Well, on Saturday it was my turn to take baby Archie out for a stroll. My instructions were to exit at 930am and not to return until 11am. He was supplied fed and sleeping.

All I had to do was leg it around Marlow keeping him quiet for a few hours. I thought it might be interesting to track my movements so when I was half way down the road, I risked a pause in the gentle rocking of the buggy to locate and download Endomondo from BlackBerry’s ever-improving App World. Endomondo is free, light-weight and entirely brilliant.

I installed it, registered an account in 5 seconds. set it to ‘walk’ and pressed ‘start’. 4.7 miles later I arrived back bang on 11am. I then sought out Endomondo.com and boom, there was my ‘workout’ (‘buggy walk’) highlighted and route perfectly documented via Google Maps. The service itself offers a heck of a lot of flexibility — including the ability to challenge your friends.

If you’ve been looking for something to use to track your walks or sports, do check out Endomondo. They’ve apps for nearly all the platforms too. Thanks for the recommendation, Kip!

I was introduced to Things by Mark Bole, former CEO of ShoZu.  Mark and I were chatting about something completely different when the ‘to do’ conversation occurred.  I can’t quite remember how it came about.  Mark asked if I used ‘Things’.  I said that I’d been using ’2Do’.

“Oh no,” exclaimed Mark (I’m paraphrasing), “You must use Things!”  He then proceeded to outline just how useful the application was.  He’s got the desktop version too — and they both sync perfectly (via local network).  Indeed there’s also an iPad version.  Things is, I have to admit, head and shoulders above every other todo list app out there.  It’s simple, clear and intuitive.  I can see why the developer has a veritable legion of fans.  Everything works precisely as you expect — you can create projects, assign tasks to intuitive categories like ‘next’ or ‘today’ or ‘someday’.  Plus there’s plenty of scheduling control for the utterly anal amongst us.

There isn’t too much to say beyond that.  It just works.  Utterly perfect.

The only problem?  The developer knows this too.  And they’ve priced their applications accordingly.  The iPhone app is a whopping £5.99.  The iPad app is £11.99.  And, well, we won’t talk about the Desktop app pricing.  Fair enough though.  The stuff works beautifully.

Two things I’d like to see:

• Cloud-based syncing.  Right now you need to be on the same network as your desktop in order to sync.  That’s not good enough, especially for the premium price.  I need cloud-based sync so that I can still sync when I’m out and about.
• People-based tasks:  My wife and my business colleagues need the facility to be able to easily assign me tasks and keep their status up to date.

Meanwhile, I thoroughly recommend taking a close look at Things.

Victor writes: “I was recently reminded that it was not possible to find any apps for Symbian (Nokia, Samsung and SonyEricsson’s phones) to help pregnant woman! This is a wrong I needed to set right”

Good man!  He wrote the hole thing using Nokia’s Web Runtime framework.  Here’s Victor describing what it does:

“So today, I would like to introduce you to a Free Symbian Web Runtime App that helps you countdown the arrival of your baby. If you are pregnant in the UK and you are going into labour the hospital will ask you to monitor how frequent and long your contractions are before going in. However, I always thought that the last thing a expecting mum (and the dad for that matter) want to do is fire up excel as the contractions are kicking in.”

I’m going to stick this one on the Nokia N86 shortly.  The application is free and you candownload it from Victor’s site.  I’m not sure if he plans to put it into the Ovi Store — although he definitely should.  I did a quick search and couldn’t find it there.

Happy contraction counting!

(And remember, they’re not to be called ‘contractions’, so a friend briefs me — that’s a negative term.  The proper way to refer to them is as ‘surges’ apparently.)

Gwabbit is one of those applications that people rave about.  Gavin May, one of the top directors at accounting firm Sage, introduced me to the product last year at the EMEA BlackBerry Alliance Summit (see my Mobile Developer TV video interview with Gavin ).  He simply adored the product.  I thus thought I’d better give it a look.  Indeed this week having got my new BlackBerry 9700, I decided to christen it with a few premium applications.  Gwabbit was my first install.  Now I did give some thought to deploying the free version (which annoyingly emails folk to say you’ve added them as a contact) then I thought, ‘screw it’, and I blew a whopping £7.95 on Gwabbit Premium.  It simply sits in the background until you receive an email.  If the recipient is not already in your address book, Gwabbit looks to see if they’ve got a contact footer at the bottom of their email.

If there’s a footer, then Gwabbit processes it and asks if you’d like to add the recipient to your address book.  It then pops up an address book entry screen with all the information magically completed already.  Sometimes I review the contact data and change the phone numbers to international format.  But usually I just press save.  Genius.  Really, really quick and definitely worth the money.

Do check it out.  It’s only on BlackBerry — but there’s also an Outlook Plug-In that you might enjoy.

(BlackBerry AppWorld, £7.95)

Kudos to the Clarityn team for dreaming this one up.  Clarityn, if you haven’t heard of it, is a hayfever relief drug sold in the UK.  I’ve used it myself many times and it does work for me.  The team there have launched a ‘real time’ Pollen Forecast app.  They’ve actually named it ‘Pollen Forecast UK’ and given it the familiar Clarityn logo.  It’s free, of course.  Run the app and it’ll ask for your location and boom, it’ll switch on your camera and then show some whizzing 3D pollen spores darting around the screen as illustrated.  Red is bad, Orange is ‘medium’ and yellow is ‘low’.

I’ve had the app on my iPhone for about a week now and I’ve grown accustomed to quickly hitting the welcoming Clarityn icon each morning to see whether I really need to dose up to avoid spending the day sniffing.  This is genius, genius marketing.  Not only am I liking Clarityn for helping given me an idea as to the day’s pollen count, but I’m seeing the Clarityn logo every time I sweep past my apps on my iPhone.  Is this nearing the holy grail when it comes to advertising?  It’s measurable — they know how many folk are downloading it.  They probably know how many times I’m opening it too, if they’ve got stats tracking embedded into the app and I’m getting my Clarityn ‘brand prompt’ at least once or twice a day.  And I’m happy because they’ve given me a reasonably fun way of finding out the pollen count. Like it.

(iTunes link, free)

I have, on occasion, been a user of SUBWAY — the sandwich shop chain.  I do like to see the chap or lady make the sandwich in front of me — although I also have to suspend my disbelief when I see the type of factory ‘formed’ ham they tend to use in their sandwiches. It’s also excruciatingly annoying when the chap behind the counter — in an effort to speed up proceedings — doesn’t give you that extra slice you thought you were entitled to.  That said, SUBWAY serves millions of customers every day all across the world.  You know what you’re getting and you know it’s going to be a reasonable price.  So why an iPhone app?  Well, you can earn points with every purchase at SUBWAY, you see.

The arse of having to remember your sodding SUBCARD though is why most people don’t bother.  Not any more.  If you’ve got an iPhone, then you can load in your SUBCARD details (or register for one).  That will then let you check your points balance easily — and when the time comes for you to claim your free sandwich (500 points for a 6″, 1,000 points for a 12″ sub), you can redeem the points by just flashing your 2-d barcode displayed on the app homepage.  Nice.  It’s not just for iPhone though, other phones are supported (try m.subway.co.uk to see if your phone is supported).

Nice work SUBWAY!  It’s nice to see something that’s a) not just for iPhone and b) rather useful for regular customers.

(iTunes Link, free)

I had a presentation to deliver in Helsinki this week. I joined a packed Finnair flight on Sunday evening along with Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian and arrived late on Sunday night. My presentation was scheduled for Monday lunchtime.

I’d spent a good amount of time pondering over the subject of the presentation. I’d made copious notes. A few nights before, I’d poured a large glass of red wine and sat there with a paper and pen and drawn out my ideas. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

Filled with ideas, concepts and the basic form, I resolved to actually write the presentation on Monday morning. I work well under pressure and since I already knew what I wanted to discuss, I was quite keen. It was just a matter of transferring paper and mind based ideas to PowerPoint.

Here’s the science bit

I decided to do an experiment — but only as the aeroplane prepared to pull away from the London Heathrow gate. Just as the announcements began to ask people to consider putting away their mobile phones, I headed on to the iPhone App Store. A strong Orange 3G signal delivered the first screen in a second or two and I did a search for ‘PowerPoint’.

I wondered if there was an app that would allow me to author a series of slides in PowerPoint format as I sat there on the plane (with the iPhone on Airplane mode, of course). I scrolled by a few different applications before I came across DocumentsToGo.

Premium vs Standard

I noted that the standard version (£5.99) could only view PPT files, whilst the premium version (£8.99) could actually author them.  Bingo!  That’s the one I needed.  I hit the purchase button and the app downloaded as the preparations for departure continued.

Within a few moments I was editing a PowerPoint deck.  I used the app’s built-in DropBox support to connect to my online file store and bring down a few recent files to look at.

As the plane took off, I stowed my iPhone and once the seatbelt sign had been switched off, I got to work.  Goodness me it was simply fantastic!  All I wanted to do was prepare my points in a logical manner.  I was then going to put in the screenshots and images once I got to the hotel using my laptop.  And DocumentsToGo performed brilliantly.

The iTunes entry explains that there is a free update coming soon that will see iPad support added — I cannot wait for that.

Definitely consider this one

The ability to logically write out my titles, bullet points and so on — from my iPhone — was simply wonderful.  I was able to get all the ideas out of my brain and on to ‘virtual’ paper — quickly and easily.  Of course the iPhone wasn’t necessarily the best device to use to create the presentation during my 2.5 hour flight, but the iPhone was near me, easy to access and quick to switch off as necessary.  I will definitely be making use of DocumentsToGo Premium in the future.  I’m pleased I spent the cash.

(iTunes link, £8.99)

Here’s some more reader application suggestions as contributed last week:

Zenon reckons Flyscreen for Android is worth looking at: “Easy access to frequently used widgets and web bookmarks without having to unlock phone. Found out about it via this week in Android podcast.”

Yatin rates AdvanceSMS, found on the Ovi Store: “I was particularly looking for an app which allows me to program SMS for to be sent later at a pre-determined date and time. I work with people across multiple time zones, and I found it more polite to send a SMS when it doesnt disturb them in the night, but I can program it before I go to sleep and it gets sent at just the right time. The interface is simple and easy to use, and integrates well with the phonebook. There are other features too, like password protected SMS, but I haven’t had the need to use that (yet)!”

Vladimir highlights Opera Mobile 10 on all platforms: “IMHO, it’s very likely the best mobile browser around. Period. It also works and looks the same across platforms (S60, Android, Java). Having said all that I am looking froward to the next incarnation of Nokia’s own S60 browser! ”

Steve likes Ubertwitter on BlackBerry: “Found it via Google. Does what is says on the tin.”

Another Steve — Steve Bannister — explains why JoikuSpot Pro is the nuts: “I was stuck in a French Gite with no other internet connectivity when a software licence expired, I used this to connect my MacBook and update my license. I’d used the free version previously but downloaded the pro version from the Ovi Store.”

Tim reckons Google Mobile Search is the way ahead: “I realize this isn’t very original, but I love the voice search. I use my phone constantly while driving and this feature works exceptionally well. The voice recognition is better than any other I’ve used (and I used to work for a company with voice recognition within it’s app, so I’ve tried most of them). I am constantly impressed by it’s ability to recognize even abbreviations. The localized results are also obviously helpful. This app will be passed by in the “my favorite app category” later this summer when my own company, Thump Games launches its first app, but for now you get my unbiased opinion.”

(Look forward to the release, Tim!)

And finally, Vasco recommends Newsy for iPhone: “Found it through genius recommendations (and through Chomp app) Rocks on the iPad“

OpenTable is the best online booking service on the planet.  I simply adore it.  Their mobile applications have seated millions of diners and generated approximately $150m in revenue for restaurants over the last year or so.  The company has now launched their first Nokia application for S60 5th edition touch devices.  It’s now available in the Ovi Store for customers in the UK, US, Canada and Mexico.  Support for non-touch devices such as the E72 is coming soon in the next few weeks.  It’s excellent to see mobile successes like OpenTable making their service available to owners of Nokia phones.

The Nokia version enables consumers to find their nearest OpenTable-compatible restaurants and reserve them free, plus you can make reservations in advance, refine results by cuisine and view restaurant menus (where available).  Plus you get to read recent reviews from other diners.

I’m going to download it for my N86 right now.

(Ovi Store link, free)

Sketch Nation is a piece of genius.  It’s an iPhone ‘shoot’em up’ space invaders style game.  With a huge compelling twist: You design the game elements.  Literally!  You use your iPhone camera to snap the various elements that you’ve drawn and then — hey presto — before your eyes, the game comes to life with the theme you’ve just designed.  One word of warning: This will require you to use a pen or pencil and paper to design the various little components.  They’ve had hundreds and hundreds of submissions that you can try out for yourself too.  Very, very clever concept.

Check out this YouTube link showing just a sample of the games designed by players.

(iTunes link, £0.69)