EditGrid Spreadsheets for iPhone/iPod Touch

EditGrid is a lot like Google Docs spreadsheets, except that you can edit their spreadsheets from an iPhone/Touch through their Beta iPhone interface. It works very well. I imported a very complex Excel spreadsheet into EditGrid and it converted flawlessly. Made some changes to the spreadsheet and then exporting it back out of EditGrid resulted in an Excel spreadsheet that was perfectly converted in every way.

Working through the iPhone/Touch interface is slow, though. Editing a large spreadsheet is impractical, unless your iPhone/Touch is the only way you can access it! Nevertheless, it works quite well for smaller spreadsheets.

I was looking forward to making my own personal budgeting spreadsheet, which is large and complex, available through my iPod Touch. However it’s just too slow to work with using the Touch. I did come up with a compromise, though, that works quite well for me. I have a small section of the budgeting spreadsheet set up on EditGrid. This is the portion that just deals with current checking account activites – checks and debit card transactions. That’s small enough to work well with the iPhone/Touch interface and allows me to make activity entries and then export the spreadsheet for easy copying of the entries into my PC-based full-blown version on an as-needed basis.

So, EditGrid is proving very handy for me. If you have some simple spreadsheet needs, check it out!

iPod Touch Postings on Twitter

If you are interested in my postings on the iPod Touch, please remember that most of them appear on Twitter. I usually publish one or more postings there just about every day.

Posting from an iPhone or Touch

I’ve been asked to give more detail on exactly how I post to WordPress from my iPod Touch – so here goes.

First of all I compose each post on Mobile Web Docs, including any needed HTML code such as that needed for hyperlinks (I speak HTML fairly fluently!). I find Mobile Web Docs to be a great little text-based document editing and storage system. It even supports folder creation for organizing files. It’s free with ad-support, but I like it so much that I paid the $15 donation fee. I haven’t found anything better in the way of document creation, editing, and storage tools for the iPhone/Touch.

After I finish up a posting I then use iCopy to copy the posting from Mobile Web Docs. Then I go to the normal WordPress posting page and click the “Code” tab. This is important as trying to enter a posting from an iPhone or Touch will not work using the default “Visual” tab. Then I use the iCopy bookmarklet to paste my entire message into the WordPress posting page.

Next comes a bit of magic. I like to include a little graphic identifying my Touch postings, as you can at the beginning of this post. I created this graphic on my Kohjinsha SH6 UPMC and uploaded it to WordPress. Therefore it’s always available for my use. To get it into my posts I scroll down the WordPress posting page to the graphics section, click on the “Browse All” tab to see all the graphic files I’ve uploaded, select the graphic I want, click “Show: Full Size”, and then click “Send to Editor”. Amazingly WordPress will automatically insert this graphic at the very beginning of the posting without my doing anything else. Then all I have to do is insert a return after the graphic to make it appear on top of the posting and hit the “Publish” button.

That’s all there is to it. Without Mobile Web Docs and iCopy it would just be too much trouble to post from my Touch, but with those two tools it’s actually pretty easy to come up with some pretty nice postings using the Touch.

I hope this explanation is clear enough for everyone, if not please leave comments and I’ll try and answer any questions you may have. Happy posting!

Free Star Trek Movie for iPhone/Touch

Star Trek fans are very serious about their passion. Who else would go to all of the trouble of creating a feature-length movie with a cast of actors from the Star Trek TV shows and movies, pretty sophisticated computer-generated special effects, and featuring production values at least as good as the typical made-for-TV movie – and then release the resulting movie on the Web for free!

That is what has happened with Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. The movie has been broken into three parts of approximately 1/2-hour each. The first two parts have been released and I’ve watched them. The third and last part should be released soon.

There are versions available for the iPhone and iPod Touch that looked and sounded great on my Touch. Below are links to the first two parts in iPhone/Touch format:

Part 1

Part 2

I hope you find these as enjoyable as I did on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Happy viewing!

B-Movie for 99 Cents on your iPhone or iPod Touch

iPod Touch tip: Buy a martial arts action movie for 99 cents that is specially formatted for the iPhone/Touch – http://tinyurl.com/2sh2r3

Running Out of iPhone or iPod Touch Memory?

If your iPhone or Touch is running out of memory, there is a simple and free solution if you have a PC that is always connected to the net. The solution is MyCast from Orb. It turns your PC into a secure media streaming portal where you can access your entire library of music, photos, and videos from Safari on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Orb will even stream TV. It’s quite easy to set up. You simply download and install Orb on your PC, and after a quick set up you can access mycast.orb.com with your iPhone or Touch and log in. Orb automatically checks the bandwidth, screen size and resolution of your viewing device and optimizes the digital content for the device type and connection speed. There is nothing to download to your iPhone or iPod Touch and no further configuration is required.

Evernote Beta

Thanks to an invite from Matt Miller, I’ve been able to experiment with the new Evernote beta for the past couple of days.

Now I’ve been a user and fan of Evernote for quite a few years, and prefer it to OneNote for note taking, and information capture and storage. However, the new Evernote beta brings this product up to a whole new level and well beyond OneNote in many ways. This is because the information created and stored in Evernote is now available across multiple devices: computers, cell phones, PDAs, and even my iPod Touch. Evernote data can now be synced between the local computer application and the Web. The Web version of the data can then be accessed through another computer or mobile browser interfaces. This means that data can now be created, searched, and accessed from any where at any time from just about any device. Wow, what an experience!

So I suggest you find a friend with some available invitations to the beta or stop by the Evernote beta site and sign yourself up for an invitation.

By the way, this posting was initially created on my iPod Touch using Mobile Web Docs, and then copied and pasted via iCopy into WordPress. The Touch is now really quite a nice blogging tool!

Microblogging

I’ve been microblogging on Twitter lately directly from my iPod Touch – primarily daily tips on using the Touch. If you would like to follow them, check out my Twitter home page.