1st Impressions

Side Effect Check is a $0.99 iPhone app that I could see in any doctor’s or med student’s toolkit.  It allows you to see if there are any reported connections between a specific medicine and a specific medical condition.  For example, you can check on “aspirin” and “ulcers” to see if there is a reported connection.  The results page, like the one displayed here, displays the results according to the MedWatch database in the computing cloud somewhere.

While the results can tell you if a connection exists, there doesn’t seem to be a way to drill down into them.  I would love to see exactly what what results were connected to just the med or just the symptom.

I’ve never had any medical training, so my attempts to find a med that had a connection with a particular symptom were random at best.  But in the hands of the right person, I can see this app as having some real benefit.  For the normal user though, I’d suggest the Drug Prescription Info and Pregnancy & Drug Safety apps by the same developer.  I’ll be reviewing them soon.

I like utilities that not only do basic functions, but are feature-rich and can handle special needs as well.  2Do is one such application.  This $3.99 app in the App Store has a subtitle of  “A Stunning ToDo List with Push and Sync”, and that pretty much sums it up.  Even the help is stunning, as the screen here (one of several) shows.  The graphics, in my experience, are truly unmatched in this kind of application.  To-do items have priorities, due dates, notes, URLs, and three types of alarms.  You can get an email reminder, an audible alert, or a push message.  Email can also be used to share the to-do item with others.

2Do currently syncs via wifi to Macs using a free sync tool that can be downloaded from the developer’s site.  If you use a real computer, other sync options are being developed.

One suggestion that I would like to see is the ability to have re-occurring to-do items.  I’d love to have something set up to be done every week or every 90 days or whatever, and once it is marked complete, have it re-schedule itself to repeat again.  The ability to repeat the alerts on a frequency would be nice as well.  That way, if I miss doing something, there is a bit more than the numerical indicator on the application icon to get my attention.  An email a day for every day I haven’t done something might just be the nudge I need.

Overall, if you need a robust application to keep track of your tasks, I’d recommend checking this one out.

I do all my email in Gmail.  Nothing comes close to it’s feature set.  Well now, there’s an app for that.  iGmail is a native app for the iPhone that does more than just give you access to your mobile Gmail page.  It does that as well, but adds some really nice features that, in my book, make it worth the $1.99 price.  First, you are able to use the app while offline.  This includes a list of your contacts (with the top 20 most used addresses sorted for easy access), and the ability to write or respond to email and have it saved as drafts for the next time you are online.

Other nice features include an optional menu to get to your Google Calendar, Chat, News, and other Google products, the ability to view email full-screen, shaking your device to select or de-select the emails on the screen, and a unique overlay of icons for easy navigation.  There is even a built-in browser for viewing the web version of your mailbox or any HTML email you receive.  You can tell this was put together by a real Gmail lover and a lot of thinking went into it.

Having said that, there is a big elephant in the room that I must address.  The one HUGE missing piece of this application is push notifications.  If it were to add that, it would definitely be worth the $1.99 price point.  As it is, I’d really recommend it for the heavy Gmail user, but not the casual user.  If you are just a casual user, I’d wait for either push notifications or it going on sale again for $0.99.

Overall, as a heavy user of Gmail, I’m pleased with the $1.99 purchase.  The developer is still working on the app and promising more updates.  I am looking forward to what the future holds for it.  Unfortunately though, the developer’s web site is down and the only way to get suggestions to them appears to be the reviews on the iTunes store.

While I hate to give away my age, I have to admit that I have been a fan of talk radio for over 30 years. Not only is it an excellent way to stay informed to what is going on in the world around you but, unlike music which stimulates your heart or soul, talk radio stimulates your mind.

In the past (although not for the past 10 years or so) I was fortunate enough to have had jobs that gave me the ability to listen to talk radio for much of the day. Now that I am handicapped and spend most of my time at home, I am once again in the position to listen to  the radio – but unfortunately live in an area where I cannot pick up either AM or FM transmissions very easily.

That is what excited me about this program, Talk Shows on Internet Radio. With it I can easily locate and listen to my favorite talk shows at any time that they are being broadcast online. Local talk show hosts, for example, broadcast live during the morning hours but may be broadcast through syndication on other radio stations at other hours of the day.  The main screen of this program shows a list of talk radio shows with 5 30-minute time slots showing if the program you are looking for is currently playing or will be in the next couple of hours.

By selecting the talk show of your choice, you are taken to a screen in which the program is described as well as the opportunity to choose which station you which to listen to.  The reason this option is important to me is because, as anyone that listens to talk radio can tell you, this type of radio programming is very popular and therefore contains a lot of commercial breaks.  Since it is also often played during “drive time” hours, it contains lots of news, weather, and traffic updates.  By listening to a station that is in your area you increase the odds that the news and weather reports are pertinent to your area and not someplace that is 1500 miles away.

One of the nicest things about the program is that you can then listen to the streaming audio while you email, browse the web, or even play games.  It is basically a “background” app.  (To turn it off, just launch Safari and tap the “done” button.)  Another thing that impressed me greatly is the swift and supportive response I had to questions or suggestions for talk shows to add to the program. For example, I used the link within the program to email a request for a local talk show to be added to the program and the developer did so within the hour.

While I love this program, there are several features that I would like to see added to it. (while there is a free “lite” version available, future improvements will be made to the $4.99 paid version.) Some of these features include the ability to sort and edit the shows that are displayed, the ability to view a particular streaming station’s schedule, and the ability to prioritize the stations that are used to play streaming audio based on their proximity to your location.  Since the program is dependent on the radio station database maintained by RadioShowLinks.com, the ability to log into your account there and access programs directly from their site as well.  According to the developer, how best to more tightly interface with the site (including favorites) is in the works.

All in all, I would already give this application 4 stars out of 5 and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys using talk radio to keep their finger on the pulse of America.  While some detractors might criticize the $4.99 price of this app in light of the fact that the broadcast of these talk shows are free, those same people would not hesitate spending $5.00 on a radio that contained a display showing when and where they could pick up their favorite talk show.

This review written by David Eaton

This free app immediately made my Must Have list.  It is the best app I have seen for finding those great bargains in the app store.  What really sets it apart is not only the push notifications, but the ability to filter each category by all sales, bargains of 50% off or more, and price drops to free.  Viewing popular apps with price drops is also cool.  The only issue I had with the app is that it doesn’t seem to have a full database.  I wanted to add the new Civilization Revolution game, for example, and it could not find it.  And when I searched for Myst, it apparently used it as a wildcats ( like *myst*) and the title was buried deep in the long list of mystery and mysterious stuff.  I’d also like to see some way to limit searches and displayed apps to only selected categories.   I am not complaining though. For a free app, it’s a bargain and very useful. Check it out.

Contacts Plus is free for the next 24-hours.  For free, it’s a great deal. It is the perfect replacement for the built-in contact app.  Not only does it show contact photo, number, and address in the index listing, but it allows you to group your contacts and alerts you to your contacts birthdays.  Tapping on a selection will offer you the opportunity to call them, email them, or SMS them.

Contacts Plus is normally $1.99 in the app store.  It adds a lot of additional functionality that really should have been included in the iPhone OS.  You can fix that oversight for free though if you hurry.

As a news junkie, I’ve been anticipating the BNO News app ever since it was announced.  For those of you familiar with news sources on Twitter, @BreakingNews is consistently one of the best sources for breaking news.  It repeatedly beats any competition with the first to post an alert.  They are able to do this because they don’t just repeat news, they are a new Breaking News wire service.  They even offer email alerts if you are not into Twitter.  Since early March, they have gone from roughly 30,000 fans/followers getting their alerts to a million or more and are now adding to that by as many as 10,000 per day.  You don’t get that kind of following without providing premium news content.

The BNO News app is much more than just another interface to their Twitter account.  While I followed the Twitter tweets, I did not subscribe to the SMS alerts for them.  Did not want SMS alerts for everything.  Advertisements for the BNO service was not something that I wanted to wake me.  But this app has some really nice push features.  You can turn off the push alerts between certain hours, and also turn off alerts for low priority news.  Push notifications that the Russians have two nuclear attack subs patrolling the eastern seaboard of the US get though with a popup window and alert sound (just like a SMS).  The fact that the Russian president called Obama to wish him happy birthday (with subs? LOL) did not alert.  But it and all the other news is available in the application.  As you can see in the first image that I posted, the critical alerts are marked with a bar on the left side.

When you tap on a news item, you are brought to a second screen.  This screen reflects the link to the story (which will take you to the third screen I posted) if one exists, as well as the option to turn on or off the alerts for low priority news.  If I could offer one suggestion at this point, I would love for the tap of an item in the news list to take you directly to the full story, with perhaps a finger swipe that will take you to this intermediate screen that doesn’t really offer a lot of new information.

The app is a very reasonable $1.99 in the app store.  This covers the first month of push notifications.  After that, a subscription fee of $0.99/month will be introduced that will cover the bandwidth costs of the notifications and offer additional options.  As the app description puts it, “Non-subscribers will still continue to receive some notifications but will not have the more advanced filtering enabled. The monthly subscription fee will be the current minimum product price in the App Store ($0.99 in America).”

Besides wishing that I could bypass this second screen, I would love to have the ability to interface to Twitter and re-tweet a story, the ability to forward a headline via SMS and/or email, and once on a page for the full details of a story, the ability to email the link or bookmark it.  Perhaps this could be done with an option to open the news links in Safari and a link to Twitter where things could be re-tweeted from there.  Enabling cut & paste within the app might work as well.

The bottom line is that this app does not disappoint.  It makes my Must-Have list.  With additional releases already being planned, I am looking forward to all this will offer as the app matures.

While Politico Tracker Twitter Edition, which I just reviewed, is a great tool for the new junkie, consider the full-blown Politico Tracker app as the toolbox.  You are not limited to the PR kind of stuff that a politician may post on Twitter.  To say that this app is comprehensive is an understatement.  To do it justice, you would really have to delve into the documentation on the developer’s site.  I’ll try to sumarize it though.

While this app does require the internet to work, it does a lot more than just a web search on a politician.  Using the unique Llesiant technology, it accesses “over 25,000 publications from around the globe – including more than 11,000 State and Federal Government News Sources”.  This includes newspapers and such, but also press releases, industry journals, lobbiest groups (like AARP), and so forth.  These can be categorized by source, topic, and other means.  For example, if I am interested in the recent ruling where a federal judge in Florida ruled that Georgia couldn’t use water from a lake that resided there but must let the water flow out of Georgia and into Florida (nuts, I know!), I can choose to look at the stories related to my senior senator and the Army Corps of Engineers.  The app finds nine recent articles on that.  If your chosen politician is mentioned in an article, the headline shows up.  Clicking on the headline will bring up the excerpt of the article in which they are mentioned and highlight their name.  The source of the article is hyperlinked and will take you to the full article at the original location.

Both state and federal politicians are available in the database for your selection.  While the politician database is not categorized by state like the Twitter Edition is, that is coming in the next update along with an update to about 8,000 politicians in the database.   Other improvements will include the ability to email the articles that you find of interest.  You can currently save them on your system for reading later or open it in Safari and email it from there.

The new state categories for looking up your politician is going to be a huge improvement in this app.  I’ve suggested taking it a step further though and allow those that need to the ability to find out who their representatives are though in case they don’t know.  As I suggested in the Twitter app, I’d also love to see the ability to add candidates to the database and not have it limited to current politicians.  Right now, the starting point for a search is a specific politician.  Ultimately, I’d love to be able to search the news database using the existing categories or sources or industries as the starting point and review the headlines no matter what politician is mentioned.  As a $10 app, the amount of information available is incredible.  How to get to it though is still limited.  In my water wars example above, I’d love to see all the recent stories about the Corp of Engineers without having to go look up who the politicians from Florida and Alabama are that may have commented on it.  For that matter, being able to put in a custom search term, like “Lake Lanier”, would add incredible power to this already useful application.  It would make it more topic driven and politician driven.

UPDATE: The update for OS 3.0 has now been approved by Apple.  It includes 30% more politicians, sorting them by state or name, email of links to articles, and other improvements.

The folks at pTracker LLC have come up with two apps that are perfect for the news junkie that follows US politics.  The first, and simpler of the two, is the $0.99 Politico Tracker Twitter Edition.  As the name indicates, this app is a collection of twitter feeds from different political figures.  Obviously not every politician understands the internet, much less Twitter, but for those that do, this is the app for following that.

When you first launch the app, you are provided with a  list of  national figures, such as the current President and Vice President, followed by categories by state.  Here in Georgia, ten different politicians are listed, including former Congressman and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  Upon selecting any of the politicians, you can then add them to a favorites list that is brought up when you tap the little icon in the top left corner of the app.

There are two things I would love to have in the app though.  First, I would love the ability to add the URL or Twitter name of someone to follow that isn’t on the built-in list.  This would allow for the “following” of candidates for politician office and could optionally send that info to the developers for possible addition in the next update.  Second, I would love for there to be a “timeline” kind of view for all my favorites so that I would not have to open each one individually to see if there was an update.  Overall though, the app is very well put together and a great tool for any news junkie interested in US politics.

Before I can get into why you need Voice Central, you need to understand Google Voice.  As a current beta user (because I used its predecessor), let me try to explain it.  Remember the freedom you felt when you signed up for something like Gmail and could suddenly have email that you could check from any computer and it could forward on to a private email address based on search criteria and such?  Email became both portable and powerful.  Well a company came along, Grand Central (later purchased by Google and renamed Google Voice), that did the same kind of things with your phone.  Instead of just having a number assigned to your specific device and location, the number was assigned to the person.  You can give out your Google Voice number and your home, work, and/or cell numbers remain private.  As those other numbers change, you don’t have to contact everyone you know with the change.  Depending on the categories in which you place a contact, they only reach you at certain numbers that you define or at *any* of your numbers.  People don’t have to guess what number to call you at.  They call *you* and Google Voice calls your specified numbers.  You can even set it up so that the number calls all your numbers and you just pick up the call at which ever one you are at.  If you pick it up at work and need to leave for home, you can transfer the call to your cell, talk on the way to the house, then transfer the call to your home phone.  As if this were not enough, you can screen your calls and, depending on who it is, answer it, dump them to voice mail, record the call, or even block calls from certain numbers.  And to quote the late Billy Mays, “But wait!  There’s more!”  Voice mails left at your number are transcribed and sent to you via SMS or email, you can send and receive SMS messages at your number, and these SMS and voice messages can be searched just like past emails can be with Gmail.  You can use Google Voice to initiate calls as well.  Domestic calls are free, and international ones are cheap.  Just tell it who you wish to call.  It calls your designated numbers, you pick up, and it then connects you to the number you are calling.  They get your Google Voice number on their caller ID and not your private personal number.  You can even use the service to conference in up to four calls together or set up a call widget on a web site so that a visitor can put in their phone number and it will connect them with you without them knowing your number.  Finally, when you sign up (as soon as it gets out of beta) you can select a nice number that is easy to remember.  For example, my number is my area code, a 223 prefix, and my four-digit birthday.  And it’s mine for life.  For a video overview of what all it does, check out this YouTube link.  If you are not a Google Voice user and want an invite, they are going out now.  Sign up for one here.

Enough about Google Voice though.  If you, as a prior Grand Central user or future Google Voice user, have access to the service, Voice Central is “the iPhone app for that”.  It is an iPhone interface to your Google Voice account.  With it, you can initiate calls to people in your iPhone address book, listen to your voice mail,  view a history of your calls and text messages, and does all this without some of the issues associated with a similar product.  The nice thing about this product is that it lets you send and receive text messages to someone without giving them your cell phone number.  They get your Google Voice number.  This, in effect, allows you to send text messages from a land line (like your home or office) because if they call you back, it can ring there.  Of course the SMS text messages are actually delivered to your cell phone (as defined in your Google Voice setup), but can also be read and responded to online.  There is something to note though in how this works.  Since Google Voice is acting as a go-between in these SMS exchanges, you are sending messages to them, and it is forwarded to your intended recipient.  This means that Google Voice sets up a unique number for that person for this purpose.  When you get a response from them, it comes from this unique number and the SMS response is preceded with their name as you have it in your Google contacts.  Your message to them is from your Google Voice number, and their to you is from a Google Voice number assigned to their number.  If you call it, it forwards to their cell (the one you sent the SMS to) and shows up as having come from your Google Voice number.  As Google explains it, “When you send an SMS through Google Voice, the SMS appears to be sent from your Google number. When someone sends an SMS to your Google number, and it’s forwarded to your mobile phone, it won’t appear as from the sender’s actual number (e.g., the SMS may appear from 1-406-xxx-xxxx). This is so that when you reply to the 1-406-xxx-xxxx number from your phone, the SMS you send appears to be sent from your Google number and will be saved in your Google Voice inbox.“  While this seems a bit confusing, it is seamless and isn’t really the fault of the Voice Central iPhone app.  It’s just the way Google Voice is set up.

There are two things I wish this app did that it doesn’t do.  I wish there was an option to sync your iTunes contacts to your Google Voice contacts, and I wish that you could access those online contacts to configure what group(s) they belong to and how they reach you.  I’m not sure that the Google api allows for that though.  Perhaps one day Google itself will come out with a interface to do that.  Until then, this is the best we have.

This app is $2.99 in the iTunes app store.  If you are usually at a PC, you can probably get by with the web interface to Google Voice.  But if you are mobile a lot an rely on your iPhone, this app is highly recommended.  So go sign up for a Google Voice invite and, if you find yourself hooked on all it has to offer, check out Voice Central.