Finally sucked it up and downloaded the 1.2GB iPhone SDK.  Looks like I’ll be buying extra bandwidth this month again.

Nice emulator included, looking forward to playing with the SDK.

Generally, my desktop looks like something exploded all over it.  One of the things I used to save most were text documents with little notes about an idea I had, or something I should build or something I have to get done.  I played with Yojimbo for a little bit and also with Circus Ponies’ Notepbook.  While both of these are excellent pieces of software I never really got to using them properly or with enough effort to see any real benefit.  For about two months now I have been using the beta of Evernote, and I have to admit, it is a damn fine piece of work. (I’m actually writing this up as draft in Evernote)

So, what makes it so much better?

Firstly, the application is cross-platform.  It runs natively on PC and Mac and on selected phones.  For most of the apps that I use I couldn’t care if they don’t run on a PC, but our team are on both PC’s and Mac’s and so here finally is something I can rave on about that they can also use.

Then, the application sync’s to a web version of your notes.  So I can continue to edit my notes when I’m not sitting at my machine.  The changes made on the web sync back to your desktop version.  I know that I could do this through Google docs, but I actually prefer working in a native application.  Web apps are not as responsive as I often need them to be.

You can also enable an Evernote menu item to clip items and screenshots directly into Evernote.

Which neatly brings me to another feature - text recognition.  When you sync new notes up to the server, any notes that contain images are analyzed for text portions and text recognition is done on them.  I’ve just synced this note with a screenshot from Twitter in it, and now when I sync back, the text should have been recognized.

I can now search for text within images in Evernote.  It filters down to only matching posts and text is highlighted.  Sweet.

My one small problem that I had with Evernote was that I couldn’t easily share notes with people.  This has now been added and I can mark a Notebook as public which creates a page for that notebook that anyone can browse.  Of course, if we could share Notebooks with other Evernote users so that we could collaboratively create and edit notes that would be awesome.

Currently Evernote is in beta, but I have 17 15 invites if anyone wants. Leave a comment or let me know on Twitter.

I was reading Dave Duarte’s latest post around how FMCG brands needs to be marketing themselves online and decided to check out the two websites that were given as examples - www.partywithpyotts.co.za and www.provita.co.za.  On the face of it both of these seem like they could be cool applications that provide an element of utility, but I can’t help but think that they missed an opportunity here.

Take Party With Pyotts.  Great, I can register and create an event and then send email invitations to my friends.  They can simply click a link to RSVP and I get a neat listing of the people I’ve invited and whether they are coming or not.  But that’s where it ends.

You’re giving people a tool to plan a social event, so why not build some social elements into it?  If you’re on Facebook you’ve probably been invited to an event planned using their event application.  What’s cool about the eventing there is that not only do you see your invite list and RSVP’s but people can chat pre and post event as well as upload photo’s and video’s.  And Facebook isn’t the only place for this, there are dedicated sites like Meetup.com and Upcoming.org for this as well.

So here’s a utility that’s been tied to the brand (because all parties need snacks) but it’s living in its own little world.  Unfortunately only Upcoming.org has an API that allows remote posting of events, the others only allow you to retrieve existing event detail.  But there’s an insight in that right there - if websites are exposing their data for you to use in other ways, why not do the same?  Why not build a application or widget that pulls the detail and displays it elsewhere, not only exposing the event to more people in the environments in which that are already playing, but exposing the utility and therefore the brand to more people.  With websites exposing their data through API’s and service-oriented architecture it becomes a simple matter to mash-up some data and build a really cool application.  Yes, retain your registration data in your database, but it could become something really useful by simply pulling together related data from other services (flickr, Youtube, Facebook).

Then, Pro-Vita.  Here you can build a sandwich using Pro-Vita and selected toppings and see how they stack up with the built-in BMI calculator.  Neat.

But now what.  I’ve invested the time in building my sandwich and it’s over.  Domino’s Pizza created something similar with their Big Fantastic Deal but with their application you could actually order it.

It’s back to the utility of the application - interesting only gets you so far, making something useful will get people coming back to use it again.

So what about Pro-Vita then?  Well, once I’ve created my sandwich, let me save it.  I can then save a few of them and put them together into a snack menu.  I sense a potential link to partywithpyotts.co.za here…  And if I can save my snack menu (which knows what ingredients I need to make them) why not let me say how many people are coming and then print out a shopping list for me with the quantities I need.

Who knows, partywithpyotts.co.za might even know how many people were coming.

Subsequent to starting this post I was in touch with the marketing department at AVI, the company that owns the Pyotts brand.  These pages are only meant to be holding pages while bigger and better things are planned.  Fair enough, but any interaction I have with a brand - online or off - will add to my experience and opinion of that brand.  So if you are going to do something, do it right and do it well!

Twitter isn’t stable, let’s all run off to plurk! or not.

Is this the sign of things to come?

Personally, I’m not sold on it yet.  I’m also wondering if that level of functionality will scale when the masses all start signing up.

Update:  just got page unavailable on the home page, and have a look at that code :)

What fantastic news.  Received a blackmail attempt this morning because apparently I have been caught on my webcam doing naughty things and logging into dirty sites.

David, here’s some hints before you send your next email:

1. Learn to spell.  Nothing spoils a blackmail attempt like poor attention to detail.  I’m frankly a little bit hurt that you didn’t make the message up from cut out letters.  That would have shown some real class.
2. Don’t follow it up immediately with an offer for “children porno” from the same email address, but using a different name.  Poor effort really.
   

On the plus side, it seems like Iike I’m not the only one to have received this.

Started messing with Adobe Buzzword this morning because UXMagazine suggested it was going head to head with Google Docs.  Google Docs loads fairly snappily as it doesn’t have a massive flash interface, so first impressions weren’t that good.

I was impressed though by their “your session has timed out message”:

Cute.  And not because it’s a baby.  Because it’s not some rude browser timeout dialog thing.

For a while now I’ve been using Google Alerts and Technorati feeds to let me know when my name, the company I work for or some of our key clients’ names pop up online.  Recently I began wondering how often these terms were cropping up on twitter, and in what context.  Summize.com is a really slick Twitter search engine and has the advantage of providing your search results as an RSS feed - all I needed to get near realtime alerts of my key search terms on twitter.

The problem was that for a search term like Peugeot there is a lot of sales spam kicking about:

I had a quick poke about the summize.com documentation, but being easily distracted I soon found myself kludging together a Yahoo Pipe to fix it.

The problem with this was that the summize.com RSS feed only returned 10 results to me, and with the Pipe cleaning out the majority of them, the resultant output feed was looking a bit bleak.

An email to feedback at summize.com sorted it all out.  Not only did they tell me how to get more than just 10 results back from a query (rpp as a parameter) but that I could negate specific authors by using -from: in the query.  Cunningly all things that I had managed to avoid reading in the documentation on the site.

All’s well that ends well.  I now have a spam-less feed and I know that the support from Summize is excellent.  Not only are they friendly to blind schmucks like me, but they value community feedback - 2 great ways to build a solid, well liked product.

Just got back from the AMASA end of year thing where a talk by Stafford Masie was the main attraction.   Overall he came across well and is certainly passionate about Google.  The bulk of the audience seemed to be somewhat oblivious to what’s happening online (Google Maps street view drew oohs and aahs) so the talk was aimed squarely at them.  All the usual stuff was trotted out about media landscape changing, consumer is in charge of your brand, user generated content - you know the drill.

What was interesting was that he said that South Africa has the most expensive broadband in the world.  OK, I’m with you.  Then he went on to say that in 18 months, South Africa would have the cheapest broadband in the world.  Really?  Where can I sign up….

He mentioned a few things that Google SA would be doing - Google Maps of South Africa in 2008, and GDrive - 20GB of free online storage.  Also demo’d Google Co-op which looks like it could have some awesome applications.

At one point he asked if there were any reporters in the room, but didn’t ask if there were bloggers.  This was after mentioning CNN using citizen journalism a bit earlier.  Little bit of a disconnect there :P

Then, he unfortunately went into demo mode.  I say unfortunately because it’s easy to get caught up in the moment when the audience are easily impressed.   The demos weren’t as focussed as the first part of the talk and as much as the audience were interested and enjoying it, it dragged on a bit.

One thing that did occur to me though.  Stafford was showing street view and saying that they have teams of people out there getting the images.  Imagine if they could combine an image pool like flickr, geotag the images, feed them through a tool like Photosynth and show that as the street view.  Now that would be cool.

Saw on Faris’ blog that Cadbury have launched a new website and with it a new ad.  This time with trucks.They have also made bits of the ad available for download.  People were going to do it anyway, so why not make it easy.The ad couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time, so here then is my first attempt at a remix video: