I love my iKids and they love my iPhone. 

Glad to see apps that are available for them to enjoy as well. While in the car, in the store, attempting a pedicure, this will occupy them just fine.  🙂

So, Finger Paint vs. Scribble –

One of the things I have appreciated most since making the move to Apple’s Mac OS X last fall is the frequency of the updates that come to most of the applications I regularly use. Rarely does a day go by when there is not an update available for one program or another. It is nice to know that developers are constantly working to refine and/or add features to applications long after they have "shipped".

My friends who have been intimately involved with the jailbreak wonder known as installer.app have enjoyed the same thing over the months. On an apparently regular basis applications they had loaded on their iPhones received updates. Best of all, the installer.app actually notified them when updates were available. There was no need to go searching for one or to hunt something down. Installer.app actually checked for them.

I was pleased to see that this same functionality is part of the App Store.

Jott and reQall are both powerful tools in their own right. While each offers slightly different functionality, the bread and butter of both is found in their transcription ability. Now that each offers a resident application the comparisons are inevitable so… I’m going to compare the two.

In anticipation of an upcoming full review of both I did a couple of quick, unscientific, tests. The main things I wanted to see were (a) transcription accuracy and (b) speed of turnaround time.

I used the following statement as the first test–

This is a first attempt at two of us doing a quick comparison of the transcription accuracy of JOTT and REQALL.

Actual transcriptions from the two–

I’ve been a fan of SugarSync, the automated Internet backup and synchronization service from Sharpcast, since it was first in beta. SugarSync does a great job seemlessly keeping the files on my various computers in perfect sync. Since it works automatically in the background, it ensures that my data is safely backed up and accessible no matter where I am.

SugarSync’s iPhone optimized website makes accessing the files stored with the service a breeze. So long as I have a data connection I can view files from my iPhone or iPod Touch, or email them to myself or others in seconds. I find the peace of mind and convenience the service gives me to be invaluable which is why I happily became one of their first paid customers when the service came out of beta in March.

SugarSync has been continually expanding their services and just this morning announced a killer new feature.

We’ve been hearing a instability stories from iPhone users including apps spontaneously shutting down, auto-rebooting and even some freezing. It’s unclear if the cause can be directly traced to the apps, the firmware or some combination of the two, but help may be on the way.

A post over at the 9to5Mac and The Boy Genius Report suggests that a quick update to last week’s 2.0 firmware may soon be "shipping". While little more than rumor, the report claims to have seen website traffic requests emanating from systems that ID themselves as 2.1.

We’re not into fueling rumors here, but with all the crashing about which we’ve been hearing we hope this latest "update" rumor is true.