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WWDC 2010: Interview with Moodboard developer Chris Nurre
I believe we've mentioned Moodboard exactly once on the site before, as one of Brett's picks back when the iPad first released. But it deserves another mention -- developer Chris Nurre of A Tiny Tribe (a company founded with a friend to help pay for skeleton equipment and travel) stopped by to see us at WWDC to both show off the app and let us know how is experience on the App Store has been going. While I'm not a designer (a mood board is a real designer's tool, kind of a collage of photos created to give inspiration or show direction), I was duly impressed by how the app has matured to fill out its space on Apple's tablet. Nurre got his app on the App Store the first day the iPad launched -- while he's also published a few iPhone apps, he wanted to try to get something right out of the gate with the bigger device, and Moodboard was it. He built the whole thing on a simulator without a real iPad, which itself is pretty impressive -- the app makes good use of multitouch to scale, size and move pictures, and he did a lot of option-clicking to simulate those in the SDK. The one thing he did have to change was a "long press" feature -- "it's a lot easier to keep a mouse still than a finger," he said, so that had to be adjusted once he actually got a device.
Notable iPad apps
The iPad is great for a lot of tasks, but one area of potential appeals to me more than any other: brainstorming and note taking. I'm not alone, judging from the outcropping of specialized apps for doing just this. I haven't had the time (or money) to hunt down and experiment with every note-taking app in the App Store jungle, but I wanted to highlight a few that have stuck out in my search for the quintessential app for idea capture and retrieval. I'm skipping over some of the apps that I consider to be obvious (albeit excellent) choices (e.g. Evernote), mostly because they've already been covered on TUAW, often repeatedly. This is not to belittle them, just to keep things fresh. Mind Mapping The first few on my list are mind mapping applications. Mind maps are the easiest and most intuitive way for me to take notes and brainstorm ideas, so that's what I look for first. It's hard to beat a pencil and paper, or even a screen with a full keyboard and keyboard navigation, but some touch-based apps do it just about right. One of the best I've found is iThoughtsHD (US$7.99). It makes it relatively easy to jot notes in a mind map format, with options for node color, icons and organization. It can expand and contract nodes, branches can inherit their parent's options, and you can manually or automatically organize and space out your map. You can add new child and sibling nodes by tapping and dragging, or use handy buttons at the top of the screen. It can import and export maps via WiFi transfer, Box.net and email attachment. When it comes to formats, it handles just about everything I can personally think of, including Novamind, MindManager (6 and 8), iMindMap, XMind, Freemind, and others, as well as multiple image formats. Read on for more mind mapping and note taking apps for you and your iPad.
