say here (http://vbiphoneblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/my-thoughts-on-iphone-5-rumours.html).



Image borrowed from www.iphonehacks.com

I'm going to put it out there at the start of this blog and say I'm disappointed with the iPhone 5. I waited from June when my contract was up for renewal until the end of September only to be met with, what was in my opinion, a substandard device. And if any Apple iSheep are reading this and getting a rage going at this point, sorry, but hey it's just my personal opinion.

So why do I think the new iPhone 5 is substandard?

Look at the picture to the left I hear you say, this device is a thing of beauty. Yes it is, I agree that it's probably the best looking phone ever built with gorgeous diamond cut and polished aluminium. It's the thinnest and lightest smart phone on the market. So from a physical point of view, it's an amazing piece of engineering.
But from an OS and feature point of view I was sorely disappointed. Where's my quad core processor that's going to see me comfortably through my 2 year contract? Where are all those nice extra little feature the Android phones offer? What is this super expensive piece of aluminium going to do to "change everything" again like the iPhone 4 did?
When I asked these questions I really couldn't justify paying ~£200 for a smart phone on contract. It seems to have become more of a fashion accessory than bleeding edge smart phone tech.

So what do I do now?

I had already been doing my research on Android and windows phone handsets based on the rumours. In the end I decided to get the Samsung Galaxy S3. Android was a more attractive operating system for me than Windows Phone. It has a better App Store (not as good as the Apple App Store though) and a similar feel but well... more free and flexible. In fact as I said in one of my other blog posts on the new Android section, it's a bit like a dog going for a walk. The move to Android felt a bit like arriving at the park and being let off the lead to run freely. Android isn't completely open unless you root it but compared to iOS, there's a whole load more you can do with your phone.

I still have and use my iPad 2 on an almost daily basis and I'm in no way an Apple hater. I just no longer feel Apple are the market leader in the smart phone market. I think that also shows in the reported problems since the iPhone 5 release. The beautiful finish on the case chips off, iOS 6 isn't as fluid to use as iOS 5. It's made improvements but it's also make mistakes. The new app store has pros and cons. Updates don't need your passed word, great. It runs a lost slower and personally I think it doesn't make good use of screen space on the iPhone at all. The new maps app has been a big mess, should have stuck with Google and updated to their new maps and maybe their navigation software.

So yes, I think the iPhone 5 is a good device but I don't think it's done to the market what the iPhone 4 did. And I mean that by a long shot as for me, the iPhone 5 didn't change anything other than my views on Apple from the market leader to chasing the pack.

Outliner for iPhone and iPad

Outliner is actually a really nice, simple app. To quote is intended function from the developers site:

"CarbonFin Outliner and Outliner for iPad allow you to organize your thoughts, tasks, and projects. Easily create a todo list for today, or track an entire project anywhere you are. Share your outlines, edit your outlines online with the free Outliner Online, and collaborate with other Outliner users"

I tried to use it to track pupil progress (from a Driving Instructor point of view) and it did a nice job. Especially on the iPad where you have the screen real estate and (compared to my iPhone 4) the processing power to keep it running quickly. To be honest I probably find it more effective than using a spredsheet as Numbers can get fiddly and laggy when there's a lot of information to process.








Draft Pupil Examples Created for Testing

So as you can see from the image to the right, Outliner has a clean UI. I filled out some pupil names and created all the sub headings I need to track pupil learning progress on.

Some of the key points I really like about Outerliner are as follows:

• Ability to create a list like those shown to the right and save it as "template" then duplicate the template and rename. For me this is essential with an app of this nature. I dont want to be manually creating each pupil progress list or any other check list that will be repeated as part of my day job. 
• I can place notes against any part of the list, even against the check box items I've created.
• The check boxes are great for me to track progress and if you look at the Parallel Park item I created, next to the words Parallel Park is a little circle, as you tick the check boxes this circle proportionatly fills up. SO at a glance progress can been seen without having to fully expand everything.
• Outliner syncs with Dropbox. Again essential for backup of data really.

Theses are just a few of the good points that for me are essential. Outliner is a flexible tool which makes it really easy to use for more than just tracking pupil progress. In fact, I think if it had the ability to sound reminder alarms it would really start to challenge some of the todo managament apps out there. It's easy to use outliner as a project and checklist manager. As you can see from the top of the above image, this is my Student Progress list. You can have multiple lists in the Main Menu (from the Outliner button on the top left) so you could have a shopping list for exmaple.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I find Outliner can be a bit slow to update on my iPhone 4, mainly when it comes to ticking the check boxes. This is probably due to the volume of the check boxes I have but at the end of the day, it's still a negative point.

A futher negative point is the positioning of the expand/collapes arrow and the completion tracking circle next to each item. If you tap on the circle you get a pop up offering to check or uncheck all. Again this is not as bad on the iPad with exrta screen space but I could see this potentially being annoying for people with bigger fingers/hands.

So overall for me, Outliner is a good tool that did more than expected. The developer is responsive to. So if you are looking to track the progress of a project, checklist, shopping list or a students leaning as I did or maybe even plan you're next novel, Outliner is a great app for the job.

Based on my experience, I'm happily scoring Outliner 4.5/5.

 

 

 

My thoughts on the iPhone 5 rumours

So the new sixth gen iPhone (aka the iPhone 5) rumours are doing over time now. There's all sorts of talk and specs flying about, some of which is based on apparently leaked info and “prototype” bits of phone.
I’m sure some of the new predicted features will appear in the new iPhone. It can't all be wrong otherwise, let's face it, Apple wouldn't be taking many steps forward considering there is a rumour for just about every new smart phone idea out there. But in a personal note, I do hope the new iPhone gets a bigger screen and a quad core processor.
It's this last point about the screen and the processor that concerns me the most. I personally think if Apple don't look to offer these upgrades in the new iPhone then they are missing a trick and possibly slipping behind for the first time.
Most of the rumours do suggest a bigger screen which is good but recently, they are suggesting the new iPhone is probably going to have the iPad 3 processor which is only a dual core. This really concerns me and has even caused me to start looking into the android market place for what of my fav apps are available and how I would go about migrating contacts over. If I did go to android it would be for a Galaxy S3 as that appears to be the leader and there are plenty of good contract deals available.
I realise the iPad 3 processor is good and plenty powerful enough to more than support the current apps. But buying a smart phone is often a two year affair for most people and I'm very concerned how much the developers will want to start writing apps and games for quad core phones.
I used to be a big AMD chipset fan for my pc’s but Intel seemed to make the quad core move first while AMD powered up their dual cores. I don't like having to run things hot. If you are cranking up the clock speed on a dual core to compete with a quad it's not only going to run hot, it's also going to shorten its life cycle. And it will eventually slip off the radar as the developers start realising what cool things they can do with the extra power of more cores.
So this is essentially my concern with the new iPhone. For me it will be a 24 month contract and therefore I don't want a phone that is going to be miles behind the market in 6-12 months time. My iPhone 4 has held up ok and I've not been fussed about the 4s. But this year is upgrade year and I'm really hoping Apple make it a good one. It will be painful to migrate away but I'm not happy to be locked in the “iprison” with a non market leading piece of hardware. The reason I have had an iPhone since a 3G is for the market leading tech and the market leading app store. For the premium you have to pay to get an iPhone I expect that and no less.

Week Calendar

Week Calendar for iPhone is in my honest opinion, the best iPhone calendar app. So there ya go, I said it right at the start of the review to get that out there. I'm not saying it’s 100% spot on perfect but it's as close as I've been able to find as an overall Calendar package.
Week Calendar allows for all the default requirements I look for. Two default alarms for event creation on timed events, separate default alarm options for all day events, specify default event duration, specify which calendar to use by default, select any day of the week as your start day and then it goes on to do so much more.

Week View

I love how Week Calendar allows you to set custom colours per event and auto colours for events containing a certain word or words on the title. It has a great graphical week (as shown on the right) and month views (shown below) with the generic day view that pretty much all calendar apps including the stock iPhone app offers.
Coming back to the month view subject, Week Calendar actually offers two month views. Mini Month and Month View. Month view is very similar to the stock iPhone calendar but designed how Apple should have done theirs in the first place. It has a smaller month grid and more info at the bottom relating to the selected days events and each day in the grid gets a coloured dot per event. The colour is coded to which ever calendar the event is in. For example, my work calendar is green so I get green dots for each normal lesson booking I make. The Mini Month view in Week Calendar is one of my personal favs, it not only looks graphically great as far as a calendar can but is also very clear to read and easy to use. Double tapping a day takes you to the day view with a further double tap returning you to the previous view. This double tap action actually works in all views to get to day view where event creation is easiest.


Mini Month View

I feel I have to talk more about the week view, I mean it wouldn't be right not to considering its called Week Calendar after all. The week view was often my primary view when I first started out with the app but as my driving instruction business got busier, I found myself needing a good month view to use. The week view is also great looking and has often been compared to that of the Mac Calendar in appearance (can't pass comment as I'm not a Mac user myself) and is not only great to see at a glance what you have booked and when you're free for the week but also very useable to create events directly by touch, hold and drag to a time slot. This last point may be less valid if you have big hands though but easily solved by a double tap to day view.
The event creation screen in Week Calendar isn't to dissimilar to the standard iPhone calendar event creation screen, the day and time picker is the same in function with the added warning at the top for overlapping events when selecting time. It does have more options than found in the iPhone calendar though but non the less, very easy to change over to if you've only been using the inbuilt app before trying this. The main differences are the addition of templates, which can be created from existing events or via the inbuilt settings menu, custom colour and contacts. Custom colour, as previously mentioned can be set per event as well as setting per calendar. Contacts can be linked to the events and templates too and by tapping a linked contact, you get the iPhone Contacts detail’s screen with all of it's functionality (try saying that last big three times fast!).
For me, the weakest point in Week Calendar is the event creation screen. The templates are great for time saving but you have to manually alphabetise them which is a pain if you have lots of them (like I do for all my Driving Instruction pupils) but great if you only have a few that you use regularly and want those first. So it's really only a bit weaker if you an make effective use of templates compared to say Calengoo or Calvetica Calendars. Calengoo is the best for event creation in my opinion as it searches your address book as you start typing the event name. Calvetica has the best time picker for your events which is actually very intuitive to use. But using wheels to adjust the date and timing of an event isn't that bad, just a little slower. And week calendar does support drag and drop of events to reschedule them.
So overall, I think Week Calendar is a great app. As far as iPhone calendar app go, it's the closest to perfect that I've found as an overall package. It's makes great use of the iPhone’s screen space and has all the general configuration options you need for quick event creation and management. There are a couple of minor improvements that could be made like with event creation but overall it's definitely my current iPhone calendar app of choice.
Week Calendar review score - 4.8/5.
- Veiledbunneh

Tempus Event Calendar

Tempus is not a personal favourite for me as a calendar app. Initially I thought it would offer that perfect balance between Calvetica Classic and Calvetica Calendars (as its now called in the app store instead of Calvetica 4). Unfortunately it's not.
Tempus has a nice month view that's bigger and clearer than that found in Calvetica Calendars using most of the screen space on the iPhone in a similar fashion to Calvetica Classic. This was a good point in my opinion as it makes the month view easier on the eye.
Tempus has the scrolling week view in landscape mode like in Calvetica Calendars but in a black and white colour scheme. This is good in the iPad but horrible to use in iPhone due to the screen size and amount of info being crammed in. Being able to adjust the zoom level so you have to scroll up and down and bit to see the full 24hrs would be a real bonus and would make this view much better and far more usable as I found it hard to clearly identify the start and end time of events.
If you find the detail of events in Calvetice Classic of Calvetica Calendars too much, Tempus might hit the mark for you but I find it a bit too basic for me as a business user. Upon tapping a day from the month view, it takes you to a “week list” view. It doesn't show any blank time slots, just a scrolling week view list of the current evens for the working week that the selected day resides in. This is probably fine for personal and social use if it's only a handful of events each week. This, however, also means you have to use the plus button for event creation! This was a tad horrific for me as I hate being forced to used the plus button. In fact I rarely ever use it for event creation. I like being able to tap, double tap, tap and hold or whatever other flavour of placing the event directly in a time slot to create my events. The reason I'm being so fussy about this is for efficiency (aka laziness) as this generally auto populates the event time and in most good calendar apps also the duration.
That's pretty much all that separates this from Calvetica Calendars as I believe they recently pulled the task management side of things. Well that and the colour as is mainly black and white for the look of Tempus rather than red and white. It even shares the same search bug where it returns your search results in random order rather than in a logical date order.

So in summary, Tempus isn't bad calendar overall but it's more simplistic approach to managing your appointments isn’t a hit with me and as such I’m only awarding it 2.5/5 for that, the poor search functionality and the poor iPhone week view screen usage.

Epic Win

I’ve been testing Epic Win, a simple todo
management app by Supermono, for the last couple of weeks. I've got to say its pretty damn good.
For those not familiar with todo apps, by simple todo app, I mean Epic Win allows you to create todo reminders with the options of adding alarms or repeating the todo with all the repeat options you’d expect from a decent todo app. It doesn't allow for project and/or checklist creation. As a point though, it doesn't aim to do these either.
So why do I think Epic Win is good and what makes it different and stand out from the plethora of other todo apps out there? Quite simply, it adds an element of fun to todo management in the form of simple RPG elements and loot. Probably the best part of this is it doesn't take itself seriously from an RPG point of view and the loot you get is done in an almost mockingly comical RPG style. In addition to loot you also have an avatar that levels up as you defeat the items on your list. XP (experience points) as assigned to the task when creating it. You assign the xp in 50 point increments ranging from 50-300 points. Supermono recommend assigning do values based on task difficulty to make things more fun and to help rank tasks in your todo list. Tasks also have a choice of 5 skill areas to be picked on creation which the xp also feeds as well as your progress to next level. These skill areas are Strength, Stamina, Intellect, Social and Spirit. So if, for example, you have to load up the car with heavy suit cases before going on holiday you might want to assign this to strength. Maybe you have to call the mother-in-law, this could be assigned to Social or maybe Stamina if it's a bit of an arduous chore to do.
Now you may be thinking this sounds like a lot of effort when all you want to do is create a reminder on your list of jobs to do. In reality it only takes a couple of seconds to set the xp and tap on of the 5 categories. If however that couple of extra seconds to make a todo list more interesting sounds like too much, Epic Win isn't for you. If having a little fun on the side at the same time as getting things done sounds appealing, it almost certainly is the right app for you.
Epic Win has generally been made with a good amount of polish too. The look of the app is clean, the sound effects are great and they way you have to hold down the little xp star on each today to make your avatar beat up the job is great. It even takes him or her longer to defeat the bigger point scoring jobs before the explode not bits and suck into your loot tab.
On the subject of tabs, there are five of them at the bottom of the screen. Quests, Beaten, Profile, Loot and Options. Quests is your todo list. Beaten are the completed todo’s which you can go into and redo them to re add to your quest list and save time by not having to recreate the job from scratch. Profile shows your avatar’s progress across the 5 stats and towards the next level up. As your level up the character description changes and so does the appearance. The Loot tab has two options, a map view which has a tiny avatar on a wavey path which list how far you've travelled and graphically shows how far you've got to go to the next loot item. The other screen in the loot tab shows crap load of empty boxes and as you scroll down the loot you have randomly unlocked populated in its corresponding box.
There are a couple of minor bugs that I've reported to the developers and they are very responsive at replying on email too. The two bugs are on setting the alarm time, sometimes it doesn't update properly and I've had to redo it and the app icon badge counter doesn't update until you open the app that day. Fortunately I've found myself opening the app and trying to think of some quick 50xp point worthy jobs to do so I can get some more xp for my character. Sad I know but it did make me actually want to get more done which is a very positive thing for your todo list.
Over all for me, I’d give Epic Win 4/5 due to the couple of bugs and it could do with an auto snooze function like Due has, otherwise, it's a great little productivity app.
- Veiledbunneh
Images borrowed from official epic win developers website

Calengoo

Calengoo is now my preferred choice of iPad Calendar replacing Calvetica 4 (or Calvetica Calendar as its now called in the app store). I recently updated the Calvetica review saying why it is no longer my preferred choice.
So moving swiftly on to my Calengoo review. Calengoo is not the best looking calendar out there. When you first open the app you may almost be a little disappointed with the appearance of the month view. Its quite bland and basic but it is clear to see your events/appointments and clarity is more important than looking pretty when it comes to the crunch. Also you may have to play Witt the font setting a little in the iPhone version to make it readable without zooming if you want to use it that way. For me, the best looking views are the portrait and landscape day views. Landscape being my personal fav for looks but portrait being my main view for functionality. I have actually asked the developer if its possible to have the all day bars from the landscape view in the portrait view as they look awesome. It's a partly opaque bar the runs vertically from top to bottom of the day rather then grouping the all day events at the top of the day. I like this bar as it really draws your attention to the fact there is an all day event on which ever day you are looking at.
While we are on the subject of graphics, it is one of the weaker points with the iPhone version of the app. There just isn't enough screen space for the month and landscape day views with the current design. The month view for iPhone needs to be reworked to maybe look more like Week Calendar or Tapcal or even Pocket Informant (Tapcal would, for me, be the preferred look for a month view as I feel it has the best month view of all calendars I've tried but cant get close to the functionality of the best ones) as I'm less keen on having to pinch to zoom or scroll the month view in landscape to make it readable. The landscape week view needs to either move or lose the top and bottom bars when the device is rotated. Here a lesson from Pocket Informat would be well applied moving the bars to the sides of the screen when rotated and rotating the buttons so they are the right way up.
These comments may sound really negative but that's not a case it's really bad to the point of rendering the app unusable, it would just improve the app making it even better than it already is.

So now to talk about where Calengoo excells and why its my iPad Calendar app of choice. It's the functionality. Quite simply, I haven't found a more functional and configurable calendar app out there. So if you want a calendar app thats for power/business use for your iPad then look no further. All the usual essential options like default event duration, default reminder(s), default calendar to assign new events too are covered and then there are literally more additional options to setup the app than you could shake a stick at. Fortunately the developer had the foresight to stick 4 buttons at the top of the Display and Use section of the app setting ranging from basic to all so it makes it more friendly for those that dont want to play about too much.
To give an example of how configurable the app is, not only can you change nearly every font, cell type colour to modify the look a bit, you can even tell it to open straight in the event title entry rather than the usual event details "list" screen. It also has the option to search you contacts as you type in the event name/title then if it is one of your contacts you are creating the event for you just tap that contact and hey presto, the details, contact number, address etc are all filled in for you. You can change how many characters need to be entered before it will search contacts in the settings but I like the default of 3 characters. If you are creating an event like, "Gym Work Out" that you put in around your work at varying days and times every week, you can add it to a template to make the creation of this event type quicker. The templates are fantastic on this too. I previously thought Week Calendar had the best templates until I discovered Calengoo templates. If you edit the template you can check or uncheck exactly which details you want to use from the event for your template making them very flexible and functional. Pocket Informat could learn a lesson here along with anyone else who wants to have template functionality in their calendar app.
Calengoo allows you to set you working hours and show this in several different ways, you can display the sunrise and sunset times too if you so wish (I like this last option as its useful for me as a driving instructor), you can set which days are your weekend, which day your working week starts on, the options really do go on and on and many of the options are set individually for the different views so if you want your weekends darker in the month view than they are in the day view you can. If you want a different font for week view to month view you can.

Calengoo as the name suggest syncs with Google Calendars and it does a great job of that. But if you dont want to use or even don't have a google account thats no problem. I moved away from Google Calendars to iCloud when it became available and Calengoo works just fine with that too. In fact, it's with iCloud that Calengoo incorporates one of my favourite and now must have options. When you open Calengoo, it prompts your iOS calendar to refresh and pull in any new appointments. The only other Calendar apps that I've tested so far that offer this feature are Week Calendar (iPhone only), Pocket Informat and Calvetica Calendars. My iPad is WiFi only and I dont like having to open the iOS calendar app to refresh and see if I have any events created on my iPhone or any events my other half has put in that I need to be aware of. iCloud push is some what unreliable I've found as sometimes it does work and other times it doesn't. So another big tick in the box for Calengoo. Another thing I like to see and feel have been let down with Calvetica is the customer support. The peeps at Calvetica are very polite but don't seem to deliver. Calengoo's developer(s) however give first class customer service normally getting back to me within 1 working day for any questions, suggestions or problems I've had in the past and actually implementing fixes and changes too.

Over all for me Calengoo is now on the bottom bar of my iPad as my main iPad Calendar and has been on and off as my main iPhone calendar app recently. Week Calendar being my other iPhone choice. With some changes to the iPhone ui it would be hands down my iPhone app of choice too but either way it's still my most recommend calendar app currently available on the app store. So if you are serious about a calendar app thats going to give you a good functional service and is a single purchase for both iPhone and iPad versions then look no further.
4.5/5 from me and would give it full marks with the iPhone appearance being improved.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad


Images as shown on the Calengoo website