Geoff's Random Thoughts

After my switch to twitterific a couple of weeks ago, I had a problem with an in app purchase. Which was detailed on this blog as a problem with the app store process here http://geoffsrandomthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/07/itunes-store-bug-and-in-app-purchase.html I fired off emails to Twitterific and Apple support and Twitterific came back with a far more timely and useful response that if I redid the purchase with the same iTunes account, I wouldn't be charged again. The action of re-purchasing the in app upgrade informed me that I'd already purchased it, so wouldn't be charged again. Unfortunately Apple came back with a very generic answer which didn't help me one bit. I can't fault apple for this for the simple reason that there are 200,000 apps in the store and they can't know each one intimately, but there should be a requirement on their part to have enough information about each an every app. One of the things that Apple Store support pointed out wa...

Well, the big announcement came and went, Evernote flipped it's lid. Unfortunately what Evernote unveiled was a formalization and expansion of the publication of the products which link into Evernote. There were already links to a lot of these products on the Evernote website and the only expansion was the publishing of notebooks to be downloaded into your own Evernote database. This sounds very negative, but please put this against the expectation built up by Evernote as a company to announcing what is almost an AppStore. This was like the expectation that builds up to Apple's WWDC or the difficult second album for a band which kicked off it's career with a million selling debut. I was expecting a shift in direction, or a mass expansion in functionality or the acquisition of a company like DropBox. Don't get me wrong, Evernote is an excellent product and the API allows developers to hook into the model easily which allows them to profit from Evernote's 3 ...

Over the last 6 months, applications like Evernote and Egretlist have become a larger and larger part of my life as I search for my ultimate GTD (Getting Things Done) setup. One of the issues I've had was that while I use a notebook at work, another at home and a phone the rest of the time, the iPhone doesn't have a large enough screen to use for looking at content regularly. When the iPad came out I was sceptical, I still don't like the app store lock in, but getting hands on with a colleague's for 5 minutes allowed me to 'Get' the iPad. Beyond GTD, I wanted to be able to read on the go, I have some dead time which could be used to catch up on articles. 1 week in. The iPad has barely left my side, I take it everywhere I can reasonably be expected to get value out of it. At Work, it's been especially useful for notes and reading. My Macbook Pro has been a little neglected although it still has tasks I can't do on the iPad and is the centre of...

I recently bought an iPad, which led to me downloading lots of iPad apps to find the best. The flip side of this was that due to the nature of iTunes, I ended up with those compatible for iPhone also being synced across onto my phone. This was an inconvenience, so I unticked the box on the apps tab of both my iPhone and ipad so that new apps weren't synced. Job done I thought. This week, I downloaded feedle and it didn't take long to set it up, but the following day feedler wasn't there when I went looking for it. I put it down to a glitch and re-synced it again, luckily setup was easy. It was only this morning that it twigged with me what was happening. Tweetdeck crashed on me once too often this morning, so I downloaded Twitterific which I love version 2 of on the iPhone and after confirming I liked it, I purchased the upgrade to premium which was an in app purchase. A little later, I synced with my Macbook Pro and after picking the iPad up again, I soon realize...