iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad

Did you ever want to use your iPhone / Touch as a portable disk drive to copy files between home and school? Did you ever want to take MS-Office documents with you to review at a meeting or PowerPoint files to review in class? If so, check out the free "Discover" program from B-Base Development Inc. in the Application Store.

Discover lets you use your iPhone / Touch as a wireless flash drive. All you need is Discover, access to a wireless network for your iPod, and access to a web browser on your computer. There is no need to install special software on your desktop computer.

When Discover starts it gives you a web address to connect to your iPod. Enter that into any web browser and you see a web site that lets you upload or download files to your iPod.

Cool features include:

• Select the "nearby" button and Discover will search for other iPods running Discover in the same wireless network. If one is found, then you can copy files directly from one iPod to the other. Great for transferring "business cards", sharing documents for meetings, etc. This feature is how "discover" got its name, because it can discover other iPods to share with.
• A separate area for "private" and "public" files. You can password protect the private area, while leaving public files open for anyone to see.
• A "Search" capability that makes it easy to find a specific file if you have a lot of files stored.
• Access to your "photos" folder. Older versions used to let you access the camera roll as well, but Apple's draconian App Store won't let developers post applications that do that any more, so they had to delete this ability. But other folders in the "Photos" area are accessible.
• The program can display or play over 30 file types right on your iPod. All the file types available in the Safari browser. This includes web documents (html), MS-Office formats (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) including the latest Office 2007 formats, Adobe Acrobat PDF files, all audio formats the iPod supports (including mp3, wav, aiff) all video formats the iPod supports (H.264, MPEG-4, etc.) all image formats the iPod supports (gif, jpeg, tiff, png) and a variety of text file formats. Great for taking documents you want to refer to during a meeting or class. Note you can only VIEW these documents, not edit them. But the documents are not modified when you store them to the iPod. So when you copy them back to the desktop computer you can edit them there.
• In addition to connecting to your file service from any web browser, you can also set up a "webdav" drive (for example, using Windows "Network Places". This makes your iPod look like another disk drive on your computer. Copying files is as easy as normal drag and drop.
• Files stored in Discover can be synchronized with Apple's MobileMe service, or with the "Discover" server provided by the developer.
• The software is FREE. There is a commercial version which works identical to this free version. The only difference is the commercial version doesn't display ads when you use it.
• Unlimited file space. You can use the full space available on your iPod. Most of the other portable disk drive applications limit the available disk space in the free versions of their programs.

The program lets you store any file, including Windows EXE files. It won't run EXE files but it will store them. I find this extremely useful. I have several programs that require that I run a program on my PC to work. For example, "RemotePad" turns my Touch into a wireless trackpad to control the mouse on my computer. But to use it I need to run an EXE file on the computer for it to talk to. With Discover, I save this exe file on my Touch. When I want to use it, I connect to Discover from the desktop computer's web browser, copy the .exe file, and run it. This lets me use my RemotePad program on any computer.

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Diagnostic Imaging Atlas (DIA) from Webster Veterinary provides high-quality illustrations of normal biology and pathologies for both cats and dogs. It is useful as a reference for Veterinary students, as well as a useful tool for educating clients about pet pathologies. You can find it in the Application Store by searching for "DIA".

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wired Magazine has released a review of the Apple Earphones with Remote control and Microphone. Overall they find both the audio and microphone use acceptable, if not outstanding. See details at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/02/hands-on-with-a/.

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OmniUpdate is providing a free webinar on Wednesday February 18 at 1:00pm CST called "Using CSS with Mobile Devices". While not specific to iPhone or iPod Touch, the information in this seminar is useful for designing web sites that are usable on mobile devices.

For more information see their Registration Page.

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog article from a first-year nursing student discusses iPod Touch / iPhone applications useful for nursing students. You can read about it at http://www.brainscramble.org/?p=219.

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google Books and Project Gutenberg both make books available for use on mobile devices. These are excellent resources for accessing classic literature and other public domain books.

Google has created a Google Books web site optimized for use with mobile devices. To use it simply visit http://books.google.com/m using Safari.

Normally Google Books contains scanned images of actual books. This was useful, but made the books harder to read on mobile devices with small screens.

This new mobile service instead uses Optical Character Recognition to scan the text off the pages. It then displays this as text in your Safari browser, allowing the text to wrap within the browser. This makes it much easier to read. However, there may be errors introduced by the OCR process.

One problem with Google Books Mobile is you need to have internet access to use it because it relies on Safari.

For more information see the Google Press Release called "Google brings e-books to mobiles".

Project Gutenberg has been around for many years. All its books are available in text format, and many in HTML, suitable for reading in Safari. Many books are also available as audiobooks. The mp3 files can be downloaded and played on your iPhone or Touch.

A search for "Gutenberg" in the application store will find many applications that can read Project Gutenberg books off-line. "Stanza" is an excellent free off-line book reader that accesses Project Gutenberg (and other) books.

Posted by Kevin Lowey at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)