FileMaker was gracious enough to provide TiPb with a walkthrough of their just-released Bento for iPhone and iPod touch ($4.99 – iTunes link). Coming as it does from a wholly-owned Apple subsidiary, Bento shows every bit as much polish as the built-in iPhone apps. Features include:
25 pre-designed, ready-to-use templates that can be quickly customized with a few taps.
Create your own forms to organize virtually any data on an iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap to call a contact, view a Web site, send an email or display a map all while in a Bento library or collection.
Manage anything from contacts and club members to projects, parties, medical bills and vehicle maintenance.
View libraries and collections, create new records, edit details, sort data, modify forms – even use the iTunes-style search to find information quickly on the go.
Select from 15 field types including text, numbers, choice, checkbox, media, time, date, durations, currency, rating, address, phone number, email, URL and IM Account.
Wireless Synchronization between Bento for iPhone and iPod Touch and Bento 2 for Mac
Works with built-in iPhone apps Contacts, Safari, Phone Dialing, Mail and Google Maps
An updated version of Bento 2 for the Mac is shipping at the same time, which is required for the sync to function. There’s no support for multiple iPhone to Bento 2 Mac sync yet, though you can manually sync one device after the other. Likewise, Apple doesn’t allow hooks into the Calendar (yet?!) but for things like Contacts, Bento for iPhone’s ability to mirror the built in Contacts database, and then transparently superset it with extra data (i.e. you could add a star rating to all your friends) is very impressive.
Most impressive, however, is the typical Apple-esque ease of use. Bento does a lot of heavy lifting so users, whether exclusively on the iPhone, or syncing between iPhone and desktop, don’t have to.
If you have any need at all to organize personal data on your iPhone, give Bento for iPhone a look and let us know what you think!
We’ve expressed concern before that, with the arrival of Push Notification, the iPhone’s built in alert system, especially the modal text boxes, may not be a user-friendly solution. There have been a couple creative solutions to this problem already on the Jailbreak side, but GriP takes a rather novel approach: it aims to be Growl (the well known Mac OS X global notification system – Wikipedia link) for iPhone — hence the name.
Personally, I’ve always found Growl to be a little “floating” for my tastes and preferred what looks like more “grounded” approaches in Google Android and especially Palm Pre, but hands down anything at this point might be better than Apple’s built in version.
Efiko Software, the developer behind which we remember fondly for providing much needed UI relief to our old Palm OS devices, has produced a very interesting looking quick tweeting application for Jailbroken iPhones called qTweeter.
It works almost magically: just wipe your finger down from the very top status bar in an application and a quick Twitter window slides down and the keyboard slides up to overlay your screen. If you’re in iPod and want to tweet the music you’re listening to, if you’re in Safari and want to tweet a link you’re reading, a quick button press auto-fills the details in your tweet for you.
It can alternatively — or simultaneously — update your Facebook status as well.
This means no exiting one app, launching another, waiting for load, waiting to launch entry dialogs, etc. when you want to tweet something. Just drag and go.
These kinds of apps show that, even post iPhone 3.0, until Apple surfaces more API’s and figures out how to allow better cross- and multi-app functionality while retaining security, there’ll still be a vibrant community of Jailbreak developers — and some amazing software to go along with it.
Available for trial on Cydia, and can be unlocked fully via donation.
TruPhone let us know that they’ve updated their iPhone VoIP app to version 3.0 and called up some major enhancements along the way. Among them:
TruPhone, previously a WebApp, has now gone native for better speed and performance
It’s new UI makes the app much slicker – specifically the integrated IM functionality
Oh, and the call quality has been “radically improved”
Other highlights include:
integrated messaging tool unifies all IM communities in a single place, meaning users can manage all their IM communication from a single page within the application – eliminating the need to constantly jockey between different applications or even different pages within an application. IM services currently supported include Skype, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk.
SplashData let us know that, with the release of SplashPhoto and SplashNotes, they’ve finished porting their well-known suite of mobile applications to the iPhone:
SplashPhoto features easy sync with the desktop companion, and integration with Flickr and Picasa for photo sharing. SplashNotes sync with the desktop is even better because it’s easy to take notes on a laptop and then take them with you on your iPhone — or vice versa.
Check out their complete — and extensive — lineup of apps at SplashData.com, including one of their favorites, Birthdays:
It tells you how many days are left before your friends’ birthdays. It automatically pulls in birthdays from your contacts.
If you’ve tried any yourself, drop a us a comment below and let us know how it worked for you!
Currencies is a simple yet gorgeous currency converter that lets you quickly and easily find out how much that sandwich at Heathrow airport will really cost you in good old US greenbacks. (Hint: not cheap!)
Developer Luc Vandal shared his favorite feature with us, and we have to admit it’s ours as well:
there are no useless buttons. Just tap on a field, select currency or enter amount and everything gets updated on the fly. No Done button, no OK button, etc. Want to make sure you have the latest rates? Just shake to refresh and amounts are updated almost instantly.
He’s right; it works as good as it looks. Which brings us to the UI design, done by Cocoai’s Sebastiaan de With. His growing reputation is well deserved. Small but delightful little touches like the exposed electronics when rearranging the currency fields is especially artistic and appreciated (see above).
Who would have thought conversion apps would be leading the quality charge on the App Store?
Yesterday we posted that Quickoffice Mobile Suite was (finally!) available in the iTunes App Store. Well, our good friend Matt Miller from sibling site NokiaExperts went one step further and provided a great overview via his ZDNet column.
After a couple hours of usage, I have to say Quicksheet is quite good while Quickword needs a couple of immediate updates.
Why does Matt feel this way? Check out his complete post for details as well as a comprehensive image gallery and video.
It must be music day here at TiPb. Sonos, which we reviewed late last year, just let us know that they’ve updated their Sonos Controller App for the iPhone, adding a few nifty features which, when combined with iTunes music now being completely DRM-free, adds a whole heap of functionality to an already automagic system:
Wake to music with Sonos – Create unique playlists and set wake-up alarms with your iPhone for every room with a Sonos
Fall asleep to music with Sonos — Set timers for any room to turn off the music automatically
Totally computer-free setup – Search for and set up network music folders without touching a computer
It’s a free update, so if you’re rocking a Sonos system, be sure to head on over to the iTunes App Store and pick it up.
You’re Smule and you’ve already released the innovative and acclaimed Ocarina app for the iPhone. What do you do for an encore? Why a Leaf Trombone, of course, a “massively multi-player musical game for the iPhone and iPod touch”, now available for $0.99 via the iTunes App Store.
Playing Leaf Trombone is easy: blow into your iPhone’s microphone (or, in Touch mode, simply touch the screen) and press down on the leaf to play a note. Slide your finger towards you – you’ll hear the pitch get higher, just like a real trombone Choose your favorite song from Leaf Trombone’s library of songs, right from your iPhone or iPod touch!
If you’re trying it out, let us know in the comments. Maybe we can get a TiPb reader band together!
Cali Lewis and GeekBrief.tv interview Greg Grunberg of Heroes, Lost, Alias, and Felicity fame who’s conceptualized Yowza!! A location-aware, iPhone specific coupon app. Participating businesses can use a simple back-end web system to set up discount offers which are then displayed on the iPhone app based on current location and/or deliberate search. iPod touch users get a local storage option, and Grunberg announces a special holiday surprise towards the end of the video as well.
It’s a trifle long, but interesting to hear both how the app came to life, and how the iPhone can be used to save money and, of course, revolutionize the world…
