Click the photo for a larger version.

While I’m no connoisseur, this pen might knock off the Pilot G2 07 as my go-to pen. It’s pretty amazing for the money.

The Paper Mate Profiile 1.4b can be found on Amazon for just over $1 apeice.

• Phone
• Mail
• Safari
• Settings

This week, in a major upheaval in my life, Launch Center replaced Settings in the Dock.

Now, this app isn’t one for everyday users. It’s closest Mac cousin is Automator, really. Here’s how App Cubby describes it on its site:

Launch apps and trigger actions from a quick, easy to use app! Call a friend, start an email, send a text, post to Twitter, turn on a flashlight — get to where you’re going faster than ever before.

In short, it’s Siri for your fingertips.¹ Instead of dealing with 4 or 5 taps to do something, Launch Center sets up an action to get right to where you want to be. They can even be scheduled, as of the newest version of the app.

To do this, the app uses custom URLs that other developers can include in their applications. Even the built-in Settings app uses them. Here are the shortcuts I have setup:

If you use your iPhone as a computer, you should check this app out. It’s just 99¢ on the App Store.

Since starting the Ungeniused podcast late last year, I’ve had numerous questions about my setup. So, here’s my gear:

• The Blue Yeti USB Microphone is the heart of my rig. It’s a great vocal mic for the money. With its tri-capsule array, it’s easy to set this mic up for one or more voices. It’s plug-n-play with OS X, and includes built-in gain control, pattern selection and a headphone jack for monitoring your own voice.
• The mic is mounted in a Blue Microphones Radius Microphone Shock Mount. This mount has totally changed the quality of my audio, isolating the mic from noises caused by me bumping the table, writing and even typing. If you are serious about isolating your voice from the environment, a shock mount is the only way to go.
• The Nady MPF-6 6-Inch Clamp On Microphone Pop Filter is a little large, but I like to move around when I’m talking, and this gives me the freedom to do so. I have it clamped to my stand with the built-in hardware.
• To be honest, I’m not super in love with my mic stand. While I hope to mount my rig on an arm in the future, right now, I record Ungeniused in an empty conference room at work. That said, I use the 8-13 inch Atlas Desk Stand. It’s well made, but I do wish it were heavier — or that the base were larger. It feels a tad wobbly with the heavy Yeti hanging out over the side of it.
• I use the Sennheiser HD-280 PRO Headphones all the time — not just for podcasting. They’re closed-backed, so audio doesn’t leak, and comfortable, so I can wear them for hours without getting a headache.

On the software side of things, I record my local track in QuickTime X. The trick here is to make sure that the application is using the Yeti to record.¹

To record both ends of a Skype call, my go-to application is Audio Hijack Pro. That said, however, Piezo looks like a nice option, too.

On the cloud end of things, Ungeniused is hosted at Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is great, and dirt cheap. It allows for fast uploading, easy-to-edit metadata, useful stats and more. There’s no reason to host a small to medium-sized show on your own.

Feedburner has the Buzzsprout feed, so I can change the backend without iTunes or Instacast knowing.

This setup isn’t the best money can buy, but I’ve found it to be a great rig for the price. Just about everyone at 70Decibles uses a similar setup, and it really shows.

That’s where WorldCard Mobile comes in. I can take a photo of a business card, and the app will work some OCR magic to put the data into a new contact. Thankfully, it allows editing the data before saving it, in case the app didn’t get everything just right. Once edited, the card is “exported” to the iPhone and — in my case — is sent to iCloud within seconds

In the few weeks I’ve had it, I have not needed to correct the app’s OCR-ified text a single time. It’s that good.

It’s $6.99 on the App Store, and well worth it.

Enter Phraseology, by Agile Tortoise. While Dropbox syncing support is coming, this app is about far more than taking notes. It’s designed as a writing tool, from the ground up.

Take re-rearranging paragraphs for example. When I’m working on a long piece (like this review), I often re-order my paragraphs more than once, to find the flow I want to portray in my writing.

In short, this feature makes it a lot easier to work how I work, using conventuals iOS controls instead of copy, cut and paste. I’ve lost a lot of text over the years to mis-typed shortcuts, but Phraseology eases that fear.

Here’s how it looks:

Each section has a word and character count, which is nice. It’s easy to get document-wide stats, as well:

Phraseology can be used with the developer’s great dictionary app, Terminology. If you aren’t using this app on your iPhone or iPad, you really should be. Here’s how the integration works:

The default text-selection pop-over has gained a few tricks:

Tapping Define will bring up the definition as a pop-over, in the app. Tapping Lookup or Replace will open Terminology (if it’s installed) in the dictionary or thesaurus mode, as needed. A link appears on the bottom right of the UI, which will slingshot you back to Phraseology.

This combination of apps is unique and powerful.

If written in Markdown, the document can be previewed with a single tap. Once done, the document can be exported as plain text to numerous app (including GoodReader, Dropbox, and Pages, to name a few.) or emailed out. If you’re old-school or want a hard copy, it can also be printed – including from the Markdown preview, so all of you markup is included.

Nice, huh? This app was built for writers, and it shows.

That means I can forgive things like American Typewriter being used as the default typeface. (It’s easy to switch to something like Helvetica Neue or my favorite, Palatino.) I’m not a huge fan of Agile Tortoise’s “sandy” color choices in the UI, but it’s consistent with Terminology, so I can live with it.

All in all, this is now my go-to app for writing long-form content on my iPad. Go drop the $1.99 on this and start writing.

Wikipanion is the exception. It makes browsing Wikipedia articles easy and fast from any iOS device. Since I co-host the world’s most popular Wikipedia-related podcast, you know I’ve played with numerous apps in this category

(While I’ll be looking at the iPad app in this review, the iPhone app is just as useful and well-designed. Note that Wikipanion is not an universal app as of this writing.)

When the app is launched, focus is placed in the search field. The app auto-fills article names after a moment:

One an article is selected, the app can show the page’s contents in the sidebar (or pop-over, in portrait mode). With a simple tap, the app scrolls to that section of the article:

The app also can be used to find related content. This is a great way to get lost on Wikipedia. This view also shows links to find articles based on your current location, or to go to the home page or a random article:

Wikipanion also can save bookmarks and store your browsing history, which can be helpful if you get lost down the rabbit hole.

The app is free, with a premium version (dubbed Wikipanion Plus) that adds a queue feature, offline access for saved articles and the ability to use the app to browse other MediaWiki-powered wikis. The Plus version is $4.99.

Go check out this app. In the months Myke and I have been doing Ungeniused, it has become a very useful tool. It really is that good.

• The new look is very clean. The tweets are on little sheets that sit above a textured background. I like this, as the old app felt really cluttered to me.
• The swipe feature from Tweetie 2.0 is gone. In fact, this new app feels nothing like Tweetie.
• That said, this new app feels fast. Moving between tweets and other screens involves no waiting on my iPhone 4.
• The compose button has a little feather on it. Adorable.
• The tabs across the bottom include Home, Connect, Discover and Me. Direct Messages are now buried under the Me tab.
• The Discover tab is pretty useless for me. It includes search, Stories, trends (including promoted ones), recommendations on who to follow and more. Seriously, I’m never going to use most of this stuff.

All in all, it’s clear to me that Twitter is trying to steer people toward areas of the service where things like promoted trends and stories can be seen easily. While that’s understandable, I really am not a fan of it taking up so much room in the iPhone app. With no way to re-arrange the default tabs across the bottom, I’m stuck with something I don’t want — Discovery — and am left with something I need — Direct Messages — too far away.

I’m sticking with Tweetbot on my iPhone.

Update: Chris Herbert pointed out that the Me tab has a few tricks hidden away.

While this seems a bit silly, I know that I type much faster on my computer than on my iPhone, and stopping my work to answer a text message can be annoying. This app promises much smoother interaction with iOS.

To set the app up, the iPhone and Mac have to be paired over Bluetooth, which I found a little buggy. I blame Lion for that, but once I got the pairing up and going, the app worked as advertised. I got a text message, swiped to reply, tabbed to Type2Phone on my iMac and replied. Until iMessage makes it to the desktop, this is a neat little way to make texting less intrusive while working at a computer.

(Of course, Type2Phone works with any text field on iOS, but iMessage makes the most sense to me for this app.)

While the app isn’t the best-looking on the App Store, I think it’ll be living in my Dock from now on.

Instacast HD is now on the App Store. If you own an iPad and care about quality podcasts, you need this app. Cody Fink agrees.

It includes all the features found on the iPhone version, re-imagined for the iPad’s form factor. The few people I showed it off to during the beta testing phase were all seriously impressed at the UI. The guys and gals at Vemedio really know how to build a good-looking app.

With Instacast’s iCloud sync, it’s easy to keep subscriptions matched between the two devices. However, I’m just using HD for video podcasts. That’s not to say I don’t love the iPad version for audio, too — I just find my iPhone a lot easier to deal with in the car, which is where I listen to podcasts the most.

I’ll be passing out a handful of promo codes over on Twitter today, by the way. Even if you don’t get one, the $4.99 for this app is well worth it.