Tag Archives: iPod Touch

Great unit conversion app for the iPhone OS

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On the Mac, I love using Apple’s unit converter Dashboard widget. I have wanted something like that for my iPhone, but I haven’t seen anything that looked as easy to use… until now.

Tapbots has released their new application Convertbot [app store link] – and it is great. You can tell they really focused on the user experience before they ever started up Xcode. You’ll use the (now almost instinctive in humans) iPod touch wheel motion to select the conversion units for whatever you’re converting. Then, you tap on the read-out to bring up a number pad for entering what you need to convert. That’s about it.

Tapbots has a great demo on their Convertbot page. I encourage you to actually watch their demo movie rather than just the animated iPhone on their site. The animation seemed confusing to me at first, but their demo explains everything and really shows how easy to use Convertbot is.

The only fault I can find with this app is that it seems like it should start up faster than it does. It may be waiting to update currency exchange rates before displaying the interface. Don’t get me wrong, though, it doesn’t take as long as some games do – I can’t count to “Three-Mississippi” before it is ready.

Apple Keynote ’09

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Apple improved Keynote this year with the usual supplement of new transitions that we’ve seen over the past year as Steve Jobs has been beta-testing this application while presenting at key Apple events.

Magic Move is a very slick new feature that will animate movement of anything from the current slide to the next slide. Just copy the same object to your next slide and place it in whatever new position you’d like it to be in and set Magic Move as your slide transition. Keynote does the rest and your object (or objects) will move across the screen as you switch from one slide to the next.

But, the coolest new feature is the 99¢ Keynote Remote application for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It works a lot like the iTunes Remote application that Apple released in 2008, except that it controls your presentation and lets you view your current and next slide in the palm of your hand when in landscape mode. In portrait mode, Keynote Remote lets you see your current slide and with notes. Swipes of a finger control your flow through your deck of slides.

There is a free 30-day trial of the iWork ’09 office suite that includes Keynote.