I have been threatening to get a tablet for awhile. Of course, as one might expect, an iPad has been the object of desire. This remains the case but not because I see this Android experience as a failure. Using a tablet has proven the tablet form factor for me. Even though I’m pecking this out on a soft keyboard which leaves a lot to be desired. Part of that’s probably due to the compromises that brought this €175 price tag. I accept that. The smart text that accompanies my typing just doesn’t seem as smart as on iOS which is down to UX design. It’s good but just not there yet. As an example, typing this I miss the space bar a lot and would expect that to be handled but it isn’t. There’s a good blog post by Benjamin Tseng doing the rounds on Twitter today (actually it was ages ago as I’ve been slow to get this finished). It talks about text and cursor selection positioning on Android versus iOS where the author prefers Android but I’m just not finding that same experience. Again, some of that is probably down to the capacitive screen and so not an entirely fair comparison. It’s enough of a pain in the arse that I’m now completing this, quite sometime after first starting this post, on a laptop.
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In the iOS Productivity Apps quick post I mentioned one app from Ricoh: Image to Text OCR and I felt that I needed to discuss it a bit further because it really is a great little app that I think might be quite under rated. When I first went looking for OCR apps I was looking to solve a rather annoying little problem: I’ve been working with Sharepoint Workflows at work and I wanted to document the rules that I was creating. I thought this would be as easy as a copy/paste of the rules from Sharepoint Designer where I was creating them. Alas, no. You can’t select the text of the rules in the workflow wizard. So I decided to look for an elaborate technical solution rather than type them out by hand.
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I’ve been in a couple of retail outlets over the past few days and am taken aback by how little effort is put into either selling or upselling. I’m taken aback because we here so much about recessionary times and how hard the retail sector has been hit. This is a bit of a long post as I’m going through the scenarios. Here’s what I’m talking about:
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This isn’t a particularly deep and insightful post, more of a share. These are the apps that I have in my iPhone Productivity folder currently. Feel free to suggest others.
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I’ve followed the GTD threads on sites like lifehacker.com for awhile but was never really able for the minimalism and perhaps the discipline required to follow true GTD. I had found a decent task manager in The Hit List but the hot and cold behaviour of the developer behind it means it’s a tool that I don’t feel I can depend on. It’s also Apple only (iOS & OS X) and I wanted one tool for everything. Having a hunt around I came across Nozbe. My first reaction was ‘Meh’ but a second look made me realise what a great app it is. This isn’t going to be an in-depth review and discussion of GTD; I’m not up to that :) What this is, is a look at how I’m using it.
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