Band of the Day iOS app

I love music, but since I’ve started a family and been working full time (as opposed to doing mostly nothing and playing in a band years ago) its become harder and harder to discover new music. It’s hard to find the time to sit around and listen to music, and most of the time I was getting recommendations from friends that I lived with, which obviously doesn’t happen anymore. I used to use last.fm as a sort of crude music discovery tool, as they will try to play music that matches your tastes based on your listening habits. That mostly never really worked for me as it was rare that I actually heard a band that I wanted to listen to repeatedly.
Today however I was introduced to a new iOS app called Band of the Day, and I loved it instantly! Each day a band is highlighted and you can read a review, check their bio, see messages from other users of the app, and stream whole songs from recent releases. You can also purchase songs or albums directly through the iTunes store. In a word, for me, it’s perfect. I have a train commute to work each day and now I have a super simple, beautiful music discovery app to help me find new bands. I’m going back now to browse trough past Bands of the Day!

iPhone app Waze updated

I had tried using Waze earlier this year, and while free turn by turn directions were really nice, my issue was with the voice guides navigation. Gladly, with the latest update the voice navigation in Waze has become much more robust! Previously the only voice input from the app was highly generic like, “turn left”, “bear right”. Now however the app tells you specifically the name of the road you are to turn onto, which greatly improves usability and obviate the need to look at the screen.
The other thing I like about Waze is the social aspect of the app. You can easily and quickly add an alert if you happen upon an accident or construction or some other delay. If enough people use this it could be very useful. Since the app is completely free, why not download it and give it a try?

Air Video Server running on a Windows XP Guest OS in virtualbox on Ubuntu Linux

For years I have been trying to find a way to easily and elegantly stream video to multiple small devices in our home. We only have one TV, and not everyone wants to watch the same thing at the same time. This really isn’t the worst problem in the world, obviously, but something I have tried to solve using all manner of different software and hardware combinations. A few weeks ago I discovered an iPhone application that required a server application running on either WIndows or Mac OS X. I tried to install the Windows version on my Ubuntu box running under Wine, but the application would crash as soon as the iPhone app tried to read a file from the hard drive. As they say, Wine Is Not an Emulator, and in this capacity it wasn’t going to cut it. I also checked the forums for the iPhone app developers who provide the PC app, and they had no intention of making a Linux version available anytime soon. So, I did what any self respecting geek would do presented with a solution which could potentially work, made it more complicated.
I first went through the process of building a new virtual machine in VirtualBox to host the Windows XP machine. That was quick and easy, and I happened to have an old XP disc lying around which isn’t in use on any computer anymore, since I haven’t used Windows at home since about 2004. The most challenging part was getting the Windows XP Guest OS to join the same network as the rest of the machines on my internal LAN, because virtual machines create a software interface and the actual packets are actually coming in through the same physical NIC card on the Linux machine. Fortunately, not too much googling later provided me with exactly the solution I was looking for. After installing these two utilities and running the script, provided at this blog, I was able to make the WIndows XP Guest OS join the 192.168.1.0 network! Perfect.
Now, all I had to do was install Bonjour from Apple, the Air Video Server application provided at inmethod.com and start it up.

I had to share the local Linux directory that stores all of our media, and set that up through VirtualBox, but that was relatively painless, requiring only that I get the VirtualBoxGuestAdditions.iso and use that on the Windows XP Guest OS so that it would recognize the shared folders and I could mount them permanently.

Once it was all good to go, I just added the /storage directory (which I mounted under Windows as Z:/ using the command “net use z: \\vboxsvr\storage”) to the shared directories in the Air Video Server app.

Here’s a screenshot of what this all looked like on the Windows XP Guest OS:

Air Video running in a Windows XP Guest OS

Now it was time to fire up the iPhone application and test all this juicy new streaming goodness!

I had been messing with this most of the night so the app had already detected the Windows instance of Air Video Server using Bonjour, which is why I had to install it on the Windows XP Guest OS:

AirVideo app Servers

Once you tap on the servername, the next screen shows you available shares:

AirVideo app available shares

Tapping on the Z:/ drive I made available shows me the directories and files located there, including a count of folders and files next to the folder names:

AirVideo app directories list

Drilling down into the TV directory shows me the same thing, folders and the number of files/folders in each directory:

AirVideo showing the TV directory

Here I have selected the Bored to Death directory, and you can see that the app grabs screenshots as well as displaying some pertinent file information for each file found, very nice:

AirVideo app Bored to Death

After selecting a particular file, I am presented with a few different options. Since this file is an xvid encoded avi, the app won’t be able to play the file natively. Air Video Server will take care of transcoding the file on the fly so that the iPhone app can play it:

AirVideo app avi file options

Now comes the good stuff, after selecting “Play with Live Conversion”, I am presented with the option to play from the previously played position, the beginning, or seek to a new position, very slick indeed:

AirVideo app Live Conversion options

After making my choice: “The Beginning”, the app begins the process of buffering the video to the iPhone app:

AirVideo app Preparing Video

Now, I suspect that because I’m running Air Video Server inside Windows XP running as a guest OS inside VirtualBox on a Linux host on a older desktop machine, the app complains that it doesn’t have the power to actually play the file, but all is not lost:

AirVideo app lies to me

I just tell the app to continue anyway, and I was able to play the entire show without interruption:

AirVideo app buffering video

And boom, about 5-10 seconds later, my TV show begins playing in perfect stutter-free fashion:

AirVideo app playing Bored to Death S01E01.avi

Tapping on the screen while the video is streaming brings up controls, in this case a little different than playing an x264 encoded file because the Air Video Server app is transcoding on the fly:

AirVideo app streaming converted file controls

If I wanted to seek to a different position, the app handles that too, which is pretty nice to have, although honestly I usually just watch a show straight through:

AirVideo app live conversion seek menu

All in all this app kicks total ass! I can now stream to any and all of the three iPhones in our house running from a single instance on a Windows XP Guest OS on my Linux box! The app works so well and I couldn’t be more pleased to be able to have this ability, which means I can now watch stuff while lying in bed without using a laptop, which is very nice indeed.

iCacti for iPhone ties into running cacti instances

I recently started setting up all kinds of different monitoring and alerting systems on my own Linux box I keep at home for media storage and as a playground/lab. About a week ago I installed cacti and started setting up all kinds of graphs and pollers to hit my localhost as well as the router which spans our internal and external networks. It was simple, and I started to think about how great it is going to be to have all this data logged so I can refer to the data at a later date. Of course, being the iPhone app junkie that I am, I went out looking for an iPhone app that ties into my running cacti instance, and that is exactly what I found.
iCacti only requires that you can supply a URL, username, and password to log into your own instance of cacti running somewhere either in your internal network or over the internet. Setting things up took about 10 seconds. I ran into a problem where the data wasn’t being read from my cacti server, but I worked with the developer Várkonyi Balázs through email and we were able to get everything working. To reward me for helping him get it working with my older version of cacti, he sent me a pre-release copy of the hotfix he sent to Apple. Now, some screenshots.

List of currently configured graphs for my cacti instance

LocalHost Load Average in landscape

You can also change the length of time that the graph displays, or refresh the graph you are currently viewing. The thing I like the most about this is that it uses existing technologies rather than making you have to run another open port in order to feed the app. It even supports SSL connections to your webserver of choice.

The app runs smoothly and provides the data I need in a beautiful little app. Well worth the $1.99!

Check it out: iCacti iTunes Link

Done with Jailbreaking

I am giving up on jailbreaking my iPhone. It takes too much effort, the phone becomes too buggy, and I ultimately don’t need to do anything that jailbreaking provides for me. Yes, it is really awesome to have an app on my phone that automatically scrobbles all music or podcasts that I listen to in the iPod app up to my last.fm account, but totally not necessary. Yes, it is totally badass to be able to discriminately choose which apps will run in the background, but also not entirely necessary. The last straw was when I decided to remove WinterBoard, which is an application that lets you change interface elements such as icons, background images on the home screen and much more. I had decided to remove it because I wanted to speed my phone back up, it does take some resources to run, and I wanted those resources back. Well, after uninstalling WinterBoard I had to reboot my device because the application puts some really deep hooks into the system. It never turned back on. It would try, the Apple logo would appear and the phone stayed in that state for a minute or two, but then it just went dark. Subsequent attempts to start the phone just ended in frustration. I ultimately had to do a full restore to factory settings in order to recover my device. I will be sad to lose the additional functionality, most especially StatusNotifier, which places small icons that look like they were designed by Apple themselves in your taskbar for missed calls, emails, text messages, and IMs. I can’t have my phone running unstable software though, as it’s a pretty important communication device to me, especially since my wife and I don’t use a landline at all in our apartment. This also isn’t the first time that I have run into issues with a jailbroken iPhone. A few months ago I had filmed a short video clip, attempted to upload that video to youtube, and then my phone went into total brick mode. In this instance I was left having to do a full restore, just as was the case today.
Android is starting to look better and better, although I know that platform isn’t without it’s flaws as well, but at least they have a kickass notification system built in without having to hack anything.

Droid vs iPhone

I got a change to really dig into my friend Felix’s Droid this Thanksgiving. I wanted to write down my impressions here, not only to share with everyone but also to keep myself in check whenever I yearn to own this multitasking big screen monster of a phone.
First of all, let’s get the biggest pro the Droid has going for it, the screen. It’s a Backlit TFT 3.7-inch WVGA (480×854) 16:9 widescreen display (267 PPI) and it is amazingly beautiful. Holding the screen up to the iPhone and viewing the same content it is no contest as to which device is more pleasing to the eye. Under the casing the iPhone and Droid both use the same processor, and it wasn’t surprising to see that both OSes booted up within seconds of each other in our side by side contest.
Android has really come a long way, and it is refreshing as an iPhone user to have more granular control over how applications are used on your device. I was able to rip open six or more applications (Google Talk, Browser, Gmail, Android Market, Music, ConnectBot) and it was quick and easy to jump between the different applications using the home button hold method. I was really impressed with how easy it was to navigate between running apps this way, and the phone didn’t seem to have any issues with lag even though we were doing so much at once. That being said, it was extremely disappointing to see such heavy lag just swiping between the three default home screen panels and when pulling down the windowshade notification bar. I have read that you can replace these apps with third party applications that perform better, but honestly you shouldn’t have to do that just to get a good experience from basic functionality of OS navigation.
Another problem I ran into was that after connecting the Droid in USB mode, and unmounting the drive once we were done transferring some media, the SD card got in some kind of funky state that caused the entire phone to become unresponsive. After taking the battery out and putting it back in we got some white-text-on-black-background about a bootloader and instructions to connect the SD card to USB, but nothing undid the problem until we actually removed the SD card and put it back in.
I have been using an iPhone in various forms (original edge-only iPhone, iPhone 3G, and now iPhone 3GS) for over two years, and the responsiveness of the screen is hands down better than the Droid, I’m sad to say. The Droid screen seems to require either a little bit more pressure or a little bit more time to register where you are pressing. If it was my first touchscreen phone it probably wouldn’t even be something I would notice, but the iPhone sets a high bar with the effortless responsiveness of their screen. In line with that the software keyboard was pretty terrible at recognizing what keys I was pressing, especially in portrait mode. I am certain that I am partially to blame as it does take some time to adjust to how a particular phone reacts to your thumbpads tapping the screen, but it was really abominable at registering my intended key even when I was typing slowly and deliberately. The portrait keyboard actually takes up a much smaller amount of space than the iPhone portrait keyboard, making it more difficult to press the tiny targets.
The media features aren’t quite as robust as on the iPhone either, but it is definitely serviceable and of course with the Android Market you can replace the default media player with one of several available. It is a little disappointing that the SD card included is only a class 2 card so the speed is not exactly optimal for playing back large video files on that beautiful monster of a screen.
Not to get nitpicky, but the feel of the device also was not as organic and natural to me as holding the soft, rounded curves of the iPhone. It wasn’t uncomfortable by any means, but just didn’t match the same fit and finish. I would like to point out however that the slider has absolutely NO play whatsoever, which was something that really disappointed me about the Pre when I first put hands to it.
Of course, there are complaints I have about the iPhone as well. Android’s notification system is in my opinion the single best way to deal with incoming alerts from an unlimited number of applications. Icons populate the status bar indicating the number of alerts for a particular application, and when you drag down the windowshade you can select actions to be taken on the alerts which usually involves opening the application that generated the alert. On the iPhone, you are typically presented with a modal pop up dialog that REQUIRES your input prior to allowing you to move on. More than once I have received a push notification or text message during a call which required me to acknowledge the alert prior to having the ability to press the end call button beneath it. That is just piss poor design, and from Apple it is just not acceptable, knowing what they can accomplish.
The iPhone does not allow multitasking of any third party applications. However, many third party developers have begun to code their applications in such a way that the exact state of the application is stored when you press the home button, so when you relaunch the application again it is as though you never left in the first place. A perfect example of this in action is the newish Tweetie 2. Prior to the latest release if you exited the app and opened it again later you had to scroll back from the very top until you could find the tweet you were reading. Now, the list is exactly in the same place it was when you exited the app. Although this doesn’t help with apps that would require running in the background (ie a media streaming app like pandora) it does make the experience of using most data heavy apps much more enjoyable, and simulates multitasking as best as possible while still meeting Apple’s restrictions by sandboxing any third party applications.
I have jailbroken my iPhone so I can selectively chose which applications run in the background anyway, but I don’t take advantage of the feature that often, because it typically starts to negatively impact the performance of the foreground application I am currently using. The only essential thing I use the jailbreak software for is to add tiny notification icons to the statusbar with StatusNotifier, which is something every phone under the sun includes. I am hoping a future update will see Apple including something like that by default, so if you have a new email, you can tell without having to unlock your phone and look at the little red badge over the Mail icon.
Felix and I also took a quick drive so he could show off the Google Maps with navigation application. It was fucking awesome. Once we mounted the phone it switched into Map/GPS mode automatically. I pressed one button to begin the audio listener, and spoke the address of my proposed destination. The phone pulled up a route, locked in GPS, and started speaking directions. The GPS was pinpoint accurate as to our current location, and the directions we received were flawless. This is extremely well executed and I am hoping the rumors that this software will make its way over to the iPhone are true, because that was a truly badass experience.
All in all, the Droid is a very impressive phone, but the OS still felt a little too rough around the edges and unpolished for me to be tempted to switch devices. The iPhone has a consistency about it that is very hard to beat, plus the performance of native applications cannot be beat by java apps that Android runs. At this pace though, unless Apple really steps up their game (keep in mind all iPhones share the same exact screen size, this is going back over two years now) I could see the slew of Android devices coming out in 2010 to be a real threat. I am certainly going to keep a keen eye out for new Android headsets, but right now my iPhone still makes me the happiest. I use it more than I use my computer, which is saying a lot for me.

Side note: Last month we exceeded the number of minutes on our AT&T FamilyTalk plan. It came to the tune of an extra $100!! I called AT&T and explained that I wanted to increase the amount of minutes on our plan since we exceeded it last month and we were on track to exceed it again this month. The AT&T rep not only took care of this right away, backdated it so that we wouldn’t incur extra charges this month, but he also removed the extra charges from our overage last month!! He did this all without any prompting by me that this was something I was interested in. I thought this type of service was extremely excellent, and it makes me feel much better towards the company as a whole. I still hate having dropped calls, but that seems to have improved a tiny bit in the last week or so.

Nagios and iPhone push notifications

I have a friend who works for an ISP and a few months back he told me about how he had wrangled Nagios into monitoring their servers and networking equipment. His story piqued my interest, and last night I finally downloaded Nagios, and configured it to monitor my 24×7 Linux host that sits behind my TV providing a number of different services to my internal network. Installing Nagios from source was simple with the instructions at http://www.nagios.org, and within minutes I was up and running. I had a little trouble with setting up auth_digest authentication for apache2 but I think that was mostly because that module wasn’t enabled by default. After I got the main configuration up and running, and I was able to access the web interface, I began to poke around. While I was doing this I got an email notification that my disk space was over 20%. I then thought, wouldn’t this be cool if I could turn this into a push notification?
I already set up a script provided by http://prowl.weks.net/static/prowl.pl, and have that working to notify me when a new TV show is added to my Linux host. I found that the settings for notifications in Nagios were located at /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/commands.cfg. In the notifications section, I added the following below the two entries for email notifications, which I included:

# ‘notify-host-by-email’ command definition
define command{
command_name notify-host-by-email
command_line /usr/bin/printf “%b” “***** Nagios *****\n\nNotification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$\nHost: $HOSTNAME$\nState: $HOSTSTATE$\nAddress: $HOSTADDRESS$\nInfo: $HOSTOUTPUT$\n\nDate/Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n” | /usr/bin/mail -s “** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Host Alert: $HOSTNAME$ is $HOSTSTATE$ **” $CONTACTEMAIL$
}

# ‘notify-service-by-email’ command definition
define command{
command_name notify-service-by-email
command_line /usr/bin/printf “%b” “***** Nagios *****\n\nNotification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$\n\nService: $SERVICEDESC$\nHost: $HOSTALIAS$\nAddress: $HOSTADDRESS$\nState: $SERVICESTATE$\n\nDate/Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n\nAdditional Info:\n\n$SERVICEOUTPUT$” | /usr/bin/mail -s “** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Service Alert: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ **” $CONTACTEMAIL$
}

# ‘notify-host-by-prowl’ command definition
define command{
command_name notify-host-by-prowl
command_line /usr/local/bin/prowl.pl -application=”Nagios” -event=”** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Host Alert: $HOSTNAME$ is $HOSTSTATE$ **” -notification=”Host: $HOSTNAME$ State: $HOSTSTATE$ Address: $HOSTADDRESS$ Info: $HOSTOUTPUT$ Date/Time: $LONGDATETIME$” -priority=1 -apikey=THISISWHEREMYAPIKEYWOULDGO
}

# ‘notify-service-by-prowl’ command definition
define command{
command_name notify-service-by-prowl
command_line /usr/local/bin/prowl.pl -application=”Nagios” -event=”** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Service Alert: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ **” -notification=”Host: $HOSTNAME$ State: $HOSTSTATE$ Address: $HOSTADDRESS$ Info: $HOSTOUTPUT$ Date/Time: $LONGDATETIME$” -priority=1 -apikey=THISISWHEREMYAPIKEYWOULDGO
}

So now, when Nagios sends a notification, I get a pop up instantly on my phone that looks something like this:

Nagios iPhone Prowl

Righteous!!

BeejiveIM with push finally hits the App Store!

Of course, the day I figured out that I could use TextFree (an app that provides you with an email address which displays any messages sent to it as a push notification to your iPhone) BeejiveIM finally hits the app store with push notifications enabled.  AIM did as well, as you can see below:

I like the new splash screen, very classy, and uh, bee hivey?

In the Settings app you can select which type of notifications you’d like to receive:

This is how the notification appears when you have the screen locked and first turn the phone screen on:

This is how the notification appears if you are currently using another app.  Not perfect, as it is disruptive, but it is leaps and bounds better than having to actually keep the single IM application open in order to see your updates.

All in all I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the performance, as I saw the notifications pop up on my phone about 1-2 seconds after receiving the same IM message on my computer.  In addition, if you delete the chat from your phone you won’t get the notifications if you’re using an IM app on your computer, so you’re not getting bombarded with notifications when you really don’t need them.  Great work overall, @BeejiveIM!

Byline for iPhone: integrating Google Reader the iPhone way

I read a bunch of different RSS feeds from websites all over the place, and for a few years now I have been using Google Reader because I can use it on any computer or device and then keep my read items in sync no matter where I am.  The experience was improved after I got the iPhone and Google quickly made adjustments specifically for the WebKit based browser used by iPhone as well as other smartphones.  However, I recently learned about an app for the iPhone called Byline, and being a feed junkie I thought I would try it out.  Boy am I glad I did.

When you first open Byline you are presented with Folders, which is basically the menu you see in Google Reader on the left hand side of the screen under normal view.  I had just finished reading all my items before I took the screen shot above.  From here I generally go straight to New Items, as that is what I want to read.

In this view you get a listing of all the feeds you would see if you were going to the Google Reader site optimized for the iPhone.  Byline fills in some extra data such as Source Webpage and time posted.  You can tap to follow through to the detailed view for a particular post.

Oh yeah, the app supports landscape orientation throughout as well.  Now that I’m actually viewing an item i have a few options.  If I tap the > button on the top toolbar the actual webpage this item references will be pulled up in the built-in browser, looking like this:

That is very cool, and extremely convenient, not to mention that it works very quickly.  When you are finished a quick tap of the < button at the top of the toolbar will take you immediately back to the previous screen.  Nice.  You can also navigate up and down through your list of unread items or add it to your starred items list, using the respective icons above.

Another superb feature of Byline is that it includes playing of YouTube clips directly in the application, rather than kicking you out and opening YouTube separately.  This includes all the bells and whistles that Mobile Safari enjoys.  For instance, if I open a detailed view of a particular item that has a YouTube clip that is not available to play on the iPhone, I will see the following:

A better look is like this:

However, if the clip is playable, you will be presented with a screenshot of the clip and the play icon without the international no symbol through it:

Tapping on the icon starts the clip in the standard YouTube interface, but the important part is that we actually don’t ever leave Byline.  Very nice integration, and this is the first time I have watched a YouTube clip without actually being in the YouTube app.  It is great to not have to jump between the two applications.  This is the kind of innovation we need to see in more applications to circumvent the circumstances in which Apple will not allow background applications.  This behavior is even better, since we don’t need to ever leave the main app we are using.  Badass.

Once you’re done reading you can choose to mark all the feeds you just scanned through as read, and then if you hit the refresh button at the bottom left of the screen the feeds all slip away and anything new starts to be pulled into the app.  This works very quickly and dynamically, so the page fills up with new items and the counter of New Items goes up one digit at a time, rapidly.

Byline is all about bringing the true iPhone experience to reading your Google Reader feeds, and syncs with your account seamlessly.  An added bonus is that the number of unread items shows as a badge on the icon when you are not using the application.  This does not dynamically update as of now, but it would be really nice if push notification system was used to update this app without having to manually sync it.

Tweetdeck rules the iPhone twitter client arena

I have started to really use twitter all the time, everyday.  It’s quite addictive to have a pipeline directly into the thoughts of all these other people that also use the service.  I have been going back and forth between Twitteriffic and Tweetie on the iPhone, and using Tweetie on the Mac up until recently.  Then I found out about Tweetdeck, which is an Adobe Air application, but works quite well on the Mac.  I started making groups and filters and going totally nuts loving all the extra control it gave me over how I could use twitter.  Then last night, the iPhone app was released.  This is probably the single nicest application I have ever seen on the iPhone, and it’s quite quick and useable.

Tweetdeck Start Screen

When the application first loads, you get the view on shown above.  It defaults to showing your friends, which is just really people you follow.  Plus there are separate columns for DMs, @replies sent to you, and you can create groups and search filters or add other types of columns as you please.  It basically mimics the desktop application experience as best you can with the limited real estate of a quarter vga LCD screen.

Rearranging tabs

One of the most visually impressive and convenient actions the application handles is rearranging your columns, and it works just like you think it would.  When you are viewing the zoomed out view of all your columns, you simply hold your finger down and the columns zoom out even further.  Then you can hold your finger down on one and drag it around to rearrange it.  It works pretty well, and when you’re done you hit the giant Done button, pretty simple.

This is how you do notifications, Apple!

Another really nice feature is the integrated notification system.  While you are flipping through columns, reading tweets and writing them too, perhaps browsing links, watching youtube clips and following new friends, updates pop up in a small bar at the top of the screen, not shown here.  But also at the bottom is the total number of updates you have not marked as seen, and when you tap it the pop up widget comes up which allows you to jump straight to the column that you select by tapping.  This is really awesome, and I wish more apps did stuff like this.  VERY usuable.

Mentions Column

The pic above shows what it looks like when you are actually viewing a single column.  I think the left and right arrows at the bottom are unecessary as you can move to the column to the left or the right by swiping in the appropriate direction.  The yellow “write” icon up on the top right allows you to go to the “edit tweet” window, and when you’re done there it just slides out of the way and returns you where you left off.  You can select an individual tweet to see the details, which is pretty useful and fully featured.

The last thing I want to show is the column edit tool:

Column Edit View

In this view you can select from a number of different “types” of columns, and then add it.  Once you have the ones you want, you can easily come back and edit them.  If you choose to sign up for a tweetdeck account the application will sync between your iphone and desktop so you don’t have to deal with marking tweets as seen in both placed, total synchronicity.  I have noticed it isn’t always perfect, but it’s still a lot better than keeping two separate apps that don’t know about each other.

Next up I’m going to take a look at the Google Reader iPhone app by Phantom Fish called Byline, it carries along this same type of idea but does the syncing through Google’s Reader service.