Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chad’s Pick: Notes

Chad’s pick of the week has to be the built-in iPhone Notes app. With the iPhone 3.0 software update, the Notes application has become much more useful; spotlight search, in-line delete, landscape and syncing has bumped Evernote for tasks (using the Autofocus system) and is very simple to use. Couple this with the built in ability to email your notes, you have one killer-app! [Built in]

Chris’ Pick: Voice Memo

My pick of the week is the Voice Memo app in iPhone 3.0. From the early days of my Palm Zire, I always liked having a voice recording app. I felt it was useful to be able to jot down a quick note or htought, rather than typing it out (and especially if you are driving and can’t type!). As soon as I got my iPhone, I purchased a voice memo app, and now Apple has included one. True, it doesn’t offer all of the accoutrements that some do (voice to text, wifi synching, etc) but it is a nice feature to include, and I find myself using it on almost a daily basis. Now if only they made it able to record phone calls. [Built in]

James’ Pick: Google Sync

In my upcoming job change, I will be losing the free Exchange server I was using to house my contacts and calendar. Enter Google Sync. With free Exchange connection for push calendar and contacts, I am able to safely save my data in the cloud. [Web link]

Justin’s Pick: E*TRADE Mobile Pro

I’ve using this app for little over a month now and love it. I find the user interface design to be very intuitive, especially with all the functionality that is packed into it. Also, a recent update has now added push notifications for stock and account alerts which makes it even more useful. You can do almost everything on that app that you can do from the computer like trade stocks, view streaming real time quotes, transfer money, view market and stock news, and much more! To sum it up, if you have an Etrade account this is a must have app. [Free - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick: VLCRemote

This is a very nifty app for those of you that enjoy watching videos on your PC or Mac. VLCRemote controls VLC player via WiFi (my mac was using a LAN line, but it’s on the same network). The app lest you control all the basics, plus view your playlist, utilize different skip speeds, and use an IMDB lookup on selected playlist items. This is a must have app for an VLC user! [$2.99 - iTunes link]

Rene’s Pick: Camera Zoom v1.1

Not withstanding the conspiratorial selection of multiple built-in apps above, I’m joining Justin in staying true to the App Store with a freshly updated little photo gem, Camera Zoom. While the iPhone 3GS did wonders with 3 megapixels, auto focus, macro, auto white-balance and overall picture quality, still missing is any form of digital zoom. Enter the simply named app above. Just move the slider to frame the scene as tightly as you’d like, up to 4x magnification, then snap the shot. Results aren’t optical quality, of course, but they’re surprisingly good. If you use your iPhone as a convenience camera replacement, this is a must-have app for your toolbox. Works fine as the hardware allows on iPhone 3G under 3.0 as well. [$0.99 - iTunes link]

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Notes, Voice Memo, Google Sync, E*TRADE Mobile Pro, Camera Zoom – TiPb Picks of the Week

iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 required iTunes 8.2 Pre-Release to install, and it looks like iTunes 8.2 Pre-Release requires… Mac OS Leopard 10.5.7 in order to sync notes now. Which, of course, is not yet available.

Previous iPhone 3.0 Betas have synced perfectly well under the current Mac OS release, 10.5.6.

A sign of 10.5.7’s immanent arrival? Perhaps. A more interesting question is what’s changed in note sync to require it where previous betas did not?

(via daveizzle on Twitter)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 Notes Sync… Requires Mac OS X 10.5.7…?

When Steve Jobs first showed off the iPhone at Macworld 2007, and told the world that it would sync data via iTunes, Notes Sync was one of the items listed on his Keynote slide. Meanwhile, over on the Mac side, Apple shipped OS X 10.5 Leopard, and the desktop Mail app popped up a warning about syncing Notes to the iPhone.

This probably led you — as it did us — to believe the original iPhone on OS 1.x would sync notes.

Ha! As if! When iPhone 1.0 arrived in June 2007, Note Sync was MIA, as it was when iPhone 3G dropped in July 2008. Fast forward to iPhone 3.0 Preview in March 2009, however, and — finally — Notes Sync is in the house.

Note: It’s our understanding Notes Sync currently only works with Apple’s Mail.app Notes under OS X Leopard. It would be all kinds of awesome if Apple expanded this not only to Windows Outlook, but to Exchange ActiveSync and MobileMe for a more robust, cloud-based solution. Right?

That, and Tasks and Task Sync. Ahem.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.0: Notes Sync (Finally!)

Back in October of ‘07, Mike discovered a warning message in Apple’s new Leopard Mail that mentioned Notes Sync with the iPhone — something that the iPhone didn’t offer. Rumors flared, and the intertubes began to hope against hope that Apple would offer Notes Sync. Thing is, though, Apple themselves said they’d be offering Notes Sync fully 10 months earlier during Steve Jobs’ original Mac World 2007 keynote where he introduced the iPhone. It’s right there on the big screen, plain as day. “Notes”.

But we didn’t get it with the iPhone 2G’s launch, we didn’t get it with Leopard’s launch, and now coming up on 2 years after that momentous keynote, we’re on to the iPhone 3G and OS 2.2, and we still don’t have it.

Kind of makes “push notification” have to stand in Apple’s “promises, promises” line, now doesn’t it?

So what happened?

Notes Sync was obviously intended for release with the original iPhone (it’s on the slide and in the Mail.app code!). Was OS X 10.5 Leopard’s delay enough to push it out, and drop it into functionality purgatory? Did Apple run out of engineers, or decide later that engineering efforts were better spent elsewhere? Did it work fine on Mac with Apple Mail, but get complicated enough on Outlook to scuttle partial-support plans?

Or is Apple thinking it’s peripheral enough functionality that they’ll just roll it into Snow Leopard’s release, which should also have integrated ActiveSync support (for “push” notes)?

What’s your conspiracy theory?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

What Happened to iPhone Notes Sync?

Brett Terpstra of TUAW fame has posted a tip here that offers a step-by-step procedure for… sitting down? … a way to CHANGE the felt marker into something a bit more professional and readable.  Read on for the step-by-step and check out Brett’s article as well!

If you wish to dispense with the Felt Marker font and go with something more professional-looking and easier to read, the power to do so rests in your hands, no Jailbreaking or hacking required. This method, by the way, will also change existing Felt Marker Notes that you’ve created, but requires that you enter each Note and follow the steps.

First, go into Settings on your iPhone, select General, then Keyboard. Select International Keyboards, then scroll down to Chinese and select either Chinese keyboard (Simplified or Traditional). Then, activate Pinyin and you are ready to go.

Next, hit your Home button and open up your Notes app. Tap on the screen to pull up the keyboard. You should now be presented with a small “world” icon just to the left of the “space bar.” Tapping the “world” key will switch your keyboard to the Chinese one, then tap a letter and you will see the font has changed. Tap the “world” button again and your keyboard returns to English. Now, anything you type on the particular Note you opened will be in the new font. If you open an existing Note and change the keyboard, the entire text of the Note will change to the new font.

Each time you start a new Note, you will need to tap the “world” key to switch keyboards, tap a letter, then switch back and the font will be changed. To avoid this step each time you need to quickly enter a new Note, you might consider making several Notes in advance, titled with a number or letter.

That’s it for this week’s Tip.  Thanks again to Brett Terpstra at TUAW.com for finding this little gem. If you have a tip of your own that you would like to share with the rest of us, please leave a Comment or you can email me at: brian.hart@tipb.com.

Disclaimer:  Tip o’ the Week makes no guarantee, express or implied, that any tip found herein will be new or particularly useful to the reader (and who came up with the Felt Marker font as the standard in the first place?? Felt tips are so 1975).

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Tip o’ the Week: Buh-bye, Felty!

I spent a bunch of time getting Leopard installed and set up on my mac to find out what goodies it would bring to the iPhone. It looks like syncing notes from the iPhone to Mail might have been pulled just before it was ready, or that it’s going to come in a future iPhone update. When I tried to change the default font in an edited note from Marker Felt to anything else, I’m given this warning message:

“Convert this note to rich text format?
Changing the style or formatting requires that this note be converted to rich text format. Rich text notes may not be editable on iPhone and other devices.”

And in other news, it looks like Apple hasn’t made up their mind whether or not we’ll be able to edit rich-text notes in the future. The fact that there’s a warning at all indicates that we should be able to edit notes on the computer and have them sync to the iPhone.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Notes Syncing