Reviews

iPhone / Reviews — No Comments
30
Nov 10

Mundu IM for iPhone

An iPhone is a gateway to the never ending world of apps. An ecosystem which is growing ever since it’s inception. If you’ve had one for a while, you would agree to it.

Instant messaging has been alive for over a decade now. Today, the mobile internet technology (EDGE/3G) has allowed us to stay connected to the peers while being on the move. However, if you are to decide on an app which one can use to connect to their favorite IMs, it may be a tough call. Yes, there are both paid and free versions of iPhone applications that allow you to connect with more than one IM contacts.

While most have been talked about at often hyped, the IM app called Mundu IM is one of my personal favorites. The prime reason being it does just what it should. More importantly, it’s been written keeping this fact in mind.

The application supports open standard XMPP protocol that’s used by many messaging systems including Google, facebook, Jabber and several other corporate messaging system. What does that mean? It means that the application has the flexibility to work as an IM client for all services that use a particular protocol, called XMPP protocol.

Both Google talk and Facebook chat supports XMPP protocol. Did that make it interesting enough? NO?

Check out the key features of Mundu IM for iPhone app;

  • Easy set up for Gtalk and facebook chat.
  • Ability to connect with a XMPP messaging service.
  • Push notification for your messages – yes!
  • Chat history and ability to email them.
  • Multiple chat support with audio-visual notifications.
  • Slick UI and features.
OpenSource / Reviews / Software — No Comments
26
Feb 10

Notational Velocity – Minimal Note taking app on steroid

National Velocity

Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is described as a modeless, mouse-less Mac OS X note-taking application.

I’ve tried many notes application starting from Mac OSX’s own Sticky, to the once-paid-but-now-free xPad to the heavy-weight Evernote and few others in between which didn’t really caught on to me. xPad came very close to be being my ultimate note-taking app and I even paid for it. Evernote is an awesome application but I’ll categorized it as a heavy-duty utility rather than just a note-taking app. Its being mentioned here as it can and do take notes. However, its an overkill for just ‘note-taking’. I use Evernote more to collect/archive documents, adding notes on top of them and syncing it across computers and devices for reference from multiple location.

Notational Velocity

NV is an app with a simplistic approach to usage with some kick-ass features. Its primary focus is that you’ll just search, if found, it goes there else creates a new note if required. The content is compressed and encrypted (optional). Once you got used to the few keyboard shortcuts, you’ll feel at ease with your keyboard and mouse interaction is not needed for most of your task. There is no concept of “Save” in NV, its just saves as you type.

How does it work

You just type in the search area. Press return to add a new note with that title. While you type, NV searches for notes whose body or title contain your words. Observe that naming a note and searching always occur simultaneously.

When you select one of the found notes (e.g., using the up/down keys) NV displays its body in the lower text area (what you’re reading now). If you had typed the beginning of a note’s title, NV would have selected that note automatically.

Just try and get used to few of the keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be all set. Most of them are pretty similar to what you do everyday, like going to the search/address bar in your browser (Firefox, Chrome)

Synchronize natively with Simplenote

The latest addition that made NV a super note-taking app is its ability to sync with Simplenote. Simplenote (view it in iTunes) is a simple to use, free note-taking app for the iPhone.

Open Source

Notational Velocity is Open Source and is distributed under a modified BSD license. It is currently hosted on github.

You can get the source;

$ git clone git://github.com/scrod/nv.git

Download/Install

Visit Notational Velocity and Download the NV.

Freeware / Reviews — 35 Comments
12
Jan 08

How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire

A day before Newsgator made their RSS Suite totally FREE, Amit did a review of Newsgator’s FeedDemon (Windows RSS Feed Reader), which got me thinking about NetNewsWire. Let me give you a brief about my RSS Feed Reader usage before suggesting ‘How to squeeze the best out of FREE NetNewsWire’.

I have been using RSS Feed Readers in a way or the other ever since the hay days of the blogging revolution in the early 2000s. While on Windows, I graduated to a full fledged RSS Reader with Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon ever since its very early days. Bradbury Software, Nick’s company that made FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator Technologies in May 2005 (I think Nick works with Newsgator at present). My FeedDemon license was alive in all those acquisitions, upgrades and I was a happy user of FeedDemon all along.

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Freeware / OpenSource / Paidware / Reviews / Software — 5 Comments
22
Jul 06

Which is the best and free RSS Feed Reader

I was a loyal customer of FeedDemon (Windows). When Newsgator took over FeedDemon and Topstyle, FeedDemon customers were given Newsgator Inbox as gifts (I have forgotten how was it, but I got it because of FeedDemon).

When I shifted to Apple Mac recently, I was looking for an alternative which should be at par with either FeedDemon or Newsgator Inbox. Well, my first option was NetNewsWire. I have been evaluating it for the past one week and I am extremely happy with it. However, before finally taking the decision to buy it ($29.95), I decided to study and see what are the other alternatives (preferably a freeware) that I can get if not as kick-ass as NetNewsWire but comparible enough.

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