My iPhone apps

I keep promising to make this list, but it hasn’t happened until now.

I have a lot of friends who have iPhones now, or iPod Touch units (my brother’s family has my old one, for instance). And while the media player is nice and the phone aspect is fine, to me, the units become most impressive when you unlock their potential as portable computers and start adding applications from the iTunes App Store.

While some apps can be pricy — $30 or more for some financial planning software, for instance — there’s a lot of free programs, too, either produced for the fun of it or as freeware previews of more fully featured paid apps. I haven’t paid more than $5 for any app, and I only actually use one that expensive. (The other two paid apps on my iPhone were $0.99 each, as I recall.)

Just like with the first time one sets up a TiVo or other DVR, or when one plunges into the world of podcasts, it’s easy to go overboard. Instead of ending up recording 48 hours of television a day, you end up with a lot of unused programs on your iPhone. Chimps Ahoy! and Space Out might be really well-polished and clever implementations, but at the end of the day, they’re still just Breakout. Do you like Breakout that much? I don’t.

So I’ve purged and, other than one free app I’m trying out, most of the apps I’ve downloaded don’t reside on my iPhone any more, but just sit quietly on my computer, hoping to be called back out of the dugout one day.

Here’s what I am using:

* Accuweather – The default free weather app — a port of the Apple weather widget — is very simple and clean, but the free Accuweather app covers the same bases and so much more, all without becoming overwhelming. I’ve banished the default weather app to my back page, where it collects dust alongside the settings and stock chart applications. (Looking at newspaper stock listings really isn’t that much fun nowadays.)

* AOL Radio – I was never an AOL user, so it’s come as a surprise to me that the brand now is applied to really excellent free radio application. All of the Los Angeles radio stations I would want to listen to — two streams of KCRW, KROQ and KFI — all can be listened to via the iPhone, streaming the audio from their respective Web sites.

* iTalk – It’s amazing that Griffin Audio cooked up a well-done free voice recorder application for the iPhone (you’ll need an external microphone to use it with an iPod Touch), but I won’t complain.

* Pandora -  Like the Web site, this free app is just amazing. Endless streams of music you didn’t know you would love, but do. (Check out the site if you’re not familiar with it: It’s pretty amazing how it uses science to determine your musical tastes and choose music for your personalized radio stations.)

* Shazam – Hear a song on TV, in an elevator or on the radio that you want to identify, hold up your iPhone, start this program, and press the “Tag Now” button. Within seconds, it’s identified the song, gives you a link to its lyrics, will offer to show you the music video on YouTube and, oh yes, happily sell you the track via the iTunes store. And it’s free. This could be a standalone piece of hardware, and instead, it’s a freebie that every iPhone should have.

* Tipulator -  Scoff at having a tip calculator if you want; they’re some of the biggest sellers on the iTunes App Store, so clearly I’m not alone. I picked this pay app (I think it was around $3) for its gorgeous and simple to use interface. It’s like a small financial application designed by Nintendo or someone similar.

* Blackjack 21 -  Another pay app (I think this was $0.99), this one lets you pick several sets of tables, different types of cards (I picked an old west saloon for both), lets you issue commands using the touch screen and allegedly authentic Las Vegas casino gestures and has “achievements” for different things accomplished in the game. All very nice. Still, in the end, it’s just blackjack between a human and the computer. Not a lot of long-term play value, no matter how beautifully rendered it all is.

* Koi Pond -  I don’t know what’s so appealing about this program (which costs some modest amount — again, I think it’s under $3) watching koi swim around a pond, but it is. It’s customizable and interactive: the fish will even nibble at your fingertip if you hold it to the surface of the water.

* Lux Touch – I was unfamiliar with the online Risk clone, but this free app port is addictive. There’s a $5 upgrade with more maps and lots of customization, but I haven’t made the jump yet. Given how much I play this one, it’d probably be well worth the cost.

* Mach Dice – Customizable 3D gaming dice. It’s a little clunkier than it ought to be — switching between types of dice means manually rechoosing the exact configuration each time, instead of having the most common sorts set as preset choices, or being able to program in set-ups to save — but still, it’s D&D dice in your pocket. Because you never know when you’re going to get surprised by a group of gnolls.

* magic8ball -  A free and yet completely accurate Magic 8 Ball port. Shake the iPhone to use it.

* Morocco – A free — and on the expert level, ferociously challenging — game of Othello.

* reMovem free – A free “remove all the colored dots” game. Given how polished and fun this is, I really ought to buy the modestly priced pay version.

* Rogue -  A free dungeon-crawling adventure game I’m evaluating. So far, it seems a little too true to its old school routes and doesn’t have a particularly good user interface. I’d love something comparable to Diablo I — which is a descendant of the original Rogue — on my iPhone.

* Solitaire City – The pay app I use the most. I think it was $5, but this is incredibly well-polished, with dozens of games, lots of customization, a gorgeous and eminently useable player interface, online scoring to let you compete against players around the world (Canadians and the Chinese are apparently huge in the world of solitaire) and more. I still have only scratched the surface of this program, and I’ve had it for months. A great purchase.

* Amazon.com -  A stripped-down phone-friendly interface that lets you buy stuff, put it in your wishlist or cart and even take pictures using the iPhone’s camera and a volunteer will find whatever product you shot and stick it in your cart for you. Free, of course, but I do a lot of shopping via Amazon, so this is useful for me.

* Characters – Keep tabs on World of Warcraft characters (“Can my dad’s hunter make that leatherworking recipe yet?”) on your iPhone with this free application.

* Google -  Another stripped-down interface, this free app searches your iPhone in addition to the Web. You can even use its voice recognition to find local directions.

* Mobile News -  The Associated Press’ news feed, with customizable categories and more. A great little free app that allows both online and offline reading.

* Night Stand – Free app. Turns the iPhone display into that of a clock radio. It does what it says.

* Now Playing -  One of several apps that will sense your location, via GPS, look at local movie theaters, tell you what’s playing, link to reviews, list the Rotten Tomatoes rating and offer to sell you tickets online. You’ll never need to pick up a newspaper again! Wait a second …

* Twitterific -  A solid little free app (the pay version dispenses with the small ads on the screen) that I used to live blog from Blizzcon. It’d get more use if I Twittered more. Or, you know, at all.

* WeightTrack -  My pick of the free apps, although none of them that I’ve seen really dazzle, so far.

2 Comments »

1. I’d also highly recommend Where To? It’s a nice navigation tool under $3 that will point you to all manner of services (restaurants, attractions, airports, hospitals and on and on and on …) using your present location as a starting point.

   Comment by Todd — January 1, 2009 @ 12:36

2. The iPhone WP theme is — “WPtouch iPhone Theme”

   http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/

   Comment by Joel Y — January 1, 2009 @ 19:51

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