Filed under: iPod Family, Software, iPhone
iPhoneDrive becomes MegaPhone, gets R/W Notes access
After getting C&D'd by Apple (a special moment in any Apple Developer's life), Ecamm changed the name of their iPhoneDrive product to MegaPhone. Today, I had an early peek at their new product and was delighted to find that it supports the creation of new notes and editing of existing notes on the Macintosh end.
This is great news. Megaphone takes a feature (Notes) that was utterly and completely useless and turns it into a pretty cool way to carry around to-do lists and other text files with you.
And there's even a way to get around the hideous Marker Felt issue: When editing a note, use the Edit > Fonts menu to pick a less eye-bending choice. You're still limited to the standard iPhone choices (Helvetica, Courier, Arial, etc) but you no longer have to deal with the M.F. font.
The new version also adds batch delete for SMS and phone call logs so you can free up some memory if you're running against the iPhone's log limits.
Power user tip: Drag an HTML file into the window with the other notes, and MegaPhone adds it as a new note. The iPhone interprets and displays the HTML properly. I tried it out with one of my 3000-word O'Reilly articles with lots of code and headers and it worked fine (no way to click a link though -- but it will load images and online div sections from the web, according to Ecamm).
There is a demo of MegaPhone available, while a full version will cost you $19.95.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mat Lu said 5:45PM on 2-19-2008
It's practically worth the price just to get rid of MF! My only question: what's the long term viability of MegaPhone? What I really want is to sync one smartfolder of notes from Yojimbo to my iPhone. My spidey sense says wait for the SDK to drop before buying.
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Frank said 6:34PM on 2-19-2008
while i appreciate the energy and work people are doing in regards to figuring out how to get things to work on the iphone, part of me has to wonder: why can't everyone just wait another week or so until the SDK comes out? wouldn't that just be easier than doing something and crossing your fingers and hoping that (1) it's gonna work, and (2) it doesn't piss off apple?
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Tim said 6:45PM on 2-19-2008
This application is simply amazing and have been using it for months and months version 1.1 I believe - it is fantastic, well developed and frequently updated with new features!
Please do not insult the developers - all Apple was angry about was using the word iPhone in the title - which doesn't surprise me since that is a copyrighted name.
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markcih said 9:37AM on 2-22-2008
I have been waiting months for someone to notes synch.
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Byran said 7:44PM on 2-19-2008
The app, unfortunately, is not the product I hoped it would be. Each time a note is edited, added, or removed, the app has to reboot your phone. WTF were they thinking? Because the usefulness of it was going to be limited to the Notes editing, I find it of no value whatsoever. I'm not normally one to be so negative, but Notes on the iPhone are still worthless.
Oh well- hopefully when the SDK comes out, that will be fixed.
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djfred said 7:50PM on 2-19-2008
The first thing I did after unlocking my iPhone was get rid of marker felt but I still agree that notes is a lot more useless than it needed to be. How hard could have been to include a check box so it could be used for to-do lists?
That said, I plan to limp along until the SDK comes out and hope for the best.
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Bill said 10:19PM on 2-19-2008
For users of MegaPhone, how would you compare it with Missing Sync for iPhone?
Thanks.
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Holly said 10:21PM on 2-19-2008
I like that the owner of this app is apparently a cow. I laughed harder than I probably should admit.
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harrywolf said 12:13AM on 2-20-2008
I like the Notes app on the iPhone - its easy to email it to yourself, and it is for out-in-the-field, no pen handy kind of stuff.
But I dont think much of megaphone - rebooting the phone every time you do anything is plain crazy.
I am sure Apple will improve Notes soon, and its silly to expect it to be a word processor or something.
I use it a lot, and email it to myself if need the text on my Macbook Pro.
What's not to like?
To do lists?
Well write a list and then put an asterisk next to a task when its done. Duh.
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Ken said 9:16AM on 2-20-2008
MegaPhone does not reboot the the phone every time you do anything. It has to reboot the phone to get notes onto there. But you can also use it to get notes off of the phone. (without rebooting).
Vinod Ponmanadiyil said 7:09AM on 2-20-2008
I'm so glad I bought it when the app was just $9.
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A guy in Sydney said 9:03PM on 2-20-2008
I find it amusing that having been c&d'd by Apple the developers chose another product name used by Apple (made by Cypress)in the 90's when they released Megaphone on the Quadra machines
How long until the name changes? again
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