1st Impressions

DeskSMS is a utility application that I am absolutely in love with.  It allows you to send, receive, and reply to SMS messages in a number of ways from your computer.  The advantages to this are huge.  Is you work doesn’t allow you to “play with your phone” in the office, or if your spouse is playing with your phone and you get a text message or want to send one, or if you are just lazy don’t want to pick up your phone because you are already on your laptop or tablet, this is the app for you.

DeskSMS is a quality product brought to you by the same developer that is infamous for his ROM Manager for rooted Android phones.  But, unlike ROM Manager, this app is not free.  Someone has to pay for all be bandwidth it generates.  There IS a free trial period of a couple of weeks, but after that, the service is a very reasonable $4.99 a year.

The key to DeskSMS is that it links the texts to/from your phone to your Google account.  This allows you to access your SMS (and contacts) via a number of ways.  You can send/receive them via Gmail, via Google Chat, via Google Talk, via Google Chrome extension (there is also one for Firefox), and via an independent web page.  I’ve tried other apps that allow you to do this via a web site, but nothing I’ve found is so easy to set up and has so many different delivery options.  Because you can access your SMS messages and contacts via a web page, you can also create an application shortcut to that page and even run it as a separate app on your computer.  And, because you can access it via Google Talk, any Jabber IM client on your phone, computer, or tablet can be used to access them.  That means that you can even cross-platforms and do things like respond to SMS messages to your Android phone via an Apple iPad, for example.   And the person you are conversing with has no idea that you are not typing at 70wpm on your Android phone.  To them, it all is from your phone.

Setup could not be easier.  Install the app, log in to your Google account, and tell the app whether to send your SMS to Gmail, Google Talk, or to the Browser/extension channels – or any combination of these.  You need to choose these wisely though based on how you have alerts set up though.  The last thing you want is to have Gmail, Google Chat, Google Talk, and browser extension alerts on your laptop going off simultaneously with the SMS alerts, mail alerts, and IM alerts on your phone.  You don’t want to get overloaded with alerts, so it is best to limit them.  Right now, for example, I have Google Talk on my laptop pop up when I get a SMS message, but that means it ALSO pops up on my phone – along with the SMS alert.  I don’t want to block the alerts on my phone in Google Talk because that will also block the contact on my laptop.  So I use GoSMS to set custom alerts for those SMS contacts to not give me the audible alert and that way the GTalk alert on my phone is the only audible one I receive.  So you need to think through how you do this if you have your SMS sent multiple places on multiple devices.

There *is* a little lag time as the SMS is forwarded to and from your phone, but I have found that to be minimum.  And, since I can type a whole lot faster on my laptop than I can on my phone, the person waiting for a response doesn’t really notice any lag in the end results.

The benefits of this system go beyond convenience though.  Say you leave your phone at a friend’s house and can’t call him because he not only has your phone, but his number is stored in your phone.  If you have ever had a SMS conversation with him, you can text him from any internet connection by accessing your email or GTalk or the browser site.  And, just in case you can’t remember the web site URL and need to access it from somewhere, I created a bit.ly/desksms  short URL to it.  :)  Also, since SMS conversations are sent to your GMail account and/or GTalk, there is an online archive of them should you ever need to search them for that phone number or address that someone shared with you some time back.  This archive can quickly fill your inbox though, so creative use of filters to label and archive them are probably best.

The way the system works via Gmail or GTalk is by creating a unique email address for the people you are sending and receiving text messages from.  This address is their number followed by @desksms.appspotchat.com.  So as long as you are using your gmail account to send something to 1235551212@desksms.appspotchat.com, the owner of the 1235551212 number is going to get the message as a text from your Android phone.  And this “desksms.appspotchat.com” domain makes it easy to set up filters for these messages in your gmail.

My suggestions for this app are very few.  It is absolutely perfect at what it does, but I would love to see it expanded.  I would love to see the ability to add an additional email account to your desksms.appspotchat.com settings so that you could send/receive texts via more than just your primary Gmail account.  That way, you could add something like a work email in case you work places that block things like access to Gmail or GTalk.    I’d also love to see the app, where possible, to be able to create contact names and pictures in my Google contacts called “SMS Firstname Lastname” or something similar for selected folks already in my SMS history or my address book.  Maybe it could put them in a separate Gmail contact group or something.  Right now, every time I get a call or SMS, I am prompted whether or not I’d like to add that number@desksms.appspotchat.com address to my GTalk contacts.  If I have already chosen a lot of them to add to my SMS group in my Google Contacts, a lot of these notices could be avoided.  And if I had the option to NOT forward these messages or calls to my GTalk, Gmail, and Web destination unless they were on this “white list” or could, conversely, set it to to automatically block contacts that are already in my contact list as being work numbers or home numbers, that would cut down on the requests to add/block every new contact.  Finally, and associated with this “black list” idea, I’d love to have some way to automatically block the forwarding of things on a formal black list (like text alerts from my bank or my current data usage from ATT) or to even filter on things like “Reply with your comment or “like”” so that you could filter out things from FaceBook.  I seriously don’t need a separate GTalk contact for every status update from every FaceBook or Twitter account I follow.  Maybe some option to not forward texts unless it is a full 10-digit phone number would block a lot of this as well.

Overall though, I’d give this app a full five stars (and did).  It is solid, dependable, and highly configurable.  So the 4.4 rating on the Android market is well deserved.  So I’d highly recommend everyone take this app for a spin.  If you don’t like it, you still have two seeks to play with it at no charge whatsoever.

I love utility apps and camera apps on the iPhone.  ToonCamera is the latest that I’ve tried out.  It is an app for not only taking photos using the back-facing camera or front-facing camera and video, but also allows you to select items from your photo library.  It then takes these images and “cartoonifies” them.  I realize that isn’t a real word, but by decreasing the colors in the image, it ultimately turns the image into something that looks like a cartoon.

I really like the effects of this program.  By adjusting the brightness, contrast, and line thickness, you can produce up to nine different versions of the image.  Examples of there are in the second image in the review here.  The end results are really nice.  And, if you combine them with an app like Colorize, you could really make some nice results that would really help to make your images pop out of the background.  Combining it with AutoStitch could also provide some interesting results.  I also used PerfectPhoto, another $0.99 app that I to remove some of the noise artifacts from my “cartoon” image.

The front-facing camera is a nice option as it allows you to take some great images for use as an avatar on Facebook or something.  The live video recording with these effects is also cool to see.  It is these options and the ability to view all this live that sets this app apart from things like the “pencil paint” and “posterize” options of apps of other apps.  Once you get an image or video that you’d like to keep, you can save it to your camera roll, share it on FaceBook or Twitter, or email it to one of your contacts.

At only $0.99, I’d highly recommend this app for any photgrapher.  It makes my Must-Have list and will remain on my iPhone.  I would like make two suggestions to the developer though.  It would be nice if you could either zoom or crop images.  I’d also love to see where the effects were more in the way of sliders rather than presets so that finer control could be accomplished.

Spots is an excellent WiFi finder. What sets this app apart from others that I have tried is that you don’t need an Internet connection in order to find one. This $1.99 app has a frequently-updated internal database of thousands of free hotspots. Launching the app displays the closest ones in both a list and in a graphical map. Touching the map icons will highlight the corresponding item in the list.

Launching the item from the list displays the name, address, phone number, and the type of service. Quick links allow you to call and/or get directions.

The only thing I can conceivably think to add to the app us the ability to submit items to the database. I could see where this information may need to be verified or indicate that it is unverified, but it would really complement this application with something I have not seen elsewhere.

Overall, the app is very comprehensive and fills a need. My only concern us the price point. With free alternatives out there, some may balk at the $2 price tag for the interface. But, on the other hand, there is plenty of competition at that price point as well.

RemindMe is a cool little utility that creates wallpaper for your lock screen with reminders on them. As I use IntelliScreen, this app provides limited benefit for me. If you don’t jailbreak your phone though, it could be of some use to you. The text is customizable, and so is the color of the note and theme in the background. It does a good job of what it does, but I would think it would be a better value at $0.99 instead of the current $1.99.

Special thanks to Jerad and The App Podcast for the promo code for this app.

MyWeather is absolutely the best weather app out there for the iPhone. The price just dropped to $4.99 and it is worth every penny. Weather for multiple cities is supported. Each city shows daily forecasts for a week, hourly temp & percipitation trends for the next 24 hours, and full-screen looping dopler radar. At this sale price, it definately makes my must-have list.

In yet another attempt to find the perfect tip calculator, I tried out Gratuitous. It has some really nice features. It has a really intuitive interface, big buttons for big fingers, defaults to different tip percentages based on quality of service, and will divide up the check based on the number in the party. It will also round the check total and email the transaction to you. All in all, it is a nice feature set. It doesn’t do pre-tax calculations, but that isn’t a deal breaker for me. I usually tip off the gross anyway. It would be a nice addition though, especially for those really large tickets.

Of the several I have tried (only reviewed about half of them), I am liking this $1 tip app the best. Of the things in my wish list (big buttons, pre-tax, default tip percent, etc) this does everything but default tax percentage. Entry involves both subtotal and tax amount. I would love to cut that down to one entry. I sent that suggestion to the developer, so we will see what happens. Another idea that I sent is ability to email transaction info. Adding that would make this the perfect app.

This app has the nice features of “fat finger” input, saving the transactions, and pre-tax calculations, but it misses the mark in my book because you have to enter the tip percent and tax amount. It needs the ability to default tip percentage and the calculation of the tax based on a default percentage. Close, but no cigar.

CheckPlease is almost the perfect free tip calculator. It has pre-tax calculations, default tip and tax percent, and will even put your transaction into PocketMomey. I don’t like the ads though, the version 2.0 interface displays all the right info, but you loose the “fat finger” interface. But since it is free, it’s not going to cost you anything to check it out.

I had high hopes for this new, free app, but it doesn’t quite do it for me. It would fit my needs if it let you change the default tip percentage and set a default for rounding up or down. That way all you would need to do is enter the bill total. My ultimate tip tool would also default/calculate tax percentage so you could enter that one amount, it would calculate the tax, tip, and total (rounded up) based on that one entry. Guess I will keep looking.