It’s completely awkward for any social encounter where you’re meeting two or more new people at the same time.

I just cannot imagine saying to someone “do you know I am really likely to forget who you are so do you mind if I take your picture?”. That’s going to kill the conversation right there. Maybe that’s a British thing but I suspect not. However, I do like ReadWriteWeb’s ideas for contact management in Evernote.

Apple seem to have managed to succeeded where I singularly failed a few years ago in persuading people that mobiles where it’s at. And that’s great, I really “get” mobile and applaud anyone who wants to be seen in the hands of every user. But, but, writing the app is only half the story.

Let me explain with a practical example.

On my iPad I have a great app from the BBC called Good Food Quick Recipes for iPad and I use it a lot. It has a large number of recipes but there are only a few that I would want to make again and again and that’s exactly what the Favourites function is for. Or at least it would be the answer if it worked. You set a favourite and then we you restart the app they are all cleared.

So I thought I would enquire of the BBC if there was likely to be a fix for this issue any time soon. Using the support link from iTunes I posted a question and this is the response I got:

This is not handled by ourselves therefore please contact Apple Customer Services who will be able to assist you with your query.

Except of course that’s not right and I can see me getting short shrift from Apple if I raised the issue with them. It does, however, highlight my point that there is no point building an app to promote your company if you cannot back it up with proper support. Why? Because if you don’t it will tarnish your brand when someone blogs negatively about it.

So to all those out there that want to be in one of the hottest technology spaces right now remember that publishing the app to the app store is only the first step in your relationship with your mobile advocates not the last.

Originally these were held in special wallets and then when they became full stacked in a piles on the window sill!

Now they get put into either my contacts or my CRM system and despite there being huge advances in technology nothing seems to have replaced the good old business card (perhaps we need Apple to reinvent it!).

So I need a  good way to quickly and accurately scan these cards without spending a fortune, so that ruled out a dedicated reader. Enter the iPhone. There are at least a couple of apps available on the App Store that allow you to take a picture of a business card and have it scanned for information and then have a contact created. This seemed ideal and so I checked a couple of them out.

WorldCard

WorldCard provide dedicated scanners so they ought to know a thing or two about business card scanning and recognition.

The app is simple to use when taking a picture of a card – you simply press the camera button on the home screen and then line up the card with the guides and click the button to take the picture. You are then shown a view of the card to allow you to rotate it through 90 degrees, change the language etc. before running through the recognition process.

WordCard has two advantages over BC Reader at this card capture stage: first the app changes to accommodate both portrait and landscape cards and secondly it has a button that only takes the picture when there is no shake, thereby increasing the chance of a clear image to scan from.

A real bonus is the option to be able to create a new contact by copy and pasting text in from an email signature (or any other place that has contact details). I already use something similar on the desktop so to have this on my mobile too is great.

But what really counts is the accuracy of the character recognition. In this respect there is very little to choose between the two apps as the recognition is equally as good. On all the sample cards I tried the level of accuracy was the same – even down to making the same mistakes. For example a number of cards have the contact details in the followinf format:

t 01234 5678910

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that in many case the “t” was also scanned and recognised as part of the number.

The only think I didn’t like about WorldCards’ scanning was its insistence on formatting telephone numbers with hyphens between groups of numbers – which is how numbers are formatted in the US but not in the UK. Not all forms of English are the same!

Download from the App Store. (£3.99)

BC Reader

BC Reader is very similar in operation to WorldCard. You take a picture and then it scans the output. The difference really comes down to the bells and whistles on offer. BC Reader offers no anti-shake option so you have to have a steady hand. Also if you want to capture a card that is portrait then you still have to hold the phone in landscape mode which means you can potentially end up missing part of the car and capturing vast quantities of table.

However, on the plus side the level of accuracy is pretty good and the equal of WorldCard. I also like the way that the letters that it is less sure about it shows in a lighter font (see below) giving you a quick visual reference for areas you maybe need to correct. BC Reader also has integration with LinkedIn allowing you to capture links to the individuals profile if they exist.

I was able to crash the app though when trying to process a previously captured card that was saved in the application.

Download from the App Store. (£2.99)

Conclusions

Overall both applications performed well at the basic job of capturing contact details from a variety of cards. No character recognition software is 100% accurate and this proved to be the case with these apps but the amount of corrections was minor making it worthwhile using them in the first place.

For me WorldCard was the more polished of the two and I really liked the anti-shake and its ability to work in both portrait and landscape mode but I did miss the LinkedIn integration of BC Reader.

Google Chrome

No change here and, in fact, I am more wedded to Chrome this year than I was last having used it for a full 12 months I still much prefer it to both Internet Explorer and Firefox. The addition of extensions has just made it all the more useful and a large part of my day is spent within the browser.

Google Mail/Calendar/Reader

Here’s the first casualty of 2010 – Google Reader. I can date the day that I stopped using Google Reader to the day that Pulse for iPad was released. All my mail is delivered to one of two Google Mail accounts – either Gmail for home or Google Apps for work, and then pushed out to my iPhone with no fuss. Love it because it simply works.

Remember the Milk

According to Remember the Milk I completed 3,523 tasks with the service in 2010. I think that speaks volumes of how valuable it has become to me. I am often to be seen sat with my iPhone in hand tapping out a quick thought task into RTM. Only gripes are that 1. there isn’t a dedicated iPad application, although one has been promised and 2. I cannot sync my tasks with any third party apps. Come on guys, no one likes a closed platform.

Evernote

Another absolutely essential application. Evernote now has literally everything fed into it as I have gone completely paperless. I scan all paper documentation into Evernote and then can quickly search for it when it is needed. Both the Mac and Windows applications have been updated this year to be faster and more usable.

iPhone/iPad

When I first heard about the iPad I dismissed it as just a large iPhone – how wrong could I be? My iPad has transformed how I consume information, particularly news feeds and magazines. My main way of accessing both RSS feeds and twitter is the iPad – I love the ease with which the information is made available.

This has meant that I have used my iPhone less as the screen is just too small for some things, such as accessing the web.

Unfuddle

Unfuddle continues to be my primary work application. Using the web based service to record all enhancements and bugs in our product. It hasn’t changed all that much in the last 12 months but does now have the obligatory iPhone app.

Zumodrive/Dropbox/iFolder

Zumodrive is one of those applications that could easily be forgotten about it is so tightly integrated into the operating system that you might be forgiven for thinking it was part of Windows/OSX. It has become something that I am using all day everyday and would be lost without it now which is why I read with trepidation recently that Zector had be acquired by Motorola. I hope that they remain true to their word and the service stays as it is.

While I still use Dropbox it is not as key as it once was, particularly as it now is being replaced at work with iFolder where we get more control for free.

Skype

When Skype went down earlier this year it was a big deal for our business as this is the primary means of communications between us and our developers who are off shore. It really hampered out progress while it was down which is a testimony to Skype’s importance and the need to ensure that you have a contingency in place for when something like this happens.

Sony Reader

I read more books in 2010 that I have in any other year of my adult life and the Sony Reader is the reason why. Its compact design, clear screen and ability to hod more books than I would likely read in a lifetime make it great. It’s not without its problems and the price of ebooks and availability is just shocking but nevertheless it means I can and do read more than I did before.

Why don’t I read ebooks on my iPad? Simple the size and brightness of the screen is just makes it a tiring experience.

MacBook Air

A couple of years ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Apple product in our house, these days it’s hard to find a Windows machine. Apple’s build quality is just stunning and justifies, in my opinion, the premium you pay – and the MacBook Air is a premium product. Its size and its weight make it the machine to slip into a case and carry with me everywhere and it is instant on, perfect for meetings and quick presentations.

I am less bought in to OSX and think that Windows 7 has the measure of it.

WunderRadio/Subsonic

Subsonic is just brilliant and is not pretty much the only way that I now listen to music. Whether it is on a computer or portable device I can have my whole music collection available and queued up. WunderRadio does the same for me only for listening to music.

DOA

So that’s the list. But what about those that have dropped off the radar? Well the move to Mac has made me rethink how I blog and having been a staunch follower of Windows Live Writer I have now ditched it in favour of either Wordpress itself or Blogpress on the the iPad. Also gone is the Netbook the MacBook Air has seen that off pretty effectively.

That’s my list for 2010 – what have you found to be invaluable?

Well in the US it seems that they care as the iPhone is not that great on AT&T and this gives them choice to what is perceived as a “better” network. This may or may not turn out to be the case.

But what about the rest of the world, how does this affect us? Well, not greatly. Verizon uses the CDMA technology which means that if the CDMA iPhone becomes a reality then it opens up another 550 million possible subscribers. Problem is CDMA is by far the poor cousin when it comes to mobile technologies as GSM is far more dominant. In fact there are an estimated 2,200 million GSM subscribers. There are NO CDMA network providers in Western Europe at all, not one. You can see why Apple chose to go the GSM route. Which is why here in the UK you can choose from six mobile providers for your iPhone.

Ultimately I don’t care one way or another if Apple produces an CDMA iPhone but I just wish that they would get it over and done with so I don’t have to read about it any more,

Perhaps the most significant of these is the new priority based inbox which Google themselves have added. This aims to sort the wheat from the chaff in your inbox using some background magic.

What I do really like though is the ability to add/remove sections. A starred section section is added automatically but you can add sections based on filters.

The one gripe I have is that the view does not seem to refresh automatically when you make a change. So, for example, if you starred an item it does not appear in the starred list until you refresh the inbox.

A couple of new third party add-ons have also surfaced in the form of Rapportive and WiseStamp.

Rapportive is similar to xobni but, obviously, is for Google Mail rather than Outlook. It replaces the adverts down the right hand side of the screen with information about the sender culled from the web. So where possible there will be information from LinkedIn, twitter feed etc.

I suspect that the problem is that people separate their personal and business email accounts and so won’t necessarily have their Facebook account recorded against a business email address. I am probably the worst case of this as I use different email addresses for each service, for example, facebook@domainname.com, twitter@domainname.com etc so making it even more difficult to track.

When it does find some information it is a pleasant surprise and works well but right now it just doesn’t find anything often enough.

Finally WiseStamp. This is a service to embed more functional signatures into emails. Using the web-based interface you are able to add buttons to services like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc, a link to your latest blog and your latest tweet. This all gets neatly formatted and automatically added to the end of your email.

The bad news is that WiseStamp automatically embeds the signature on all emails on all Google mail accounts that you have open. This means that if you manage multiple accounts, and in particular multiple business account, you have to remember to change the signature each time before sending – something that I just don’t do and so end up sending the wrong signature. I am told by WiseStamp that auto detecting of the current email account is coming and for me it cannot come soon enough.

So of all the three new additions to Google Mail it is the one developed by Google itself that triumphs. Both Rapportive and WiseStamp have some way to go before they become as essential as the priority inbox already has to me.

Used any of these add-ons and feel differently? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

In a recent review of blogging on the go I identified the ability to easily add links as key – and now you can. Not only that you can also do things like insert bold text and change the font properties, such as the colour. ll this makes Blogpress so much more usable as typing the HTML by hand was torturous at best.

Download Blogpress here.

With its massive, bright, screen the iPad is perfect for viewing photos and coupled with the camera kit it is unbeatable. I have been able to hook up a number of cameras using both the USB and SD connectors, including getting pictures off the iPhone. The iPad has recognised them all and imported successfully. This process is painless and then using the existing photo app it is possible to view and enjoy. Unfortunately the options for managing the photos on the iPad are limited, something I hope that Apple or a third party address in future.

Once the photos are on the iPad it is useful to be able to manipulate them and I have found a few apps that allow you to do that as follows:

Flickr

In order to share my photos I use the Flickr service. They provide a free app that allows you to both view and upload photos to your account. Unfortunately at present this is only an iPhone app but I am sure this will change at some point in the future. The app works well but I couldn’t get it to upload the photos in any size other than about 640×480, even when set on maximum resolution.

Photo Layout

A simple but effective free app for creating collages. You add the photos from your library and then pinch and zoom to move, scale and rotate the pictures into the positions you want. There are buttons for moving the current picture above or below those around it or you can simply touch it to bring it to the top. A good example of what can be created is shown below:

This is the only app I paid for and only did so after reading through a few negative reviews and ignoring them! I’m glad I did as Retouch makes what can be a time consuming task simple – that is to remove areas of pictures you don’t want. See the example below where the crane has been removed. This is a simple example and could have been done with in a painting app with a suitable blue colour but Retouch makes the process easy and also worked on more challenging images too. Well worth the small price.

The last app is another free one that is more generalist. PhotoPad allows you to do operations such as scale, crop, rotate etc as well as applying filters and effects. Great for putting the finishing touches to your photos.

All in all I have been greatly impressed with the iPads photo handling capabilities. The third party apps make it easy to work with photos to get the best results. My biggest criticism would be that the camera kit should be built into the iPad. Apart from that it is perfect.

I have a couple of blogs and post to each on an irregular basis. When I am at home I use Windows Live Writer which, in my opinion, is the best blogging app by far and is the only reason I continue to run parallels on my Macbook.

The iPad strikes me as the perfect blogging platform with its big screen capable of working with text and pictures (which I will cover in more detail tomorrow) and therefore I was disappointed with both the choice and the quality of the blogging apps on offer.

I used three “apps” to try and find the best fit for me and these were: Blogpress, a third party iPad application which supports multiple platforms (including Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad). Wordpress’ native iPad application, which only supports Wordpress and a dedicated, web-based, mobile interface for Wordpress.

It was immediately obvious that all three suffer from the same problem – they are little more than simple text editors. You get zero control over the look and feel of the text, for example, you cannot embolden or italicise text, nor can you change the justification. This I can live with as it is not a major issue for me. What I found most frustrating though was the inability to be able to hyperlink some text or to paste in a link and have it converted. This seems a glaring omission that I hope is rectified in a future release.

Both Blogpress and Wordpress are supposed to offer facilities to insert pictures and to save drafts locally for future updates. Here Blogpress wins hands down on both points. While the picture handling is basic you do get a variety of options for where you want to upload a picture to, including Flickr, and this works faultlessly. I have never been able to get the Wordpress app to insert a picture – it always crashes.

One thing that the Wordpress app does do that Blogpress does not is allow you to see and manage comments and if you get many this may be a time saver for you but if it is blogging you are interested in then Blogpress is for you, even if it is not free.

Maybe it’s me but I just don’t get iOS4’s “multi-tasking”. Multi-tasking is supposed to be a time saver not a confusing pain in the arse.

With the introduction of iOS4 you get (limited) support for apps running in the background. Correction! You get support for certain features running in the background, such as streaming music or uploading a file. For anything else the app is put into suspended animation. These apps are put into, well what can only be described as a system tray. Double clicking the home button now brings up a display of all your running apps.

After a while that tray runs to many apps and takes many swipes to see them all (see screenshot above) which seems to somewhat defeat the purpose of this being a quick way to move between “running” apps. It gets to such a stage that I have so many apps in the tray that it is just as quick for me to find it on the normal home screens. That can’t be right surely? It seems that it is and I am not the only one to complain. The following is Jared Newman in a post entitled Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple Blew It:

“What bothers me the most, however, is the sloppy implementation of iPhone multitasking. Every time you open an app, it gets added to the tray, and the only way to close it is by pressing and holding any app icon, then clicking the top-left corner of the apps you want to close. If you don’t micromanage, the tray quickly becomes overrun with clutter, making it hard to find the apps you really need.”

All this and battery life that is much worse than before (and it was pretty bad to start with). Let’s hope that Apple look into both these issues quickly. However, I am not hopeful as Apple have a poor record on this sort of thing – they have, no doubt, moved onto the iPhone5.