Design

When it comes to looks, Noteshelf’s beautiful design blows both Remarks and Notability out of the water. The main screen displays each of your notes like a notebook and displays them nicely on a bookshelf similar to iBooks. Remarks also has the greatest selection of paper and pen color and sizes. There is also a Noteshelf store where you can buy more paper and book cover designs. Making Noteshelf visually appealing was clearly a priority on the developers’ list.

PDF Annotation

One feature that Noteshelf does not offer is importing and annotating PDFs. Both Remarks and Notability do, however. To import a PDF, you must browse to the PDF from somewhere else — like Dropbox or email — activate the “open in” option and select Remarks or Notability from the list of choices. Once opened, the PDF works like any other note that you have in the app.

Audio Notes

A unique feature to Notability is the ability add audio recordings to your notes. Neither Remarks or Noteshelf offer this functionality. Unfortunately, you can indicate which area of the notes your recording is applicable to, but this feature will still be welcomed by many.

Organization

All there apps allow you to organize your notes into folders, but do so differently. Noteshelf has separate bookshelves for groups of notes, Remarks displays each folder like it’s own notebook, and Notability has more of a file system take on grouping notes. All of them are equally functional, but Noteshelf’s is the most visually appealing.

With Notability, you can also add categories as a way to further organize your folders.

Sharing

Remarks and Notability have the “open in” feature enabled, allowing you to quickly open your notes in another other application. It is a little buried in Notability and Noteshelf does not offer this functionality at all.

For Notability, the destination options are Dropbox, email, “Open in”, WebDAV, iDisk, iTunes, and print.

With Remarks, you can email, print, or “open in” another application (including Dropbox).

Noteshelf allows you to export to email, iTunes, Dropbox, Evernote, your iPad album, or printer. Noteshelf is also the only app of the three that lets you share just individual pages from a note. You can also choose to quickly share the page you are editing to email, Twitter, or Facebook.

Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This weeks selections include apps for photo blogging, social gaming, podcasts, an interesting accessory, and a fun children’s book.

To see what we picked, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Posterous – @sethclifford

Since I just can’t leave well enough alone, I’m always tweaking my workflows and every other kind of flow I’ve got. This week it was all about photos for some reason. I started a Posterous account years ago when it was a new service whose main point of differentiation was that you could send an email to your blog to autopost to it and to your other sites really easily. At the time, it was super cool and worked extremely well. I eventually ended up using it more for just a photo blog, and then for some reason I can’t recall, I just stopped using it all together. I was literally hovering over the “delete my account” button on the site this week because I haven’t used it in so long when I decided to wait and explore a little. I’m really glad I did. The service has really grown a bit and become a really interesting place to host a blog as well as leverage as a platform through which you can post to a variety of different social channels and sites. I downloaded the new app in the App Store (there was a very basic one released a few years ago) and liked what I saw.

The design is pretty nice and clean. It’s easy to get around and you know where you are and what you’re doing quickly. And there’s a lot packed in here. There’s a reader function for people you follow – similar to Tumblr – and you can browse through posts and read your stream from your phone, but I think where the app really shines is both in the posting and management of your site(s). It’s extremely easy to throw a post together and toggle which places you want it to go (it will always go to your Posterous by default anyway). You can add a title, tags, and text as well as slap a location on there in one tidy little interface.

Posterous has also done something that I really like (and think is really smart) and that’s giving you some great admin controls over your sites right from the phone. From the “Profile” tab you can edit your profile and set up and modify autopost options, which means you really don’t have to hit the full site very often if you don’t want to. There are still more advanced things like theming that don’t appear in the app, so not everything is covered, understandably. But it’s still cool to have a few things you can tweak on the fly. If you’re looking for a new clean place to start a sharp little blog and possibly save yourself some work cross posting between sites, you may want to give this one a look.

Free – Download Now

Scramble with friends – @Alli_Flowers

Our “friends” have done it again. First we fell in love with Words with friends, and now it’s Scramble with friends. To say it’s addictive is an understatement.

Similar to many word games we’ve known and loved in the past, Boggle, Bookworm, and others, the idea is to make as many words as you can out of sequential letters in a grid. Did I mention you only get two minutes to find your words? This is fast paced fun, and it brings out our competitive best when you play against your Facebook friends.

You can score extra points by using letters marked double point value – letter or word, depending on your level. And to keep things interesting, you can “buy” help, like the ability to turn your playing area sideways to help see the letters from a different angle; hints for additional words; and the ability to “freeze” your play for an extra five seconds to find even more words.

Free and paid versions are available, but so far only for iPhone, not iPad. Playing double screen on the iPad is acceptable for Scramble, but an iPad optimized version sure would be nice!

Free – Download Now

Pocket Casts – @chrisoldroyd

As a long time user or Instacast, I decided it was time for a change as certain features and more importantly, the interface was starting to get on my nerves. I decided to take the plunge and try out Pocket Casts by the developer with the awesome name of ShiftyJelly.

Pocket Casts is laid out very well, and is very simple yet very powerful as a podcast collector and playback tool. It even provides push notifications when a new podcast episode is available to download. You can also download episodes over the air without the 20MB restriction. All in all I find it to be a much smoother and more intuitive podcast application than any of the other ones I have tried so far.

$2.99 – Download Now

Parcel — @andrewwray

With all the package tracking apps in the App Store, finding which one is best for you can be difficult. My personal favorite happens to be Parcel, which is designed as a universal app for both the iPhone and iPad. Parcel makes tracking packages simple and easy, with over 100 delivery services supported including UPS, DHL, USPS, FedEx, OnTrac and more.

One of the best features in Parcel is barcode scanning, allowing you to quickly input new packages to track without the need to type in a long string of numbers and/or letters. Additionally, Parcel automagically recognizes which carrier the tracking number is associated with, making the process even easier that most other package tracking apps out there. Another neat option is the ability to track your package on a map so you can pinpoint exactly where it is en route, giving you a much better idea of delivery time in case the package runs into any delays or issues.

Push Notifications are also included with Parcel so you won’t need to constantly open up the app when the delivery is coming close to hitting your doorstep if you’re not at home. One important thing to note is that Parcel does come with ads, and only lets you track up to three packages at a time under their free offering. It also doesn’t come standard with Push Notifications. That — along with adding more than three packages and removing the ads — comes at a cost of $1.99 via in-app purchases. Bottom line: If you’re looking for an easy way to track your packages, Parcel is definitely something you’ll want to take a look at.

Free – Download Now

Gripsta – @JorjLim

As I mentioned in my most used accessories post, I don't own that many accessories for my iPhone or iPad. However I was lucky enough to get my hands on a stand called The Gripsta.

The Gripsta is a stand for your iPhone, iPod Touch (or even Android or Blackberry, if you're so inclined) made of foam (the same foam you'd find in a stress ball.). The unique design of the Gripsta allows you to stand it up, either in portrait or landscape, with the perfect angles for FaceTime or just watching movies.

I'm finding myself docking my iPhone into the Gripsta and just using the iPhone like normal because of the soft comfort of the Gripsta.

Its soft, comfortable, colourful, useful and a great product to pick up to spice up your desk.

£9.95 (+£2.95 P&P) – Gripsta

Hank Saves the Day (iBook) – @llofte

Hank Saves the Day is a book available in the iBookstore. It’s about a big, friendly monster who has to save a bridge that was destroyed by a giant piece of Swiss cheese. I downloaded this as a recommendation from someone on Twitter and my daughter loves it! She’s only 18 months old, so the big, simple pictures, big letters, and short sentences are perfect for her. She’s already learning to identify objects in the book.

I recommend Hank Saves the Day to anyone with small children, especially since it’s free!

Free – Download Now

Tell us your pick!

Those were our picks, iMore Nation, so now it’s your turn! Tell us your pick of the week below. Give us the name of your favorite app, site, or accessory, and tell us why it made your life more productive, more informed, more entertaining, or just plain more fun.

So what are you waiting for? Jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

iOS 5.1 has been in beta for a while now, but several features have remained hidden from developers thus far — potentially including rich text formatting for the Notes app. Previously limited to just plain text, iPhone Hellas reports that users will soon be able to include bulleted lists, links, underlined text, change the font color and more.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be getting rich text editing in the new Notes app for Mac, so this would mean parity between the platforms. If accurate, it’s great to see Apple pushing Notes a little further, as it’s been essentially the same since the early iPhone OS days. It probably won’t have any effect on App Store note-taking apps, which often include additional features, or features Apple would never add, like Dropbox or Box.net support, or allow hand-writing support.

Like the Photos app, it’s just bare bones functionality.

iOS 5.1 has been rumored to hit the streets on March 9th from operator profile code uncovered in the latest beta release, which is also right around the time we think Apple will be announcing the iPad 3.

Source: iPhoneHellas

“Should you pick up League of Evil 2? Only if you’re a sucker for over 100 levels of fun, funny, violent, punishment.”

League of Evil 2 launched on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad last week, making a big splash in the top 25. It’s a pretty straightforward platform game with some smooth cortoon graphics. You play a government special agent with a few robotic enhancements, and have to navigate through a level full of traps and henchmen to capture briefcases full of classified in intelligence, and deliver a righteous uppercut to the evil scientists in charge of building weapons of mass destruction. You’re ultimately rated out of three stars for how quickly you liquify the evil scientist, and if you nab the suitcase in the level. There’s full Game Center support, and it’s universal, so you can enjoy this one on the iPad too. There are five chapters, each consisting of 20 levels or so. After you finish each one, you unlock a different outfit which you can swap out mid-game.

The original League of Evil game was more or less the same thing with one notable difference – the graphics. The original had a charming 8-bit feel to it, which suited the simple platform gameplay and the old-school Nintendo control scheme. Although it didn’t take advantage of the high-res display on the latest iOS devices, the first League of Evil was perfectly playable on older devices, going all the way back to the first-gen iPod touch. Seeing as the gameplay has changed little between the two iterations, the developer, Ravenous Games, has smartly provided their title for every tier of iPhone owner. Beyond graphics, the other major addition to League of Evil 2 is boss fights. This pit you against a particularly large opponent that somehow doesn’t explode into a million pieces with the first punch. Unfortunately, the game is hard enough that I didn’t even get that far in, so can’t comment much on exactly how hard those bosses are.

Perfecting wall slide and double jump techniques are vital to getting around in League of Evil.

The controls are dead simple, and amply large. Navigating any given level tends to involve sliding down walls and frantically double jumping to avoid obstacles. I did find that often my finger would slip off one of the directional arrows if I had a particularly long run. If your aim is remotely off on either the jump or attack button, it can easily mean a level restart, but this is mostly nitpicking. Overall, I found the control scheme simple and easy to use.

Although the core inspiration for this brand of platform game is the classic PC, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis titles of the late 80s, the original League of Evil feels very much like Super Meat Boy. Super Meat Boy is a “casual” game that started on PC and Xbox, and is coming to mobile soon, though it will apparently not control anything like the original game. League of Evil stands more on its own thanks to the smoothed-out graphics, and the ability to do more than just jump, but the gib-filled explosions enemies make when you attack them always reminds me of SMB.

All you have to do is punch an evil scientist. Easy, right?

I would deign to call League of Evil 2 a casual game, only because it’s fairly unforgiving of failure; one small misstep, and you’re exploded into a pile of guts. The sense of humour is top-notch, though a little violent if you have an aversion to that sort of thing. The graphic style is fluid and sharp, but I definitely feel that it lacks the charm of the original. Should you pick up League of Evil 2? Only if you’re a sucker for over 100 levels of punishment. Right now, it’s only $0.99, so it’s not a huge investment, but that price is going up to $2.99 soon.

$0.99 – League of Evil 2

Responding to the ongoing controversy surrounding working conditions in Chinese factories, Apple has granted ABC News and their Nightline series exclusive access to go inside Foxconn and take a look around. Nightline new anchor Bill Weir has gone to Shenzhen China with film crew in tow to bring back the visual documentation of what exactly happens there.

“For years, Apple and Foxconn have been synonymous with monster profits and total secrecy so it was fascinating to wander the iPhone and iPod production lines, meet the people who build them and see how they live. Our cameras were rolling when thousands of hopeful applicants rushed the Foxconn gates and I spoke with dozens of line workers and a top executive about everything from hours and pay to the controversies over suicides at the plant and the infamous “jumper nets” that line the factories in Shenzhen. After this trip, I’ll never see an Apple product the same way again” said Weir

The full broadcast will take place on February 21st, at 11:35 p.m., ET on the ABC Television Network but portions of it will be spread across the ABC networks line up.

Source: ABC News

If you cast your mind back to the launch of the iPhone 4, you may recall a bit of shenanigans over the performance of its antenna. You may remember the death grip and what quickly became known as "antennagate". Apple even had an event to explain what the issues were with the antenna and then offered a free bumper case to anyone who bought an iPhone 4 for a limited time only.

A lot of people were still not satisfied and a total of 18 class-action suits were brought to the table; these were consolidated into one case. The case claimed that Apple was "misrepresenting and concealing material information in the marketing, advertising sale and servicing of its iPhone 4 particularly as it relates to the quality of the mobile phone antenna, reception and related software."

The case has now been heard and as part of a preliminary approval, US residents who purchased an iPhone 4 will be entitled to $15 in cash or again a free bumper case from Apple. All original buyers of the iPhone 4 should receive an e-mail alerting them of their entitlement before April 30^th. If you qualify, you have a further 120 days to claim your $15 in cash or free bumper case.

Source: cnet

Apple is clearly bringing the best parts of the iPad to the Mac, but how about bring iOS some of the best parts of OS X as well?

Yesterday Apple released the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developers preview, and like OS X 10.7 Lion before it, front and center was a drive to take what worked best in iOS in general, and the iPad in specific back to the Mac. To make an Apple experience that’s more consistent across their two platforms.

But how about a little quid pro quo? There are several aspects of OS X, including some of what’s being implemented in Mountain Lion, that I’d love to see in iOS 6.

Messages

While webOS-style Synergy should be the end game, one Messages app to manage them all would be a good start

Messages for OS X replaces the venerable iChat and brings iMessage to the Mac, including the ability to send text messages, as well as picture, video, and audio messages, and to share location and contact information. Just like in iOS, you get delivery and, if enabled, read receipts.

You can literally send an iMessage from your Mac at your desk, pick up your iPad and send a reply from the couch, then grab your iPhone and continue the conversation out the door. It does test the boundaries between connection and noise, staying in touch and being just to much, but it’s there on the Mac if you want to use it.

And unlike the iPad, it also handles AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger protocols. Can we have this for iOS?

The ideal would be a webOS-style Synergy, where Apple would collect all your IM accounts in silos and present them in a unified view, so it doesn’t matter to the user what protocol anyone else is using, they just see it in iMessage. (Sort of like the unified inbox in Mail doesn’t care which account anyone is sending from, or which account you’re receiving from.)

One Messages app to rule them all, however, would be a good start. (Especially if they could figure out the iMessage overload issue.)

Notes

Adding photos to Notes would be nice. Adding typeface options would be nicer.

Notes has been around since iOS 1 (iPhone OS 1) and works in the best tradition of the venerable [http://www.treocentral.com](Palm OS) memos, automatically saving anything entered into it. Aside from some typeface choices added to settings, however, and rich-text options made system-wide, it hasn’t had much attention over the years.

The Mountain Lion version keeps the iPad aesthetic but adds some functionality, including rich text formatting options, the ability to add images, and to tear off pages to stick to the desktop. It’s not TextEdit-type functionality, much less Pages, but it’s… something.

It’s going beyond simple notes but not entering the realm of true text editor. It’s closer akin to the very basic image editing features added to Photos in iOS 5.

I don’t know if we’ll see anything so “widget”-like as page tearing in iOS any time soon, but the ability to do rich text, basic formatting, and paste images would be nice. What would be even nicer would be more typeface choices, like the Mac.

Marker Felt, Chalkboard, and Helvetica make for a rather anemic selection. iBooks offers more for reading than Notes does for writing. iOS in general, now that it has far more processing power and bigger storage options, could do with more typographic options to go with it.

Notification Center

Putting linen back in the background would please designers, stopping banners from covering buttons would please everyone

Both iOS 5 and OS X Lion make abundant use of the linen texture, but its inconsistency in iOS has caused some consternation in the design community. Given linen’s use in the fast app switcher and folders, it seems to signify a layer beneath the Home screen — something literally in the background. Yet Notification Center slides down on top of the Home screen.

Mac Notification Center uses linen, but is visibly beneath the scenes, just like folders and the iOS fast app switcher. It’s more consistent, which is far from a mainstream problem to to be sure, but it’s something Apple usually nails. So, yeah, want that.

The stacked banners shown off for Mountain Lion could work on iPad but not the limited screen real estate of the iPhone. Already on the iPhone the banners often obscure buttons at inopportune moments (until they automatically go away or you manually dismiss them.

Again, webOS does this better by making notifications much easier to dismiss with a quick swipe.

So take the background layering from the Mac, but take the functionality from webOS.

Gatekeeper

But would allowing the side-loading of non-App Store apps, signed by identified developers, really fix any iOS pain points?

This is the big one. The thing most power iPhone users have probably dreamed of since the original, no-third-party-apps iPhone launched in 2007 — the thing that led to the jailbreak scene. The ability to run apps not approved by Apple. The ability to run app that come from outside the App Store.

The Mac has always been able to do that. (The Mac App Store is a very recent development). With Mountain Lion, however, Apple has given users the choice — run only App Store apps, run App Store apps and non-App Store apps signed by identified developers, and run any app, no matter where it comes from.

The App Store provides a lot of security — it minimizes the chance for malware or other malicious software. For all the hoops developers have to jump through to get their apps approved, it creates a trusted environment that makes users not only confident and willing to buy apps, but eager to.

Non-App Store apps signed by identified developers is a good middle-ground. They don’t need Apple approval but if any of them are found to be malicious, their certificate can be revoked.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this would mean much for iOS. It still wouldn’t allow the tweaks that jailbreak users enjoy, the ones that hack into notification center or the dock or folders or the messages system, or otherwise modify the system itself. It could potentially allow porn, copy-cat or other intellectual-property violating apps, GPL-licensed apps, and the few remaining things Apple still blocks or removes from the store, but what else? Tethering apps? Apple may yank certificates for those anyway. And unlike the Mac, the potential market doesn’t seem worth the effort on iOS.

A few more things

There’s more from OS X and the Mac, past and present, that I’d like to see on the iPad and iOS. In no particular order:

• FaceTime conference calls. Like the iChat that Mountain Lion kills off, the big iPad screen — especially a Retina display on a quad-core iPad 3! — should allow for multi-person calling.
• iPhoto. The built-in photos app has basic editing now, but it doesn’t have the range of tools iPhoto offers. Aperture could be an App Store app, but unifying Photos and iPhoto, like iChat and Messages, should be on the agenda.
• Print to PDF. A built-in PDF printer option, built into AirPrint, that goes right to Documents in the Cloud, would be great for everything from Mail to Safari.
• Per-account mail signatures. No reason the current signature setting can’t be moved down a step in the Settings hierarchy. Work and play can’t always have the same signature.
• Top Sites for Safari. I could do without the forced curve effect, but quickly getting my most common sites as thumbnails is very convenient.
• Launch center. Or Expose. Apple originally tested a more Expose-like fast app switching system before settling on the current, dock-behind-a-the-dock approach. Visually, it still seems like a better metaphor, especially for a larger display like the iPad. Apple used it in Safari (well before webOS cards), and they could still take it system-wide.

I’m sure others would add multi-use login, or even guest login, to the list, but it’s fairly clear Apple means for iOS devices to be personal devices at this point.

iOS 6

While iOS is based on the same core as OS X, and they share many of the same concepts and ideas, if different implementations at times, there’s a lot about the Mac that should now go back to the iPad. Hopefully Apple has that planned for iOS 6.

With Apple taking everyone by surprise and announcing Mountain Lion to the masses, to say this week has been busy is quite an understatement. If you missed out on anything, you want to use the blogs to get yourself caught up to speed. Once you’re done that, if you’re still looking for more iOS goodness then check out the iMore forums. You can register now to get started today and while you’re at it, check out some of the threads below:

• XBox 360 Kinect giveaway
• iPhone 4S Resale Value?
• Changing Apple ID Password
• Let’s Talk Mountain Lion
• How Do I Clean My iPad?
• iCloud Enabled Apps

If you’re not already a member of the iMore Forums, register now!