My iPhone Apps – part 3

March 10, 2011

Part 1
Part 2
Part 2b

In this ongoing series on my iPhone4 apps – I present my 3rd screen:

 

You may notice by now that the best/most useful apps get to screen 1 and screen 2, so please bear with me as 3 onwards might include some dogs.

WEATHER PRO
This is a very detailed weather app run out of Europe and includes Cape Town. It appears to be fairly accurate, although I must admit that, as a home-worker, I don’t watch the weather much. Certainly better than the default weather app though.

SCANLIFE
This is one of 3 barcode/QR code scanners I have. Picked this up somewhere on the way and altho it works well, I’ll be removing it in favour of Read Laser (below). I am a HUGE fan of QR codes and although they’re still far from mainstream (especially on the sunny shores of South Africa where you can always add a year or 2’s lag time), once they reach a tipping point they’re gonna be EVERYWHERE.  NFC technology will probably get there faster, but doesnt cover all of the bases that QR does.

LIVE MOON
I like following the phases of the moon. For one thing they tell me when the the spring tides are, and Low Spring tide is one of my favourite times to go to the beach. I’ve hardly ever used this app – just too much hassle to go into it. its a perfect example of how the live phase picture of the moon should show on the icon – without opening the app.

DRAW4FREE
Although I dont really have a use for this App – it ROCKS!!! One of the first apps I turn to when I want to show off the iPhones capabilities to newbies. Draw on the screen with your finger, show them the pic, shake the phone and the pic disappears and you always get rave feedback. I DO love doodling, so I can’t wait for my iPad, where this kind of App will evolve into much more than a party trick

FINDIPHONE
A critical app, especially in South Africa where cell phone theft is so high. Crazy not to use it.

TEXT-EXPANDER
This was one of those apps I hunted down right in the beginning. I envisaged sending lots of work emails back and forwards while out and about, and as a lot of my emails tend to have the same text – setting up a few keywords/templates would beat pecking away on the keyboard (on my desktop I use a plug-in for Mozilla Thunderbird called Quicktext, and it is so useful/critical to my day that if it weren’t a freebie (as it is), I’d gladly shell out good money for it). As it turns out, the occassions when an email reply cant wait til I get back to the office is very rare – so havent used this yet. But I did a lot of research – so I’m sure its a goodie.

PHOTO-SORT
Bit of a clumsy app, but it allows me to assign my on-board photos to different folders which is really great.

TALK MESSENGER
This is basically a Google Chat gadget. I tend to use G Chat rather than skype for my IRC’ing. This app is not the best – in fact its pretty buggy if you have other sessions open like on your desktop.

MT TEMPLATES
See my comments above on TEXT EXPANDER. Same story. Havent used it but initial research suggested this was the best.

STICKYBITS
I’ve been a huge fan of the innovative Stickybits website forever. It has HUGE potential, but am not sure that it will ever tip into main stream. A great pity – because this site is revolutionary. It takes the whole QR code thing (as discussed above) and then generates a fixed URL editable page unique for that code so that anybody can add comments/video/pics. The use-cases for this are infinite and havent even been dreamed up yet. lets hope they get there.

ZEN-TIMER
If you meditate then GET THIS APP!! It is superb. You get to set up meditation timers with a whole range of Tibetan Singing Bowls and other gongs and they sound amazing. It also seemelessly keeps all your meditations stats. Highly Recommended!

RED-LASER
Another of the QR scanner apps. This one is supposedly the best of the lot but I havent used it enough to endorse that yet.

INSTAGRAM
Instagram, the photo-sharing twitter-like app has had a huge amount of hype in recent months. I’m a sucker for these things and cant resist trying them out. Yes, its pretty cool, but would only be really good if lots of your friends are on. I also think this space is getting crowded – I mean you arrive at a new place and there’s only so much you can do… After checking in on twitter, FB and foursquare … the instagrams and foodspottings and, and, and…  get a bit much. 

GOOGLE PLACES
And oh, while we’re on the subject of me-too location services – dont forget the biggest copy-cat of them all Google Places. The only reason I added this one is because my day-time job revolves a heck of a lot around Google and SEO so you always have to keep your hand in, just to see whats going on…

Stay tooned….

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