I have been seeing a lot of references to cuil.com popping up in my RSS feeds and tweets lately. Wondering what it was all about (and how it is supposed to be pronounced), but too lazy to actually click on any of the links, I put the url in my trusty Firefox browser and was sent to a new search engine.

Cuil.com is a new search engine that claims to search “three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”. They don’t mention Yahoo, but, then again with all of the trouble they are having lately, I guess I am not surprised. My first thought on seeing this is, do we really need another search engine? First off, I don’t actually go to the search engine pages, I generally just type my query into the search bar at the top of my browser. It appears that you can add this functionality, but would it be worth it…

I decided to give this browser a try. I didn’t really have anything at the top of my search list, so I decided to type my name in, Shawn Cope. Hmmmm, well the top search for my name was an article on the musician, Citizen Cope, and while I like his music, this obviously wasn’t what I was looking for. Thinking I should refine my search, I added quotes around my name. This search yielded somewhat better results in that it actually found pages that referenced my name. There were lots of pages that referenced me, or pages which I had left comments on. What it did not find however were any references to my site, www.shawncope.com. This is kind of worthless to me. If I do this same search in Google or Yahoo, that is the top search result, and what I have to assume someone might be searching for. I could not find this link in the top 3 pages.

I did a few other searches, and they all came up with somewhat interesting results, nut not the most relevant results. For me, this will not become my search engine of choice anytime soon. Perhaps in the future, they will get better, and I will change my mind. I doubt however I am going to change my mind about their name. Is it supposed to be pronounced, cool, coil or something else?

Shawn Cope - photography | design | motion

The WordPress app for the iPhone was recently released and I wasted no time installing it! Since I also need a reason to try it out, I am going to give a quick review of it.

This is an app that I am really looking forward to using! Let’s face it, who can’t use yet another opportunity to stay plugged in and productive! I am actually writing this post while on my way to a ball game. Just one less excuse for me not writing more often.

My first impression is that it is rather clean looking and easy to use. Everything you need to create a post is right here and easily accessible.

There are only a handful of features to use. You can create a new post. You can edit any existing post on your blog. You can assign categories and tags to these posts. And you also have the ability to upload photos from the iPhone which will be a very handy feature to have while out and about.

That is about the extent of things however. Keep in mind that this is just the 1.0 release so it is only going to get nicer, however for the app to be really useful, I would include some additional features.

One glaring omission is the lack of a code editing mode within the posts. This most likely won’t be an issue for the typical blogger, however, if like me, you also use WordPress for content management, it is a very useful feature to have.

Another feature I would like to see added is some way to manage the back end of the blog. Personally, I can’t see wanting to do much here on my phone, but it would be nice to be able to moderate comments, or work with pages.

While this app doesn’t have every feature you might want now, it is a great start, and I have a feeling, quite a few bloggers are going to find it indispensable. Oh, and by the way, it is completely free!

EDIT – for some reason when I posted this, it reverted back to a the draft I was editing. Not sure if this is a bug, or if I did something wrong, but I would strongly suggest you check the published post to be sure it is correct.

Shawn Cope - photography | design | motion

In a few short weeks we will finally have apps on the iPhone. What will the price of these apps be? How much would you be willing to pay for something that would increase your productivity? What about a game that would always be with you, waiting to distract you from the slower parts of your day?

For myself it depends on what the app can do for me, as well as the level of quality and polish in the app.

One app I can not wait to get my fingers on would be a simple to-do list. I feel like this is something Apple should have included on the iPhone from day one. Since they haven’t, I still have to resort to writing my to-do lists on post-it notes, which inevitably get lost half of the time anyhow. Now, let’s assume that I had to buy my own post-it notes (work buys them for me), I would probably spend $5 a year on these little yellow wonders! That isn’t much money, but I would gladly take the five bucks and spend it on an app that did the same thing on my iPhone. It is possible that I would even consider paying more if the app also integrated with iCal and the other apps on my iPhone, but anything more than $5, the to-do list app would really have to wow me.

What about an app that would truly let me be productive away from my computer. My work consists mostly of photography, designing and writing code. Since I doubt that the iphone has the power to deal with. A sweet text editor like Textmate or Coda should be well within reach of the processor though. Something like this I would easily consider dropping $40 on because it could save me from having to carry my macbook around all of the time. If the developer started adding features like FTP to the mix, I might even consider paying more, it would just depend on what value it added to me.

Games are a little tricky though. I love games, and think the iPhone is going to be a great platform for them. It has more power than either the PSP or the Gameboy DS, but at least to start will probably only see “casual games” developed for it. Generally I see the sweet spot to be around five dollars, at this price, I could easily buy a few to check out, and just replace them if they don’t entertain me. Any more than this and I have to question if it truly worth it, not because I won’t enjoy them, but more because they aren’t something that I need. Truly good games, like Spore perhaps, I might be willing to go up to $20 though. When the price get’s higher than this, wouldn’t it be better to just buy the console version?

The price of the different apps will probably be all over the place. I am sure there will be versions of sudoku that can be had for free, as well as specialized sales tools that will probably be closer to $100+ to have. One thing is certain, we only have a few weeks left, and I for one can hardly wait to get my finger swipes on them!

Shawn Cope - photography | design | motion