So, Apple has been pushing their “iPad App of the Year” in my face every time I open the app store for the last few weeks. So, because of repetition, I finally broke down and watched the video displaying it (see below).

A very pretty blonde woman attempts to pretend that she’s manipulating the world’s largest wall iPad using Snapseed. Unfortunately, the only thing I got out of that video was that Snapseed can be very hard to use when pretending to use it on a giant wall iPad. Look at her expression when she’s trying to manipulate the photos. It’s as if she was struggling to get her hand in the right place, and then the director would yell “SMILE!” and she’d go “oh yeah, I’m supposed to be having fun!” and smile for a second. After about 4000 takes the crew was tired and the director gave up and just cut it together with what he had.

I started wondering if the only point to the video was to get her model career started, as there seemed to be more images of her than of the app itself.

I then went to my standby app evaluation: go to the app in iTunes (iTunes) and look at the Most Critical reviews first.

Yep, here we are, from slugworthy: 1 star, “WAY overrated”. Slugworthy feels that filterstorm, photoforge2, and photogene2 are “MUCH better.” And hey! I already have those apps! Good, now I can go get an americano at *$ instead!

My editor sent me a note about Apple’s new HTML 5 Showcase and my first reaction was to chat with her about it. But then my brain kicked in and I realized that she wanted me to write something about it.

I’m slow, but I do catch on eventually.

I posted a note about writing this template and discussed the virtues of using HTML 5 or lack thereof. I still think HTML 5 is cool, but if you know your audience is using Internet Explorer, you need to head back to HTML 4/XHTML 1 -land if you want it to work.

I don’t know why, but I’m interested in puzzles lately, and I thought it would be fun to create an app to let people post and fill out puzzles. Of course, I’ll have to limit how the puzzles work at first, but this should be a fun exercise in planning and implementing a site. And if I’m lucky, I might even have enough documentation at the end to actually get a few articles out of the idea. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

So the first thing I’ll be using is my newest note taking app on the iPad AbleNote. This app appears to have all the features that I was looking for in a note taking app. It’s kinda eerie making that blog post to the universe and then the next day (or maybe 2 I forget when I downloaded it) finding that app. True, it’s not free, but it seems to work better than the other one I was using. (That, while free, now has the “feature” of in-app purchases to try to entice me to pay them, um, yeah…). AbleNote wasn’t $9.99 – yay!

So, today I got fed up with my current iPad note taking app (Sundry Notes) crashing and taking my notes with it and decided to look for a new one.

Wow! There are a lot of sticky notes, cork boards, and note taking / drawing apps out there! They could be a category all their own. EXCEPT They all do the same damn thing. Let me tell you, if you’re planning on creating a note taking app for the iPad, your app will not be “stupendous” “amazing” or “revolutionary” (no matter how many times you use those or other superlatives in your description) if all you have is the ability to write notes and change the background color/pattern of the paper.

Here’s what I want from a note taking app:

• Typed as well as handwritten notes. Personally, I don’t have great handwriting with a pen, so expecting my finger to create legible text is laughable at best. Give me a keyboard! And make sure that the bluetooth keyboard works, while you’re at it.
• A pen tool is nice, but being able to create different colors and widths is important. Not mission critical, but colors are pretty!
• Web browsing. Okay, I don’t need a built-in browser (well, actually I do), but I would like to use my note taking tool for research as well as notes. And so being able to surf to a page or Google search, grab the content (copy text as well as take a screen shot, please) and paste it into my note would be really handy. But please don’t make me a plagiarist, include the URL of the page I got the info from as well.
• Multiple pages in one category or note. The iPad screen is big, but my thoughts are bigger. Let me page between screens, but have it all kept together as one note.
• Categories are my friend. I want to be able to create notes and put them in categories, then move them to other categories. For instance, perhaps I’ve created a list of things I need to do. I would store that in the “to do” category. But then when they are all done, I’d like to be able to move them to the “done” category.
• Search. Since I’m putting all this work into typing my notes, it would be great if I could then search for what I’d written to find it later.
• Honestly, I don’t care about your images, backgrounds, or metaphor. Make it a sticky note on a cork board or a spiral notebook on a refrigerator. I don’t care. BUT. Make it pretty. I’m not going to be impressed with an app that just has a series of lines of text, even if they have twisty icons to show that there’s more content below the headline. Text is boring, give me a notebook metaphor or something. If I wanted plain text, I’d have kept my VT-100 terminal!
• And don’t charge an arm and a leg. On the iPad that means that unless you convince me that your app will make my bed and get my toddler to sleep before 10pm, I’m not, I repeat NOT, paying $9.99 or more for it. Come ON! Don’t be greedy. At least give me a light version that’s free so I can be convinced that $9.99 will help baby fall asleep, but remember $9.99 is too much. I won’t do it. I just won’t!

It’s really hard to not feel like everyone in the universe is greedy for more more more when most of the apps that I used regularly on the iPhone have new, bigger iPad brethren that cost more, a lot more. I’m starting to think that apps that are universal will get an extra star from me, or maybe that apps that have an iPhone version that is cheaper than the iPad version would lose a star (or half a star?).

I feel like I just bought DDH Software HanDBase for my iPhone/iPod. And now they have an iPad only version for $9.99. I’m sorry, DDH, but you won’t get my business a fifth time. I’ve bought the Mac desktop version (which is crap), the iPhone version, the Palm version, and the Windows desktop version. No way in hell are you getting another dime from me. Sorry, but your app works fine in the version I have, and since you didn’t see fit to make a universal app I don’t see fit to give you any more of my cash.