Advocate's Studio

I usually save the mobile apps for my Mobile App of The Day blog, but this one seems particularly useful for attorneys and worth a mention here in the Studio. Remarks is a new PDF app designed for the iPad from the fine folks at Readdle who know a thing or two about annotation and PDFs on the mobile screen. It is a fully featured PDF annotating application, with a variety of tools to fine-tune your marks. You can highlight, underline, strikeout text, draw upon the documents – that means pretty much anything you can do with the document on paper. But what sets Remarks apart from other apps, like another fav of mine iAnnotate and the like, is the extremely simple view / interface. It drops the complex layers and just gives you the WYSIWYG experience. Combine that with an able note-taking interface and it seems Remarks might be a replacement for more than few apps on your iPad. Notes become PDFs, which can then be easily viewed, printed and edited on your computer. Share notes with others for their perusal and comments. From the iTunes description, here are a list of features:

★ Make notes

Write everything you think is important on a meeting, lecture or presentation.
★ Sketch new ideas
Draw the plan to take over the world. Maybe even two, just in case.

★ Type in text notes
Prefer typing text to handwriting? We have a tool for that.

★ Annotate PDFs
Mark important things in books, journals or documents that you need to review.

★ Draw with your finger
Use it to make remarks in scanned books or simply draw something beautiful.

★ Co-edit notes with friends
You can edit notes made by any other Remarks user and vice versa.

What else Remarks lets you do:

✓ Add Notes Quickly
Only one tap is needed to start new a note, no matter where in the application are you located at the moment.

✓ Exchange documents with your computer
Use a USB cable and iTunes File Sharing to transfer notes and PDFs between your iPad and your computer.

✓ Edit your notes on the Mac or PC
You can make changes into your notes using any PDF editing application like Preview on the Mac or Adobe Reader on the PC

✓ Annotate Email Attachments
Open PDF attachments directly from the Mail app to annotate them.

✓ Share Notes With Your Friends
Email your notes to any other person with Remarks and they will be able to edit it like their own.

✓ Import PDFs from Dropbox, Box.Net, Safari and other applications.
Use “Open In” to transfer documents for note-taking or annotation from any popular cloud storage or iPad app.

You can get Remarks for $4.99 in the app store – a small price to pay if it becomes your favorite note-taking, PDF annotating, document collaboration app on the go.

Adobe teamed up with Echosign, an electronic signature service, a while back and now its hitting up the iPad and iPhone with all of the legally binding digital goodness in Echosign’s universal iOS app. Echosign allows you to send instant fax and e-signatures, track changes to contracts in real time, auto store and manage signed agreements, all with enterprise-grade security. Echosign has a number of different integrations, but this new iDevice option is pretty sweet. Download the iOS app for free and Echosign subscribers can attach their electronic signatures to any document within the app, along with the great sending and tracking features found in the full-service version. Echosign is no fly-by-night either – a lot of big names you might recognize rely on it for the contract execution and tracking efforts (Twitter, Google, Facebook, VMware, Dell, and Groupon, to name a few). So what are you waiting for? Get signing!

I HEART ONENOTE! I have said it before here on the Studio and it is time to crow about it again. Why? Because OneNote will be the first of Microsoft’s Office products to hit the iPad and I think that is just perfect.

If you aren’t familiar with this fantastic note taking / note book application often found bundled in the Office suite, then check out my quick post about OneNote here. About a year ago, I was jumping for joy when OneNote first made it onto the iPhone, making OneNote all the more convenient and accessible. Now, just in time for Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, OneNote becomes the newest note taking and organizing tool on the ubiquitous iPad.

Like the iPhone version, OneNote for iPad is not as full featured as the desktop. You can sync and view your desktop notes on your iPad while on the go. You can also create and mail notes while out and about. You will need to activate a Windows Live account to get the syncing feature – well worth the effort as it offers a few other cool goodies, like SkyDrive. 

It does boggle my mind a bit that it has taken almost two years for Facebook to release an official app to access its popular social network on the most popular tablet on the planet. The new iPad app is now universal – giving iPad users that full screen / full resolution experience. On the pad, you get bigger, better high res photos that you can flip through like a photo album and pinch to zoom, easy navigation with fast multi-touch gestures like tap, slide or pinch to move from one screen to another, built in access to Facebook apps and games, the ability to share content or send messages from the News Feed, and the ability to see who might be nearby with the map feature. Most importantly, you no longer get that grainy 2x image familiar to those who used the iPhone app on the pad.

Facebook also released a new mobile platform for app developers on the same day, giving developers the tools to incorporate their apps right into the mobile experience. As developers leverage the platform, Facebook’s user experience should improve as well – with native or HTML5 incorporation, developers can access the mobile phone’s features within Facebook to deepen the functionality of apps.

As a universal app, these upgrades in functionality are available on the iPhone as well. Nice!

I note that some people have experienced problems updating the app – Facebook recommends that you delete the old app first before trying to install the new app.

Since Facebook is one of my regular iPad stops, I am very happy to see this release.

I think it is high time to revisit a web application from my very early days of poking around in web applications. StumbleUpon is and has always been one of my fav cool tools and, if nothing else, an incredibly entertaining way to spend time on the Web. If you don’t already know what StumbleUpon is, it is an online community that promotes discovery and rating of Web pages, photos, and videos. To do this, it offers, via the touch of a few buttons, the ability to secure personalized recommendations, using peer reviews and social-networking principles. In a word, its tons of fun.

Some of my early blog posts were the product of successful Stumbleupon jaunts. After setting up my profile and selecting some preferred topics of interests, I would sit at my computer, press the cute little blue and green button and be magically transported to cool pages and information I had never heard of or seen before. The more your rate the results, the better the results get. In a word, the ultimate on-line surfing engine for just about any kind of web content you can imagine.

Stumbleupon is fun, sure, but it is no slouch for professional use, if you are interested in such concepts as increasing web site traffic. I regularly get Stumblers from articles that have gotten posted up on Stumbleupon. And that is no fluke. Recent reports show that StumbleUpon  was the biggest driver of traffic among social media websites during the month of June, 2011, beating even sharing titan Facebook. And just a couple of weeks ago, Stumbleupon started making available a publishing widget for websites and blogs designed to keep readers on the site by offering curated, related article suggestions, much like Outbrain.

And today, in an effort to stay in touch with the cutting edge shiny, it has updated its iPad app with new features that reemphasize the social aspects of the site: there is now a “social bar” at the top of each stumbled page that highlights friends or other users who also liked the page, with the option to to visit their profile and connect.  If you haven’t used StumbleUpon on the iPad, you should – the device and the app are made for each other when it comes to entertaining web consumption on the ultimate consumption device.

So, let’s hear it for StumbleUpon – a great information service with social aspects and the ability to power your on-line campaigns. Oh, and a great way to blow an evening finding cool stuff.