A great app from one of the giants of the software industry:

You can write in large letters on the screen rather than trying to make tiny motions like a pencil. Note Taker automatically shrinks your writing so you can fit a lot of text on the screen. You just keep writing and Note Taker automatically adds new writing next to the old. To quickly correct mistakes, it has a multi-level undo button as well as an eraser — just drag your finger over the page to erase the “ink” under it.

For those youngsters who don’t recognize the name:

Note Taker was designed and programmed by Dan Bricklin, the same person who 30 years ago came up with VisiCalc, the pioneering electronic spreadsheet for the Apple II that made working with numbers on a personal computer so easy.

Details and video here:

http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/notetaker/

For most developers (including yours truly), the most straightforward way to design and prototype an app tends to be, well, building it out. Interface Builder is of course a great help here.

This approach doesn’t work particularly well though when you’re collaborating with others – particularly others who aren’t comfortable with Xcode. You can get a good feel for this when the response to your suggestion along those lines is “WTF”.

So. There’s a great roundup of iPhone interface design tools – ranging from paper to online – here:

http://www.henkwijnholds.com/sketching-prototyping-tools-iphone-apps/sketching/

The whole paper approach appeals to me, so I’m quite interested in the iPhone UI Stencil Kit – particularly since it includes a pencil, and I can never seem to find a pencil these days.

There’s also a useful (free) sketch template, which you can download and print, and if you have your own pencil and ruler (and you can remember all of the UI elements), this might be enough.

In the “not paper” category, iPlotz looks kind of interesting. I’ve only tried it briefly, but it looks like it may have legs.

I have to admit that the really fascinating aspect to all of these tools is that they exist in the first place. In all the years I’ve been doing mobile work, there’s never been this wealth of design material – which is a great indicator of the degree of the iPhone’s success.

Posted via web from Cam’s posterous

I’ve been doing some prototyping using MapKit on iPhone 3.0. Of course the big thing that you want to do on a MapKit view is drop pushpins for locations (or annotations as they’re referred to).

And of course to place the pushpins, you need latitude & longitude coordinates. In a real implementation I’d use some web service to map addresses to coordinates, but since I’m only prototyping, I just want to hardcode them in. I guess I might hardcode them as well even in a real implementation if I only had a small number of fixed points.

So the easiest way to get latitude & longitude coordinates turns out to be a bit of javascript in conjunction with Google Maps – find the address and then paste this javascript into the browser address field:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

And a popup will show you the coordinates…

…which you can then use in your code:

// Add some test annotations
StoreLocation *theLocation;
CLLocationCoordinate2D theCoordinate;
theCoordinate.latitude = 45.489993;
theCoordinate.longitude = -75.669464;
theLocation = [[StoreLocation alloc] initWithCoordinate:theCoordinate];
theLocation.title = @"Soundshift Store";
theLocation.subtitle = @"World Headquarters";
[theMapView addAnnotation:theLocation];
[theLocation release];

Which of course ends up giving you nice annotations on the map view:

(Courtesy of Lifehacker)

I had my first opportunity to use tethering today with my upgraded 3G iPhone. Works great, and is incredibly fast on 3G with my MacBook Pro.
The only thing that slowed me down was not realizing that I had to exit the Tethering view in Settings for the tethering to actually kick in.

Grats to Rogers on the speed, and Apple for the seamless experience.

“Last summer I wrote a post about the utility of the iPhone 2.0 as an e-mail device for people, like me, who are heavy e-mail users. Now that the 3.0 release of the iPhone OS is upon us, I wanted to post an update to see what Apple’s fixed, or not, from the original complaints. I had hoped to get some hands-on time with a Palm Pre as well, but haven’t quite made it there yet. However, I have spent some time using the version of Outlook Mobile from Windows Mobile 6.5, so that’s now my baseline standard for comparison.

Executive summary: Apple invested a ton of time in the 3.0 release, but most of it went to other aspects of the OS, not into the messaging and calendaring experience.”

Worth a read – great analysis.

A great utility for throttling down the speed and responsiveness of the Internet connection on your Mac in order to test the robustness of your networking code.

Highly recommended.  Download it at http://mschrag.github.com/

Official Google Mobile Blog: Gmail gets a new engine for iPhone and Android-powered devices

After trying this quickly, I’m thinking it’s good enough to give it a side-by-side trial with the built-in iPhone mail app.  The offline access part clinches the deal for me.

But while iPhone owners around the world will be able to use the Skype application to call and message other Skype users for free using the Wi-Fi connections on their smartphones, Canadians won’t be among them.

Skype app for iPhone to launch Tuesday, but not in Canada

So I’m not really sure that this has anything to do with CRTC regulations, as some of the comments suggest, but you know, I’ll still take Canada’s tendencies towards regulatory agencies if it means we have more important things like a stable banking system.

TUAW: The iPhone needs a native Gmail application

Most interesting is the video of the unreleased Gmail web app which uses the offline caching features of HTML 5 to give native-ish capabilities.  I almost buy this, except that notifications of incoming mail are kind of important, and I’m not seeing how this will happen from Mobile Safari.