This is a pretty cool Google Maps mash-up: Destroy your home town. A nuke at the middle of the 92345 ZIP code will totally take out our house, alas, although the fallout will be blowing away from work, so I’ll be able to cover the attack from there.
I did one of these a while ago, but with the price drop of the iPhone 3G and sudden Treo death, several friends have gotten iPhones recently, and I figured running down what I’ve currently got on my iPhone might be useful for app ideas for them.
Home screen: First off, notice that I’ve rearranged the icons on the bottom, to be what I actually find most useful, rather than what Steve Jobs felt like mentioning in a speech. I recommend you do the same.
Most of the stuff on the home screen are default apps, but there’s a few others:
Facebook: This app is pretty good, but like real Facebook, there are way too many subtle distinctions in content, so you will find yourself clicking on three or four tabs to see everything that’s going on. Also note that anyone whose feeds you may have muted in Facebook will show up un-muted here, so you can remember why you did it. A new version of this app is coming soon. Free.
Pandora: If you haven’t discovered this streaming music service yet, which creates radio stations based on any songs you suggest, and then refines it based on your reactions to the program’s choices, this is a good time to do so. Works fine over 3G and even Edge service. Free.
Pennies: A simple budgeting app. The only issue with it is that it wants a set amount of money every month — if that varies, it’s not quite as useful. Not free, but cheap.
Shazam: Identify songs that you put your phone’s microphone near. The program will then offer to sell you the songs on iTunes, show you the lyrics or the music video on YouTube. Free.
Tipulator: A gorgeous little tip calculator. I know; I can do this with the calculator or just in my head. It’s still very efficient and slick. Not free, but modestly priced.
Twitterific: Post and read from multiple Twitter accounts. There are small ads, but they’re unobtrusive. If you really hate them, there’s a pay version that eliminates them.
I was one of the lucky people to download a third party Armory application for my iPhone 3G prior to Blizzard getting them all yanked down a few months ago. (As so often happens, the legal folks associated with Blizzard seem to be working on a different page than the rest of Blizzard — why an app like Characters, which pulls World of Warcraft character information to the iPhone is a problem, while countless third party Web sites that do the same are not is hard to fathom.)
Characters was a so-so application — it didn’t display even the raw numbers of achievement points, didn’t display titles, and so on — but it was free and it was there. Until it wasn’t.
This morning, Blizzard Mobile Armory, and it’s really, really nice. (And, like Characters, it’s free.)
So … yeah, not buying this, although I did happily snag the free in-game pet that goes along with this. (And notice that it was the Horde stabbing the Alliance in the back — as usual!)
I keep having this same conversation with people lately, and although I am not an avid user of Twitter, I do “get” it. I keep running into people who don’t just not get it, they’re actively hostile to it.
Here’s my official stance on Twitter:
Twitter is an opt-in one-to-many (almost) real time chat with unlimited scrollback. It’s an asynchronous one-to-many communication system that merges the best aspects of e-mail (it can be private, remember), message boards and chat. But since you can join a conversation already in progress and catch up on what was previously said — it creates its own paper trail — it’s massively better than e-mail for work purposes. It’s also opt-in, so if you aren’t interested in what someone’s saying — we all have that friend who uses it to talk about his lunch every day — just stop following them.
E-mail, in comparison, takes a lot more hassle to opt in and out of, and if you want to go and join a conversation already in progress and catch up, you can’t.
At the end of the day, it’s just a tool, but it’s a tool that has some real value.
