My iPhone app “Snippets” went out a few days ago, and I was lucky enough to get a mention in TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog!

A nice quote from the article:

“The canned responses included with Snippets are worth its price of $.99 alone, in this blogger’s opinion. But even if you are wittier than I and appreciate original pieces of text, Snippets is a great app with a very easy-to-use interface that I plan to use again and again.”

Thanks, Kevin Harter, for an excellent write-up!

Some people have asked why you would want to use Snippets instead of just the built-in iPhone Notes app…  Well, Snippets has categories, comes with a slew of premade snippets to use for inspiration, and it’s fast because you just have to look at a snippet and it’s automatically copied to the clipboard, instead of doing a double-tap, select button, drag and drag the sliders and then the copy button.  With Snippets it’s 2 taps and you’ve got a snippet copied to the clipboard!  (Not counting launching the app)

I’ve read a lot of books by Steven Brust, mostly his Vlad Taltos series.  I stumbled across his website at some point when I was in the midst of serious Firefly withdrawal, after having just finished watching all the TV episodes and then Serenity for a capper.  I had been searching for more Firefly stories to gobble up, and had found the graphic novels on Amazon (which seem to rock so far!) and found out that Steven Brust had written a novel in the Firefly universe.

I contacted Steven to see about making a free iPhone app version of his book, and he said to go for it.  I started by looking around for any open source ebook readers I could use as a base.  The best one seemed to be iphonetextreader, but like all the others I could find, it was made back before the SDK was available and used a bunch of unsupported API calls.  I downloaded it and tried to strip out all the unofficial calls, but it wasn’t looking good.

Time to start over.  What was I trying to do?  Get the book onto the iPhone.  Stanza is a free ebook reader on the iPhone, but their catalogs of ebooks aren’t open for adding new items.  Yes, you can find a somewhat hidden place to download from a URL, but typing in a URL by hand, and from memory (no copy & paste on the iPhone), um, blows.

But hey!  Stanza, having been made by some smart folks, has a protocol handler for doing direct downloads!  All you need to do is make a stanza:// link to a “.epub” version of the book and it will fire up Stanza (assuming you click the link on your iPhone) and install it!  Sweet!  It took a few tries to get a reasonable looking epub version (I didn’t much like calibre, Stanza Desktop did alright for conversion) and that was it.

So that’s the punchline, click here if you are on an iPhone and have Stanza installed, and enjoy some Firefly goodness.  Steven will have it up on his website soon, too.

After Apple started letting in fart apps recently, it was only a matter of time…   Flatulence was criteria 5 on the Unofficial App Store Rejection Criteria list.  With farting given the all-clear, I figured more of those criteria would start to open up.  And apparently vibration is now acceptable!

30 Second Massage is now in the AppStore.  It’s not searchable yet, but the direct link to it works.  Game on!

Okay, so it’s not that big of a leap, I guess, but I stumbled across Tony Buzan talking about the miracle that is mind mapping (not), and as I watched, I couldn’t help but think that it’s just a well marketed and not so interesting variation on an outline. Do curvy lines help with information? Um, that’d be a no. Go ask Tufte and he’ll give you a whack upside the head (or a failing grade) if you have anything in your information design that is not contributing to the comprehension. If the thickness and curviness of the lines is conveying information, then great! But if it’s just because “the brain likes curves”, then stop kidding yourself – it’s chartjunk.

I often use MS Word to do outlining. I’ve got a simple generic template for MS Word that I use, and you can use tab and shift-tab to move sections in and out. Well, most of the time. Sometimes things get mucked up if you hit tab in the middle of a line. Try highlighing an entire line or three and hitting tab, or having your cursor at the beginning of a line.

Anyways, I tend to brainstorm project ideas, requirements, designs, anything, in outline form. And then everything is numbered, easy to move around, copy, paste, edit, delete. And now, I feel so proud that I’ve been doing mind maps all along! I don’t need any new-fangled online mindmap tools! MS Word, for me thanks! Or Google Docs does just fine, too, actually, if you don’t want to spend any buckage.