Remember the Milk is a popular, web-based tool for managing tasks. You can use it to store reminders to take out the trash or pick up groceries, or just about any other task you’d like a reminder for. You can set due dates for tasks or sort tasks by tag, location, or other criteria.

The folks at Remember the Milk also offer a Pro service that lets you sync your task list to apps for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone. A Pro account will set you back $25 per year. The mobile apps are all available as free downloads, but you need to pony up for a subscription if you want to keep using them after  a free trial period expires.

Or at least, that’s how it used to work. Today Remember the Milk launched a new version of its iPhone app which works without a Pro account. What’s the catch? You get a limited feature set. If you’re using the free version, you’ll only be able to synchronize your tasks once every 24 hours — and you’ll have to do it manually. Still, this is a great way to try the service before deciding if you’re going to use it enough to justify paying for a full year’s membership.

Pro users will continue to get unlimited auto-syncing, the ability to keep your tasks synced across multiple devices, and push notifications for reminders. You can either sign up for a Pro account at the Remember the Milk web site or make your purchase from within the iOS app.

The Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android apps still require Pro Accounts to function.

Remember the Milk for iOS is available as a free download from the App Store.

via Lifehacker

Ever need to print a PDF file, sign it, scan it, and then email it? I’ve lost count of the number of contracts and other documents I’ve had to do this for. Doc Sign is an iOS app that saves you a few steps, by letting you use your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to sign a PDF using your touchscreen display. No printer or scanner required.

You can use the app to open PDF attachments from the iOS Mail app, from Drop.io, or from a computer. When you’re done, you can either export the document or email it.

Doc Sign isn’t just for signatures though. You can also use it to fill out forms in PDF files. One thing that sets this app apart from other PDF signing apps is the fact that it doesn’t require an internet connection, because everything runs natively on your mobile device. That means your files will never be uploaded to the developers’ servers.

The app supports older iPhone and iPod touch models, but some features are reserved for iOS 4 and iTunes 9.2, including the ability to transfer documents from your desktop using iTunes file transfer and the ability to open Mail attachments directly into Doc Sign.

Doc Sign is available from the App Store for $3.99.

via ReadWriteWeb

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at WWDC today, he suggested that there were a hundred new features in the iPhone 4 and that he would only focus on 8 of the bigger ones. Sure, he talked about more than 8 things, introducing a few new apps, when talking about the operating system, for example. One app he didn’t mention was iWork. But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming to the iPhone. In fact, there’s some evidence that it might be doing just that.

Apple introduced a touchscreen-friendly version of the iWork office suite when the company launched the iPad a few months ago. Now it looks like there may be a new version scaled down for the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display.

As the folks at TUAW and MacRumors have noticed, if you look at the Apple press shot for Mail on the iPhone 4 features page, you’ll see a screenshot indivating that you can open a presentation file in Keynote. That would certainly seem to imply that Keynote and other iWork apps will be available for the iPhone 4.

If that’s true, I imagine the app will also be available for the iPhone 3G, 3GS, and iPod touch, since all three will be upgradeable to iOS 4 come June 21st.

Having trouble tapping out text using the tiny on-screen keyboard on your iPhone or iPad touch? Maybe what you need is a little practice, and textRace is a free app that will give you just that — wrapped into the trappings of a kind of fun, if somewhat monotonous game.

The app comes from textPlus, developers of an app that enables free text messaging on the iPhone. Game play is pretty simple. You just tap the training or challenge mode to get started. The app will show you a line of text, give you a brief countdown, and then it’s up to you to type the line as quickly and accurately as possible.

Your high scores are saved on your device, or you can compare them with other users worldwide.

By default, the game works in portrait mode, but you can switch to landscape orientation by hitting the “More” button on the home screen and selecting the “orientation” option. I was completely unsurprised to notice that my scores went up after switching to landscape.

The game also does a pretty good job of showing you just how hard-working Apple’s predictive text algorithm is. I found I made far more typos in textPlus than I do when entering a URL or writing an email on my iPod touch. That’s because the iPhone software usually catches my mistakes and auto-corrects them. That won’t happen when you’re typing in this game. And that’s a good thing, because practice makes perfect — especially if you don’t have a crutch to rely on.

I just wish that textPlus came bundled with a few more sample lines of text. You can only type the same lines so many times before the game starts to look really boring. And in my case, that was about 5 times.

There are a few more screenshots after the break. You can download textRace for free from the iTunes App Store.

via Download Squad

Adobe Ideas for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad lets you draw pictures, organize your sketches, and email the output as PDF files which you cn edit in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.

As you can see from the screengrab above, my artistic skills are somewhat limited. But I found the app very intuitive to use, with controls for adjusting the brush sized and colors and the ability to undo up to 50 levels. There are also separate drawing and photo layers which allow you to draw on photos.

If you need a little more screen real estate, it’s easy to minimize the menu on the left side of the screen. But overall I get the feeling that Adobe Ideas would be a lot more useful if I had an iPad instead of an iPod touch. And, you know, if I could draw.

Adobe Ideas is available as a free download from the App Store.

via Web Worker Daily

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BugMe! is a popular sticky note application for the iPhone. It lets you create handwritten or typed notes, set alarms for each, and save a note to your iPhone Home Screen. You can also set a note as your iPhone wallpaper.

Today Electric Pocket launched a free version of BugMe! called BugMe! Lite. It has all the same features as the pro version, including the ability to change the color of the ink or background for your notes, post notes to Twitter, or email them to contacts. But the free version includes advertisements on the bottom of the main screen, a three note limit, and watermarks on some notes.

If you don’t tend to keep more than three notes at a time, BugMe! Lite is probably all you need. But the full version only costs $0.99, so if you like the free version but want to eliminate the restrictions, it’s might be worth spending a buck to upgrade.

BugeMe! Lite is available as a free download from the App Store. The full version is available for $0.99.

You can find more pictures after the break.

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WebIS has launched an updated version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Pocket Informant provides iPhone users with a highly customizable calendar and contact app. The company also makes Windows Mobile and BlackBerry versions of the software.

There’s a huge list of new features and bug fixes in Pocket Informant 1.3. But here are a few of the big ones:

• Add map locations for events
• Email tasks and events
• New landscape column week view
• Add Task button in the Celandar and Today views

There are also improvements that should improve synchronization with Google Calendar. You can find a complete list of changes in the release notes. And you can find a more detailed look at the mapping feature at the WebIS blog.

Pocket Informant 1.3 for the iPhone is available from the iTunes App Store for $12.99. There’s also a free version available with limited features, but it hasn’t been updated since March — so it doesn’t including location mapping or the other new features.

Yahoo launched two new search apps for the iPhone and iPod touch today. Interestingly, they both rely on Google Maps to some degree, rather than Yahoo Maps. But that’s OK, because in one way or another, each search app is kind of awesome.

The first is the new Yahoo Sketch-a-Search app, which lets you find restaurants in any given area by drawing an outline on the map. You can draw a straight line, a circle, or an Italy-like boot shape and Sketch-a-Search will let you know where you can eat in that area. Tap on any pushpin for more details.

You can also filter your search results by cuisine, mood, and the number of stars the restaurants have received in user reviews.

The second app is a more straightforward search utility. But Yahoo Search for the iPhone doesn’t just provide you with boring looking blue links on a white background. Instead results are presented from high profile sites with iPhone-friendly links. Look up a movie and you’ll likely get results from IMDB, Wikepedia, and movie review sites. If it’s currently in theaters, you’ll also be able to find show times.

Look up a location, and you’ll get a map, among other results.

I’m pretty impressed with both applications. But it’s not like Yahoo! is the first company to launch food or general search apps for the iPhone. The company faces a fair bit of competition in both areas.

Yahoo Search and Sketch-a-Search are both available as free downloads from the iTunes App Store

via Mashable

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For years, one of the first applications I installed on any Windows Mobile PDA was Pocket Informant. This personal information management application offered far more features than you could get from the built in calendar, contact, and task applications. Pocket Informant makers WebIS have been offering a finger-friendly version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone and iPod Touch for a while, and I took it for a spin recently.

There are a few significant differences between the Windows Mobile and iPhone versions of Pocket Informant. The first and most noticeable is that Pocket Informant for the iPhone has been designed to be easy to use with your fingertip rather than a stylus. Instead of tapping and holding on tiny text, you can tap on a day in the calendar to bring up an Events view with larger text showing appointments coming up each day. Tap any appointment to see more details or edit it.

The second, and at least as important difference is that at $10, Pocket Informant for the iPhone is significantly cheaper than the $20 Windows Mobile version. There’s also a free version of Pocket Informant for the iPhone with a limited feature set.

This pricing makes sense since iPhone apps tend to be cheaper and $20 seems like a lot of money to pay for an iPhone app. There are also an awful lot of iPhone users out there, which could theoretically make it easier to make money by selling the software for less money.

The iPhone app doesn’t include a contact manager. But the calendar is at least as good as the version for Windows Mobile. One of my favorite aspects is that there’s a very usable week view. For some reason, most mobile calendars I’ve seen have decent day and month views. But when you switch to the week view, you see a bunch of lines letting you know when there are appointments instead of text telling you what those appointments are.

Pocket Informant divides the screen into 7 segments and lets you see what’s actually happening, today, tomorrow, and a week from today at a glance. I don’t know why this is such a revolutionary concept, but it’s almost worth paying $10 for this feature alone. But it’s the next one that gets me really excited.

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