Twice the suck makes for a very versatile iPad mount

The MobileMount is almost done with its funding efforts — there’s less than 24 hours to go before it becomes funded. But it’s already met and exceeded its goal, with more than $97,000 pledged as of this writing. For $25, you can still get in on the ground floor and receive one of the first devices, which is designed to stick to any smooth surface via two attached suction cup mounts.

So basically, one end could be attached to the back of your iPhone, while the other is attached to your counter, or to a window, for example. You can also use the included vinyl stickers to make it work with surfaces that have a rubberized back or textured surface, like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The suction cup uses a twist-to-lock design, which amps up the suction power and makes it possible for the mount to remain attached for “weeks,” according to its creator. The MobileMount comes in black and white, looks pretty cool, and is expected to ship in January 2012.

A stylus that goes the extra mile

A stylus may not be the most necessary of iPad accessories according to Steve Jobs, but doodlers and fans of handwritten notes might disagree. The iPen is a project that aims to cater to those individuals, tackling the deficiencies inherent in current iPad drawing utensils.

The iPen achieves this by working with an active digitizer accessory that plugs into your iPad’s dock connector port and “talks” to the stylus itself via ultrasonic and infrared transmissions. The added dongle allows for proximity sensitivity, precise drawing and writing, and palm input rejection, which is a really big sore spot when it comes to using the iPad as a notepad currently. It’ll launch with two apps at least that support the hardware, and the iPen’s creator is hard at work convincing other apps to introduce support, too.

The iPen so far has achieved just $8,680 of its $35,000 funding goal, but you can help by pledging $50 to pre-order your own kit via the early bird special, which is reserved for 250 early backers. After that, it’ll be $79 for one, which still seems like a bargain for those interested in being able to use a pen with their iPad without oddly contorting their wrist or sacrificing legibility.

Got an exciting Kickstarter project? Send it to us for consideration in our regular roundup of promising accessories.

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So I was intrigued by Shapes, a simple diagramming app for Snow Leopard. Shapes has been created by prolific developer Todd Ditchendorf, who is perhaps best-known for Fluid, the system that lets users turn websites into desktop apps.

Shapes’ interface is pretty simple. Just drag a desired shape from the palette on the left and drop it onto the page; it can be resized and moved to suit. Colors, fonts, borders and other attributes can be controlled by changing variables in the inspection panel on the right. Shapes can be turned on and off from the outline panel, lined up vertically or horizontally, grouped, and made to move to the foreground or background.

The software includes a reasonable, if fairly small, collection of shapes. It also includes the ability to insert image files and text into the drawing, and a line tool. For those used to other drawing programs, though, the line tool may be a disappointment, as there is no way of attaching lines to other shapes. The developer says this function is in the works.

Files are saved in the proprietary .shapes format, but can be exported as images (.jpg, .gif, .png, .tiff) and as PDFs. Shapes is available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store and from the developer’s website. A trial version is also available from the website.

Shapes doesn’t yet offer all the features of a full-blown diagramming program, but its simple interface and ease of use may be appropriate for some people’s more modest needs.

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Those of you who’ve done professional illustration work on a Mac will probably recognize the heritage of this latest addition to the field. Autodesk is the company that acquired Alias, the makers of Sketchbook Pro. Sketchbook Pro has long been one of the very best digital painting programs available for the Mac platform.

I’ve tried both Layers and Brushes, and while I’m generally pretty useless with both, I do see my ability slowly growing, and more capable artists than myself have been able to generate pretty stunning images using only the limited toolset these apps and your finger provide. Recently introduced features, like the ability to export to .PSD in Layers, have elevated the game from idle play to a serious outlet for digital art on the go.

Sketchbook Mobile doesn’t export to .PSD (it uses the .PNG static image format), unfortunately, but it does bring a UI tailored for a touchscreen interface that’s been developed and refined for many years in the desktop version of the app. The result is an uncluttered working space that still allows quick access to all of your tools in a unique, radial menu design.

Like Layers, and more recently, Brushes, Sketchbook Mobile offers standard painting tools like layers, different types of brushes, color and media pickers, and so on. That said, Sketchbook Mobile still manages to feel like the most underpowered of the bunch despite its pedigree. The full version (iTunes link) is $2.99, but you can get a free Express version (iTunes link) to try it out first.

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Here’s a story that gives new meaning to the term Apple fanboy. A 9-year-old youngster from Singapore, prompted by his younger sisters’ love of drawing, created an application for the iPhone called Doodle Kids. Budding artists create pictures by dragging a finger across the screen and then shake the phone to return to a blank canvas.

According to news reports, fourth-grade protege Lim Ding Wen has been using computers since he was two and already knows six programming languages. Doodle Kids might be his first app in the App Store, but it won’t be his last. Wen is already working on a sci-fi action game for the iPhone called Invader Wars.

Of course, the story of a 9-year-old whiz kid is great to hear, but it also illustrates a larger point about the development process of iPhone apps. It’s clear that we’ve gotten to a point where technology is becoming less mystical and more approachable.

A mere decade ago, computers themselves were still viewed as elusive gadgets and programming was left to people with only the highest levels of geekery in their bloodstream. Now we have kids programming smartphones before they’re old enough to drive a car.

Stories like this — and the proliferation of apps in the App Store created by people with no special training — are a great testimony to the aptitude of the mainstream consumer. Apple offered its user community the opportunity to participate in the development process and people have taken to the idea in droves.

Apple deserves a lot of credit for its willingness to open the App Store for people who want to share the applications they create. Of course, Apple isn’t the only community that develops home-grown apps for its platform;  and of course, Apple gets something out of the deal as well. It’s great, however, that Apple has created an ecosystem that encourages developers of all ages and skill levels.

It’s tempting to assume that young Lim Ding Wen is an exception among app developers. While he may be one of the youngest people to have an app in the App Store, he isn’t the only one interested. Just this week my 9 year-old son came to me clutching a wish list for his birthday next month. Number two on the list (right after a brand-new Wii game)? The iPhone Software Development Kit.

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Welcome To Aqua

The first noticeable item is how quickly OpenOffice 3.0 beta loads, even when compared with Microsoft Office 2008. In less than five seconds you are at the welcome screen ready to create your next masterpiece. Where the X11 interface felt choppy and looked…like an X11 interface, OO 3.0 definitely looks and feels like a fully integrated Aqua application, with menus being very responsive and keyboard shortcuts working (mostly – hey, it’s beta) as expected. How does each behave in this newly integrated world? Let’s take a look.

Writer

Whether it be your latest manuscript, research paper or basic flyer Writer definitely has the tools you need to get the job done. Complex header/footer arrangements, full table of contents manipulation, floating frames and more make this a very sophisticated word & document processor.

I do a great deal of legal document markup and the new notes feature keeps OO 3.0 on track with Pages and Word:

I also especially liked the font preview option for the font menu:

The multi-page layout view mode makes it very easy to see if the visual flow of your document is to your liking:

And, it was refreshing to see a “preview” mode that wasn’t just a export-view to Preview.app:

However, this is also where my first beta bug reared its ugly head with a half-dup of the menubar:

Writer also has basic support for VBA macros, something which neither Pages nor Word 2008 can claim and a feature which came in extremely handy this past weekend for a document I absolutely needed to work with (I could have VMware’d or Boot Camp’d into XP, but OO 3.0 made it so I didn’t have to). That same document also had many form-fields which all worked flawlessly in Writer.

When saving my document, doing so in Microsoft Office compatibility mode produced documents that worked flawlessly on Word 2008 and Word 2003/2007 (on Windows). Importing Microsoft’s new XML-format documents also worked well, though mine aren’t complex by any stretch of the imagination.

Writer is a fine tool, but there are still multi-platform quirks, like the button rendering in some dialogs:

and a less-than Mac-like preferences system:

Calc

I’ll state up-front that I hate spreadsheets. I hate them mostly due to the fact that people use spreadsheet programs as page-layout tools rather then as number crunchers. Numbers understood this and makes no attempt to hide that it is first-and-foremost a way to make pretty, numerical pages. But, getting back to the topic at hand…

Calc is a clear mimic of Excel 2003 for Windows, complete with charting and “solving” capabilities (which the developers are quick to point out do not exist in Excel 2008). Not being a non-work spreadsheet geek (and, I can’t use work examples) I Googled for filetype:xls and pulled a pseudo-random document to work with (the one pictured above). You can see what that Excel document looks like in Excel 2008 just for comparison:

The formatting is pretty much identical and, as a result, I decided to extend my test by checking out Calc’s new charting capabilities:

and then saving in compatibility mode and re-opening in Excel 2008:

I was truly impressed by just how well the two programs worked together, making me a bit more confident if I ever have to use OO 3.0 to edit/share docs with others. I did not have an opportunity to test the new collaboration (i.e. track/merge) feature.

Impress & Draw

With Keynote I have little need for alternate presentation software, but Impress worked as well as previous versions and I did create and preview a quick presentation with no issues:

Similarly, while I have no real need for Draw, it was trivial to create basic line-art documents with this tool:

Database

While it may not have a catchy name like FileMaker (although one could argue that is equally as utilitarian a name) or Bento (I promised myself I would not take this review as an opportunity to trash Bento), OO 3.0′s “Database” application fills a void that exists in Microsoft Office on the Mac and that has been missing in general from the open source world.

The built-in field sets and templates in Database made it trivial to setup a quick recipe database with entry form. And, best of all, I just used the defaults. If I wanted to make it more attractive, I could have spent as much time as necessary crafting primary keys, adjusting field sizes, adding font labels and customizing each feature of the forms. It may be worth it just to keep OpenOffice.org 3.0 around just for the Database program.

The true power of Database comes with full integration into the OO 3.0 suite. I can use the recipe database (if I populate it) to have Writer make a nice recipe file (Database reports could do this as well). Database also allows for data export as well, so you are definitely not locked into the program.

Odds & Ends

Some features spread across the individual components and others were just noteworthy or interesting. For example, when comparing the PDF export feature in Calc, it wound up creating a smaller file than the OS X “print to PDF” option and created table of contents labels based on the spreadsheet tab names.

OO 3.0 also provides a decent number of templates to choose from when starting a new document, some of which aren’t obvious from the flashy “welcome” dialog or just casual interaction with the program (like the full XML document editor).

The help system is very robust and can assist you in pinpointing where to find the functionality you just know is there (like how to mimic Word’s “different first page” feature).

OO 3.0 provides no AppleScript dictionary, so scripters are once again relegated to GUI scripting and the UI – while integrated well with Aqua and with decent Universal Access support – is definitely showing its age. The beta outright crashed on me several times as well, but it confirmed the rock solid document recovery capabilities of the program.

I can say, honestly, that the final version of the software will take its rightful place in my Applications folder, if only to have the ability to deal with the occasional VBA-based document that comes my way and to make use of the Database program.

If you’ve tried OO 3.0 beta or are one of the developers for it, drop a note in the comments with your take on the software and any tips or advice on using the various components. Remember to submit bug reports if you do test the beta and find some quirks. You can also grab a slew of test cases which will cover more of the functionality than I have in this post.

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