When looking for a better alternative to sending 100′s of emails to App review sites in an attempt to get them to review the new version of Corkbin, I drew a blank. There were PR Firms that would charge frankly-silly amounts of money to send the emails for me and do their ‘black magic’, but, not having frankly-silly-amounts-of-money to spend, that wasn’t an option.

I literally just wanted to get my description, press release and images in front of as many reviewers as possible and I didn’t have the list, or the time to send them all individually (mass-mails just go to junk).

So, I decided to make it. AppLaunch is an affordable way to give your app launch a big press push by getting your App in front of hundreds of potential reviewers!

Check it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts… AppLaunch

Now, I am a man, and I grow (admittedly somewhat disappointing) facial hair which up until now, the semi-disposable Gillette razors with maybe 2 blade-changes a year, have done a perfectly decent job of removing. Time to turn over a new page in the book of my shaving life.

After fighting with their site for a couple days to be able to order – hey, these guys aren’t about TechOps, they’re about fu*king amazing razors – I ordered my $6/mo package that would turn me in to a smoother, generally more awesome man.

Today they arrived and here is the handle and first set of blades.

The handle is weighty and very substantial feeling and I will admit – for $6 there definitely is a feeling of a surprisingly high degree of luxury… I guess that’s what you get when every other month they send you $1 worth of blades for your $6.

So, enough rhetoric… Are these razors any good…?

Yes. They glided along very happily both with and without shave gel – I thought about taking a video but nobody really wants to see me in the shower!!

I love the Dollar Shave Club. I love the concept, the simplicity, the ease and the price. They solved a problem that I (sort of) had and gave me a warm fuzzy feeling – almost that ‘new shoes’ feeling, but for my face. In fact – id like to give them more money, I hope they branch out in to providing a shave gel as well and who knows what else!

Want to sign up..?

This post was originally created for the iPhone App Cafe article: 10 Essential iPad Apps That Let You Leave Your Laptop At Home

I recently had the experience of being away in New York and decided to leave my Laptop at home. Instead, by my side would be my trusty iPad. Great in theory; lighter, longer battery life, great web and email experience but can you really do everything you need on just an iPad? I think you can…with these 11 apps (that’s right, 11, one is a game!)

To give some perspective… I have a couple roles in the world right now. I’m CTO of Corkbin; a wine memory and sharing platform, CoFounder of Launch Team; an alternative incubation concept in London and consult on various technological areas in-between. My days are spent mixed between endless emails, development, basic design, release management, concept planning etc…

So the Apps that have made me reach for the iPad and not the MacBook air are:

1. Pages, Numbers and Keynote 

Notes will often do the job, but leave you having to copy and paste content out with no formatting etc… These three apps let you have an office suite on your iPad to get the job done and ticked off – not 70% done with some finishing off to be done when you can get to a computer. Technically 3 Apps but it’s one suite so I’ll let it go!

2. FTPOnTheGo Pro 

This may or may not be necessary for you, but for anyone working on a web project, direct access to your FTP Server with a built in (basic) editor is invaluable. This lets you make quick edits to your web content wherever you are or share things to the web.

3. Team Viewer 

There are times when you just really do need a computer. And for those times, Team Viewer can let you connect to your computer at home and achieve that task. A file you need to add to the Dropbox, a quick iOS recompile etc…

Read the full review of Team Viewer.

4. Drop Box 

Are all of your files in Drop Box? No…? Well they should be! Drop Box lets you access and keep up to date, your files on all your devices. You Can even open the file in the appropriate editor and save it back! Genius! Works great with Pages, Numbers and Keynote!

Read 10 Best iPad Apps for Business.

5. WordPress 

If you blog then you need this App.

6. Things (or Producteev) 

Task management is super-important and both Things (flat cost) and Producteev (subscription) do a great job of tracking your tasks, projects etc… And most importantly, keeping those tasks in-sync with the mother ship and between devices!

7. Skype  

Conference calling with video on your iPad. Enough said.

8. AppCooker 

Another one which may be quite specific to my role, but if you prototype iOS Apps then this is a no-brainer… Just as good as mocking them up in XCode!

Read the full review of AppCooker.

9. Twitter 

If you use twitter, then this is the best iPad experience going. Manage your companies twitter account – the push notifications make it easy to know when people are mentioning your brand and manage your reputation online! 

Read 5 Really Cool iPad Apps For Free.

10. Photoshop 

Its relatively basic, but most image manipulation tasks are catered for; resizing images, altering colours, cropping, adding text and more… Great for when you need to quickly edit an image for an Article, presentation or document.

Read 5 Really Cool iPad Apps For Free.

11. Angry Birds HD 

Because… All work and no play makes Chris a dull boy!

Read 10 Most Addictive iPad Game Apps Ever Made.

So these are mine. What tools let you leave the laptop at home and lean on the iPad alone…?

First impressions – the new functionality is awesome, but this beta is not for everyone, I’ve come across a couple bugs already.

Setup

There is a new Setup Wizard for Post-PC setup. I lost most of the images from this during the sync, but here are the few left!!

Notifications

iMessage

This post in Safari Reader – meta!

some more screenshots:

Every once-in-a-while an App comes a long that slots in to your day-to-day life in a way that feels totally intuitive and fills a hole that you were actually aware was there. Team Viewer for iPad has done exactly that; effortlessly (and without configuration) allowing you to connect to your home Mac or PC from your iPad wherever you are providing you have an internet connection.

This particular solution uses both an application on Mac / PC and an App on the iPad (whereas something like RDC Lite uses Remote Desktop without an application on the host computer), but in exchange for this you don’t have to mess around with Firewalls, Ports and IP addresses. Install the application on the host computer, enter the session number and passcode it gives you in to the iPad and you’re in!

The App itself is well-designed and offers great performance; over a good 3G connection the experience is smooth & responsive. You can easily zoom in and out using the standard pinch-to-zoom functionality and extensive keyboard keys give you the ability to combine keys to utilize keyboard shortcuts and combos (if you really want to!)

Basics covered… there are however some features that would make this an even more useful way to integrate a remote desktop app in to your workflow; things like Shared Clipboard (currently the iPad clipboard and that of the Mac/PC can’t interact) and retaining a connection when switching between apps; the iPad is a fantastic device for multi-tasking but currently if you leave this App for more than a few seconds (i.e. it notices) then you loose your connection. Not that you could have copied anything from the other App anyway!

In summary; a fantastic App that is genuinely useful and I’m excited to see some of these extras that already exist in the desktop version come across to the iPad App!

I love Sparrow. It’s like the iPhone Mail App for the Mac – I love the iPhone Mail App. Writing with it actually makes me feel quite ‘happy’; everything is a click a way and the simplicity just makes the App get out of your way.

When I bought it, I trialled stopping my practice of always having a Gmail window open in Chrome. It did mean I had to fire up iChat but that’s fine. Reading email is great. Multiple Account management is fantastic (even better in the last update). Writing email is perfect and its’ handling of HTML mail is probably my favourite of any mail client.

Today, I have found myself resuming the Gmail window practice for one reason; search. If I type a word in to the Gmail search box, if I have an email; sent, archived, in a folder etc.. that contains that word then it sure as hell finds it. Sparrow (and other mail clients) are fine – even good – at finding emails in your inbox, or a known folder, but when you want to cast your net extremely wide they fall over. Part of this is inherent to being a desktop client; you can only search what you have on the desktop, plus what the exchange search protocol will give you access to – not much. It is rubbish. That said, if you asked me if I’d set aside 3GB of my SSD space in order to store all of my emails and index them then I couldn’t say YES fast enough.

I’m not sure whether this is by design (this functionality mimics the iPhone’s search box which is context-aware to the folder with no option to search at the top level) or whether they both share a technical limitation which dictates this lack of a feature. But unfortunately it does mean that it’s basically impossible for anyone with a lot of email, to move totally away from the Gmail web client at the moment.

Gmail – any chance you’d like to make the search functionality available via an API?

Chris

I’ve spent the last few years working towards this target personally and am finally at a stage where any of my media is accessible, anywhere, on any device; it’s all fast and compatible.

So, I thought that I would write about how to achieve this; or at least how I have, and how someone could go about replicating a completely digitally connected home.

This article will be the first of many in this ‘series’, so bear with me; I may even seperate these out on to a different domain for reference if they prove popular.

Okay, so by media I mean audio, video and pictures. But that’s not all that’s required; universal accesibility of files is also important and then so is maintaining a secure network. Harder than it sounds sometimes!

So firstly, this really requires an N-spec wireless router (or hardwired cables if they’re built in to the walls etc..) and I would recommend connecting any devices that just won’t support N (except for portables) to the network with cabling. I designed my physical network topology around that; ensuring that the devices that didn’t support N were easily cable-able from the router.

Although this is not necessarily ‘required’, I went down the server route; this is a relatively inexpensive box running a cheap C2D with 2GB of RAM. The key is lots of hard disk space; 2TB of hard discs make both backing up networked computers and sharing media possible, although obviously less is okay if you have less to store/ backup/ share! This is connected via Gigabit cabling to a Gigabit router. This is mainly for future’s-sake as most of the rest of the network is either 100Mbit or N-spec wireless but it seemed pointless not to go for Gigabit given the choice; any 100Mbit router you have lying around should be fine, or use one of the ports on the back of the wireless router.

This server is running Windows Home Server. This is a fantastic server operating system that doesn’t require you to have a keyboard, mouse or screen on the server but rather use their client software to remotely access it. The software is intuitive and easy to use to set up media sharing and backup of any windows machines. This also allows you to create a VPN or Remote Desktop tunnel through to your Windows machines from the outside world, whilst maintaining security, along with sharing your files with you wherever you may be.

This server is also running both iTunes Media sharing and Windows Media Connect allowing Macs, Windows Machines and the XBOX360s access to the media. On top of that, the file directories are available over the network volumes anyway.

So I live in an appartment with one other guy. Also a Computer Scientist. We have technology all over the place. He’s a Windows guy, I’m somewhere in between Windows and Mac.

We’re both 360 users and as it turns out; the 360 is the best device to have under your TV-set by far. It easily grabs and plays all of the media from our server. We have one centralised store of music, video and audio which we both update with our music as we purchase it.

So; I have no music on my computer. No video. No pictures. And… as a plus, only I can access my pictures on the server thanks to folder protection in Windows Home server and thanks to Wireless-N, it’s as fast as if they were on my machine. (Although I do copy files locally to work on them in photoshop etc…).

So what about outside the house? Orb. Orb is fantastic. It’s a media server that can be used via a web interface, or any platform with a client. I can be at my girlfriend’s house and her, her family and I can watch a movie from my server on her TV (via a laptop).

My iPod Touch / iPhone using Wifi can play 100s of GB of music even when I’m on the other side of the world.

No need to carry a USB Thumb drive, as any computer I go to, I just log in to my home machine, or else download them to the machine right there. Added bonus… no need to update them when I get home; the new files are just there on my home screen.

Part two coming soon…

Chris

The search engine space hasn’t had many new large entrants in the past few years (if you exclude Microsoft’s no-brainer of Live Search) but now there seems to be a slew of new contenders. Mahalo (one of Jason Calacanis’ projects that I’ve posted about a few times),  and now Powerset; an interesting project that claims to use natural language semantics to interpret your search question and provide fast and accurate results.

Currently this is limited by its source material (wikipedia), and so the searches may only be factual in nature, so let’s take a look and figure out how well this thing does against Google (and for novelty), Mahalo.

So… some search questions. Seeing as Powerset requires factual based questions, to be fair, all will be factual in nature.

Aims:

1. How long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

3. How many different types of Swallow are there?

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

I think that these represent a pretty good spread of questions over various topics. Now… to see how they all sum up!

1. How Long did Queen Victoria reign over England?

Google: Varying the search text, between the first and third results contain the answer in the summary text. :)

Powerset: The very first result contains the answer (also highlighted). :)

Mahalo: Typing ‘Queen Victoria’ returns a page with the answer in the nice Guide Note box in the corner. Another win: all three seem pretty good with history!

Image Collage

2. What is the atomic weight of Boron?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result contains the answer highlighted.

Mahalo: Not indexed on Mahalo… does give Google results though so see above.

Image Collage

3. How many different types of swallow are there?

Google: Fourth result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: The first result does contain the answer, although not obviously and it does not appear in the summary text.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic, however again, the Google results yielded the same as above.

Image Collage

4. What is the largest muscle in the human body?

Google: The first result contains the answer in the summary text.

Powerset: I couldn’t actually find the answer at all. I’m sure that it was in one of the pages somewhere, but not in any summary text on the first few pages of results, or ‘obviously’ within any of the first results.

Mahalo: Mahalo did not have a page on the topic but gave good Google results.

Image Collage

Okay, so how did Powersets do? Not bad at all.

I was actually pleasantly surprised; I had set out to show that it was not even as good as Google, but it seemed to pretty much equal it most of the time. With the added plus that you can type the search in natural language. Its natural language support seems limited to simple sentences with no logic (e.g. and, not…) (at least from what I could tell), but it could seem easier for a novice.

However, despite offering a useful service; I don’t see where it would fit in to my (or anyone’s?) life. It’s not a complete search engine… I couldn’t use this as my home page. I couldn’t rely on it for day to day searching. AND… honestly, if I’m looking for encyclopaedic content, why not just go to Wikipedia.org?

The only way I can imagine using this is if they say made a Sidebar gadget or widget out of it, that I could just type my search in and away I go, rather than remember another search site when Google works just as well.

What I did end up learning here though, is that Mahalo is *actually* pretty good. It seems to crash my Firefox instantly :(, I don’t know if that’s the fault of FF3B5 or the site, or (quite likely) Flash Player (don’t know if they use any flash), but it has crippled my system of late, so you’ll notice the Mahalo pics are in IE, but I really like it.

Mahalo seems to have gotten it right… I will seriously consider swapping over to using Mahalo as a home page because it accepts the fact that their own data is limited. Mahalo seems to focus more on creating its own articles in the areas of popular culture, trivia, how tos etc… This is really useful content that doesn’t really exist in a consolidated manner anywhere else. But it then provides you with outside links for things that it doesn’t have. So essentially you get added value, and don’t lose anything from what you had before.

Okay, this is getting long, but… Powersets? Does it work? Yes. Is it new? I hope not; I really thought we were at this stage a few years ago (http://www.lexxe.com http://www.msdewey.com)

Chris