Month: June 2011

Well, two apps in one month. This one is Nearest Contacts, a travel-related app for iPhone and iPad.

Nearest Contacts delivers a list of your Address Book contacts, sorted by how near they are to you (or to some other point that you choose).

What’s it good for? First, when you’re on the road, it’s a quick reminder of which of your friends, family and colleagues are nearby. That’s handy.

But Nearest Contacts really shines when you use your Address Book to record your favorite restaurants, hotels, and other points of interest. If you’re like us, this kind of information, if it gets recorded at all, tends to be randomly distributed across notes, calendars and what-not. But your iPhone’s address book works great for this, having space for addresses, phone numbers, URLs, and your own notes.

So get in the habit of using your address book to remember your favorite sites, and then use Nearest Contacts to help you find them when you happen to be in the area.

Visit the App Store and snag a copy.

The aforementioned Any Day Journal (for iPhone) is now up to version 1.1, with a website and everything.

The changes are in the interest of making the user experience more efficient: fewer touches or other actions are needed to get the most common tasks done. I’m quite pleased with the improvements.

An example: in version 1.0, after adding a photo to the journal, you’d add a caption by tapping an Edit button at the top of the screen, then a “disclosure” button to the right of the photo, and finally tapping the text area of the resulting screen to bring up the keyboard.

In version 1.1, you simply touch the space to the right of the photo (which is where the caption appears) and start typing. That’s one touch instead of three, but the real difference is at once more subtle and more important: you directly touch the thing you want to change (the caption area) rather than touching a sequence of control buttons. That’s an essential aspect of the iPhone’s touch interface, and it’s not just fewer touches, but more intuitive ones.

Been thinking of starting a journal? Today is a good day for it.

An iPhone app developer, that is. I’ve been working on an iPhone app for the last couple of months, as a way of learning Objective-C (the language of iPhone apps) and Cocoa Touch (the application framework). The app is Any Day Journal, a (surprise!) journaling app.

Try it; you’ll like it.