Like its desktop cousin, the new iOS app, named VoxOx Call, attempts to bring together the features of many other products. At first glance, it looks most like Google Voice. New users can select a free U.S. number, or purchase a low-cost number in Canada (something Google Voice doesn’t offer); number porting is coming.

Surprisingly, VoxOx Call doesn’t make calls using VoIP. Instead, it’s a callback service that connects both parties using standard lines. The provider explains its decision this way:

“Most VoIP calling apps rely heavily on a user’s bandwidth, which can quickly deplete a mobile data plan or result in unreliable call quality. The VoxOx Call app utilizes the traditional telephone network to initiate a call, but does so at VoxOx’s cheap worldwide calling rates, ensuring low cost and reliability. A user simply dials a contact’s phone number, and then waits for their phone to ring with that person on the line. Instead of the call being routed as an outbound call for which a mobile carrier may charge toll fees, VoxOx turns it into an inbound call, which in most countries is toll free. This allows a mobile user to pay only pennies per minute for long-distance and international calls via VoxOx rates instead of dollars per minute through their mobile carrier.”

Whether this system makes sense for you will depend on what kind of phone and data plans you have. An interesting side-effect of this procedure, though, is that the app can be used even on iPod touches and iPads, since you can set the app to call you on any number, including non-iPhone cell phones and landlines in your vicinity.

Like Google Voice, VoxOx offers transcriptions of voice messages, and these can be viewed in the iOS app. I haven’t tested it enough to evaluate how accurate the transcriptions are; Kevin Hertz, CTO at Telcentris (the company behind VoxOx), claims 80-90 percent accuracy.

In addition to international calling, VoxOx offers worldwide SMS. VoxOx has aimed to make text conversations as seamless as possible. If the person you’re conversing with leaves their office during a chat, it’s possible to switch between, say, their IM account and SMS on their cell phone. The app also has a simple way of emailing chat transcripts.

The iOS app offers several advanced features, including the ability to record calls, transfer between devices in the middle of a conversation, and arrange conferences of up to 20 people. Users can set up call forwarding to multiple phone numbers. VoxOx Call users can also receive, view and forward incoming faxes, change outgoing caller ID on the fly. It offers push notifications, too.

VoxOx Call doesn’t have quite as many features as the desktop version, though, and while it’s possible to sign up for a VoxOx account from the mobile app, VoxOx Call is intended to work in concert with the desktop software. There are a number of functions that can’t be accessed from the iOS app; even simple things such as adding an IM account aren’t available. Also, Skype integration seems to be missing, apparently because Skype requires its own software to be running in order for other programs to access it.

On the other hand, the iOS app has something the desktop application doesn’t: integration with the device’s address book.

During my conversation with Kevin Hertz, I asked him about some of the issues that caused me to be skeptical about the Mac version of the desktop app when I looked at it a few months ago. I’d been disappointed by its “un-Mac-like” appearance and poor font rendering, which made it unappealing to use. I had been surprised by its lack of connections to the Mac address book, or even a system for importing contacts. I was unhappy with its inconsistent support for such standards as oAuth and Facebook Connect. And I had also been annoyed by the tendency of VoxOx to default to an “invite your friends to use this” setting. Hertz assures me that all these issues will be addressed in updates to the desktop application.

VoxOx remains a promising, but flawed, product. The initial release of VoxOx Call for iOS will definitely appeal to those who do a lot of international calling and texting; its limited features and reliance on callbacks will make it less compelling for the rest of us.

VoxOx offers a number of calling and texting plans. You may also pay as you go. The VoxOx Call app is free (iTunes link).

Do you use VoxOx? How do you manage your mobile communications?

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The app installs quickly, and it’s reasonably sized at around 2.5 MB. Unfortunately, it can’t be moved to an SD card.

When I first launched the app, it didn’t ask me to log in to my Google Apps account, since my phone already syncs with my account. It took a few minutes for the documents in my account to appear in the app’s home screen. You can scroll down to see previous documents, or click the search icon.

Once in a document, you can edit it by clicking on the “Edit” button, which appears to take you to the mobile web version of Google Apps, but it’s so tightly integrated with the app that it’s hard to tell. You can also upload documents from your phone, print documents through Google Cloud Print, and access a web-based help function.

Editing word processing documents is pretty easy; just click anywhere in a document and the current paragraph will be outlined in blue and the keyboard will pop up. Editing spreadsheets is a bit trickier, but still reasonably easy to navigate. I’m not sure I would care to write an entire document in this editor, but it’s fine for minor edits.

The Google Docs app also lets users create documents from photos taken with the phone’s camera, and even tries to convert them into text using optical character recognition (OCR). Just click on the new document icon and select “document from photo.” Take a picture with the camera, give your new document a name (or let the app assign one), then wait a few seconds for the new document to appear in the document list, or go off and do something else. The app notifies you when the conversion is finished.

Unfortunately, the results were less than stellar. Here’s a sample of a document created from an 8″ x 6″ card that I happened to have, about a solar charger I recently wrote about. As you can see, Google Docs only managed to recognize a couple of lines. Results weren’t any better with several other printed documents and business cards that I tried. It’s hard to say whether Google’s OCR system is limited (although Simon has previously reported reasonably good results from using Google Docs OCR), or whether the photos my camera takes just aren’t good enough, but at least the Google Docs app also includes the original image in the document, so you can edit it manually as needed.

There’s also a widget with direct links to open the app, go directly to starred documents, take a photo to upload, and create a new document.

I’m impressed with the app so far, with the exception of its OCR capabilities.

The free Google Docs app is currently available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones. It’s  available by scanning the QR code, or by visiting the Android Market.

Have you tried the Google Docs app? What do you think?

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The new Android version lets users share documents and notebooks (groups of documents). Shared documents can be edited if both users are Premium subscribers, and Premium users can also view shared documents offline.

Evernote for Android now has the ability to share notes directly to Facebook, Twitter and other services. It has also added the ability to include map locations in notes (a feature that its competitor Catch has had for a while).

Evernote for Android’s interface has also been revamped, making it easier to navigate, while it also includes a more useful home screen widget. Evernote Premium users can now set up a PIN to lock the app. At over 3MB, the program is fairly large as Android apps go, but it can now be moved to an SD card.

Meanwhile, the note-taking alternative Catch, which I wrote about a few months ago, has added a new premium version that supports file attachments, including images, sound files, PDFs, RTF files, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It’s also added the ability to share notes via Facebook, Twitter and email, although Catch does not offer shared editing.

Both services are available in free and premium versions. Evernote Premium allows users to upload any file type up to 50MB in size, totaling up to 1GB per month, for $5 per month or $45 per year. For the same price, Catch Pro also allows uploading of 1GB per month.

I still find Evernote more compelling than Catch. And while the latter service’s simple interface will appeal to some, Evernote’s enhanced sharing capabilities will be helpful in many collaboration situations.

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When you open the app, instead of the usual grid of hours, you’ll see an analog clock face marked with AM or PM. Click the plus sign, and you’ll be presented with over 50 icons that can be used to create different types of events. These images are imaginative, and include a check mark, a golfer, a dog, a party hat, a sailboat, a skier and a blank one that you can add text to. Once you’ve selected the icon, you can drag it to attach it to the clock, or double-tap on it to add details. The result is a visual representation that’s surprisingly easy to understand at a glance. It works well for “dinner at 7″ but is probably not so useful for “train at 5:28.”

Diacarta has some cute touches, like a “ticking” sound that plays for a couple of seconds while it’s loading. It uses some unusual gestures like rotating the clock face — clockwise to move forward in time, or anticlockwise to move backward — so it takes a bit of learning. But I figured it out in only a couple of minutes, even before watching the entertaining and narration-free video.

What makes the app stand out are the graphics, which are elegant, and a real change from Apple’s usual clean, if slightly sterile, design. The app looks good on my iPod touch, and I suspect it’ll look even better on the iPad’s larger screen. The only jarring note is the use of a monospaced font in certain interface elements, which looks out of place to me, but which doesn’t detract from the app’s readability.

This is an initial 1.0 release, and it lacks some features that would make it more useful, like a way to sync information with the iPhone’s own Calendar, or with other services like Google Calendar. It also doesn’t have a way to create recurring events, or a backup and restore function.

But if you’re an analog sort of person who’s not “so amazingly primitive that [you] think digital watches are a pretty neat idea,” (thanks, Douglas Adams) you may find Diacarta a refreshing change from the traditional interface.

How do you manage your schedule on a mobile device?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Adobe Ideas is a brand new free iPhone and iPad app, one that’s intended as a general purpose creative notebook, integrating sketches, images and a pretty amazing color scheming tool that can use either photos taken from the iPhone’s camera or any images in your library as its source.

User Interface

I wanted to start off by saying that this app has one of the best UIs I’ve ever come across in an iPhone app. And, surprisingly, it manages to achieve this using an interface that doesn’t feel very “Apple.”

Flat buttons and sliding menus make everything about this app feel smooth as butter and oh-so-responsive. I found myself eager to create new ideas, organize them, and then delete them just for the pleasure of interacting with the app’s various menus and buttons. Other developers should take note; doing something original like Adobe’s done here can pay off hugely in terms of differentiating your application from thousands of copy-cats.

Usefulness

Enough crowing about how great the interface is. Just how usable is the app in actual real-world situations? Well, it’s honestly not really much more than an embellished drawing app, but it’s great at that. It has changeable brush sizes and opacity, a color picker, and the ability to add photo layers underneath your existing drawings, or to draw on top of existing photos. It doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles of some dedicated drawing apps, but you can export your work as PDF files via email, which is really all you should need on a mobile platform.

There’s also that color scheme generator, which graphic designers should go ga-ga for. It’s especially handy with the iPhone, since you can take a photo of literally anything you run across in your travels and the app will break it down to a five-color palette you can then use in print or web design. My only problem with this tool is that you can’t export the image, to be used with a color picker on your desktop, for example.

Bottom line: The Adobe Ideas app is free, it works for both iPhone and the iPad, and it’s a genuine pleasure to use. Grab it now if you do any kind of creative work.

Let us know what you think of Adobe Ideas in the comments.

Here’s my video interview with Darren Rowse of Problogger fame. Rowse was one of the unlucky presenters whose lecture was interrupted by a convention center-wide fire alarm. But he was able to present long enough to reveal that his real “claim to fame” and his largest web site is the Digital Photography School; he considers Problogger to be his “side project.” Quite the large side project!

Stay tuned for the rest of the video interviews from SXSW.

What is your favorite web app so far this year?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

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Luckily, Facebook recently opened up its API to allow third-party developers more access to core features, which gives them a chance to rework the web app and deliver something a little easier on the eyes and potentially less frustrating. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s done with its new Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, available for Windows and Mac. It’s also demonstrated that Microsoft can sometimes make something I actually like.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the Silverlight Facebook client does something visually striking with the content it pulls from Facebook itself. It uses a fairly sparse dark theme with big, easy-to-read type that borrows just enough from the standard web-based Facebook layout that you won’t find yourself hunting for commands and interface elements.

Your main view shows your news feed (the live feed, not the “News Feed,” which is completely useless and should not be the default for any reason). You can filter your news feed results using the same filters you’d find on Facebook.com, which appear down the left-hand side. Commenting and “liking” is enabled in the news feed, and you can post status updates by clicking the “what’s on your mind?” link at the top. Clickable selections from your friends’ photo updates appear slightly blurred on the right-hand side, providing even more functionality.You can also switch to either “grid” or “photos feed” modes. Grid displays your news feed in a columnar view, so that you can see more at once. Photos feed brings the partially-obscured photos backdrop to the fore and displays a mosaic of your friends’ recently uploaded images. It’s quite nice looking, and it provides a way of looking through your contacts’ images that’s far more appealing than Facebook’s standard method.

The photo browsing in general is very cool, and it feels much better checking out albums than it does on the web. The only downside I’ve found is that some albums, for whatever reason, aren’t browsable in the app, because of some setting the uploader has used in creating them.

What really puts this client over the top, in my opinion, is that it gives you access to both Events and your messages. Thanks to the inclusion of both of those features, I no longer have to visit the web-based Facebook at all. You won’t be able to use Facebook chat through the Silverlight app, but there are other solutions for that, too, including some web-based clients and multi-client apps like Beejive for the iPhone (which is what I use).

Other limitations include some control issues –you have to click on a column’s arrows to scroll, instead of using a mouse wheel, for example. This may be a limitation of Silverlight itself, or it could just be because the client is still in an early beta stage at this point, but it does get a bit annoying. You also can’t hide things you don’t want to see without visiting the Facebook web site, and some types of links will take you back to the web, though I didn’t encounter this very often because those are mostly Facebook app links, which I don’t generally use anyway. There are also some obvious bugs, but again, this is an early beta.

By far the most useful aspect of the Silverlight Facebook client is how it treats Facebook more like a CRM system and less like something to use for idle distraction. For example, whenever you view messages between yourself and someone else, it populates the right-hand side of the app with the latest updates, links and photos posted by that person. That way you can refer directly to that contact’s recent activity. It isn’t providing you with any information you can’t get on the web site, but it is combining and presenting it in much more useful ways.

It’s a solid Facebook client, and it makes the service feel much more professional. If you use Facebook during the course of your work, and you aren’t happy with how it works on the web, the Silverlight Client is definitely worth checking out.

Post your thoughts on the Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook below.

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Idea Organizer is an app for the iPhone that I recently discovered that makes logging those ideas incredibly easy. There are other ways to do what it does, some via built-in tools offered by Apple itself, but no other solution brings all the features and functionality together in the same place.

Idea Organizer combines an audio recorder, a text notebook and an image capture tool to help make sure that you can not only keep track of any ideas that pop into your head, but also the ones you get from the world around you. You can create an idea using any type of media mentioned, and then add other types of content later to provide context.

The other reason I prefer this app to any other is that it keeps thing simple and has an intelligently designed user interface. The app opens directly to a screen that presents you with a button that gives you access to your most recent idea, and three big buttons that allow you create a new idea based on text input, photo or audio. Idea Organizer’s developers were clearly thinking about the fleeting nature of good ideas when they designed the app.

Finally, you can email any ideas to yourself at any time, for easier editing on an actual computer. You can also batch email all your ideas at once, which is a terrific convenience feature.

For $1.99, Idea Organizer (iTunes link) is great bargain for a very handy little app. Sure, you can approximate its function for free, but in many more steps and with a lot more hassle.

How do you make sure you don’t lose track of great ideas you have while out of the office?

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Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

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Account Creation

First thing that isn’t easy: account registration. There’s no indication of what’s required in a long list of fields requiring a lot of information, because it turns out they all are, including some things I’d generally expect to to be optional, like referral information. I soldiered on anyway, hopeful that despite early hurdles, the app itself would be worth the inconvenience and the attempt to get you to sign up for a newsletter immediately following registration.

Once you do receive your activation email, you click a link to get started, which then launches an account creation process that takes between five and seven minutes to generate your EasyProjects.net account. Really? Five to seven minutes? I literally stepped away from the computer, made some tea and came back, and it was still in the process of creating my account. Maybe that’s the price you pay for ease of use?

Usability & Interface

My free demo of EasyProjects.net came with some test data already included, so that’s what I used for the purposes of this review. Oddly, my account picture appeared to be Hugh Grant, which struck me as an odd choice for a generic user account. Quirky, I guess, but considering the actor’s past and reputation, a questionable pick. I’d have preferred John Cusack, for the record.

The nice thing about EasyProjects.net in action is that it gives you a lot of information to work with, and it presents that information in a manner that is relatively easy to digest. Your projects view provides a nice overview of everything that’s currently going on, with a tabled breakdown showing the priority and completion status of each project, in addition to any other pertinent information. You can also sort the information by each column, in either ascending or descending order.

Icons and a relatively clean interface make this a very useful front page for getting a sense of exactly what’s going on at a glance. And a handy collapsible “Quick Panel” provides ample control with only a mouse click.

The project detail view is equally rich, with customizable fields, an in-line text editor for creating a project description and notes, project members, billings and attached files. It’s as comprehensive a project outliner I’ve yet seen from a web app, and perhaps somewhat accounts for the lengthy build time necessary upon first setup. You can easily hide panels, set up custom notification preferences, and export your projects to an MS Project-friendly format.

Each individual member can log their time, automatically creating comprehensive graphs and reports that are easy to read and understand. Entry is a snap, too, so even team members who maybe aren’t used to detailed project management practices should have no trouble ramping up. In addition to billing, available reports include summaries, Gantt charts and project milestone rosters, so even experienced PMs should feel at home with EasyProjects.net.

Pricing & Options

Because they offered a free trial, and because EasyProjects.net seemed like such a fully featured, powerful tool, I was expecting to find that converting to a full account would be quite costly. It turns out that isn’t necessarily true, especially if you’re just looking for a single-user solution. A free hosted license will get you one user with unlimited projects, customer access and tasks/activities, and 100MB of online storage. Upgrading to multi-user accounts will cost you between $11.25 and $24.99, depending on how many other people you want to grant access to. Multi-user accounts also get a full 1GB of storage, SSL encryption, logo customization, API access and more support options.

You can also opt to install EasyProjects.net’s software on your own servers, for which a variety of subscription and one-time licensing fees are available. Whichever way you decide to go, it’s actually priced very reasonably, considering how functional and feature-rich the offering is. It looks like in this case, at least, first impressions definitely weren’t indicative of how good the product would ultimately be.

Have you tried EasyProjects.net? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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