iWork and ePub, Assorted App Updates

Apple has released iWork 09 version 9.0.4. This is of interest to mobile genealogy fans as Pages version 4.0.4 can now export to the standard ePub file format. That means that iBooks users on iPhones, iPod touch, and iPad, as well as owners of Barnes & Noble’s nook, Sony’s Reader series, and Google Android users can now easily read documents created with Pages. Quite a few people use Pages/iWork for creating family newsletters and similar documents, and this increases the distribution choices.

Read the full story at Mac Genealogy

Amazon.com has updated their Kindle App to version 2.2.1. The Kindle App allows you to view electronic books (ebooks) purchased or downloaded through Amazon’s Kindle Store on your iPhone OS/iOS devices. We’ve highlighted some of the genealogy eBooks available through Kindle in the past.

Changes:
* Improved highlight sensitivity to reduce inadvertent highlights when turning pages
* Fixed a crash some customers experience when highlighting a word
* Corrected a problem where the most recent page is not saved when returning to the app
* Other bug fixes based on customer feedback

You can download the Kindle App for free (iTunes)

Google has updated the Google Mobile App. Google Mobile App acts as a front-end for various Google services (Google Search, etc.), and it also interacts with other Google apps.

Changes:
* Push notifications for Gmail and Calendar.

You can download Google Mobile App for free as well (iTunes).

Last, but not least, another major update to a free app. NASA has updated the NASA app. The NASA app features information revolving around NASA missions, information for astronomers looking to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station, NASA’s Image of the Day and the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This has absolutely nothing to do with genealogy, but they’ve done something that I think is really cool, and being a fan, I had to mention it. Besides some fixes for iOS 4 users, they have added live streaming of the NASA TV public channel. Not everybody has access to their public channel, but if you have an iOS devices, now you do. They show quite a few interesting shows on there, as well as live streaming from orbit during various activities.

Download here: NASA App (iTunes)

iPhone OS 4.0 Details

Earlier today, Apple discussed its highly-anticipated iPhone OS 4, the next major software upgrade to hit the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad lines. It will ship this summer for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and later in the fall for the iPad. Pay attention: It’s only going to be available for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 2nd generation (late 2008), iPod touch 3rd generation (late 2009 – 32GB/64GB) and eventually the iPad. Yes, the original iPhone is not showing up in that availability list. Apple is touting 100 new features for users and 1500 new APIs for developers in creating their apps.

Was it everything that everybody wanted? No and these kinds of things never will be.

Was it everything that I expected and wanted? Mostly.

There are four major new features that most of us will come into contact with. You could throw in iAd, a new mobile advertising platform for the iPhone OS line as well as gaming additions and enterprise additions, but I’m going to ignore those for now. The major additions, as far as I’m concerned are:
1) Multitasking – this is going to be beneficial to those of us wanting to run VOIP or instant messaging apps while we are doing other things. To me, it’s actually not a big deal, but I think the platform as a whole was in need of it. Yes, you could be messing around in a genealogy application, and assuming everything is coded properly, you could get on Voice-Over-IP or IM and call up a relative or check something out without losing your place.
2) Folders – this is a bigger thing to me – organizing your apps into folders. It allows you to go past the current limit of 180 apps, which is a huge deal, since it’s actually easy to rack up that many apps. For me, it’ll be nice to have my genealogy and genealogy-related iPhone apps all in one folder. Yes, there’s not much difference between going into a folder and say flipping to another screenful of apps, but I was started to run out of slots for more apps.
3) Mail – a unified inbox and the ability to switch between inboxes, organize messages by threads, and open attachments in third-party apps.
4) iBooks – It will be yet another way to read books on an iPhone or iPod touch, and this is just bringing the iPad’s bookstore down to the level of those devices. This joins the Kindle in things that are cool to have, but may not necessarily be practical in real-world usage, depending on your tolerance for reading on mobile devices.
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Evernote for iPad

Evernote has now been released for the Apple iPad. It is a “Universal” binary, and does not require the 2x mode that some iPhone-formatted apps do – it has full support for the iPad’s hardware.

There is a note on the Evernote blog complete with video showing it off.

In case you’re not familiar with it, Evernote is a free note taking application for various platforms. It allows you to create text notes along with photo, video, and audio notes (assuming you have the proper hardware). It also includes location-awareness data if you have the hardware and have set it up. If you move up to the premium subscription, you can work with PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other formats. It synchronizes with the Evernote servers so that all of your notes, images, etc., are in sync and can be accessed across various platforms. Yes, it has support for images, and will even do optical character recognition (OCR) on them.

You can see that aspect of it in action in part three of the Griffin Clarifi for iPhone Review that was posted on MobileGenealogy.com a while back.

I’ll post my impressions of a friend’s iPad later today, but suffice to say, Evernote would be a deal-breaker for me as far as getting an iPad, which I’m still looking at doing. No Evernote, no iPad. I keep a lot of my genealogy to-do lists in Evernote, along with a lot of family research as well as notes about various websites, etc.

There are also a couple of fixes included for 3.3.1:
- Fixed synchronization bug on iPhone and iPod Touch
- Fixed search results bug on iPad

It’s supported on the following platforms:
- Web – I’ve used the online/web client in Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox
- Mac OS X
- Windows
- iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad
- Google Android
- Windows Mobile
- Sony Ericsson X-Series

Download for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch

Genealogy Applications for Google Android

Although I’m primarily an iPhone user with the occasional Windows Mobile device, I have to admit I’ve been keeping an eye on Google’s Android platform. The thing that gets me is the hardware – performance, expandability, and display resolution. Now that PDAs and smartphones/mobile phones have merged, for all intents and purposes, things are changing – there is more of an interest in mobile computing and mobile genealogy especially. There have been a couple of TV shows on in the US recently – Faces of America on PBS which just wrapped up, and the new “Who Do You Think You Are” currently running on NBC, which are helping this as well. The hardware is moving along while coming down in price. In fact, some of the Android devices are getting into resolutions of 800x which was not possible not too long ago – you were looking at a low-end netbook with that kind of resolution. Then there is the iPad, but more on that later in a later post.

Anyways, there are currently two genealogy-related applications for Google’s Android platform that have been developed over the past 4-5 months (or at least released). Both are basically family tree/GEDCOM viewers/browsers, and both are being actively developed. They may not be as polished as their iPhone or Windows Mobile counterparts, but I think they are probably coming along a lot faster given that both developers appear to be new to the mobile genealogy software scene. Both allow for importing GEDCOM files.

The first is AGeneDB, and it’s still considered to be at an “Alpha” development stage. It’s free at this time, and future plans include adding families, individuals, and events to the GEDCOM file/genealogy database. I don’t have that much information on it, unfortunately.

The second is Family Bee, which is $10, and is much more polished at this point. It has a variety of ways to import GEDCOM files – through web browsing, email attachments, and hooking up to a computer via USB. The GEDCOM files are stored on an SD card, and it’s been reliably tested out to 12 MB of data (which is over 30,000 names).

I don’t like to recommend software or platforms I really haven’t tested, but if I had to choose, it would probably be Family Bee, although it wouldn’t hurt to try AGeneDB either since it’s free. Family Bee has (to me at least) more features and is garnering more favorable reviews on the various Android app websites. I don’t have an Android device at this time to test these out, but will be acquiring one soon.

2010 is shaping up to be a very good year for mobile genealogy software. In the coming days, I’ve got a lot of updates to the site I’ll be rolling out – some really useful stuff for mobile users. More on that as they are rolled out.