Tag apps

Entries 7 Total Description

The latest phenon driving the success of mobile devices and disrupting the age-old market for traditional expensive software and multiple application suites.

My Two Favorite Apps

Apr 30, ’12 9:38 PM

My favorite app: Appy Geek

In just a few shorts weeks Appy Geek an app for gatering technology news and information has catapulted itself into becoming my app of choice. It went from marginally functional to absolutely superior in one fell swoop and should loudly demonstrate to other app developers that quality and talent will win out. It has totally blown away every other tool I used to gather tech news. The interface is powerful. The feature are many. It is a bullseye winner on my old out of date HTC G1 Android Phone that I hope to use for years to come.

To see Appy Geek click here.

My second favorite App: Catch

I use Catch for my news notes and drafting my posts. I take copius notes on my HTC G1 (Android) and export them to my desktop for editing. I turned to Catch when Evernote became highly unreliable, ultimately unuseable and tech support was lacking. As a high level of note taking is essential to my work and profession I really needed a solution that delivered on its promise and potential. I can say two weeks in that Catch has indeed delivered. I just discovered the Online desktop component of Catch.

I started using MacJournal until it too upgraded itself out of correctly functioning.

What a relief to find an app that takes quality and performance seriously. Catch is a catch. Watch this company vlosely they have a clue and know what to do,

A great app from the Android sandbox at Google I/O was Catch.com. It is the SF based company that purchased AK Notepad, one of the first notepad apps available in the Android Market.

The Catch developers have introduced a feature-packed app which with cloud and local hooks allowing users to take notes, photo notes, voice recording, geo tagged notes and more, and then save them, sort them and categorize them with hash tags.  Note etrieval extremely easy

To see Catch click here.

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Application Evolution

Apr 7, ’12 12:06 PM
From the beginning of our long convoluted tech journey we have used applications and suites that offered the promise of solving our most perplexing problems and filling our basic daily needs. Although they were buggy or incomplete ar first they promised to improve over time with use, feedback, support and continued development. This while and as technology itself continued to expand and evolve.
Somewhere along the line probably about the time of the emergence of mobility and apps all of that changed.
Companies set out to reduce their work down to bite-sized solutions that cater to emerging  trends and usually inadequately solve our problems or address our needs sometimes they do not do this at all, they aren’t about that.
Because of the low cost of these apps there usually is limited or no support nor reliable upgrade path. This happens to be the mobile world we now inhabit.
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MS: Are APPS Really Evil?

May 26, ’11 9:49 AM

There is a tactic widely used in Politics now being applied to technology. It is to change things by changing the name of the thing or changing the game itself. Police action, Shock and awe are just examples.

Microsoft may be attempting to do both in order derail the momentum behind the fast moving app train. They seem to be hinting that apps are evil and in their opinion users might prefer functions and features hard-fused into the OS of our phones. This would be the approach of the very company that has done exactly this for years with our computers. Whether it is correct is not for me to say. The ultimate judge will be users. The questions to be answered by the marketplace are: (1) Will we step away from “app dependency”? (2) Are we willing we step into a past where manufacturers embed and impose everything into operating systems?

How is this different? In the worlds of iPhone and Android, apps define most of the experience, now on Window’s Phones post Mango, this will be turned on its head with apps getting pulled into the user’s mobile communications experience. It is clear that there are different approaches at odds about to clash and time will tell which is either correct or appropriate.

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2011: Mid-year SOTA Report

May 21, ’11 9:19 AM

 

 

 

 

 

Tablets as expected were the most significant device of note. Tablets managed to totally disrupt the mounting momentum behind netbooks and dramatically impacted laptops to a major degree that caused great concern and consternation to most manufacturers. Smartphones on the other hand continued to gain marketshare and added capacity as these days almost everybody has made the move from basic cell phones to fancy smartphones.

Online, Social Media remains the wellspring of activity and development. Everything else is an integration of Social Media into more traditional services usually in the form of marketing and community building.

On the Search front Bing has steadily gained small increments of marketshare and Google has the problem of figuring out exactly which businesses they want to be in. Mastery of the secrets of (SEO) Search Engine Optimization has become a major revenue generator for developers, consultants and experts that decode the constantly shifting landscape of SEO.

Along with Cloud Computing “Apps” are leading the charge away from more traditional application software and towards smaller inexpensive bite-sized solutions that can are often mashed up and aggregated into more personalized and customized configurations and integrations.

The industry most affected by change is publishing. Publishers are scrambling to uncover new ways to produce and provide content while looking for ways to monetize their efforts to survive and sustain the shifts and pitfalls.

To sum up 2011 has become a time of disruption and change. Yet beyond greater mobility there is no major change that amounts to much of anything that is really new and innovative. Most innovations are mainly enhancements and extensions of trends that are only now realizing their full potential and promise.

A handfull of companies have taken the time and effort to leverage their brand and extend their reach into new market spaces.

Taking a heavy hit industry tradeshows are attempting to stay relevant but the virtual world and poor economy has made many of them less essential and able to justify their expense.

 

 

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COOL CONFERENCE: APPNATION SF

Apr 9, ’11 7:07 AM
AppNation SF

AppNation SF

I didn’t think I really needed a sign, a co-signer or confirmation when I personally declared San Francisco to be the de facto “new capital of New Technology and Social Media”. That was just an extrapolation of the realization that many of the hot companies are here and most of the important events happen here. More proof of this arrives here on April 27 to 28th in the form of a conference in downtown San Francisco called APPNATION. It was held last March in New York but!!

When at the beginning of last year I predicted Apps would take over I did not know it would happen so soon. APPNATION is the sign. It is a new conference aimed at App developers and entrepreneurs, APPNATION will feature speakers and exhibitors. Developers can also summit their app for a chance to pitch it at something they call “the App Circus”  Deadline for entry is April 17.

A focus WILL BE on how consumer apps and emerging connected devices are disrupting and transforming the advertising, media, and entertainment industries. IT IS A high-caliber, executive-level event bringING together key decision-makers and industry-influenceRs from across the consumer app economy to discuss the transformation of these industries and THE opportunities and challenges THAT lie ahead for the greater advertising and media economies.

if you use APFUS4! you’ll get 40% off the ticket price.

For more info: http://www.appnationconference.com/

 

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Mac Bundles 2011

Mar 21, ’11 8:48 AM

Being a longtime Mac User one of the things I have appreciated over the last two years has been the availability of Macintosh-centric application bundles.

I already have most of the major Mac OS X applications that I use and need, still there are some specific other things that I need to do that those deep programs just don’t do. I then turned to smaller bite-sized programs and utilizties to fill in that gap. I landed in the camp of a handful of enterprising bundle  providers. A bundle, for the uninitiated, is an affordable package of small applications and services gathered and usually offered at a significant discount for a limited period of time.

On the Mac side some of the leading budle providers have been: MacUpdate Promo, MacHeist, Mac Bundle Pro, BundleHunt, Bundlleecious,  The MacBundles, App Sumo, Mac Switcher, MacBuzzer, MacFriendly; The Ultimate Mac Bundle

A couple of site supply more targeted bundles for specific types of uses like games: Popcap Games, Mac Game Store, Graphics: Macgraphoto,

To keep up with new bundle announcements one usually visits the providers site and signs up for future notices. One sites that uses lenses to to monitor current and expired announcements and deals is called Squidoo.

Recently there have been far fewer bundles offered. I think this is probably the result of the rapid ascent an popularity of am “App Market” like the Apple AppStore. They have allowed developers access to market to new buyers, a method of distributing products and a secure way of collecting the revenue.

So in a way we must say, “So long” to most bundle offers. Of course a couple of companies will try to hang in there with super bundles and mega bundles but at this point the momentum behind bundles has wained, at least for now.

When I wrote this post I forgot to add one of the more comprehensive bundle monitoring sites over at: http://bundlesite.com/category/mac-software/ Happy hunting!

http://www.squidoo.com/current-mac-bundles

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iPad 3 Speculation Begins

Mar 7, ’11 11:06 AM

Of course, there is always room for improvement so what does Apple need to deliver in an iPad 3 of the future?

The iPad 2 is hardly fresh from of the mouths of Apple and yet wild speculation from media pundits such as that recently voiced in an article by Jason Perlow Sr. Technology Editor at ZDNet has already begun on the iPad 3. Jason writes that the iPad 2 was “a strong but incremental second act”. And brought a number of surprises and some disappointments”.

Well I ask you, my readers, was the iPad 2 such a disappointment, or have we just gotten impatient and possibly spoiled rotten? In reality, we can’t really expect anything like an iPad 3 until sometime in 2012 unless something dramatic spurs Apple to rush one to market to stifle competition or to respond to mounting competition with more significant advances. However, for the moment, Apple competitors have tons of time and information in hand to ready new products for the next big event, CES 2012. So let’s talk!

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