Databases on the iPhone / iPod Touch - Updated!

Back in August of 2008 I wrote a post about some database applications available for the iPod Touch / iPhone. You can find the original post in this blog somewhere.

I think it is time for an update. As there have been a lot of new apps added to the App Store over the last 2 years, some of which are worth exploring.

• First of all a quick update. FMTouch has come down in price significantly! It is now only €7.99. It makes it a lot more accessible. Still I haven't gone for it.
  
  
• I still use CSV Touch as it is a very simple way to carry data around. With good search capabilities. However, CSV touch forces you to have a essentially a materialized view of your data as you can not perform any joins between different tables. You can think of it as carrying a number of reports on your iPhone.
  
  

Since I want to play around with SQL, I have looked at a few options. Note, there are a lot more options available these days, including things like HanDBase or AppCreator that let you develop more application like forms on the iPhone, or even clients that let you connect to corporate databases and keep copies of the data on your phone.

So to choose, I ran a search for sqlite on the App Store, and after reading about the different app features I settled on SQLite Editor as it seems to have the most features available. I am only starting with it, but so far, so good.

As always, comments are welcomed!

Multitouch gestures on new firefox beta for Mac

Last week I downloaded the new beta of firefox for my mac (3.1b). I usually don't download beta versions of products I use regularly, but the the fact that I could use multitouch gestures on the trackpad of my macbook was reason enough to try it. I am really pleased I did. It is even better than what you can do in Safari. So far, they have implemented:

• swipe: move three fingers on the trackpad on any direction
• twist: rotate two fingers
• pinch: move two fingers away or closer to each other

And the actions you can perform with the different gestures:

• Swipe Left: Go back in history [press Cmd to open it in a tab]
• Swipe Right: Go forwards in history
• Swipe Up: Go to the top of the page
• Swipe Down: Go to the end of the page
• Pinch Together: Zoom out
• Pinch Apart: Zoom in
• Twist Right: Next tab
• Twist Left: Previous tab

It is available on Mac's with multitouch trackpa, including the Mac Book Air, the MAc Book Pro's releaed in early 2008, and the new laptops released later in 2008.

Download it and enjoy!

Lotus Symphony on the Mac!

Finally, last Wednesday (November 5th, 2008), IBM released the long awaited version of Lotus Symphony for Mac as part of the version 1.2 update. Despite the fact that IBM is using the old name for the GUI version of Lotus 1-2-3, that's where the similarities end... I am a bit annoyed that IBM didn't respect the '/' menu options on the spreadsheet product... but I digress.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a free office suit that has a word processor, spreadsheet and a presentation program. It supports the OpenDocument format (ODF), as well as the binary Microsoft Office and Lotus Smartsuire formats. One of the really good features is the fact that it can export documents in PDF format.

Symphony is based on OpenOffice techoloy and uses the Eclipse Rich Client for it's framework.

It is available fon Windows, Linux and Mac, and best of all it's free!