So, you want to get your JAMM fix without using a RSS reader or our mobile site from your Symbian phone? Well, thanks to some of the new app publishing tools from Nokia, you can now download the Just Another Mobile Monday app from the Ovi Store directly from your phone.

It even comes with a great JAMM icon that you can add to your home screen. Head on over to the Ovi Store to download the Just Another Mobile Monday app today!

SPB Mobile Shell has been one of the great Windows Mobile programs over the past several years. Along with HTC’s TouchFLO/Sense UI, it would really give Windows Mobile a great, user-friendly user interface. The main complaint I hear about Symbian/S60 lately is that the UI is out-dated and stale. I have to agree, so it is great to see SPB bring their Mobile Shell program to help users breathe new life into their Symbian 5th Edition devices.

From SPB Software:

May 25th, 2010 – SPB Software, a leading mobile software developer, has launched SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 for Symbian. A best-selling customisation and personalisation tool for touchscreen user interfaces, SPB Mobile Shell for Symbian lets Symbian users make the most of their mobile phones.

With recent Gartner statistics showing that smartphones with a Symbian OS are the fastest-selling mobiles in the world, SPB Software is catering to the huge demand for customisation and personalisation on Symbian OS-based devices.

“Up until now there hasn’t been a good user interface for Symbian yet despite the number of users out there,” said Sebastian-Justus Schmidt, CEO of SPB Software. “Our aim is to bring our experience with Windows Mobile users to Symbian (and other OS) enthusiasts. Last year we launched six projects for the Symbian platform and partnered with Nokia, StarHub and MTS, customising and helping implement the products for Symbian OS. The simple implementation process means manufacturers and mobile operators can easily customise the products on a variety of platforms to offer the same capabilities to all users.”

SPB Mobile Shell was initially launched in 2007 and has seen global success with many award wins and several million licences being shipped by more than 15 device manufacturers. SPB Software has also joined open industry standard, Symbian Foundation, to ensure its applications for Symbian OS are at the forefront of what its users want.

SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 for Symbian Main Features:

Multiple customizable homescreens
Widgets for tasks, agenda, weather and a lot of others
Widget-based photo contacts
Launcher with fast access to all the features
Adaptive skins, support for OpenGL and 3D carousel

Pricing and Availability

SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 for is available for Symbian-based touchscreen devices (works on Symbian S60 5th Edition and higher) from 25 May 2010. It can be purchased for $29.95 or a 15-day free trial version may be downloaded at www.spb.com.

So, if you have a Symbian S60 5th Edition phone, head on over to SPB Software’s site and check out the trial or buy your copy of Mobile Shell.

There is no denying that the iPad makes a fantastic Bible Study tool. Up until recently, some of my personal favorite Bible apps had not been optimized for the iPad. PocketBible has been the main Bible app that I have used since my Windows Mobile days. I use it regularly on my iPhone and since I bought my iPad, I have been using it, pixel doubled. So, when I checked the App Store and saw that there was an update for PocketBible, I immediately downloaded the update and fired it up.

Now, it is one thing to update an iPhone app into a universal app that works on the iPad as well, but Laridian didn’t stop there. They also included some new features for iPhone/iPod Touch users like the ability to open multiple windows at once and they also implemented a synchronization feature to back up notes, highlights, and bookmarks to Laridian’s iPocketBible.com web server.

From Laridian:

New for iPhone/iPod touch:

• Open two windows to view multiple Bibles or books at once or multiple passages in the same book (open up to five windows on iPad)
• Synchronize and/or backup your personalized data such as notes, highlights and bookmarks (you’ll use our iPocketBible.com server to do this)
• Calculator style go-to for Bibles

New features exclusive to iPad:

• Control panel (Keeps search results and lists of notes, highlights and bookmarks available all the time.)
• Library search (All searches search your entire library, not just the active book)
• Notes search (Search your notes using Boolean operators, just like you search the Bible)
• Book notes (Add notes to non-Bibles)
• Edit note while using program (Makes it easier to copy/paste verses into your notes)
• View search results, lists of highlights/bookmarks while using program
• Lock panes so they don’t sync to content movement (Handy while writing notes or following cross-references out of a search)
• Additional margin and leading in single-book view (Makes for a more pleasant reading experience)

Head on over to the App Store to download PocketBible now.

One of the best things about mobile devices like smarphones and PDAs is the convenience of having some of your most important information with you at all times. When I first owned a 3Com Palm Pilot Professional, that information was mainly PIM items like phone numbers, task lists, shopping lists, and keeping my schedule organized. As mobile devices have evolved, so have the types of information that I keep on them. I still use my iPhone for PIM, but I also use it for music, movies, photos, email, light document work, Bible study, gaming, and so much more. Over the past year, I have been on the search for the perfect device to read PDFs. Not just any PDF, but big and colorful PDFs with graphics and specially formatted text, like programming code snippets. I bought the iPad for this, but I needed better software to really get the full use out of PDFs on the iPad since Apple doesn’t exactly let you have local storage for files like documents and PDFs. So, I fired up the App Store on my iPad and one of the first apps I saw that should help with this function was GoodReader.

iPad Launch Day Decision

Keep in mind that I bought my iPad at the local BestBuy on launch day, so I was pretty surprised when GoodReader was available right away. I have to give credit to any developers that were able to get a working app on launch day, especially since they never even used their own app on real hardware, only the emulator that comes with the SDK. This was also my first gut-check moment where I was faced with the decision about buying an iPad specific version of an app that I already owned for my iPhone. I have to admit that I was a bit annoyed at first, but the $0.99 price tag on GoodReader helped me get over that quickly.  I am a firm believer that developers should get paid for their work, and from what I had seen from the iPhone version of GoodReader, these guys definitely deserved another dollar for their work.

On my iPhone, I mainly used GoodReader as a PDF reader, but it is really more of a multi-function app.  It allows you to store files locally so you can read offline.  In addition to PDFs, it also reads pretty much any files that the iPhone can handle and it will also open almost any other file in plain text.  This comes in handy if you want to read source code for a JavaScript file or something similar. On the file management side of things, you can create folders, subfolders, cut, copy, paste, zip, unzip, and more. You can even set protect individual folders with a password in addition to setting a password for the application itself.  The one thing to keep in mind though, is the combination of jailbreak and an app like iFile, which requires you to be jailbroken, can still view these files since they exist on the iPad or iPhone’s file system.

In the above screenshot, you may notice the “Open In…” button.  If you have any files that are supported by other apps, such as .PDF, .DOC, .XLS, and other files, you can select the file and click this button to get a list of other apps that you can use to open that file. As you can see, GoodReader also shows up as one of these applications, so if you receive a file that GoodReader supports in an email, you can open it in GoodReader. It’s not as good as a central shared file system, but it’s still a pretty good implementation for the end user that doesn’t want to think about where they saved certain documents.

So, you can store files locally in GoodReader, but how do you get those files there in the first place outside of the “Open In…” option? The cloud is one of the best ways. GoodReader will let you download files from several cloud storage services like DropBox, box.net, iDisk and even Google Docs.  In addition, you can download files from any FTP server (no SFTP yet) and you can even setup most email accounts and grab any attachments sitting in your inbox. Sure, there may be apps like DropBox and others that will work with one of the services, but having a single app work with so many different services takes me back to the Windows Mobile days when mobile software was not so narrow-minded.

One thing I noticed when interacting with some of the FTP servers that I use and DropBox is the huge speed boost that you get using the iPad and its 802.11n speeds.  It simply blows my iPhone out of the water when downloading 40-50 MB PDF files or even 6 MB high-resolution photos.

As if the cloud storage/server options weren’t enough, GoodReader also allows you to download files directly from the web. If you know the exact URL of the file you want to download, you can just go to “Enter URL” and it will add that file to your download queue.  This is great if someone emailed you a link to a file, so you can easily just copy it from the email and paste it into GoodReader.  You can also browse the web and if you find something you want to download, you have a few different ways to get it.

Usage Scenario

Here is a walkthrough of one of my recent uses of this feature in GoodReader.  I heard the announcement about the upcoming Nokia N8 and I wanted to get some more information about it and see if I could get some photos of the device. I went to the “Browse the Web” option in GoodReader and went to Nokia’s press website. When you click on a link, it pops up a semi-translucent box that asks if you want to follow the link you clicked on or download the linked file. You can disable this option in the settings if you do not want to see this prompt whenever you click on a link.

After you click to download an item, you are greeted with a box that just lets you know that the download has started and where to go in GoodReader to find it. You will notice that there is also a warning that the App may appear to freeze while downloading. I have only experienced that a couple of times and it was usually when I had 4-5 active downloads going at once.

After the file finishes downloading, it is saved in the base “My Documents” folder. Now, for some reason (I guess to make it easier to force web browsers to download), these photos that I wanted were in zip files.  Luckily, this was not a problem at all for GoodReader, since you can unzip files using the “Manage Files” tools.  Actually, it’s easier than that since if you click on a zip file without the “Manage Files” toolbox open, it will ask you if you want to unzip the file(s). It will unzip the files into a folder with the same name as the zip file. If you were unzipping a file that had other subfolders, they are preserved as subfolders. So, for Nokia_N8_01.zip, it created a folder in \My Documents\Nokia_N8_01\ where the image was found.

GoodReader also makes a great image viewer.  The image below (which has been edited to fit the website) is a 7 MB high resolution image.  It does take a couple of seconds to open it up, but it looks beautiful on the iPad’s display.  You can even click on the camera icon at the bottom of the screen and it will save the image to your photo library.

Of course, while I am trying to do 95% of my daily computing tasks on my iPad or iPhone, there always comes a time when I need to use a real computer. GoodReader even makes this easy by offering a Wifi-transfer mode that fires up Bonjour and allows you to access files you have saved in GoodReader from any computer that is on the same network as your iPad or iPhone. This makes offloading files to my computer a breeze and it also means that files that I save in GoodReader can be accessed without tethering my iPad to iTunes, which is another huge plus to me.

Now, if you are a fan of tethering your great mobile device, GoodReader also supports the new file transfer functions in iTunes. It is good to see the developers for GoodReader fully support Apple’s attempts at file management while still being on the cutting edge by supporting cloud storage options and wireless file transfers.

GoodReader as a PDF reader

I seem to remember saying something about using GoodReader to actually read documents.  I guess I got a little carried away by all of the other things you can do, but back to my main reason for wanting an app like GoodReader.  I use a service called Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com) to read a lot of computer books.  My favorite series of books is the “Head First” series because it uses a ton of graphics, quizes, and exercises to keep your brain active while going through the book.  The only other device that I have ever used that would show all of the graphics for these PDFs was the Nokia N900.  Thankfully, they also look great in GoodReader on my iPad.  As far as reading a PDF file goes, GoodReader does everything I thought I needed, but it also has a feature that I never knew I needed until now.

Such a simple little icon, but it has some of those magical powers that Steve Jobs mentioned when he announced the iPad.  What does it do?  Well when the icon looks like it does above, it locks horizontal scrolling. This means that you can zoom into a PDF file to get rid of the white space/margins around the text and then lock the scrolling so that you can only scroll up and down.  This is brilliant and is honestly one of my favorite features when it comes to reading in GoodReader.  I can’t even count the times I have tried to read a PDF on a mobile device only to accidentally hit the screen and scroll off to the right or left. This feature really makes GoodReader seem like a full-fledged eBook reader because once I have the zoom setup, i can just read without having to think about anything else.

You can also “reflow” the PDF so that it looks like a normal text file.  I appreciate this option, but I have not found a need for it on the iPad.  I think this option is great for the iPhone and other devices with screen under 7 inches, but I have not needed to use it yet on the iPad. The one thing that I think could be improved here is that when the text is reflowed, I think you should be able to do “infinite” scrolling.  I know from experience that this is much harder to implement than people think, so for a feature that may not get much use, it may just not make sense to spend the development time to implement.

There are also other options that let you dim the screen brightness, go to a specific page, go to a bookmark, search through the PDF file and there is even a toolbar button to lock rotation.  I don’t think I have actually used that since I use the hardware rotation-lock option, but I am the kind of guy that likes options, so why not?

Improvement Opportunities

In all my years of using mobile devices and mobile software, I have never come across an application that didn’t have room for improvement, and GoodReader is no exception.  Here are the features that I would really love to see added to make GoodReader my only document/file management tool on my iPad:

• SFTP support:  FTP support is great, but I am becoming more and more of a security nut, and most website hosting sites are starting to offer SFTP support by default, so this would be a much appreciated feature to get files off of my domains for quick access.
• Folder creation for web services:  Other apps can do it, so I know it is not a technical issue.  I like to be organized and I would love to be able to create folders in my DropBox account without having to fire up the DropBox app just for that reason.
• SugarSync support:  Up until recently, this would have been impossible, but the guys over at SugarSync recently released an API to interact with their service.  I truly hope that this gets integrated because GoodReader is a better app than the SugarSync app for the iPhone and iPad, and this is really the main cloud storage option that I use since it had better mobile support before DropBox did by supporting Windows Mobile at the same time as Microsoft was thinking about their Live Mesh service.
• Gesture refresh:  I blame this on the fact that when I am reading a PDF, I am really treating GoodReader like I do when I am reading a Kindle book.  I want to be able to swipe left and right to turn the page. According to the developers, this is being addressed soon!
• Add “Download” to the press-hold event in “Browse the Web”:  I like options and it would be nice to disable to popup box, but still be able to download directly from any link that shows up in the browser.
• Exchange email attachments:  This one would be nice, but the more I think about it, the less it is probably needed.  Since Apple is allowing you to open attachments from the build in Mail client, this would probably just be a waste of time.

None of these are deal-breakers and honestly none of them are major enough to me that I would stop using GoodReader if they were never implemented.  However, if they do get implemented, I can already count about 5 other apps that I can delete from my iPad.

Conclusion

GoodReader is one of the apps that was made for the iPad before the iPad was even made.  It was great on the iPhone, but with the added screen real estate and horsepower of the iPad, it is a must-have app that proudly sits in the dock on my iPad.  For $0.99, it is an absolute steal, so if you have an iPad head on over to the App Store and download GoodReader today.

The iPhone version of GoodReader is just as good as the iPad version, only some of the features, like PDF reflow become much more important since screen real estate is so much lower.  If you have an iPhone, check out the iPhone version of GoodReader or the free GoodReader Lite.