If you’re like me an like the puzzle genre mixed with some action, go checkout SIZZ (iTunes Link). It should be free by the time this post sees the light.

Here’s a quick how-to-play/making off:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_i7Cb2FnkE

In a nutshell, Dropbox has been the best performing, most streamlined files/folders syncing and backup service available in the cloud for quite a while. Users have praised it time and again for its simplicity and seamless integration on many platforms, including the iPhone, iPad and Android.

The simplicity, however, came at a price: The service was operating on an all-or-nothing paradigm.

Once you joined a Dropbox (think shared folders), your machine received every single file and folder inside the hierarchy. No chance for you to opt out of single folders and choose what you want to sync to individual machines. While admittedly this made things easy, it became a problem more often than not when you were running a setup including machines with hard disks of largely different sizes. At least until today.

The way selective sync in build 0.8.64 works is pretty straight forward: You click the Selective Sync… button on the newly introduced Advanced tab in the Dropbox preferences dialog and uncheck the folders you don’t want to sync. Done.

A note to early adopters: When I first tried the new release, Selective Sync was grayed out. This is expected behavior. According to the FAQs for the new feature:

If you are running the Dropbox desktop application for the first time, you may have to wait until Dropbox has finished indexing the files in your Dropbox folder before you can access Selective Sync settings. If you see a message that says “Performing initial sync with server. Please wait…,” it means the Dropbox desktop application is in the process of indexing the files in your Dropbox or you have paused syncing from the Dropbox menu. You can choose to wait until indexing is complete to access your Selective Sync settings. Otherwise, select Cancel to dismiss the message and return to your preferences window. If you have paused syncing, you can resume syncing via the Dropbox menu.

One other aspect did not change, though: Everything you want so sync still needs to sit inside your main Dropbox folder. So, including folders outside your Dropbox continues to require the symbolic link workaround for a while.

More screenshots as my Dropbox moves forward:

(I originally published this article at The Next Web Apps.)

While the App Store has lots of applications that give you a list of pharmacies around you, Apotheken is unique in that it provides you with those drugstores only that are on emergency service and open at the time of your request. It’s the only official solution of the German Pharmacys’ Umbrella Organization (ABDA).

Each day the ABDA updates the list of roughly 2000 of the 21.500 drugstores in Germany which are on duty 24 hours. This exclusive data is available only from the ABDA – and now at your fingertips wherever you are.

The application has been integrated into ABDA’s backend services and makes use of the latest Google Maps features that have been introduced with iPhone OS 3.0. It requires just two touches two get directions to the nearest pharmacy which is available now. Apotheken can either locate you automatically or you can manually enter an address, which will then be used for the search.

The concept and screen design has been done by apertomove GmbH for the ABDA. apertomove asked acceleract GmbH to develop Apotheken for the iPhone.

With so many gimmicks with limited use in the App Store these days, I hope this application will add value for you and helps you being prepared if it comes to the worst.

The service once more went down for a scheduled maintenance but as a compensation we got a couple of major updated Twitter clients: Sessmic DESKTOP, TweetDeck and TweetDeck for the iPhone.

I’ll cover the new iPhone release here and leave the desktop clients for somebody else. Whenever I refer to “TweetDeck” in this article, I mean the iPhone version. I explicitly point out if I refer to the desktop app.

In short: TweetDeck is a very impressive first release, however, I will continue to stay with Tweetie.

Desktop TweetDeck, brought to us by Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan, the guys behind the Y Combinator-funded company Posterous, according to TwitStat accounts for 10.58% of all Twitter traffic, thus being the largest contributor behind the Twitter website itself.

Interestingly enough TwitStat also reveals that rank three and four are hold by two Twitter clients for the iPhone (Twitterrific and Tweetie). While Tweetie started out as a sole iPhone solution and introduced a Mac only desktop variant earlier this year, this release of TweetDeck for the iPhone is very likely Posterous attempt to secure its position as the leading Twitter client for both worlds.

iPhone Twitter clients have to survive in a highly competitive environment.

Admittedly if you come out with a product as late as Posterous did, you’ve got a fair chance of learning from the others, copying their best practices and incorporating a bit of what made your desktop application successful. You simply don’t have to innovate as much as the first movers. (Building a Palm Pre is just that much easier than coming up with an iPhone.)

And this is exactly what TweetDeck resembles.

What I like

• The UI feels complimentary to the desktop app. Especially the way the column view, which TweetDeck for the desktop got famous for, has been ported to the iPhone is really beautiful. It’s a great combination of standard iPhone tables and the integration of swipe gestures.
• I haven’t seen desktop like notifications (Growl) incorporated into any iPhone app before. Nice job!
• The overall performance is okay. It’s not as fast as Tweetie but it’s fast enough for my everyday use.
• I love the updates notifications and the ability to mark all as read. The very clear and straight forward indication of new items is essential if you’re heavily leveraging Twitter to communicate with your peers.
• The seamless blending of multiple accounts into the multi-column view is intriguing and makes handling more than a single Twitter account that much easier.
• The ability to sync my TweetDeck desktop settings across multiple computers and the iPhone is a nice add-on.

What I don’t like

• Though overall the UI is extremely polished and pleases the eyes, there are no visual clues for links and images in the column views. Links are clearly indicated in the Tweet Detail view, which is only a single tap away, but still I’d prefer to have links in different colors in the Tweet Tables, too.
• Multimedia attachments are nearly impossible to spot in the list view. Same problem as with URLs.
• No indication of favorite tweets in list views.
• The profile details don’t offer a full size view for profile images. Tweetie’s support for photos is superior.
• No indication whether a user follows you. TweetDeck does indicate whether you follow a given user, but not vice versa. In most cases, however, it’s the other information that you need, specifically if you plan to DM that user. (Admittedly, Tweetie does not indicate this, either.)
• The handling of API limits is less than ideal. While you get a “Growl” notification once you hit the API limit, in many of the subsequent views low level Objective-C errors (@null, etc.) are exposed to the user. This needs some serious rework.
• No direct user search. (The Quick Follow follows a user straight ahead.)

Showstoppers

This is my very personal list. It might not apply to everybody, but hey, isn’t all of this a matter of opinion anyway?

• No landscape keyboard! This is my absolute no go for TweetDeck. Landscape keyboard is so important for text entry, that Apple names it one of the key features of the new iPhone OS 3.0 (which will be released to the public today). Tweetie offers a setting which automatically turns the keyboard into landscape mode. It’s a killer feature and one that should not be that difficult to implement. You never again want to type your tweets in portrait mode, once you get used to the landscape keyboard.
• The “Recent Tweets” listing which you access from a profile detail view, does not offer you options to follow links, repost tweets, mark tweets as favorites, etc. It’s essentially a read-only view. You can’t navigate anywhere from here, except back to the profile view.
• No handling of sudden application shutdowns. In case you have to quickly quit TweetDeck in the middle of typing a message, your work is lost. This happens more often than not: Crashed, Incoming calls, Pressing the Home button, etc. In contrast Tweetie handles all unsolicited termination situations really well. It supports drafts and in case Tweetie terminated while you were typing, the next time you start the app, your message is right there, ready to be finished.

Finally, I don’t know whether TweetDeck will support the upcoming Push Notification services. I’m running on the GM release of iPhone OS 3.0 with full support for Push Notifications but could not find any related settings in TweetDeck.

I understand that Push Notifications are a brand new enhancement of the iPhone platform, but if you release a communication/messaging application one day before the public iPhone OS 3.0 launch, I’d expected it to include this essential feature.

Will TweetDeck gain significant iPhone screen real estate share?

It’s hard to say. There might, however, be one significant reason for it to become very successful and I did not cover that aspect before: TweetDeck is free. The other iPhone Twitter clients mentioned here are paid apps.

I’m pretty sure that neither the makers of Tweetie nor the producers of Twitterrific are backed by VC gold. Rest assured, I like to save money and thus using free apps as much as anybody else.

Grabbing market-share primarily by offering your app entirely free feels a bit unfair to me. We do need excellent developers like the folks at Iconfactory and atebits. TweetDeck might literally be successful at their expense.

Even if it’s ultimately not the better solution.

Finally a couple of screenshots:

Twitterrific has long been by far the most capable and well implemented twitter client available on the iPhone. Craig Hockenberry, one of the key minds behind Twitterrific, has received some great attention for the initial version. It therefore comes at no surprise that the moment this major version update entered the App Store all the usual suspects started to provide in-depth reviews, most of which are pure hymns of praise.

For quite some time Twitterrifc has been without any serious competition. Though many iPhone twitter clients made it into the App Store none of those lived up to the high standards Iconfactory had established.

The game changed with atebits releasing Tweetie.

One important feature of Tweetie was the support for multiple twitter accounts – something which becomes important if you start corporate tweeting and maintain a second private twitter account. In addition Tweetie came with lots of features that simply outperformed what Twitterrific delivered as part of the initial release.

I’m a pretty heavy twitter user. (By the way, please feel free to follow me!)

I’ve initially switched to Tweetie primarily for its multi-account support. Given all the advanced praise given to Iconfactory I’ve very much been looking forward to this new release.

With all the respect I have for the great coding the folks at Iconfactory do, I don’t understand the almost total absence of critical opinions I see when reading through the traditional iPhone app blogs. It seems a bit as if whatever Iconfactory does, must be considered perfect, innovative and exceptionally good.

I don’t agree.

I’m not doing yet another side-by-side, feature-by-feature comparison between the two. Iconfactory took a long time to learn from what atebits has done right and added a couple of neat features here and there. Sure enough atebits will catch up very soon. Overall it’s the (weak) twitter API which limits what can be done and what not.

I’ll stick with Tweetie. Here is why:

• For me Twitterrific kind of abuses one of the fundamental concepts established on the iPhone: Hierarchical Navigation Controllers. The iPhone Human Interface Guide describes some best practices and Navigation Controllers have become a de-facto standard for navigating through hierarchical data structures. Drill-down by selecting a table cell, roll-up by pressing the top left button. This pattern is widely available in almost all data driven iPhone apps. Not so with Twitterrific. I found the many different uses of top bar buttons confusing and they simply do not feel consistent. I’ve always felt slightly “lost” within Twitterrific’s navigational structure. Sometime they bring you back to a previous view, sometimes they cause an action, sometimes they invoke an action sheet. You never exactly know what will happen next. (Until you get used to, but hey, Don’t Make Me Think!)
   
• One could think that one of the goals for this new version of Twitterrific was to literally take the company’s name, Iconfactory, and transfer it into a design concept: There are just too many buttons and icons everywhere. There’s a second bottom bar full of buttons, there are buttons in the top bar and even when you enter some text, there are buttons and labels everywhere. I do understand that a lot of functionality had to be covered but overall the new UI feels way to crowded for me. In addition most of the icons did not allow me to intuitively grasp their meaning. Creating icons which deliver an instant semantic meaning is an art in itself. Iconfactory failed to do so many times. The “filter icon” and the “more-features-that-we-had-to-squeeze-in star icon” are just two examples of where things went wrong.
   
• I don’t know about you, but when it comes to application settings I usually do them once and then forget about them. I’ve got no clue why Iconfactory decided to make them the top most view of the navigation hierarchy. I constantly navigate “too far to the left”, accidently ending up on the settings screen.
   
• While a lot of energy obviously went into providing an overall polished look and feel of the (themed) UI, I’m recognizing a subtle lack of love for the details. A good example is, again, the settings view. If you touch the “Settings” navigation button which sits in the upper left corner, you would naturally expect the new view to be pushed in from the left. Twitterrific instead moves it in from the right and it does not push out the Sources view. I admit this is a subtle detail but it adds to the overall feeling of inconsistency and unnatural feel for an iPhone application.
   
• Probably the single most important issue I’m having with Twitterrific – and the single most loved feature in Tweetie – is Twitterrific’s inability to offer the landscape keyboard. The upcoming new iPhone OS 3.0 allows users to switch to the landscape keyboard in almost every application. (I’m not breaking any NDA here as this information has been made publicly available by Apple a while ago). The great engineers at Apple have recognized the difficulties people are having when using the standard portrait keyboard to enter more than a few letters in e.g. contact search. I love the landscape keyboard. It allows me to type as fast as on my previous BlackBerry smart phones. Because Iconfactory has chosen to add a fancy “hide keyboard” icon and lots of additional buttons to the text entry view, they do not support switching to landscape orientation. This is my personal no-go criteria.
   
• Another example for lack of love for the detail: What does the grayed-out star icon on the profile view do? Why is it there?
   
• Twitterrific allows users to configure actions for single-tapping, double-tapping and even triple-tapping the avatar which sits beneath each tweet. Unfortunately this does not work at all on any of the current beta versions of iPhone OS 3.0. Iconfactory states it’s a bug that falls within Apple’s responsibility. Funny coincidence: Just yesterday Apple announced that as of now all apps submitted to the App Store have to be fully compliant with the current beta of iPhone OS 3.0. Twitterrific is not. So if I want to quickly look up an author profile it requires three taps: Selecting the tweet. Tapping the star icon. Selecting author. Tweetie again offers a way more natural and consistent experience.
   
• I could not find any option to quickly jump to a user profile by user name. Tweetie has a “Go to User” feature where you simply type in ANY user name and it takes you directly to the users profile. Twitterrific can do so by searching for tweets of a specific author and then allowing you to view the author details. Way more taps than the two step solution available in Tweetie.
• It might be another iPhone OS 3.0 related issue but I could not find a way to get a list of followers/following. Neither for myself nor for any other author profile. Maybe the labels on the author view are supposed to be clickable and take you straight to such a list (from where you should be able to start following/unfollowing users yourself). If not I’m seriously missing this feature as managing followers is part of what I regularly do. Tweetie’s solution is simple and very elegant and makes managing followers a straightforward and easy task.
   
• Last but not least I had the impression that I’m reaching the twitter API limit (100 requests per hour) faster when using Twitterrific but this might be pure coincidence. Maybe Twitterrific reaches out to twitter a bit more often than Tweetie to present some consolidated views where Tweetie sometimes simply leaves out some info (which is not necessarily the better approach). Again, this might be pure perception.

Just to be very clear: I appreciate the work the Iconfactory developers have done. They showcase some very advanced UI Kit techniques and they might push UI Kit to its limits.

However, for me, an iPhone twitter client is not about showcasing what can be done. It’s all about productivity and usability. And this is where Twitterrific fails.

I’ll stay with Tweetie. I’d love to see some enhancements there, too, but I like the ease of use and Tweetie’s consistent implementation of navigating the implicit data structures of the twitter data model.

Feel free to comment. Hardcore Twitterrific fans are invited to flame this post as much as they want as long as it adds value to the discussion. :-)

The fine folks at The App Dojo are too busy to finish their website and if it would be up to me, they should forget about it and continue to focus on building intriguing games for the iPhone and other mobile gaming platforms.

I’ve had the pleasure to test drive an early version of SIZZ, their upcoming debut title for the iPhone and iPod touch. Being pretty much a casual gamer I loved Iconfactoy’s Frenzic and the now world-famous Trism by demiforce.

SIZZ is my personal new favorite!

I’ve rolled out the preview version to my entire family and we all became immediate SIZZ fans.

The game has all the ingredients which lets it easily stand in line with Frenzic and Trism:

Great Visuals

The App Dojo has done a great job in working out detailed graphics, smooth animations and an overall extremely polished look. In a mixture between the arcade style games of the 80′s and the modern, glossy look that we’ve all come so used to SIZZ delivers a pleasant, eye-pleasing overall user experience.

Simple and extremely Addictive Game Play

In SIZZ you’ve got to close path by placing and rotating tiles. The more you progress the more complex the tiles get and, of course, you constantly get less time to make your decisions. Most of the games that fall into the puzzle/Tetris category share an overall simplistic basic game idea. Many titles I’ve seen for the iPhone fail to deliver a great gaming experience. SIZZ is a fantastic exception: The fundamental game concept is based on a real-world board game, envisioned years ago by SIZZ’ graphic designer Peter Dahmen. The App Dojo’s Sascha Sigges has done an outstanding job in transferring this concept to the iPhone platform and giving it its unique ascetics and a high-performance game engine.

20 Preview Invites

The App Dojo is offering 20 readers to get access to the preview version while SIZZ is being reviewed by Apple. Simply use the Contact link at the top to let me know you’re interested and I’ll make sure you get a fresh copy of SIZZ right from the source.

SIZZ is currently under Apple’s review. We’re going to update this post once it becomes available for purchase. The App Store price will be 1.99 US$.

SIZZ for the iPhone

SIZZ for the iPhone

TAXIRUF 2.2

What might seem like a minor enhancement to ask for sometimes turns out to be a lot more painful than assumed initially. As mentioned in the iTunes App Store description TAXIRUF ships with a carefully assembled database containing all German cab stations. We deliberately decided to not simply connect to one of the Google or Yahoo! web services to return cab stations found by these. Many location-based iPhone app competitors do simply that. There are two reasons to not do so:

1. It does not work when you’re offline. And we want to make sure you get a cap even if there’s no data network.
2. It tends to return pizza taxis and other stuff simply because the term “taxi” is part of the query.

In December 2008 we decided to add the names of all the stations in our database and ship it as a free update to all existing customers.

So here we go: If you’re in Germany – or plan to visit the country – grab a copy of TAXIRUF (link opens iTunes) and enjoy the added value we’ve just created.

Feeds

The German App Store returns more than 100 RSS related applications and I’ve certainly not tested them all but I did trie a lot. Google Reader syncing is one of my key requirements as I’m heavily using Google’s web based feed manager to go through my daily updates. If this is also one of your requirements, it significantly limits the number of options.

For almost a year I’ve been a loyal user of Byline. Byline has a decent user interface, syncs perfectly well with Google Reader and provides you with a good overview of what’s new and hot even if – like me – you’ve subscribed to 30+ feeds. The biggest issue I’ve had with Byline was performance and the fact that I could not add feeds from within the iPhone app itself. So in case I’d discovered a great new feed while I’ve been on the move, I had to wait to access a Mac to add the feed via Google Reader’s web interface and then sync it to the iPhone.

While Byline became recognizably slower with a growing number of feeds I always thought this might not entirely be the developers fault. Maybe syncing with Google Reader’s APIs did not allow for a better performance. It’s been Prime31 Web Design’s Feeds that told me the better.

Feeds feels about 20 times as fast as Byline! I cannot provide any real numbers but purely from an end user’s perception Feeds is just amazingly fast. Once I got used to its performance, I’ve never touched Byline again.

Besides this Feeds supports many other features, too:

•  Star feed items
• Share feed items
• Email feed descriptions and links
• Categorize feeds into folders
• Read feeds offline
• Integrated view of the web version
• Tag feeds
• Add feeds to InstantPaper

Some of them depend on having a Google Reader account (sharing and tagging) but Feeds can also be used as a standalone RSS reader.

Feeds

Feeds is available in the App Store for 2,39 €.

Without any question the App Store has outperformed any other platform’s offering targeted at mobile software distribution in terms of active developers, number of downloads, purchases and end-user acceptance and ease of use.

As a developer who started with the very first beta release of the iPhone SDK and strict SDK policies in place, I’m really happy to seeing that more and more frameworks for the iPhone get released.

Y|Factorial yesterday released ObjectiveResources v1.0 It basically is an Objective-C (the language native iPhone apps are written in) port of the well-known Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource.

With ObjectiveResource consuming RESTful web-services that return XML or JSON responses, published by many Rails applications, is extremely simple.

The Y|Factorial people created a dedicated site for all things related to ObjectiveResource. I’ve just started to check it out and so far everything works as “advertised”. Go check it out if you’re working on an iPhone app that will be connected, needs offline syncing capabilities and you’re going for Web Services based back-end communication.