Pastebot is a powerful clipboard manager by Tapbots that stores text & images copied from your iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad (compatible though not universal yet.). You can organize, apply filters to, and copy clippings to be pasted or sent to other apps, or even to your Mac.

Have you ever gone to a website on your iPhone and it was the type of site that would read much better on a full screen? Or maybe the site is Flash based? With Pastebot and a few “touches” you can paste that long ungodly URL directly to your Mac’s browser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used this little utility already.

Pastebot, the “little utility that could”, and does, is only $3.99 on the iTunes App Store. Combine that with the free Pastebot Sync from the Tapbots website and you have a very handy and useful combo.On the iPhone, Pastebot will keep track of every item you cut or copy. It will automatically save 99 items in its “clipboard”. You can name and file any of those items into folders for later use. I have copied all my eMail signatures into a folder in Pastebot, and now I can easily copy any of those back to the iPhone clipboard to paste into eMail I compose on the iPhone.

Saw a site on your iPhone you’d like to see on your Mac? Use Pastebot Sync to be able to paste that URL directly from you iPhone into the Safari URL field. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that. Want to quickly paste a snippet from a document on your iPhone to a document on your Mac? It’s so easy.

And now that iOS 4 has multitasking, it’s easier than ever to switch back and forth from Pastebot and any other application. On my iPhone this has been one of my most used apps. It’s become indispensable.

With so many rumors flying, no one knew what to expect. Would Steve start with something innocuous, the new iPhone OS (which didn’t happen) or a new iPhone (which also didn’t happen) and then at the last moment …. oh … just one more thing. No. He launched straight away into setting up and introducing the new iPad.

There will be those that will rip it apart for what it doesn’t do. No phone. No Camera. No Verizon. No multitasking. But as a consultant, I need to talk about what it does do. And the possibilities it brings. Oh. And the joy!

Hello iPad: Let’s start with the obvious. It looks like a large iPhone. But it’s not. You can’t make a call from it even with the Wi-Fi and 3G package (unless you have Wi-Fi & use Skype … but that’s just theoretical … I digress). Looking at the icons on the front screen, it looks very much like an “exploded” or “expanded view of the iPhone desktop. Only four icons across, and four in the dock. If more will fit in the dock, will remain to be seen when the first Wi-Fi versions of the iPad ship in 60 days. Though 60 days from today Wednesday January 27, 2010 is Sunday, March 28, 2010. So maybe the 29th? Guess we’ll have to wait for the official date from Apple. Who knows what version of the OS it will finally ship with … iPhone/iPad OS 4.0?

Apple Inside: Apple has taken a bold step in it’s evolution with the iPad. It runs a new 1 Ghz Apple A4 processor. Apple’s chip also includes onboard video processing. No Intel inside. No Qualcomm inside. No NVIDIA inside either. Apple bought P.A. Semi back in 2008. It’s the first time they have used their own silicon in an Apple device.

eBooks: We wanted them. We got them! Plus a new iPad application called iBooks. Like iTunes you can buy eBooks directly from Apple via iBooks. The interface is simple, slick, and well designed. There have been other iPhone books apps that have looked similar, but Apple is not one to shy away from “quoting” another programmers work & calling it their own.

Apple announced partnerships with five major publishing houses, including Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Shuster. With more to come. All books on the iPad will be in ePub format, which is the most used open book format in the world. So in theory, any ePub book can be read on the iPad. iBooks is going to be yet another cash cow for Apple … and the publishers. Look out Kindle and Nook.

Mail: Mail on iPad has been redesigned. It’s use of popup contextual menus is well designed. The virtual touch keyboard for composing new eMail looks almost like a real keyboard. It seems that big too. Turning the iPad in landscape gives you a screen with your Inbox and folders on the left. select a piece of mail and flip iPad to portrait, and the inbox goes away and you eMail fills the screen. Sadly I can’t tell you much more than what I’ve gleaned from photos and the iPad Video on the Apple website.

iPod: Dream alert! Imagine if you will, an iPad landscape car dock. Now imagine if you will the ability to use iPad with my car stereo. I could use iPod.app for the first time in iPod history, to see album images on the screen large enough, that I could use as my music interface for my car. In landscape, I would imagine, iPad’s version of iPod.app uses cover stream. No more searching on a single line of text on my “iPod compatible” car stereo for songs buried deep within a playlist somewhere. I may have to build this thing myself if I have to!

It will also be nice to see what iPad developers do with the new screen real estate … all 9.7 diagonal inches. Plus the new iPhone SDK that will give them access to all the new menuing and other iPad specific features. It will be another summer of exciting new iPhone and iPad apps! As of now all current iPhone apps will run on the iPad AS IS. No updating needed. Plus you can run the current iPhone apps in “double” pixel” mode, which makes then fill the entire screen. Pretty thoughtful on Apple’s part!

I could go on about each redesign of each app, but Apple.com has done it best. Whether it’s Safari, Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Maps … they all have been redesigned … and they look and function great.

Now I can’t wait to get my hands on one to test for myself. Apple did a great job of making the entry level 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad only $499.00. I’m like a kid waiting for early Christmas! Oh gee …. is it 60 days yet???!!!

“Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.”

Written by the folks at 140ware, this little piece of java heaven is a little tab that resides on the left side of your site. When there are new Tweets to be read the tab color becomes red and displays the number of new tweets since your last visit. When first opened you are presented with only the new tweets, with another tab to see all tweets. These tweets will be any that the website owner has entered in you their Twitter account, or those who have visited the Tweetboard and left a message. Forum users must have a Twitter account and be logged in to post to Twitter via Tweetboard. If they don’t at least they can read the threads.

The Alpha version of Tweetboard has only been up and open to public use within the past few days. You must go to the Tweetboard website and ask for an invitation. Once you get a reply tweet, you paste a snippet of java code which can be found on their support page into your website or blog, log into your Twitter account through Tweetboard, and wait for Twitter stream to populate Tweetboard for the first time. That’s it. One piece of advise, you also have to include your Twitter username in the pasted code. Make sure you do not use the @ symbol. Your username should look like yourusername, not @yourusername.

Since it’s Alpha release 140ware has been busy tweaking the java code (that is the heart of this app) continuously. Yesterday, it had “issues” with Microsoft IE7, or more rightly IE7 had issues rendering standards based java and HTML. On Sunday 6.29.09 it was announced that Tweetboard had become IE7 compatible. Pretty amazing to see such fast turn around. I also had asked some questions on the tweetboard.com support page and got prompt answers. Several of them.

One of the current drawbacks of Tweetboard is not being able to see friend’s feeds. But in reply to a question on the Tweetboard website, “You will be able to moderate your friends post early this week, it’s our next update!” So it seems that fixes and feature will be headed our way.

If I had a feature wish list this is what I’d ask TweetaClaus for:

1. URL shortening button.
2. Add image button.
3. An “Expanded” button on the All tab.
4. Seeing my entire Twitter stream, including replies outside of Tweetboard, as an option.
5. A friends tab, so you don’t have to leave Tweetboard.

That’s it for now. If you have any thing you’d like to see in upcoming versions of Tweetboard, leave a message, or use my installed Tweetboard. Either way it would be interesting to hear your views. Happy Tweeting!

Wearing the chapeau of web developer I have several tools that I use regularly. Besides the obvious ones like Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, I use a little coding application from Panic called Coda.

I use Coda regularly. As they say on their website “text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.” I don’t know if I could have explained it better. It’s a text/code editor, with full color formatting to make code snippets more easily identifiable, and readable. It’s allows me to save every site I’m working on as it’s own file within Coda. So when I want to work on my eMac blog I double click, and Coda will FTP to my eMac blog folder on my hosts server & I’m ready to go. This allows me to edit code live. If there are minor changes I need to make to my WordPress theme, I can do it live.

Whether it’s editing a index.php file or a CSS file I make the change in Coda, hit save, go to my browser hit refresh and I see the changes I just made to my page. If it still needs more tweaks. I repeat the steps until It looks the way I want it to look. Live editing is not for the newbie, or the fain of heart. I also use Coda to SSH into my hacked & cracked iPhone when I need to add files or make changes there too.

One of my favorite features in Coda is its CSS editor. It’s so good I wish Adobe would take cues from Panic or license the interface. But until that time I set up Dreamweaver to open a CSS file into Coda when it’s double-clicked. In Coda I can look at my CSS code in one of several ways. Of course as text, but their multi column setup is so intuitive. I can view my CSS code in Visual Mode, Text Mode, or any combination of both.

I’m sure I could go on and on … go check Coda out for yourself.