Blake Helms | Birmingham, Alabama

I haven’t writ­ten many iOS app reviews lately but every now and then and app comes along that I just have to tell peo­ple about. That app is called Down­cast, a pod­cast down­loader. Now I know many read­ers are prob­a­bly think­ing “Why do I need a pod­cast down­loader? I have iTunes.” I thought the same thing when I first heard of it, but I was wrong. Down­cast has many fea­tures that really sets it apart from iTunes and makes it a fan­tas­tic iOS app.

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Synch­ing

Synch­ing is where Down­cast really shines. It lever­ages Apple’s iCloud ser­vice to allow you to sync pod­casts, set­tings and most impor­tantly episode infor­ma­tion such as play posi­tion between all of your iOS devices. The play posi­tion sync­ing is huge for me. It allows me to lis­ten to a pod­cast on my iPad pause and fin­ish lis­ten­ing on my iPhone. The key is their imple­men­ta­tion is com­pletely trans­par­ent and is basi­cally just mag­i­cal. It’s much akin to Amazon’s Kindle’s whis­per sync. The best way I can describe it is it just works! You never have to think about how the sausage is get­ting made. iOS devel­oper should take note, this is how every app should han­dle syncing.

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Auto­matic Downloads

Another great fea­ture is auto­matic down­loads. Down­cast allows you to select the fre­quency of these down­loads. So whether you want to get new down­loads every day or even every hour it will auto­mat­i­cally work for you. Again all of this is done trans­par­ently in the background.It’s great for when you’re on the go and not near your com­puter because one of the promises of iOS 5 is PC free, so why should you have to plug up to iTunes to get new podcasts?

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Ges­tures

One of the much-hyped fea­tures is ges­tures which allows you to con­trol the inter­face with­out tak­ing the phone out of your pocket. This is a fea­ture that I have not used much because I use the con­trols on the head­phones remote which also works with this app.

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Every­thing Else

Other fea­tures include a sleep timer, speed con­trols and pod­cast direc­tory. It also sup­ports password-protected feeds. Down­loads can be resumed and pod­casts can be streamed while down­load­ing allow­ing you to star lis­ten­ing immediately!

The devel­op­ers have really paid atten­tion to details right down to the pleas­ant sound effects when synching

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What I’d like to see

Over­all this is a fan­tas­tic app and I think it’s only going to get bet­ter over time. In my opin­ion the iPad inter­face could still use a lit­tle more tight­en­ing and pol­ish. It needs that lit­tle inde­scrib­able some­thing to really push it over the top and make it a fan­tas­tic UI much like reader. The iPhone inter­face how­ever is about as good as you can get!

Another fea­ture I would like to see but don’t believe will be here any­time soon is sup­port for audi­ble audio­books. The audi­ble iPhone app is okay but I think that the fea­tures that down­cast is using with pod­cast could really shine with audio­books. Unfor­tu­nately the DRM and audi­ble will prob­a­bly pre­vent this for the per­ceiv­able future.

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Down­cast is a uni­ver­sal app avail­able in the App Store for $1.99. If you are at all inter­ested in lis­ten­ing to pod­casts it is a must-have app for all of your iOS devices.

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I wanted to cre­ate a playlist which included both “Blues” and “R&B/Soul” but I didn’t think it was pos­si­ble until I learned this trick. When you cre­ate a Smart Playlist in iTunes you are able to add rules to build it. The playlist can either match all or any. This setup does not allow you to include mul­ti­ple gen­res. While creating/editing a Smart Playlist hold down the Option key, this changes the ‘+’ (plus) in the rules option to a ‘…’. Click on the new “…” but­ton it cre­ates a new rule option that allows you to choose either ALL or ANY of the same type.

A few days ago Google re-released their highly antic­i­pated Gmail iOS app. After open­ing it you’ll quickly real­ize that its not the highly pol­ished app that peo­ple were wait­ing for. Infact it’s noth­ing more than a wrap­per around the stan­dard web inter­face. Granted Google is a web com­pany but they should make a com­mit­ment to be good cit­i­zens when writ­ing apps for other plat­forms. When Google Chrome was first released the Mac and Linux ver­sions were delayed because they chose to imple­ment them natively instead of using a com­mon run­time. They wanted to make sure that Chrome per­formed well on each sys­tem. When it comes to mobile devel­op­ment they do not seem to take the same care to make sure the user expe­ri­ence is of the high­est qual­ity on each device.

It seems lately Google has been putting out sub­par prod­ucts. I believe Google should make a company-wide com­mit­ment to build apps to the high­est stan­dards on each plat­form both desk­top and mobile.

While using Siri on my iPhone 4S in the car today I inad­ver­tently dis­cov­ered a secu­rity hole. I use a pin code lock on my phone and for some func­tions Siri hon­ors the lock but for oth­ers it does not. I am able to send and read new unread texts, place call, cre­ate and read cal­en­dar appoint­ments and most impor­tantly retrieve con­tact infor­ma­tion out of my address book (includ­ing addresses). These are not huge secu­rity breaches for most peo­ple but for some this could be very valu­able info and defeats the pin locl. Apple needs to reeval­u­ate their strat­egy when it comes to retriev­ing info from your infor­ma­tion stores with Siri.

Steve Jobs 1955–2011

Few peo­ple have had such a last­ing imact on the world as Steve Jobs. Some of my fond­est mem­o­ries in ele­men­tary school were going to the com­puter lab and learn­ing on Apple IIs and later on the Mac­in­tosh. Those early expe­ri­ences shaped who I am today. It instilled in me a love of tech­nol­ogy that even­tu­ally led me to become a pro­gram­mer.  Today my life is sur­rounded by the legacy of Steve Jobs. Rarely am I more than an arms length away from the won­der­ful devices that Steve’s vision has given us.  His drive for excel­lence is an inspi­ra­tion to me. He truly drove the human race for­ward. I will miss you Steve.

Ever­note, you are so close to per­fect yet so far away. I am still search­ing for the per­fect all in one note app and I keep falling short. Every time I think I can make this my go to app I find another flaw that moves it out of the realm of my work­flow. I’ve cre­ated a list of fea­tures that I would love to see in Evernote

• Audio
  • Built in audio recorder in the Mac client
  • Speech recog­ni­tion
  • Notes synced with audio
• Text Capa­bil­i­ties
  • Rich text in the iOS apps
  • Mark­down support
• Every­thing else
  • Encrypted note­books
  • Video sup­port

Let me break it down like a fraction.

Audio

Built in audio record­ing in the Mac client

Really Ever­note? It’s in the iOS app! Can’t a devel­oper spend a cou­ple of hours and copy and paste the code? I shouldn’t have to use a sec­ond app for some­thing so simple.

Speech Recog­ni­tion

Audio notes would be so much more use­ful if they were search­able! This one I will con­cede is a lit­tle tough. There are a cou­ple of third party tools like Dial2Do but they only allow 30 sec­onds of record­ing. That’s not help­ful unless I’m only using it to tran­scribe the legal terms at the end of an injury lawyer com­mer­cial. I wouldn’t even mind if it had some type of seam­less inte­gra­tion with a tool like Dragon Dic­tate. Auto­mat­i­cally sync over to Dic­ta­tion and then send the trans­la­tion back. Take the Nuance CEO out for drinks, then men­tion it to him. Offer him some of your “the­o­ret­i­cal Inter­net dol­lars.” Lay­out the utopian future he’ll be cre­at­ing as a part­ner with Evernote.

Notes synced with audio

This would almost make up for the lack of speech recog­ni­tion. It’s in One Note and makes that prod­uct one of the best pieces of soft­ware ever to come out of Red­mond. I also have this capa­bil­ity with my Pulse Smart­pen (but that data is stripped when I sync to Ever­note). When using One Note I would often make notes for myself for the express pur­pose of using the notes “audio bookmarks.”

Text Capa­bil­i­ties

Rich text in the iOS apps

This is a huge one! The spit and bail­ing wire method of attach­ing adden­dums to a rich text note doesn’t cut it, this is a note not a Con­gres­sional farm sub­sidy appro­pri­a­tions bill. iOS needs to be treated as a first class cit­i­zen in the Ever­note ecosys­tem. I would love to use the check­box fea­ture on the go which is when I nor­mally find myself mak­ing check­lists. I’ll con­cede the iPhone to an extent, but not the iPad. This is 2011, we’ve put a man on the moon or at least made a very con­vinc­ing show of it. Throw a cou­ple of devel­op­ers in a room with a fridge stocked with Moun­tain Dews and let’s get this knocked out in a week­end! A quick fix to this prob­lem would be Mark­down sup­port, see below.

Mark­down Support

This one is a lit­tle less main­stream than the rest but I have the con and I’m steer­ing this blog post where I want to go. In fact this post was writ­ten in Mark­down! Sim­ply put Mark­down is a bril­liant “writ­ing syn­tax” devel­oped by John Gru­ber. It allows you to do all the basic for­mat­ting you would expect in HTML in a sim­ple and easy to read for­mat which can eas­ily be con­verted to com­pli­ant XHTML. All of this allows me to not have to worry how a note is going to appear being copied and pasted around as there is no com­pli­cated styling.

Every­thing Else

Encrypted Note­books

How did this get left off the nap­kin at the Chili’s where you decided to build Ever­note? If I’m going to use Ever­note as my doc­u­ment repository/digital brain I need a lit­tle secu­rity. I would love to have my tax doc­u­ments and pay stubs a few clicks a way but I need to know that the data is safe and encrypted.

Video sup­port

Ever­note already sup­ports mul­ti­ple file types, the iOS apps have cam­era sup­port and there is an iSight note type in the Mac app. Why doesn’t any of these sup­port video?!

I really like NASA’s photo of the day so I threw together a quick Automa­tor Action to make it easy to set your back­ground. I thought some other peo­ple might find it useful.

Down­load