AppEzzy » Blog

Don’t forget to rate our apps

admin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 19:40:55 +0000

Have you rated any of our apps in iTunes yet? If not we really appreciate your 5 star ratings and positive reviews. Ratings really help our apps be seen by more people and the larger audience we have the more time and resources we can spend adding new features to our apps. The App store is a great place to find some really cool apps for such a bargain. If you think about it most apps that are well thought out and designed still only sell for $1.99-$3.99. Compared to a simple desktop app these are really great deals. Although these apps might seem simple from the outside they take a huge amount of time to create and with over 250,000 apps now in the app store it can be hard for developers to continue to add features to their apps without remaining in the top of the sales chart. That’s where we appreciate your help. To keep our apps in the charts your positive reviews help out a lot. So take a quick minute and head over to iTunes to give us a great review:

AppEzzy Apps on iTunes

Also if you want to share an app on Twitter or Facebook here are some quick 140 character messages for some of our most popular apps. Just copy and paste one of these messages to your friends:

Photographers automate your todo list with Photographer’s Workflow app, get it on iTunes: http://bit.ly/pflow

Learn how to take better portraits with @appezzy Portrait Photography 101 app: http://bit.ly/port101

Realtors, keep track of everything that needs to be done for your listings. Let Realtor Assistant keep you organized http://bit.ly/a7jyuC

Learn how to take more creative wedding photos with Wedding Photography 101 for iPhone: http://bit.ly/dgFJ2N

We appreciate all of your support, having started this business almost a year ago its been an amazing experience so far and we are looking forward to creating the best apps we can in the year to come.

- The AppEzzy Team

10,000 Apps Sold, and counting

admin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:15:45 +0000

Last week we hit our 10,000th app downloaded! Thank you all so much for your support and feedback along the way. All of your reviews and ratings in the iTunes store are appreciated and help to keep us adding more features and content to our apps. We love to hear your feedback on any product enhancements you have. You can always contact us on our Facebook page, Twitter or click the Support page above.

We have some great apps planned for the future and are very excited about what we can create for you in the coming months.

Also join us on FaceBook or follow us on Twitter. Follow us and be the first to know about new features and apps coming soon.

Thanks again everyone,

The AppEzzy Team

Photographer’s Workflow 2.0

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:29:33 +0000

We are excited to have just released two great updates to our most popular workflow apps, Photographer’s Workflow and Realtor Assistant.
Automate your todo list and stay organized with these productivity apps!

Some of the new additions to these Apps:

You can now save your projects directly to your iPhone native calendar or Google’s calendar

The data is now stored in a database to give you even faster access to your information

All graphics and icons have been updated for the Retina Display of the iPhone 4

Get these in the iTunes store now:

Photographer’s Workflow

Realtor Assistant

We have also received some great feedback for new additions to these apps and appreciate your input. Leave us a message on FaceBook or fill out a contact form.

How do our workflow apps help you?

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:08:47 +0000

With iOS 4.0 there are lots of new things you can do with your iPhone, and as developers we have over 1000 new things we can tap into with our apps! There are going to be some nice updates to our series of workflow apps coming soon to add in new features from the iOS 4.0 software. As we are getting these updates ready we want to hear from you. How are you currently using our apps to help streamline your business and save time? Right now we have 3 different workflow apps for specific industries:

Photographer’s Workflow

Realtor Assistant

Wedding Client Flow

We want to know how you are using our Workflow iPhone apps to streamline your business. Share with us your story on how you use our Workflow Apps to stay organized and the difference it makes in your business. What did you use before using one of these apps, was your desk a pile of papers and sticky notes? How much time do you save entering in all of these tasks with just a few taps on your iPhone now? We love to hear how our products help your business and want to share your story. We will feature a few people on our website to show everyone how our app can help real world working business owners out.

Also don’t forget to follow us on twitter @AppEzzy or sign up for our newsletter to be first to know about new apps! We have some great things in store for 2010 so follow us to be the first to know about any exciting news.

To share your story with us and possibly be featured on our website just fill out the contact form below.
[contact-form]

iPhone 4 Facetime

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:44:25 +0000

iPhone 4 Facetime – a new way to communicate

Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, Daughter Judy, Jane his wife….. That tune for me brings back memories of one of my favorite cartoon shows. Although it was a little bit before my time I loved watching reruns of the Jetsons and always dreamed about life in the future. Flying cars, robots and video calls. They all seemed so cool and although it was just a cartoon I couldn’t wait for this type of technology to be real. Growing up I was amazed with futuristic sci-fi shows and movies, they made my imaginazation run wild with all the cool things technology and gadgets could do in the future. When Steve Jobs rolled out the latest iPhone this year he said to Jonny Ive on a live video call “I grew up here in the US with the Jetsons…. dreaming about video calling and its real now”. It is real now and I have to say almost as cool as I could have imagined.

This is the one feature I have been wanting and waiting for since the first iPhone. One of our first steps into the world of the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi shows. Apple calls this technology FaceTime and while it isn’t the first device to offer video chat it still is very amazing and will change the way that we communicate. Here are our first thoughts on FaceTime.

First off the implementation of this is simply Apple, easy to use and it just works. Apple has been known for focusing on having technology that is amazing but not really show to the end user. They want their technology to be so great that the end user doesn’t really notice it and FaceTime is a perfect example of that. There is nothing to setup, no extra app to download its all built into the iPhone and made to work seamlessly. To initiate a FaceTime call all you have to do is call another iPhone 4 user and once you are connected with them tap on the FaceTime icon on the center of your phone (it looks like a little video camera). It will send a message to the other party that you have initiated a FaceTime call and once they accept a full screen image comes up with the other person. The quality of the calls is very good but just like anything with a camera phone lighting is the key. I have noticed with FaceTime calls where the other person is inside and poorly lit the resolution of the video can look pretty choppy and pixelated. But head outside or somewhere with enough light and the video quality becomes very good. WIth FaceTime you also have the ability to switch between the front and back camera, all you have to do is tap the icon on the bottom right and it will switch cameras for you. This feature is very useful, you are talking to Grandpa one day and your kids are running around the house just switch to the back camera and let Grandpa see all the action just like he was there.

Having used skype to talk with my out of town family and friends for awhile I think where the iPhone really hits it out of the park with FaceTime is in how the interface (or lack of it) is displayed. It is so simple just a full screen image of the person you are talking to with a small insert of your cameras feed that you start to talk to the person on the other line and the more you talk the more the technology just fades away. You start to feel like you are there chatting with them in person. Because you have no laptop setup with a large screen, keyboard and all the extras around it the video chat with an iPhone 4 feel much more personal and intimate. It is a great example of amazing technology that is so hidden from the user you don’t notice it at all, instead you focus on whats most important… the person talking right in front of you. I have really enjoyed using FaceTime so far and can’t wait for more of my friends and family to get an iPhone 4 so I can use it even more.

The only negative thing about FaceTime is you have to use it while connected to wi-fi. Steve Jobs did say when this was released that they do plan on making it available for 3G down the road but for now it’s a wi-fi only feature. This is too bad because when you are on the road and traveling this is when FaceTime might come in the most handy.

iPhone 4 First Impressions

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:49:33 +0000

The launch of a new iPhone has become somewhat of ritual in the past four summers: unprecedented amounts of speculation, hype and hysteria that launch consumers right into the times of warm weather, summer blockbusters and backyard barbecues. And never has the frenzy seemed so large as with the debut of the all new iPhone 4.

We were lucky to have ours shipped early and here are some first impressions of our experiences with the shiny gadget.

Design and Form Factor
Much has been said about the new physical design of the iPhone, with Apple opting for a more rectangular, boxy construction lined with the phone’s antenna and three seams on the sides. Previous versions subscribed to a curvier contour, with a seamless, silver bezel. The new phone is just as long, but much more slim and compact. The iPhone 4 might at first feel unnatural for long time users familiar with the curvy plastic back, but we found the new size to be perfect and easy to grip. The front and back are now a super strong glass and both give the phone a sleek, strong appearance. Overall, the phone looks impressive and feels more dense, a quality that makes it appear to be of a more solid build.

The Screen, aka the “Retina Display”
Once you get past the new body, the next thing you’ll notice is the screen. The “Retina Display” as Apple has coined it, is truly out of this world. Once you see it in person you’ll wonder how you ever functioned with anything less than the 960 by 640 pixels that it offers. There is no visible discernment of pixels and the screen is so crisp that it almost looks like it’s a static, printed background. But seriously, the screen is that good and, aside from the front-facing camera that we’ll get to in a minute, it’s the feature that makes the iPhone 4 the most upgrade-worthy.

Performance
Users that are upgrading from the 3G or the original iPhone are going to think that the iPhone 4 moves in light speed. For 3GS upgraders, the 4 is still even zippier than that device. Apple equipped the iPhone 4 with their A4 processor, which is the same chip they used in the iPad. What that means is that the phone is incredibly fast and responsive. Applications open almost instantly. The camera loads fast and snaps photos very quickly. It’s also been confirmed that it has 512 MB of RAM, allowing you to have many multitasking apps on standby (though most developers have yet to adjust their apps to take advantage of iOS4’s multitasking features). As for call reception, the iPhone 4 hasn’t ostensibly had better or worse 3G AT&T service than its predecessors, though we’ll need to spend more time on the phone. We haven’t had any dropped calls yet.

The Cameras
Probably one of the most griped about omissions from the 3GS was a front facing camera. The iPhone 4 features significant upgrades in the photo-taking department. It is equipped with two cameras, a 5 megapixel one on the back of the body and a new, front-facing camera on the flip side. And Apple also threw in a flash for the back camera. The picture quality is an obvious step up from before and the pictures are noticeably more crisp and vibrant. It is also equipped with a 5x digital zoom (a nice feature to have, but one that doesn’t allow for the best quality of images). The lens also records video in 720p now, which looks great on the device as well as when exported to your computer. Users will be able to chop up these videos in the all new iMovie app that is now available in the app store.

The camera app has been slightly tweaked to accommodate all this new functionality, giving an overlay to toggle the flash from “On” to “Off” to “Auto” mode. Another overlay allows the user to quickly switch between the front and back cameras. Most of the rest of the controls remain the same with the button to toggle between still and video recording. And like we mentioned before, the app is super-responsive, so you will be less likely to miss the picture with the iPhone 4.

Battery Life
The new design for the phone allowed Apple to cram a larger battery in. Short battery life is a problem that has plague the first three iterations of the the iPhone and the devices simply fail to last through a day of normal use, let alone a day with many phone calls, internet browsing, photo snaps and GPS browsing. Apple is advertising the battery of the iPhone 4 as having 40% more usage time then before and, at first glance, the device does appear to last much longer. We haven’t had the phone long enough to fully test out the battery’s life, but what we’ve seen so far is promising: it is holding up to above normal use.

Overall, the iPhone 4 (and iOS4 for that matter) have a lot to offer (much more than we’ve covered here), and we’re seriously impressed. The iPhone 4 is a truly amazing device and well worth the price of admission if you’re thinking about taking the plunge or upgrading. We’ll be spending more time on the device and checking out feats like FaceTime, so stay tuned for updates.

iOS 4 new features

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:19:52 +0000

Today we are continuing our look into iOS 4 and want to showcase some additional features that you will love with this new operating system. Here are a few more of the big updates that Apple put into the operating system along with some little known gems.

Spell check – The iPhone now has spell check built right into the operating system and for those of you who are using the iPad it works the same way. Basically once you have typed a word that the iPhone thinks is mistyped it will underline it in red. Then tap on the word and you will see possible replacements pop up above it, tap on the correct word and thats it! Very simple to use spell check and based on a few days of real world testing seems to be very accurate.

Events, Faces and Places in the Photo Menu – This is going to be very cool for anyone that has iPhoto. When you go into your Photos app you now will have 4 tabs on the bottom; Albums, Events, Faces and Places. This gives you more ways to navigate through your iPhone photos quicker, I think the faces is a really good addition to the iPhone. Faces will only work if you have iPhoto on your computer and use the Faces button there to sort your photos by person. If you haven’t tried that out in iPhoto it does work very well, I have been amazed at the accuracy of predicting people once you tag them a few times. The Places tab will work regardless of if you are using iPhoto or not, since your iPhone tags the location of where the photo was taken it will now give you a map view of all of the photos from your iPhone and group them by where they were taken.

Notes Sync – Another small but very useful addition is the ability to sync notes. I have been waiting for this for awhile, I am always jotting down notes in the notepad but then have to remember to email them to myself so I can see them on my desktop later. Now as long as you are a MobileMe member click into your Mail, Contact, Calendar setting in the settings app. Then click on your MobileMe account and you will see a new button for Notes at the bottom.

Here are a few more little additions that most people don’t know about yet

Resize Photos While Sending – This is a great new add on if you want to send a quick photo from your iPhone but don’t want to send the full size photo. It now gives you 4 options when sending a photos, Small, Medium, Large or the original size.

SMS Character Count – For everyone who always runs out of space with your SMS messages you can now turn on a character count. In the settings app under messages you will see a new option to turn on message count. Then when you are typing a message over 30 characters you will see a new counter to the right.

SMS Search – You can now search your SMS messages just like you search email. At the top of the SMS screen there is now a search box.

Birthday Calendar – There is a new calendar for Birthdays that pulls together all birthdays from your contacts.

Smart Links For Dates and Addresses in Emails – Dates and Address in your email now appear as smart links, clicking on them will let you look up the location or add the date as an event. Just like the smart links in your Apple mail client!

Bluetooth Keyboard Pairing – You can now pair your Apple bluetooth keyboard with your iPhone.

Cellular Data On/Off – In your network settings you can also turn on/off your cellular data

iOS 4 new and improved features

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:28:13 +0000

Today Apple released the latest operating system for the iPhone and this one might be the biggest jump in functionality and improvements since the iPhone came out. iOS 4 (renamed from iPhone OS since it also runs the iPod Touch and iPads) has over 100 new improvements to the OS and actually is pretty amazing. After testing this out for awhile I do have to say I have been very impressed with some of the new features and just overall improvements to the OS. Over the next few days this week we will be rolling out a series of blog posts covering some of these new features and will also have an in-depth look at the iPhone 4 roll out on Thursday so keep checking back for updates all week long.

Today we are going to just cover 3 of the top new features with iOS4; Multitasking, New and Improved Email and Folders.

Multitasking and Fast App Switching
For awhile Apple has said they were waiting to include multitouch because they wanted it to be perfect. They didn’t want to sacrifice user experience or battery life and I do have to say the multitasking in the iOS 4 is pretty cool. For all of the people that want a true desktop multitasking experience this doesn’t give you that but does open up a lot more you can do. Switching between apps is a breeze just double click the iPhone main button and a new menu will appear at the bottom of the screen. Your most recent apps will be shown here and you can scroll to the right of the screen to see more apps. Just tap on an app and it will launch with a cool little rotation animation. Now if you were running an app like Pandora your other app is still running in the background so you can still listen to your music. Another nice feature with this is if you scroll to the left of this new menu it will give you a few additional options.
- portrait orientation lock. Now you can lock your iPhone into portrait orientation so if you are laying down or just don’t want the iPhone to auto rotate for you, just lock it in portrait mode.
- controller for your iTunes. Just like you used to be able to double tap the main button and pull up a controller for your music you can do this from this screen now.

New and Improved Email

The improvements to email are pretty huge. Now if you have multiple email boxes like me you can see all of your email consolidated in one box. The boxes are still separated for everyone who wants to keep them separate but Apple added a new box as the top for “all inboxes”. So now if you prefer to see everything together you don’t need to jump back and forth from email boxes to see all of your emails.

The other big addition to email is threaded conversations. Now any back and forth conversation you have had with someone are consolidated in your inbox. So no more searching through your inbox to see a response from a few emails ago, in your inbox any conversations will now have a number icon right under the timestamp of the email. Click on that email and you will see all messages from this thread. Then you can tap into any message to read the details again. After using this for awhile you will be amazed how useful this is, it really creates a much more robust email experience. I really can’t wait for this to be added to the iPad that will make the iPad so much better at email.

Folders
This was another big item when the iPhone 4 was announced. Have been an iPhone user since the first gen I have way too many apps installed. The spotlight feature released awhile back has helped but it still can be cumbersome to flip through pages of apps to find what you need. Folders takes care of this problem and does it in typical apple style. To group together multiple apps into a folder just hold down your finger on one app until the apps start shaking. Then drag and drop any app on top another and it will create a folder. It names it for you based on app category but you can edit this anytime by entering in your own name. Navigating your iPhone apps just got a lot easier and is beautifully done.

Surprise Camera Features
Also if you want a nice surprise not advertised out there try your iPhone camera now and see how snappy the response is when you press the shutter…. Nice!

Another cool camera feature that didn’t get much coverage is the camera now has a zoom feature. Just hold down your finger anywhere on the screen while about to take a photo and a new slider will appear on the bottom. Zoom in with this slider and then take the photo as normal. You are going to loose image quality when zooming in but still a feature that can come in handy sometimes.

There are a ton of more features and we will be posting more over the next few days so check back soon. We will have some video walk throughs coming along with coverage from the line in San Jose on iPhone 4 day (and maybe an interview with the Woz). Whats your favorite feature of iOS 4? Leave us a comment below.

ArtScapes new collections coming soon!

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:05:52 +0000

We have just submitted an update to Apple to add 2 new galleries to our popular ArtScapes iPad wallpaper app. This app has hit the #1 spot in 4 countries already and is a collection of some artistic images from Europe. You can get ArtScapes for free right now with a sample of 12 artistic wallpaper images. Coming later this week you will have the ability to add 2 new collections to ArtScapes for onlyl $.99 each. We are releasing a Venice collection and a Swiss collection. If you are a art lover and appreciate Fine Art photography you don’t want to miss these apps.

ArtScapes – Not your ordinary wallpaper! Get a collection of artistic images from throughout Europe.
All images are high resolution sized perfectly for the iPad.
Let these wallpapers take you on a journey to Switzerland, Italy and France with some beautiful artistic images.

Realtor Assistant iPhone App

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:08:36 +0000

Having a hard time keeping track of everything that needs to be done for your listings? Let Realtor Assistant keep you organized.

Realtor Assistant was created to help Realtors keep organized and focused on what needs to be done for every client. This is a quick and easy way to create a series of tasks from any client project that will import to your Google Calendar. With just a few taps on your iPhone, it will create a series of predefined events on your Google calendar. Simply create a new project, pick your workflow and start date. The app will do the rest and populate your calendar with all of the necessary events that you need to finish the job! It’s a great way to stay organized and each project can be customized to fit that specific clients needs. Realtor Assistant is simple to use yet powerful.

Think of how many different things you need to do when you take on a new listing. You need to do the a CMA, meet with your clients, organize all of the paperwork, handle the marketing tasks and many more items. With Realtor Assistant, all you have to do is name your new project, tap the new listing workflow template and in a matter of seconds you will have all of the tasks on your Google calendar. And if you use Google Sync all of this info will also synchronize automatically on your iPhone’s native calendar.

 Realtor Assistant comes standard with 4 sample workflows; New Buyer, Pre Listing, Listings and Marketing the Listing. There are over 60 pre-set tasks already setup for you and you can edit these or add your own as needed. You can also create as many new workflows as you need.

Note: You do need a free Google calendar account to get the full use of this app.