Majority of us when given a business card exchange pleasantries then tuck the card away in our wallet or other form of business card holder never to be seen again. This is exactly what I do which I find a complete waist and not a smart way in todays times to file contact information. So, I thought I would try out a few business card scanner apps for the iPhone. The best I found after reviewing a number of different apps was WorldCard Mobile. The app is extremely easy to use and recognises the various aspects of the business card with great accuracy.
To scan a new card to your iPhone/iPods contacts is simple:
1. From the main screen press the 
icon
2. A listing of tips to increase the accuracy is displayed. Press OK to continue or Don’t Show Again to not be notified of these tips in future
3. At this point you can simply line up the business card within the guidelines and press the 
button to capture the card. However, a great feature included in this app is the Anti-Shake Mode capture. Line up the card within the guidelines, press the 
button and the app will wait until the camera is steady enough to take an accurate snapshot of the card.
4. Once a snapshot of the card has been taken, simply click the Recognize button and the app will scan the acquired image for contact information
5. A new contact record will be displayed containing the acquired information from the card snapshot. Add to or edit this information as required then press the Export button to create a new contact in your iPhone/iPods contact list
There are a number of business card scanner apps in the App Store but personally I found the speed and accuracy of WorldCard Mobile exceeded that of the other apps that I compared.
(Test Case: iPhone 3GS w/ iOS4 to Windows 7 Laptop)
Yahoo! have become the first service to offer free video calls from iOS devices to non-iOS devices such as a desktop computer or (soon) Android smartphone. The call process is similar to that of FaceTime or placing a Skype voice call and can be initiated or received on either device. The process of making a video call is as simple as selecting an online contact and pressing the video call (webcam) icon or accepting the call if the call has been initiated from another device.
Sending Video Call Request
Receiving Video Call Request
The video quality is nowhere near that of FaceTime, but the app does have the advantages of; working not just on Wifi but also on 3G, it is available on all iOS4 devices not just iPhone 4 and iPod Touch Gen 4 and is not limited by only allowing iOS to iOS video calls. This app has taken a huge step in minimising the current proprietary nature of iPhone video calling (ie: FaceTime only works for iOS device to iOS device).
One thing to note is that the app currently does not seem to be able to accept calls from the Mac OS X version of Yahoo! Messenger. We must remember that this is the first app to successfully provide this type of service and I am sure future updates will improve and strengthen the service. Well done Yahoo!
There are a number excellent computer control iPhone/iPod Touch apps out there that come in various forms and have a multitude of amazing features. But… these apps all come at a price. For the user who simply wants to control their mouse and keyboard from there iPhone/iPod Touch for FREE, there is TouchMouse.
TouchMouse from Logitech allows you to control your computers mouse and keyboard in three easy steps:
1. Download and install the Logitech TouchMouse Server computer application (www.logitech.com/touchmouse)
- The server app is available for Windows XP/Vista/7 and OS X
2. Download the TouchMouse iPhone/iPod Touch app from the App Store.
3. Open TouchMouse on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app will find any available computers on the same network that have the TouchMouse Server application installed.
Connect and enjoy!
The app has many options including; two finger scrolling, tracking and scrolling speeds and a nice settings for prohibiting your device to go into sleep mode.
Considering that this is a WordPress blog, I thought that I would do my first iPhone app review on the WordPress app (recently released WordPress 2). I am writing this post from the application on my iPhone and I intend to keep them short as the title suggests. (Inline images added through WordPress Admin)
The app is quite simple and well set out for ease of navigation. The setup is as simple as inputting your blogs web address, username and password. The app contains three sections; Comments, Posts and Pages.
The comments section allows you to approve, unapprove or edit user comments. The posts and pages sections allow you to review, add or delete posts or pages and their content.
Overall the app works well and is extremely easy to use. I can see this app being quite handy for posting on the run or when you just don’t want to sit in front of your computer. A couple of things that I can think of to improve the app would be; the ability to add a hyperlink to a post or page and the ability to add inline images into posts or pages.
The app did crash on me once while I was adding a category but reopening the app recovered my unsaved post as per the pic below…
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