as i mentioned a couple of posts earlier, i’ve been on a bit of a quest to find apps which use the additional features i have on my iphone, as compared to the ipod touch. mostly this means i’m looking at apps which avail of compass, GPS and/or camera:

redlaser & pic2shop - barcode scanners

a bit of an change for you today. i’m going to review these two apps together and compare them. they’re both quite similar and do similar things, so there disnae seem much point writing two separate reviews. also, they’re both free so, if you’re interested you might as well grab both and see which you prefer.

redlaser & pic2shop both use the iphone’s camera to capture barcodes and identify products. so therefore they require a camera [duh!] and an intarwebs connection to search their databases and look up the items.

to use, you select the appropriate capture mode, which fires up the iphone’s camera. you then simply line up the barcode in on-screen sights and let the app get it in focus. with any luck you’ll then hear a beep -similar to the barcode readers in supermarkets- which tells you the barcode has been read. redlaser seems to acquire and read the barcodes quicker than pic2shop. both apps have difficulty reading barcodes on bottles or crumply/reflective materials. again redlaser seems to score slightly better.

FIRST PIC: redlaser - SECOND PIC: pic2shop - i’m having to hold redlaser off the barcode, as its acquisition time is so quick i couldnae get a screengrab before it went to the results screen. pic2shop takes a second or two longer, so i could screengrab in time:

BARCODE READING: redlaser

after the barcode has been read, both apps then search their database of items to try and match the barcode. here again, redlaser was the winner for me. whilst both apps do equally well with what you might call ‘global’ items; books, DVDs, electronic gadgets and the like, redlaser was far more successful at identifying ‘local’ items such as food packets and suchlike from my local supermarket. this is obviously a ‘YMMV’ situation - you’d have to test both apps in your own country and see which is best. one thing i did find tho’ was that pic2shop did throw up spurious results on more than one occasion, when confused by a smaller local item [it identified a bag of ASDA cheese’n’onion crisps as an HP laptop battery!], whereas redlaser either got it right or identified it more vaguely [but still correctly as] “product of ASDA stores ltd.” as regards database lookup times, i’ve only tested it over wifi, not ‘in the field’. both apps returned results instantly.

search results screen. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. redlaser’s layout is a lot cleaner:

DATABASE RANGE: redlaser
SPEED OF RESULT RETURN: draw

i think that both apps must somehow allow you to submit your own info to their databases, as i hardly imagine the developers have the means to access barcode info for products around the world, but i’ve not been able to find a way to do this through either app. if either app cannae identifiy a barcode, they throw up a similar screen which provides options for searching via google or amazon for the item. i think both apps are glaringly missing a “submit item” button here.

UNKNOWN ITEM HANDLING: draw

item not found screen. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. again, redlaser’s layout is a lot cleaner:

for those situations where either app is having problems reading the barcode, both will also allow you to manually enter the long number underneath and search manually. unfortunately your humble reviewer is to feckin’ lazy to be arsed testing this, but i’ll assume it works on both apps.

manual code entry. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop:

when a barcode has been correctly identified, both apps will return a small thumbnail of the item and a price comparison list showing the current price of that item at a variety of sites. in theory, you can then click through to order that item directly. this usually works well, although sometimes clicking through just results in a blank screen and spinning cursor. the blame for this may lie with the sites in question tho’, rather than the apps, as both seem to baulk at the same sites. i prefer redlaser’s interface for the results checking. it’s more neatly arranged and, after viewing a result, you can return to the results screen by clicking a iOS style back button. pic2shop superimposes two grey arrows on top of the results themselves, to navigate back and forth and –when viewing a retailer’s web page in the results– you have to make sure and position a clear bit of the page underneath the back arrow, otherwise any links underneath activate when you click on it.

the reason pic2shop have had to use this stupid navigation system is because their app is polluted with adverts, so in the space at the top of the screen, where redlaser uses a nice iOS style navbar, pic2shop sticks a feckin’ ad! :vomit:

results clickthrough. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop. once again redlaser’s layout is just so much cleaner and more logical:

redlaser also wins, when it comes to accessing previously scanned items; the main screen comprises a compact list of items you have scanned, which you can click through at any time [you can even favourite items and email them as a wishlist]. with pic2shop, previous results are available from the results screen by scrolling down the page. if the results for the item you have just scanned fill a full screen, as they do in these screenshots, it is not immediately apparent that there are more results underneath. in fact, for a long time i thought that pic2shop only remembered the last item scanned. after you’ve scanned about a dozen or so items, having to swipe down through that many screensful of results to find a previous item soon becomes a major PITA. redlaser’s list is a much cleaner and better implementation.

previous results. FIRST PIC: redlaser, SECOND PIC: pic2shop - redlaser’s previous results are always there, nicely listed and selectable on the main screen. pic2shop just keeps adding to the full results screen, so you have to scroll through the whole thing every time:

ACCESS PREVIOUS RESULTS: redlaser

so that’s about it. in my opinion, redlaser beats pic2shop in every department. ironically, when you fire up the apps, pic2shop looks the more professional as it displays some nice toolbar icons and [if you’ve used it before] a thumbnail of the last scanned item on the results page. redlaser just has a boring looking list and a ‘lightning bolt’ button. you’d be forgiven for thinking [as i did initially] that redlaser was going to be the lesser app. once you’ve used both for a while tho’, you realise the opposite is true. pic2shops’s home screen icons are about the only area were it beats redlaser.

for me tho’, the final nail in the coffin for pic2shop is that it uses adverts. i know they dinnae bother some people but i absolutely loathe advertising, both on TV and in applications. even if the apps were evenly matched, for that reason alone redlaser will be the one i keep and pic2shop will be going to the great app store in the sky.

NOT HAVING FECKING ADVERTS: redlaser

REDLASER
COST: free
RATING: - one star off for not being able to add your own items

PIC2SHOP
COST: free
RATING: - not as accurate. and let down by poorly designed interface and adverts

it’s been a while since i paraded any new toys here. so here’s a couple of new ones i’ve got, since acquiring my iphone 3GS with compass and GPS:

motionX-GPS - GPS software

i did a bit of reserarch into the ‘must-have’ apps which take advantage of the later model iphones’ GPS and magnetic compass and this one kept coming out near the top of the list. as i’ve mentioned before, i’ve got a handheld GPS - a garmin GPSmap76, which i’ve used for years to mark camping spots, places i’ve been to on holiday. etc. etc. [much to the annoyance of the GF who regularly has to stand around waiting for me while i manually add waypoints into the garmin, when we’re out sightseeing :grin: ] so i’m quite into the whole GPS thing anyway.

i wasnae expecting this app to be that great but, in the couple of days i’ve had it, i’ve been completely blown away by it. it makes my garmin look like something out of the stone age. it also goes quite well with my new rugged case for my iphone, as it makes it look like some kind of really modern handheld GPS. unfortunately - even with the otterbox case on - my iphone isnae anywhere near as weatherproof as my garmin [which is waterproof and also floats], but for use in moderately ‘outdoorsy’ conditions, it should be fine.

OK. enough about its outer shell . what about the app itself?

i s’pose the heart of any GPS app is the mapping screen. motionX’s is nice and clean looking and you can pinch’n’zoom and swipe to move around, as you’d expect. by tapping the icon in the top right of the screen, you can choose to work in ‘outdoor GPS’ mode, ‘wifi/triangulation’ mode or ‘manual’ mode [which basically turns of motionX’s attemtps to find out where you are, to conserve battery life]. the icon in the corner changes to reflect which mode you’re in.

wifi mode [left] and GPS mode [right]. the globe spins and is coloured if motionX has a GPS fix or coloured red if it disnae:

for map display you can choose between motionX’s own maps, google maps, or bing maps. the app will cache map tiles as you view them, for ‘offline’ viewing. and you can also choose to download if you’re planning to visit an area away from a wifi signal. for downloading maps, you’re limited to the motionX format ‘for copyright reasons’.

selecting which maps to download is a bit of a palaver which involves either draging out a circle to describe an area within which you want to download maps, or dragging out a kind of sausage shape to describe a route, along which you want to download maps for. you then have to select more options, such as minimum and maximum zoom levels for the maps you want to download, before you actually start downloading. i say it’s a bit of a palaver and it is, when you’re used to just selecting to download a map for a city or country, but i suppose, in its favour, it does offer you a fine degree of control over what you’re filling up your iphone’s precious hard drive with.

clicking the double-arrows at the righthand side toggles ‘fullscreen mode’. clicking on ‘maps’ allows you to switch between different map providers and also gives access to the downloads options:

[left]choosing coverage area for downloading maps - [right] choosing coverage area for downloading maps along a route:

opposite the ‘GPS’ button at bottom left of the screen [which is where the GPS stuff lives], is a ‘menu’ button. tapping this opens up a panel with a whole swathe of other standard GPS functions, which motionX has. all the expected ones are there, such as compass, navigation, waypoints etc. each of these options takes you to a different function, which usually has as many modes and configuration options as the main map screen. if i wanted to cover everything, i’d be here from now ‘til christmas - and this review is already long enough, so i’ll just give you a couple more screenshots to be going on with:

menu: a wealth of other features:

compass screen and navigation menu screen [lookslike they’ve taken a leaf out of tapbots book for that one!

this app uses the GPX format to store waypoints, which is incompatible with google earth’s KML format. this was a bummer for me, as my garmin has no connectibility with my mac at all but, over the years i had transcribed all my waypoints into google earth by manually entering the co-ords stored on my garmin. i was dreading having to do it all again, transcribing them into motionX but then, on a whim i read the help files :eek: and found out that motionX have a nice automated facility whereby you email a GPX waypoints file to GPSimport@motionx.com and straight away you get an email with a link in it. if you open that email on your iphone and click on the link, it fires up motionX which then offers to import those waypoints. the only problem that remained was to convert the waypoints from KML to GPX format in the first place. this i was able to do using file > save > save my places as… in google earth to save KML files and then used this website to convert the KML files to GPX ones, which i emailed to the abovementioned address. the motionX help files say that their email import thingy will only handle 12 waypoints at a time so, for the first few KML files i exported from google earth, i stuck to this number. but, when i miscounted one time and got an email back from GPSimport@motionx.com which, when imported into motionX, contained 15 waypoints, i started being a bit more adventurous and converted the rest of my waypoints in batches of 20-30, which seemed to work fine.

it sounds a bit of a palaver but, once i got a rythm going, it probably took me about half an hour to import at least a couple of hundred waypoints into motionX. [export KML from google earth > convert to KML to GPX > email GPX to motionX > click link in email reply > OK import of waypoints into motionX]. if i’d had to enter all that info by hand, it would have taken me several days and would have been riddled with errors. try manually entering several hundred pairs of co-ords with six decimal places, without making any mistakes!

well, in this review, as in my usage of the app itself, i feel i’ve only scratched the surface here. i think this app is beautifully designed and incredible value for a measley £1,79. i’m so impressed with it that - even tho’ i got a cracked version of it for free - i’m actually going to buy it anyway.

the only slight caveat i have in the midst of all this praise, is that i havenae tested the GPS abilities of the app [and by extension the iphone itself] when i am away from a wifi signal and am thus just relying on the iphone’s GPS capabilities alone. i doubt it’ll be as accurate as my dedicated garmin but, with any luck it’ll be close enough.

COST: £1,79
RATING:

[EDIT:]

PS - i’ve got to say that, for such a lovely looking app, motionX-GPS has got to have one of the fugliest icons i’ve seen on an iphone. it’s incredible that the same people who came up with the interface in those screenshots above, would hide all that stylish design behind an icon that looks like this [it disnae actually look too bad at this size, but iphone-size, it’s really grotty looking:

i’ve promoted moitionX-GPS to my homescreen, but that feckin icon is really doing my head in :vomit:

not a new one, as such, but just a re-mention for pocket universe:

i reviewed this earlier in the thread. it’s another app which is greatly enhanced by the presence of the GPS/compass on the 3GS iphone. as i said then:

madra wrote:

obviously the app takes on a whole new level of sophistication, when installed on one of the new iphones, as it uses the GPS and compass to automatically adjust the display, as you move your iphone around. so you can pretty much use it as a HUD against the sky. but i think that, even in its slightly more limited operation on my ipod touch, it’s not bad for £1,79.

i’ve now been able to try this and it’s really cool to turn round in a circle and watch the stars wheel around on pocket universe’s screen so it always shows what’s [allegedly] right in front of you. i say ‘allegedly’ bacause, stupidly enough, i’ve not actually tried this outside, with a view of the sky yet, so i cannae vouch for its accuracy - any time i’ve thought to do it, it’s been too cloudy or raining. so until i have given it the ‘accuracy’ test, i’ll hold off on updating its score and adding that extra point.

i’ve been meaning to revive this thread for a while but, unfortunatley, along with my herman blog and my ranting blog, it’s turned into one of those things where the longer you leave it, the more catching up you have to do, so you put it off for another while….. and so on. :hmm:

however, i have been inspired by i5m recommending in this thread that i check out tapbots’ other apps [i already had convertbot and i’d just bought calcbot]

so let’s hear it for:

pastebot - clipboard utility

one of the things that frustrates me no end with iOS, is the fiddlyness involved in copying/pasting. if you want to copy more than one thing, from one app to another, you have to swing back and forth between the two apps, copying one item at a time and, of course, depending on what you’re pasting into in the second app [forum edit fields for example], you often find the first thing you pasted has vanished into the ether by the time you return to paste in the second.

on my laptop i’ve been a longtime user of the excellent [and free!] PTHpasteboard, so not having a multiple clipboard at my disposal on any mac i use makes me feel like i’m working with one hand tied behind my back. i’d never even contemplated that something this cool would appear on iOS, i just hoped that some day copying and pasting would be a lot less ‘sucky’.

enter pastebot - a clipboard manager for iOS that allows you to retain all those things you’ve copied for future reference. of course, due to the limitations of iOS itself, the procedure is not completely transparent as it is with PTHpasteboard in OSX; there every time you copy something it automatically gets added to the pasteboard stack. with pastebot in iOS, you copy something to the clipboard, then launch pastebot and that ‘thing’ is automatically added to pastebot’s clipboard stack. so not exactly seamless, as you have to go through a bit of a copy item01/launch pastebot/quit pastebot/copy item02… routine, but it’s not too painful and it does allow you to build up a nice stack of copied items, ready for pasting into wherever you want to paste them, from one central location, instead of jumping around from app to app.

clipboard stack in pastebot

that’s a great help, but where i think pastebot really shines, is in its managing of clipboard items and its integration with OSX. i’ll deal with those in order:

once items are in pastebot, you can edit them, give them names and move them about into folders - you’re limited to 99 items on pastebot’s main clipboard, but you can make as many folders as you want and move items into them, to free up space. these features are so handy that i’ve started using pastebot on my ipod as a kind of PIM like journler, yojimbo, macjournal et al. on desktop OSX.

edit clippings and/or organise them in folders

integration with OSX is also excellent. simply install the freebie pastebot sync on your mac. you’ll end up with an icon in your menubar. once you’ve paired your mac with your ipod/ipad/iphone, this icon turns blue. to get sommit from your mac to your ipod/ipad/iphone, all you have to do is make sure pastebot is open on your gadget and then copy something on your mac. you’ll get a brief glimpse of some ‘sync arrows’ spinning on paste sync’s icon and the item you copied will instantly appear in pastebot’s clipboard on your ipod/ipad/iphone.

pastebot sync menu

to go the other way, you simply select an item in pastebot which causes a button bar to appear beneath it. click on the ‘send’ icon and choose ‘paste to mac’. the item is automatically pasted into the current front application on your mac.

great stuff!

the other buttons which appear under a clipping allow you to move it to a folder [as mentioned above] or run a variety of text or image filters on it.

applying filters to text and image clippings

in summary, pastebot is an excellent app, which would probably be worth the £2,39 price of admission just for its multiple clipboard provision alone. add in the syncing and clipboard management [which, as i’ve said, makes it double as a PIM for your ipod/ipad/iphone] and the fact that it’s all wrapped up in a really lovely interface [typical of tapbot’s products] and you’ve got yourself a real bargain here. this is one of those rare apps that, within a couple of days of acquiring it, you start to wonder how you ever managed without it. i’m using it so much now, it’s actually in my dock on my home screen.

[apologies for the generic screengrabs by the way. for some reason my ipod seems to have lost the ability to do screengrabs. i hear the shutter sound but nothing appears in my photo albums :confused: ]

COST: £2,39
RATING:

mypantone - posh colour picker

anyone involved in the art world will know that pantone colours are the de facto standard for er… ‘standardising’ colours used in graphic design.

mypantone is an app which puts all these colours at your fingertips. so, armed with your ipod/iphone you should theoretically be able to identify and store away for future reference any nice colours you happen across, as you skip happily through the world.

i must fess up and say that i ‘acquired’ this app for free from a nefarious source, for a bit of a try-before-you-buy, as i think the £5,99 price tag is ridiculous for a glorified colour chart [in fact i’ve got a feeling that £5,99 might actually be a the sale price, coz i’m sure the app was £10,99 last time i looked! :loon: ].

in use, the app is [as i said above] basically a glorified colour picker. there are some nice graphics, showing an infinite [well, the size of the entire pantone collection anyway!] virtual pantone colour book - again familiar to oldschool graphic artists - through which you can flip to find the colour you’re interested in. you can view the chosen colour fullscreen, note down its pantone number and save it to your favourites [on a silly corkboard].

there’s one other interesting feature, whereby you can load an image and mypantone will ‘extract’ a colour palette from that [presumably selecting the 5 or 6 most prevalent colours]. you can also use a loupe to sample colours from the image and see the pantone equivalent. all fine and dandy but, when you get right down to it, not really anything that the eyedropper tool in any other colour picker couldnae do. there is also a camera button, which i presume allows you to photograph an object and then sample the colours from the photo. obviously i cannae try that, as i dinnae have an iphone.

i’ve not really used the app in anger, to be honest. so i’m not sure how accurate it would actually be. at the end of the day [as we all know from threads on here], colour matching digitally is a bit of a black art, which is affected by colour profiles, lighting conditions and the screen of the hardware used. i’m not convinced that either visually trying to match a digitally rendered colour with a real world ‘analogue’ object, or taking a photo with a cheapo phone camera and then sampling from that, is going to give a particularly accurate result. but i’m prepared to be shot down on this.

dinnae get me wrong. if you live and breathe pantone colours, then this app puts a complete wealth of information at your fingertips. however, my reservations about its day-to-day practicality lead me to suspect mypantone might be more of a vanity app than anything else; something that pretentious designers like to have on their iphones to impress their equally pretentious mates - but not really of much use in the ‘real world©’

does what it says on the tin, but i’ve got to knock a couple of stars off for the ridiculous purchase price

COST: £5,99 :wink:
RATING:

backgrounder - run multiple apps at once

one of the biggest bugbears people have about the iphoneOS is the ‘one app at a time’ limitation. a lot of us were surprised that the launch of the ipad didnae see a corresponding upgrade to the OS, allowing multiple apps to run at the same time.

backgrounder is an app for jailbroken ipods/iphones which allows you to do just that.

using backgrounder is simplicity itself. while in the app you wish to keep open, you press and hold the home button for a second. a dialogue then pops up, saying “backgrounding enabled”. you can now click on the home button again to go back to springboard and launch another app. the backgrounded app will keep running in the background.

image from dev site, as it’s not possible to screengrab whilst holding down the home button. in use, the dialogue actually appears on top of the app you’re using. not on a grey screen, as shown here:

sorry! - had to remove the screenshots as they were linked from a now defunct google code repo, which was causing an annoying login box to popup on the page!

to quit the backgrounded app, you click back on it again in springboard, to bring it to the fore, press and hold the home button for a second again until a dialogue pops up saying “backgrounding disabled”. now if you click the home button your app will quit as normal.

image from dev site, as it’s not possible to screengrab whilst holding down the home button. in use, the dialogue actually appears on top of the app you’re using. not on a grey screen, as shown here:

sorry! - had to remove the screenshots as they were linked from a now defunct google code repo, which was causing an annoying login box to popup on the page!

i’ve not used the app a huge amount; one major drawback is that all iphone apps are [through the limitations of the OS] currently designed so that they do not interact with each other. so even with backgrounder enabled, it’s not possible to pass data back and forward between apps. in effect, all backgrounder does is remove that slight delay while an app launches. still, for this reason i find it handy, when i’m using two apps at the same time and constantly flicking back and forth between them [eg: safari/mail, when reading emails and clicking on any links in them - such as forum notifications… or 2across/wikitap, while doing a crossword].

there are a wealth of options for configuring the app, such as setting the hotkey which triggers backgrounding, selecting apps which always background or never background and chosing whether or not to indicate currently backgrounded apps in springboard.

plenty of options:

note the option to add a badge to the icon to indicate a backgrounded app [you can see it on wikitap in the 2nd pic]:

i’ve not encountered any problems using the app either; no crashes and, as long as you keep a weather eye on your available RAM [see my review on SBSettings] and dinnae go mad by keeping half a dozen apps running at the same time, it seems to work fine.

so, the proof of concept works. now we’ve just got to wait for apple to catch-up and bring multi-tasking to the iphoneOS. then developers can start taking advantage of the feature and allowing apps to talk to each other. until then, backgrounder will remain of limited use - through no fault of its own.

TYPE: jailbroken only
COST: FREE
RATING: