Kate Dohe

JotNot is an odd application; its usefulness depends almost entirely upon integration with your existing workflow. By itself, JotNot does little more than enhance images of text which you take with your iPhone's camera by adjusting perspective, sharpness, and contrast to make letters more legible. If this sounds absurdly simple to you, think of it this way: JotNot aims to be a small digital copy machine in your pocket, essentially letting you scan receipts, business cards, and whiteboard doodles.

Developed by MobiTech 3000, JotNot is ridiculously simple to use--open the application and take a picture (or alternatively, select one in your iPhone's photo library). Once you have an image, the app allows you to crop the photo by adjusting each corner independent of the others, then processes the image by increasing contrast ratio and adjusting perspective and alignment to match your appointed corners. The app's integrated settings allow you to adjust contrast or convert images to black and white, as well as add a small time-stamp. While image quality is a far cry from PDF documents, text is generally clear after conversion, especially when converting to black and white. You can test these features for yourself with JotNot Lite, but only the paid version will allow you to save the image to your photo library.

What many people call "productivity" often amounts to little more than selective procrastination--deciding, often at 4:30 in the afternoon, what tasks we simply cannot accomplish before our deadlines. While there are dozens of to-do apps and productivity systems available in the App Store, Put Things Off appeals to the slackers, the overloaded, the remaining few who do not worship at the altar of David Allen. Here's to the crazy ones.

Pocket Jam's $3 Put Things Off is actually based on a simplified GTD-style system. Tasks reside in one of four "bins" depending on their status. However, this approach lacks contexts, tagging, priorities, and many of the other trappings of regular task management applications.

Couch to 5K is a running regimen designed for people who struggle to run around the block. It consists of a nine-week routine in which the runner alternates running and walking, gradually building up to running a complete 5K. C25K by Alex Stankovic makes it a little easier for out-of-shape technophiles to complete the program.

C25K is extremely minimal; the app is little more than a list of running days and a preprogrammed timer for each day. Couch to 5K itself is about encouraging new runners to meet challenges, and the app reinforces this by emphasizing what a runner has accomplished--checkmarks appear next to completed runs, and the timer prominently displays how much of the run has been completed. Smartly, the application gives auditory instructions, which work well even with music playing. C25K also integrates with Facebook Connect, so completed runs appear as stories in your timeline; for more private runners, this can be turned off in preferences.

Email 'n Walk frightens me.

Don't get me wrong, the iPhone application from Phase2 Media is clever and innovative, allowing users to compose e-mails while simultaneously using the phone's built- in camera to see what's directly in front of them. No, what scares me about Email n' Walk are the possibilities. Email 'n Stalk. Email n' Drive. Even Email 'n Walk Into Traffic On A Major Thoroughfare is a chilling scenario. While the app theoretically improves user safety--I'm sure many of us have nearly been run over by a pedestrian paying more attention to his phone than his surroundings--it could easily be abused by people who lack the common sense to know texting and driving don't mix.

Serious researchers in the sciences are likely already familiar with arXiv.org, Cornell's open access digital repository for preprint scientific articles. Now it's possible to browse, search for, skim, and save scientific articles available at arXiv.org when you're on the go, thanks to arXiview for the iPhone.

ArXiview's research features are appropriately basic for a mobile device: users can browse arXiv.org's contents by date and subject, skim easy-to-read abstracts, search by title, keyword, or full-text contents, and even save PDF articles to folders within the $1 app. In addition, the application offers a very convenient option to e-mail the article's URL, title, authors, and abstract, which makes it flexible enough to fit into different research workflows. You can save PDFs locally for offline reading--for quick reading, this is nice, but without an easy method to transfer PDFs to the desktop, it isn't a perfect research tool.

As a serious Delicious addict, I am always on the lookout for a new iPhone app to organize and sort through my substantial bookmarks from the bookmarking service. Unfortunately, Delicious from www.iTunesFriend.com is not that application.

(Image Caption: Tag, You're It: Tapping a saved link or tag in Delicious makes this dialog pop up each time. It's a maddening step to repeat.)

When I give presentations, watch movies from the sofa in my office, or need to start a task away from my desk, I don't want to be within arm's length of my mouse. So I appreciate the freedom offered by Air Mouse Pro ($6, buy-only), a full-featured remote control from R.P.A. Tech. The top half of the Air Mouse Pro Screen features a two-button trackpad, while the bottom half gives you a keyboard, along with controls for browsing the Web and playing movies and music.

I am, admittedly, a meat-loving Midwesterner who rarely gave much thought to vegetarian dining requirements. When I married a very strict vegetarian a few years ago, I learned quickly that many restaurants' "vegetarian menus" consist of a house salad and marinara sauce. Since we relocate and travel frequently, researching restaurants that accommodate his diet can be a challenge. VegOut from Front-Ended seems perfectly catered to traveling vegetarians like him.

The app--currently on sale for US$3--uses the social network HappyCow to identify and categorize restaurants as vegetarian, vegan, or veg-friendly. It also leverages either GPS or a manually entered location to list nearby restaurants. VegOut makes essential information--like type of cuisine and price--easily accessible. The app integrates well with Google Maps, allowing you to view either an individual restaurant or the entire results list on the map.

When I give presentations, watch movies from the sofa in my office, or need to start a task away from my desk, I don't always want to be within arm's length of my mouse. So I appreciate the freedom offered by Mobile Air Mouse, a full-featured remote control from R.P.A. Tech. The top half of the Air Mouse Pro Screen features a two-button trackpad, while the bottom half gives you a keyboard, along with controls for browsing the Web and playing movies and music.

Using the accelerometer and touchscreen of either an iPhone or iPod touch, Air Mouse works over a local Wi-Fi network to control you computer's mouse and keyboard. Before using the app, you do need to install a small application on your computer-there's a version for both Mac OS X and Windows users-which manages the connection and controls many of the mouse and keyboard settings.

As a graduate student, I spend a good amount of my time writing papers with titles like "The Ramifications of Convivial Design Mechanisms on Affective Responses." This sentence doesn't actually have any complex meaning (Translation: "How Group Features Make People Feel"), but by using a thesaurus, I can make it sound much more important--the secret of academics everywhere.

Consequently, the thesaurus is an essential writing tool, and it's only natural for established publishers and independent outfits alike to bring mobile thesauri to the iPhone. I took a look at a trio of apps to determine which is nonpareil.

Most lighting designers of my acquaintance have picked up dozens of swatch books over the years--thick, stubby sample packs of lighting gels from various manufacturers, intended to help designers pick the correct color filters for stage productions, among other things.

While swatch books are essential tools in the creative process, referring to them is sometimes unwieldy, and the books themselves tend to disappear during productions. Wybron's Gel Swatch Library brings these swatch books to the iPhone and iPod touch in a convenient interface.

One of my favorite web browser additions is Inquisitor, a search enhancement tool for Safari and Firefox. On the desktop, Inquisitor simplifies and speeds up Google and Yahoo searches by predicting search terms and listing top results inside the browser's search bar--and it does this with style. Now Inquisitor has come to the iPhone, and Yahoo's mobile offering is one of the sleekest search applications available.

(Image Caption: Find It Fast: While the mobile version of Inquisitor has many of the same tools as the desktop search enhancement tool, the iPhone app adds news stories to your search results.)