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!

You begin in a cell where you are introduced to your crude, satirical and sometimes straight-up brilliant main character; an overweight cop somewhat disillusioned with life and the town he lives in. He has a hangover. He talks about it a lot.

Here you also familiarise yourself with a game-play mechanic which hasn’t been used popularly in some time; you have to collect and use items from the environment to escape each enclosed area and progress the story. There’s usually a pretty obvious low-hanging entry point but sometimes the steps invade the domain of downright convoluted. Fear-not though – there are hints and tips available to stop you getting stuck in one story-area for too long!

The story is humorous and surprisingly open-ended, allowing you to engage in all manner of outrageous conversations with amusingly stereotyped characters. More than once I found that my mouth was open in a ‘can you say that?!’ manner… There were just as many laugh out loud moments though.

Soon after you begin, you are charged with doing the bidding of a local ‘terrorist’ as part of your role as a Hostage Negotiator in order to meet his demand and prevent him from killing his hostages. This sees you having to fix the local clock tower and purge the town of pornography among other things that the lunatic perceives to be degrading the town’s moral fabric!

Hector Episode 1 HD is a fun and amusing game that could very easily grow into a series of great games. The format lends itself very well to the iPad and I did find myself a little addicted. It is however, less than 5 hours of gameplay (much less if you use the tips a lot) so isn’t at the same level of no-brainer value as some other games with more replay value.

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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