Productivity App of the month

Productivity can become even more of a must-have in the early months, as managers try to make up for any lost time brought on by the festive season. So what tools out there can help this cause?

January: Write Or Die

What’s the big idea?
Let’s imagine you’ve got a pitch to write. Or a report. Maybe some copy? Your word count is set, but you’d rather Tweet than reduce your to-do list by 140 characters. Write Or Die makes the choice for you - the longer you leave your work unchanged, more and more words disappear!

Our favourite Apps...

Just a little insight into all of us here at Idealogy - a list of our favourite Apps and which platforms we use them on...

Discover your own App-sonality

Here’s an experiment we ran at Idealogy just recently, and it’s really fun and straightforward.

Take a screen grab of your iPhone home  screen, show it to a friend, a colleague or a third party and let them give you a summary of your personality, based on the way you display and organise your apps. Like all things ‘psycho’, sometimes it’s bang-on and sometimes it’s way off. But it’s strangely compelling, and a good way to start an argument.

It's official...

Idealogy always likes to be ahead-of-the-game when it comes to solutions for our clients, so that's why we now have official Apple, Android and Blackberry Developer certification. That means in 2012 we're ready to develop and distribute Smartphone and Tablet apps on behalf of our customers through the iTunes App store, Google Android Marketplace and BlackBerry AppWorld.

2011 - the year of the mobile and bright yellow pandas!

Did you know there are more mobile devices in the world than PC’s? I’m sure you did!

Yep, 2011 will be the year of mobile and location services and apps and HTML 5 and bright yellow pandas…I guess you’ve heard most of this before (maybe not the panda part though!) Every year, the experts try to predict the big trends and they rarely seem to get it wrong - they just happen to be a year or so out sometimes! That statement would certainly be true with their mobile predictions anyway, as 09 and 10 were both going to be the year of mobile, when, in fact they nearly were. At least, that’s my opinion.

I do agree with them this year though! 2011 does seem to be the year that things are really going to take off. The big brands are on-board already and the SME brands are realising they need to do something for the mobile customer - they just need some help on what that might be.

I believe you can thank Apple for the massive drive forward in mobile absorption in 10 and 11. The iPhone certainly kick-started a slow market and added real ingenuity and style. The iPad added to the momentum and with Google (Android) and Microsoft (Windows 7 mobile) biting away at Apple’s heels with some classy stuff, the train has well and truly left the station and it’s getting faster and faster in 2011.

Add to that, the fact that Nokia has just thrown it’s full support behind Windows 7 mobile, and then there is the ever growing glut of iPod ‘wannabees’ (and possibly a real contender in there as well) and you don’t have to look hard to see a rapidly increasing market and opportunity.

Why an X-Blog beats an iBlog any day!

We’re all used to iThings; where technology’s concerned we know as consumers that the obligatory ‘i’ prefix is what we need.

‘A blender Sir’ - ‘no thank you’

‘An iBlender Sir’ - ‘I’ll take three of those please, and with iWhisk attachments too’.

See? Works every time. Replace the word blender with anything else you choose and you’ll want it more when it’s an iThing. iBeer (want), iBike (need), iKellyBrook (let’s not even go there!)

Apple App Store

Apple now has strict new guidelines for developers to get software onto their forthcoming store: “No betas or demos and no upgrade pricing” - interesting moves (no beta, demo, trial or test versions allowed!!), but that should be a good thing for the consumer as only quality, tested, proven apps will make it onto the store.

On the positive side, there will be Apple’s rigorous (some would say extreme) testing process, which means only quality makes it online (quality meaning ‘working well’ rather than quality content) and that has to be a good thing. It also means that developers and clients need to focus on what they produce and why – and that’s also got to be good news for us all as consumers.

On the negative side, they are talking about being stricter on the UI (user interface) and anything that is complex or deemed to be ‘not good’ will be removed or not allowed. This could mean the end of many good apps that have been clever in the way they uses the touch interface, which is a massive shame in our opinion. Also, tight regulations on pricing and upgrades are going to be hard for some developers to work with, adapt and overcome we would suggest.

Apple’s stringent control always means that you can rely on well developed, quality apps that work and won’t cause your iPhone any heartache. Sadly, the same can’t always be said for the content some people produce in apps! The worry is that Apple are taking too much control and opening the door for Google to push past them - quality vs the mass market. We’ll just have to wait and see, but sadly, if the X-Factor is anything to go by, the mass market might win! Then again, Apple is the Porsche of the computer world…
Posted by Simon Johnson

New animation tool not just a Flash in the pan

Idealogy heard yesterday that there looks finally to be a good product for rich, timeline-based animation that will do "Flash…but without the Flash!'.

A lot of people probably wouldn't see the need for such a tool - Adobe's stats are impressive, as is a lot of Flash content on the internet…but probably not if you're browsing on your phone. A lot of mobile phones still don't fully support Flash, the iPhone for one.

Sencha Animator is still in Beta at the moment, but from the screenshots that we've seen of it, any Flash developer would be very comfortable using it; it's a visual tool, outputting HTML5 and CSS3 in the background.

Chrome, Safari, and mobile WebKit browsers such as Android, Blackberry Torch, Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod touch are all supported so it could be a very interesting piece of software to watch, we'll certainly be looking forward to using it for our clients.

Posted by Paul Skinner

Another tool in the box

We're expanding our tool set and from next week D-Media will be able to speed up it's development of desktop AIR applications and web-based Flex applications with the arrival of the new Adobe FlashBuilder 4. The ability to interface with and create apps for social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter will be enhanced too, and what with Apple's recent decision to support iPhone authoring straight from Flash CS5, next year could prove to be very interesting.


Posted by Paul Skinner