Jonathan Markevich

Category: Apps

  • WD MyBook Live

    I discovered the other day that my WD MyBook Live is a lot more capable than I realized. It is actually running some flavour of Debian and has a fair suite of default unix commands. So what did I do with it? I didn’t go too wild… Due to the death of a previous MyBook…

  • WWDC 2014

    Apple had their WWDC keynote today, and announced, well, everything. Their user experience is converging like I couldn’t have imagined before.  Continuity lets you transfer your work from mobile to desktop just by being close to your Mac.  You can answer your phone from your computer. Mavericks looks awesome, despite my worry about flattening things.…

  • iPad multitasking

    I have no idea if this rumor has any substance to it, but it makes me wonder. I have long wanted a way to view, for example, a document alongside a stopwatch, which is a very simplistic use case, I know. Or a Bible app alongside an ePub reader. If they do this, I can…

  • Kindle

    This morning I got an email from Amazon, they are now syncing side loaded documents to their cloud service alongside Amazon-purchased books. I loaded the kindle apps on my iOS devices again and sure enough, the one test book I had uploaded showed up. With a little bit of arguing I got annotations to sync.…

  • Microsoft Office on the iPad

    With lots of hoopla, Microsoft finally realized they were ignoring a lucrative platform and released “Office” for the iPad. I, like millions of others, wanted to see what it offers, despite my… ennui (is that contextually valid?) with Office for the iPhone. I realized that most of the functionality is locked away behind a (fairly…

  • Another eBook reader option

    So, while I like Google Play Books, I would like another option with a little better library management.  It has to have good syncing so iBooks is definitely out. I did a search and came across a Wikipedia article on comparing iOS book readers.  There are a lot more than I thought!  The one that…

  • Sorry iBooks, it’s over.

    I’ve had it with iBooks, mostly because of its insane destructive syncing scheme.  Which isn’t syncing at all, is it?  See my logic below. I want to read books with my two portable Apple devices, optionally with my desktop Apple computer.  I want to highlight, bookmark or annotate in one device and sync to any…

  • Google Play Books redux

    I gave a quick review of Google Play Books when it first came out with user uploads.  (tl;dr version: meh.) It turns out that the iOS version is the weakest of their representations.  As foolish as that is, I should have known.  Now that I have tried the Android version, I see some significant advantages.…

  • iWork for iCloud Beta

    I just got to try it out. It’s… OK.  Definitely nicer looking than Google’s Docs offering, with some more conversion and graphics options, for sure, but some things elude me.  In Pages, for instance: Tabs/margins? Dragging or clicking on the ruler does nothing. Columns as shown on this page don’t seem to be possible. Editing or…

  • Office for iPhone

    So Microsoft finally released Office for iPhone.  Even two years ago I would have cared, but I can’t get excited enough to investigate it beyond skimming a few announcement pages. Maybe it’s related to the fact that recently I have been so disgusted with Word for Mac beachballing when I try to do something complicated…