bruceb

Anyone know of an iPhone mail client that lets you choose the address to send mail from? I've got a couple I keep for specialty purposes and it would be very handy to be able to dump them all into one mailbox. GMail makes it tidy to choose a reply address, but I have yet to see an iPhone OS client that'll do it. Am I missing one?
 

This odd device works very much the way the ad copy says it will. I'm quite pleased. 

Now I'm officially signed up for Weight Watchers. I must say that their online tools are now very impressive, and their mobile page outstanding on my iPod Touch. Looking forward to progress. :)
 

...an actual, honest-to-goodness, turn-based strategy game, called Uniwar.

It's not a super-complicated game, but I've found it really engaging. It feels very much like the sort of game I was playing in the year or two before discovering D&D, a bit like some of the more complex Microgames with options for bigger maps. The animation is fun, the display of necessary data is clear, and the music's quite good.

Here's a review.

A tip of the hat to mysticalforest for a twitter about this. Turns out you can go to the iTunes app store and get Kindle for iPhone as a freebie. You fire it up, sign into Amazon with it, and then go shop at the Amazon Kindle store via whatever browser suits you. Sales are via the 1-click system, and whatever you've acquired is synced to the iPhone (or iPod Touch, in my case) the next time you run the iPhone app.

Seems to work, and the typography isn't bad. More thoughts as I poke at it.

I do remain interested in not having a lot of my assets tied up in DRM schemes, as I posted not very long ago. But there's some things for which this may well be a convenient way to go. I shall see.

Last night I asked about places in which to dump and sort notes. I have done some more poking around, and it looks like Evernote is the answer, or at least an answer of a very good sort, to my wishes. It's a free-form holding facility with support for tagging out the wazoo and amazingly good searching, including surprisingly good text recognition within images. It allows for input and retrieval via web browser, desktop apps for Mac and Windows, and apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch and Windows Mobile.

I've dumped a few odds and ends into it so far, and the results seem very good indeed.

More news as it happens.

I have a great fondness for apps that do one thing really well. Check this out:



Big Stopwatch (iTunes store link) does that, and nothing but. You get the numerical countdown, the display on the very large notional dials, and the condensed view in upper right. One tap starts it, one tap pauses it, one tap resumes or resets depending on where you tap it. (The word "RESET" appears in the upper right dial.) It keeps time once started even if you leave it for some other app.

I'm very fond of the typography and presentation, which reminds of old-school aviation dials somehow.

Good stuff! If you need a timing app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, I recommend this one. Oh, and it's free.

On a whim I took a flyer on Beejive, and in early testing it's working great. It promises to catch incoming messages and provide a mail notification when Beejive isn't in the foreground, and it does this, so that I get notifications of what's waiting for me when I bring it back up. And tests show that friends see me as continuously connected rather than on, off, on, off, which I'd been wondering about and hoping to avoid.

So it's doin' good, this evening at least.

Any of you used Beejive? Does its background-updating approach actually work? I'd like to have a Touch IM app that could, one way or another, but don't quite feel like gambling so purely sight unseen.

I discovered a pattern in my division of tasks/apps between desktop and handheld recently, and once I realized I was doing it subconsciously I set about doing it more intentionally. I'm gathering more and more of the little spur-of-the-moment time-filling things onto the handheld.

I don't spend a lot of time pondering this myself or whining about it to others, but I really do sometimes feel the isolation of being almost entirely housebound very strongly. I'm working on improving my ability to get out and around, but the process is inevitably both long and slow. I've been poking at different ways of giving myself more time away from the desk and chair, even when that just means going into another room for a while.

Having social networking apps along with reading and games and such on the handheld contributes to this. I can get away from the desk and still not be isolated, but I'm getting to be in touch in different ways. (If I could move my IMing over there I probably would, but not being able to leave it running in the background makes it not suitable for this kind of thing. Maybe in future OS updates....) In turn, I'm getting better focus on what I'm doing when at the desk, and clearing more notional space for the writing work I really yearn to do.

(I should also pause here to note that I've been freshly reminded almost daily how very fortunate and blessed I am. There are a lot of people out there with hardships worse than mine and none of my advantages in raising, cultural position, friends, and so on. So I'm trying to keep the gripes in proportioned, and directed more toward "What can I do to make life better?" than looping complaint.)

Are there utilities that let you adjust the lists of things to be synced without actually having the docked unit currently connected?