All posts tagged iPhone

JotNot Rocks My World!

By on January 31, 2011 in Business, iOS, iPhone, Opinion, Productivity, Software, Tutorials & Explanations with 1 Comment

I tripped across an app that has skyrocketed towards the top of my “can’t live without” list:  JotNot Pro, for iPhone.

JotNot uses the iPhone’s built-in camera to take a photo of a piece of paper and turn it into an electronic document for emailing or faxing.  It supports several standard/popular formats such as JPG and PDF.   This app shocked and amazed me with it’s robust features, high quality results.

I was skeptical at first.  I mean, how good/clear could it be? But after reading some great reviews, I bought the Pro app for $0.99 on sale.  (There is also a free version, albeit with somewhat limited functionality). I figured for a buck, what the heck.

As it turned out, this completely surprised me.  The quality is EXCELLENT, and it’s so fast and easy to use, it’s now my preferred method of “scanning”documents versus my actual desktop scanner.   You just take a photo of the page.  The app automatically “finds” the page edges and eliminates the background (such as the desk, table or whatnot).  You can shoot multiple pages and then have them assembled into one multi-page PDF, name it whatever you want, then save it or send it off.

I have been moving towards the Utopian “paperless office” for several years.  Faxing has waned for me.  98% of my documents arrive via email now.  For those occasional (once a month?) incoming faxes I use the eFax service with a dedicated phone number so that all faxes get received and turned into PDFs and emailed to me.  So there’s never any paper — email and faxes both show up in my email.   Then I can save them to my server for filing / keeping.

For sending, I basically scan paper and then just email it.  Who doesn’t have an email account these days?  (I’ve never run into someone with a fax who doesn’t have email).

The only break-downs in this all-paperless scheme are:

1. those rare cases when I absolutely *MUST* send via fax (usually a government bureaucracy thing) and emailing is not allowed; or

2. when I have to send a document that I have physically on paper and I’m not at my desk (i.e. out on the road)

JotNot is a godsend!  With a snap of the camera I can digitize a document and fire it off, literally, in seconds.

And as alluded to previously, I have learned that this is faster and easier than using my desktop scanner.  I’m finding myself using it to scan receipts for expense reports/reimbursements, legal documents, letters, and more.

It’s like having a scanner, PDF generator and fax/email system right in your pocket, wherever you go!  The truly mobile office, ready instantly on-demand.

This app is a major productivity boon!  Highly recommended.

Should iPhone Users Switch to Verizon?

By on September 21, 2010 in AT&T, Cell Service, iPhone, News, Opinion, Phones, Verizon with 2 Comments

Credit Suisse released a report Monday that said that 23% (an estimated 1.4 million) AT&T customers would switch if Verizon released an iPhone next year, as is widely anticipated.  A very slim margin (3%) said they’d go so far as to break their AT&T contract and pay the penalties.  Most said they’d just switch at the first opportunity.

Personally, I’m going to take a “wait and see” attitude, assuming this even does come to pass.

All in all, I do sincerely believe that Verizon has a better network.  That said, there are two interesting little factors that keep me on the sidelines in this whole situation:

* First and foremost, is the issue of network saturation.  While I believe that Verizon traditionally has had a better network, I have to acknowledge that the iPhone brought a crushload of data usage and new customer traffic that was previously unseen.  In other words, AT&T had no clue what they were getting themselves into.  I firmly believe that if Verizon had done the deal (it’s widely reported that Apple went to Verizon first and Verizon wasn’t willing to give Apple what it wanted, so Apple shopped their deal to AT&T next…), that we’d all be sitting here complaining loudly about Verizon and hoping that AT&T would be getting the phone soon!   So if 1.4 million users jump ship, not to mention a whole crushload of existing Verizon users make a move from other phones over to the iPhone, we could see Verizon getting slammed.  The odds of that happening are admitted less now that they have the hindsight experience of watching AT&T’s debacle.  If Verizon does get a black eye in any of this, it’s their own fault!  But the possibility still exists for a greater-than-expected turnout, and some network problems down the road.  Not to mention the lighter load on AT&T once 1.4 million heavy data users are off of its network.

* I hate (yes, that’s underscored and bolded for a reason!) the way Verizon has to OEM-ize all of the phones on their networks.  They disable cool features that are normally accessible elsewhere, and install silly VCast junk on the phones, etc.  I want to see if Apple stands up to them and keeps a “normal” phone, or if the Verizon-based iPhone is somehow hobbled or Verizon-ized before I’d make any decisions.

So all in all, I’m VERY interested to see how this unfolds.  But I’m in no hurry to jump ship.  While I screamed as loudly as the next person originally, I must admit that AT&T’s purported $4 billion-plus network buildout really has helped solve a lot of the initial problems, their hundreds of new cell towers have helped, etc.  It’s not perfect, but the service as improved to where it’s definitely satisfactory.  And thus, I’ll take the “one in hand is worth 2 in the bush” stance and wait to see how things pan out with a Verizon-powered device before jumping ship.

The Truth About iPhone 4 Reception Issues

By on July 7, 2010 in Apple, iOS, iPhone, News, Opinion, Phones, Tutorials & Explanations with No Comments

OK, there’s been so much hype, hyperbole and misinformation about the iPhone 4 antenna issue that, after the umpteenth time I was asked about it, I thought it was time for a blog post!

95% of what’s floating around the airwaves right now is dis-information.   Here are the facts:

1. It’s true that if you hold the iPhone 4 a certain way, you can hamper reception.

However, that’s true with ANY and ALL cell phones!  I find it truly hilarious that the Android camp is jumping all over this to “prove” (in their minds, anyway) that their devices are better than iPhone.

I hate to break it to you, but there are zillions of online articles, postings and YouTube videos like this one about the Google Nexus One phone that suffers a loss of reception if you hold your hand over the bottom.  Others (the HTC android phone, the DROID, etc.) lose signal if you hold it a certain way, or place it flat on a surface (which, incidentally, is how I use my phone 90% of the time — I put it on my desk and use the headset to talk hands-free while I type on my computer). C’mon and think about it people — there are mini antennae in the phones. OF COURSE you’ll degrade signal if you cover them!  In the case of the iPhone we’re talking about a fairly specific “death grip” that isn’t consistent with the way the majority of users hold the phone, and in fact there are solutions to this “problem” anyway.  Read on.

Read more…

Troubleshoot Web Site Problems With NetToolz

By on June 29, 2010 in Diagnostics, DNS, iPhone, Networking, Opinion, server, Troubleshooting, Tutorials & Explanations with No Comments

“Hi.  I think our web site is down.”

Nothing can ruin a day faster than those words.  It can send an afternoon into the can in three seconds flat.

On the positive side, more often than not it’s really not a web site / web server problem.  On the negative side, that really doesn’t matter — you still need to go through all of the requisite steps to properly diagnose and isolate the actual problem.

When faced with a generic “Is the web site is down?” query, the best course of action is to quickly check a few of the basic fundamentals to rule out 90% of the most common and most obvious issues, continuing to peel back the onion (so to speak) through each subsequent layer.

First, I obviously check the web site myself, from my own machine or phone.  If I can reach it and make it respond to dynamic requests (that is to say, hit pages and see them load, especially if database-driven), then that proves that the web site is alive and responsive, and I’m not just seeing older pages cached from hours or days before. In that case we’re usually done — the issue is the client’s own Internet connectivity at their location, or with their immediate upstream Internet provider.  Maybe their cable modem provider (etc.) is having a glitch, and so forth.

The more savvy clients will have thought of this already and tried from a separate Internet provider, whether calling someone they know (“hey Martha, can you reach my site?”) or checking from their smartphone over a 3G cell provider that provides a completely diverse route to the web site than their desktop computer would be taking.

So if the site is in fact unreachable, then we move on to checking the basic network connectivity problems…

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Official Twitter App Released: A good thing or bad?

By on May 19, 2010 in News, Opinion, Social Networking with No Comments

Uh oh…

Today Twitter has released their own official iPhone app.  It’s labeled version 3.0 because this is actually an updated version of the previously popular Tweetie app.  The Twitter juggernaut recently acquired Tweetie and the company behind it, taking over the app and re-branding it as the official Twitter app.   Since its debut, Tweetie had been $2.99 in the iTunes AppStore.  Twitter has now made it free for all users.

While this offers more opportunities for end users (and makes this popular app now free), I personally have serious reservations about this development!

As an independent software vendor (“ISV”) myself, I don’t read this headline as a good, consumer-friendly move.  Instead, I read it as an anti-competitive move.

One of the things that has helped Twitter explode in popularity has been it’s software interface/platform (it’s “API”), which lets 3rd party software products and web sites connect to the service and do useful things.  Websites can automatically pull twitter feeds – you see “my latest tweets” in sidebars on WordPress blogs all the time, for instance. This has given rise to a whole ecosystem of 3rd party software products and add-ons, ranging from mobile twitter apps like Twitteriffic (my personal favorite), Tweet Deck, EchoFon, and more, as well as web services such as TwitPic.com, UberTwitter and more.

Twitter execs, just last month, revealed that 75% of their traffic comes from outside of the Twitter.com site, through API calls.  They also quantified this: 3 billion API calls per day, every day, coming from 3rd party mobile devices, independent web sites, and so forth.

Read more…

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