AppCraver » Misc Business

VeriSign’s VIP Access App Doubles Your Security

Michael Alexander — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:00:25 +0000

VIP Access - If you worry about an unauthorized person accessing your PayPal, eBay or similarly sensitive account where your security is paramount, download VeriSign’s free VIP Access app.

The way hackers often get into sensitive accounts is by exploiting weak passwords. They know many people use passwords that are too short, or consist of pet names, birth dates and other easy-to-crack passwords. You would be surprised just how many people use “sex,” for their password, for example.

What VIP Access does is to add an additional layer of security that makes it nearly impossible for someone other than you to get into your account.

Security 101: There are essentially three layers of security. The first is one-factor is something you know like your login ID and password. The second is two-factor, which is something you know and something only you have such as a bank card. The third is something you know, something you have, and something you are, such as your fingerprint.

VIP Access uses two-factor protection and the thing you (and only you) have is a “token.” A token is a device with a unique credential–a lengthy series of alpha-numeric characters—and the ability to generate a temporary password every 30 seconds. In this instance, your token is your iPhone or iPod touch.

VIP Access attributes a unique credential to your handheld and it generates a temporary password. When you go to one of VeriSign’s member sites, you’ll be asked to register your credential and each time there after that you’ll enter your usual login ID and password and a temporary password created by you iPhone or touch.

I know all this can seem daunting but it’s actually easy once you’ve done it the first time.

From your VIP Access launch screen, you have the options to watch a video (see below), read how to get started, peruse a FAQ and find out where you can use this app on the Web. VerisSign’s member sites include PayPal, eBay, banks and other sites where you might be concerned about security. The number of places where you can use this system are somewhat limited right now, but VeriSign’s security is widely used and I have no doubt many more sites will get with the program.

To begin, visit a member site by entering this URL from your desktop or laptop browser: vipmobile.verisign.com/wheretouse.v and click on the logo of the site you want to use and go there. On the site’s home page, look for the VeriSign Identity Protection logo and follow the instructions to log in with your credential ID and your security code. Register your credential at each VIP member site that you plan to visit. You only have to do that once for each site.

Thereafter, when you visit the site, you’ll log in as usual, followed by a six-digit password provided by the app.

It’s a safe and sensible way of protecting your identity and hard-won dough. It’s all free too. Give VIP Access a try. It’s well worth the small amount of effort.

app_name: VIP Access
rating: 9/10

Convert: Answers In The Palm Of Your Hand

Keith Lewis — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:30:30 +0000

Convert (Unit Converter by PBF) – One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there are several categories of possessions. The two that come to mind today are the possessions of others that I would love to own and those that I own but seldom use — but when I do use them nothing else will do.

Convert (Unit Converter by PBF) is an iPhone app by Polar Bear Farm Ltd that helps to condense the latter. I don’t know how many times throughout a year that I’ll need to know how to convert miles to nautical miles or need to know that 45 radians is the equivalent of 2,578.31 degrees but with Convert handy I know I will be able to solve such dilemmas.

Convert is a unit converter that allows you a selection of a wide range of categories and units from which to chose. Your choices include Angle, Area, Currency, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Speed, Temperature, Time and Volume.

Within each category of Convert are sub-categories. For example within Angle you can convert degrees, radians, gradian and revolutions. Chose Temperature and work between Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. Tap into currency and your choices are endless.

When I first saw Convert I knew it would convert currency using up-to-date exchange rates. I thought, that’s nice but how often do I really need to know the exchange rate, once a year or so?

Shortly after I got Convert I heard a discussion on the radio concerning 35 nautical miles. I was quickly able to determine that 35 nautical miles was equal to 40.277 land miles.

Convert is nothing fancy but extremely functional. It’s basic gray and blue screen colors are a perfect combination. The look and feel is such that I can almost hear my old professor working his way through algorithms on the board. The only problem I could find with this app was the inability to enter a minus when converting. Which could be useful when converting temperatures. (Note:it will show a minus within results after calculating.)

There are probably thousands of situations when Convert would be great to have available. One of the things that it could be very useful for is converting things like tablespoons into teaspoons while cooking.

I own many items that I must have but seldom use. Tape measures, power drills, hand saws, and levels are the types of things I’ll use only couple of times a year. The security of knowing they are available is often more important than actually needing to frequently use them.

The Convert iPhone app falls into my category of possessions I love to own but will probably use just a few times a year. If I were still in school I’d probably use it considerably more. For the time being I’ll be happy knowing that when I have a need to convert something, I’ll have Convert available to me. Maybe someday in the future I’ll have a boat like my neighbor and really want to do some work in the nautical miles category.

app_name: Convert by PBF
rating: 8/10

StockAdvisor Brings Serious Stock Analysis

Derek Walter — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:05 +0000

StockAdvisor by Tradeoffnews is an app for those who want control over their stock trading. At $19.99, it is not for the faint of heart. But it has some pretty powerful tools that make it worth considering if you plan some serious stock trading.

Mastering StockAdvisor takes a bit of time, but it can definitely be done with some patience and playing around with the features. What separates StockAdvisor from the Apple Stocks app or the other third party apps is the rapid availability of trading information.

There is a page that rates news tips on whether your portfolio contains any good buys or stocks to dump. The information is pulled from sites such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

It would be nearly impossible to compile all this information on your own. Having it all inside of one app is quite an advantage for staying on top of how the market is doing. Of course, there is also detailed portfolio information presented in an easy-to-read format. Adding stocks is a snap and StockAdvisor lets you easily scan your stock information.

The StockAdvisor web page is a pretty good resource for information about the app. Many apps have a dedicated web page for promotion, but many are fairly static. StockAdvisor’s site has a blog which includes tips and updates about how to make the most of it.

The $1,000 question (or in this case the $19.99 question) is whether StockAdvisor is worth the cost. Overall, StockAdvisor does its job well. There was a constant flow of information throughout the day of buying opportunities that would be valuable for any trader. It may be overkill for some users, it speaks to the iPhone’s potential that a serious, in-depth stock app like StockAdvisor was developed.

app_name: StockAdvisor
rating: 9/10

proSEO Reveals the Inner Workings of Web Pages

Michael Alexander — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:30:17 +0000

If you make it your business to understand how well Web pages are optimized for search engines, proSEO is a good way to go for iPhone users. This handy app from Infinidigm enables to look at a Web page’s keywords, tags, HTML and other important attributes that factor into a site’s search engine ranking.

Enter the URL of the Web page you wish to analyze into the app’s browser and bookmark it if you plan to revisit it. After the Web page loads, tap the Analyze button and proSEO does the heavy lifting.

You can analyze a page by selecting one of four options: Source Analysis, Body Text Analysis, Anchors and Link Text and Images and Alt Text. Tap, say, Body Text Analysis and you’ll see the all the text that appear on your chosen Web page, the page’s word count and its stop word ratio.

Some of that is evident, even for users who are unfamiliar with SEO jargon. Stop word ratio is a measure of the number of times words such as “the,” “and” and other oft-used words appear on a page. Searchbots ignore commonly used words like those.

For example, a look at AppCraver’s home page reveals 1979 words (which includes menus, captions and other text) with a word stop ratio of 43.507%. That means about half the words on the home page are indexed by searchbots.

Drill deeper into the Body Text Analysis by tapping the Phrases button and you’ll get a list of words on the home page and how often each word appears. That alone won’t tell you much. However, you also have the option to remove stop words and to use a slider to see which words appear in phrases.

So, for example, to see phrases of up to five words (the maximum), adjust the slider and up will come a list of phrases and the frequency in which they appear on the page. The phrase “apps in the App Store” appears four times on the home page. That’s pretty good from AppCraver’s point of view because that’s one combination of words a person is likely to enter into Google or another search engine.

proSEO enables you to look at how well a page is optimized based on what are considered to be best practices. If you look at Alt tags — the text that describes an image’s content — and see that the text is missing or does not closely match up to your the keywords you want on your site, you should fix that.

proSEO is not only useful for people who already know what SEO is all about but it’s also a great learning tool for people who want to understand what goes on behind the scenes and see what sorts of stuff searchbots feed on.

There is a problem with proSEO, and it’s one the developers readily acknowledge. That is, the app will bog down and even crash when your handheld is low on memory. Web pages with lots of content will do that. The app is also prone to slow to a crawl between page loads if connectivity is less than optimal. In other words, you’ll be okay on a Wi-Fi connection; you’ll be drumming your fingers over 3G; and you probably won’t get anything done on EDGE.

If you need to look under the hood of Web pages, proSEO is worth its $9.99 price tag.

app_name: proSEO
rating: 8/10

Mail2Group: One App to Mail Them All

Michael Alexander — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 01:00:42 +0000

If you often need to send emails to more than a few people in your contacts list at the same time, then Javid Alimohideen’s Mail2Group fills a gaping hole between iPhone Mail and Contacts.

Mail2Group is an adjunct to the iPhone’s native email app. You can organize your contacts into groups and manage your groups in a variety of ways. With Mail2Group you can send an email message to everyone in the group, send email messages to only some people in the group, and you can decide to use the same or other content in the subject line for the same group.

You can sort your groups alphabetically, copy them to form new groups and set “copy” and “blind copy” to the people in the contacts that comprise the group.

In Settings, you can set a confirmation before launching your email, which might keep you from accidentally emailing all your co-workers your opinions about the new boss. Settings is also where you can also choose to sort your groups by name or to leave them in the order you created them.

Mail2Group is one of those apps that should have been included with the iPhone and that’s probably going to happen sooner or later. However, it’s hard to imagine that Apple could come up with any features that aren’t already in Mail2Group. Alimohideen seems to have thought of everything. I didn’t encounter any bugs either.

app_name: Mail2Group
rating: 9/10

GottaDash Lets You Customize Fake Calls

Anna Axster — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:30:08 +0000

GottaDash-Premium Fake Caller is the fake call app by developer Chillingo Ltd. GottaDash offers simple and easy-to-use functions and unlike some other fake-call apps like Wingman or Exit Strategy, GottaDash lets you customize your calls with several selections.

You simply select from seven different ringtones (including a vibrate option), choose how long the ring should last, and finally set the timer for when the fake-call is supposed to come in. Additionally GottaDash lets you choose from seven different wallpapers. Both wallpapers and the length of the ring have to be selected in the iPhone’s system settings.

All of these choices sound great and at first it seems like GottaDash has one up on many other fake call apps. But using GottaDash quickly uncovers its shortcomings. The selected wallpaper is on the screen of the iPhone before and during the fake call and when the “end call” button is hit, the screen goes back to the GottaDash selections. Furthermore the ringtone selection could be diversified since none of the seven options sound like typical iPhone ringtones.

The idea of providing options to create the nature of your fake call seems great but the options GottaDash offers leave a lot of room for improvement and the use of the wallpapers is clumsy in its development.

app_name: GottaDash
rating: 4/10

iSpreadsheet: An iPhone Excel app for number crunchers

Derek Walter — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:00:15 +0000

Editing documents has been one of the major holes in the iPhone experience. While the e-mail and other apps give a solid performance in letting one view and send files, the ability to manipulate them has been lacking.

Enter iSpreadsheet, the first app that allows you to actually create and save spreadsheets. It is a solid concept — giving users the ability to keep track of business expenditures, household expenses, or other types of data. There are some very clever functions that make good use of the iPhone’s touch interface.

But there is a downside to being first out of the gate. iSpreadsheet leaves a lot to be desired in functionality. Some features that one would expect are missing, and others are a bit on the clunky side. While iSpreadsheet may improve with updates and time, as it currently stands you should consider that at a price of $3.99, you are going to get what you paid for.

Using the software is fairly simple. You can create headings for your columns, change their width, and format them just like you would with Excel. The icons appear when you are working in a column format.

As with Excel, you can name your rows and put in the ever-popular Excel formulas that power users are familiar with.

Color is available for highlighting the background or just the symbols themselves Bold and italics are also available for making things a bit more legible.

The biggest drawback is the learning curve, as help is available but hard to find. The italic “i” in the left-hand corner is where you go for help.

The syncing with Google Docs is handy, but of course this will only be of benefit if you are a Google Docs user. There is a familiar large Googlesque “G” on the header where you can access your Google Docs.

iSpreadsheet is handy tool if you want the power of spreadsheets in your pocket. It is the first of hopefully many apps that will unleash the iPhone’s screen power for productivity tools.

app_name: iSpreadsheet
rating: 6/10

beamME Sends Contact Info to Anyone, not Just iPhone Users

Derek Walter — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:30:28 +0000

The beamMe app is a fast, easy way to share your contact information with a friend or colleague. It is an offering from rmbrME, which promotes the app as a way to boost your sales and connections through the quick ability to share your contact.

It is easy to set up your information and then either text or e-mail your vCard. The receiver simply goes online to download it into their address book. In fact it is so seamless, it leaves one wanting for the ability to do the same with the other contacts in their list.

Another strength of beamME is that you can share information with anyone — you don’t have to be connected to the same network or have the app running on both phones, unlike some other apps.

Check out beamME in action on YouTube:

app_name: beamME
rating: 8/10

Fliq is a Great Concept, but Not Seamless Just Yet

Derek Walter — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:00:35 +0000

The strength of Fliq lies in its relative ease-of-use for transferring contacts and photos. Plus it is free, unlike the paid version of Handshake. With just a couple of taps you can send out photos from your collection along with your contact information.

Once you open the program, you get a list of others who are running Fliq. This also means getting those you want to share things with to also download Fliq… and be near you …and have the app open when you want to share something.

While Fliq has some conveniences, sometimes it may be easier to do things old-fashioned ways: e-mail or text.

app_name: Fliq
rating: 7/10

Handshake Shares Contact Info — With Other Handshake Users

Derek Walter — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:30:41 +0000

In business the handshake often comes with a business card. The makers of the Handshake app hope to put the entire process on your iPhone. The app — there is a free and paid version — gives you the ability to send contact information (yours or someone from your contact list) or photos. You must, however, both be using handshake to make the transfer (you can view a Handshake YouTube demo).

It works pretty seamlessly, but the necessity of the other user having the app makes it limiting. It would work best if you and a group of friends or colleagues all agreed to use the app. Then it would make contact and photo sharing a rapid, painless process.

app_name: Handshake
rating: 7/10