Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Apple recently announced that there are more than 15,000 apps (applications) in the app store. My iTunes shows I have downloaded and tried 189 of them, but even going through those, there are only a handful that I would actually buy if I had tried them out first.

Based on that, here are 22 apps that I actually recommend to other iPhone users, as well as the reasons why I recommend them.

MOST USEFUL

These are the apps I find I use all the time, and they occupy the first two screens on my iPhone:

• Note2Self — An indispensable part of GTD is ubiquitous capture, that is the ability to quickly record down anything as you remember it; get it out of your head so you don’t have to worry about remembering it. You can use a pen an paper, or jot things down in a digital notebook, but none can compare with this: open Note2Self, lift the phone to your ear, say what you need to remember, then lower the phone again. Note2Self wil automatically email you an mp3 of what you said. The whole process takes only a few seconds more than actually saying what you need to say, you can do it with one hand, there’s no need to carry anything but your phone with you, and you won’t have yet-another-inbox to worry about. This is by far my most frequently used app.
• Evernote — The bundled iPhone notepad sucks, so I’ve started using Evernote for recording down reference information and stuff I just need to be able to look up every now and then. It syncs with the Evernote web application, and my Evernote desktop app.
• Things (OmniFocus) — As you’ve seen from the above two apps, I follow GTD, and as such I need a way to manage lists of tasks. Things is just that, and it sync’s (via wifi) with my Things desktop app. I generally keep todo items and shopping list items on Things, and more unstructured project information in Evernote. I also tried OmniFocus, which also has a desktop app that syncs, but it was just too much for me to get my head around. Things is beautifully simple.
• Tweetie (Twitterific, Twinkle) — If you’re into Twitter you will need a good Twitter client. I tried Twitterific and Twinkle, but Tweetie is incredibly compact, clean, and feature complete. It’s an example of great UI design.
  
• WifiTrak (WiFinder) — I am always on the lookout for new hot spots to potentially work from. Previously I used to open my laptop, look for available networks, try them out, discover that although they weren’t encrypted (with WEP or WPA) they had redirection pages in place asking you to pay up to use them. That whole process took a minute or two. Now I just open WifiTrak and it’ll scan all the networks, letting me know which are open, broken, closed, or have URL redirection on them. I also tried WiFinder, but WifiTrak has more features and a cleaner interface.
• 1Password — Gone are the days when you had one username and password to remember. I have more than 250 logins, so there’s just no way for me to remember them all. Most people reuse the same passwords 100s of times, eventually lose it to some phising or security leak, and get their MSN account hacked and used for spam. 1Password remembers all your accounts for you, can log you in automatically when you get to a login form, and can even store other non-login information like credit card stuff, all protected with multiple levels of passwords. I primarily use 1Password’s desktop client, but I frequently have to look up PIN codes etc on the iPhone version, which syncs with the desktop client, of course.
  
• Remote — At home, iTunes on my computer is my music system, and it’s set up to stream (via AirTunes) music to three sets of speaker systems scattered around the apartment. Apple’s Remote software allows me to connect to my computer’s iTunes from the iPhone, saving me a few trips up and down the stairs, or getting up from the bed to turn off the music before going to sleep.
• Instapaper — People send me links to stuff I should read all the time. I used to read them immediately, but that wasn’t good to my productivity at work. Then I started adding them to a “To read” bookmark folder, but I would never look at it. The problem was that in front of the computer I would always have other more important things to do, so I would never get to it. This app works in combination with a bookmarklet and a web service; any link you want to read later you just bookmark, adding it to your “to read” list on the web service, which then downloads it and strips off all graphics, leaving you just the bare bones text, perfectly suitable for reading on the iPhone on the go. I find I’m much more likely to catch up on reading when I have some time to kill.
• Midomi (Shazam) — I’m in a restaurant, or in a shop, and they’re playing some music that I really dig but can’t recognize. Midomi can grab 10 seconds of the music, filters out background noise, analyze it, and determine which song it is. It even lets you buy it from iTunes immediately. For extra fun, try to hum or sing a song to Midmi; it can usually figure it out. Although it’s supposed to do the same, I found Shazam less accurate.
• iChinese — There’s no better way to learn to write Chinese characters than this app! If I had had it while I studied Chinese I estimate I would have learned 2 or 3 times as many characters. Write characters, iChinese will tell you where you got them wrong, even correcting your stroke order.

SHOW OFFS

Although it happens less and less frequently these days, people that haven’t really seen an iPhone before are curious, and since I really enjoy the phone myself, I of course can’t help showing it off These are some of the most unique and fun apps I have:

• Ocarina — Turn the iPhone into a flute-like music instrument called the Ocarina. It has to be seen to be believed. Then, once everyone is oh-ing and ah-ing over this incredibly creative use of the phone, pop open the globe view to see streams of notes emanating from other places on the globe, in (semi) real time! See little lights everyone on the globe where the app has been installed, listen to the best tunes from people in a certain region… you get the point, pretty mind-boggling. See Smule’s youtube video for a great example.
• Bloom — Another great way to create music, this time ambient music, this time in collaboration with Brian Eno. It’s so simple, anyone can do it, and it does show off another iPhone first: multi-touch display. See youtube video.
• Pocket Guitar — While I’m on the go with musical instruments, why not show the iPhone can be a guitar! I never imagined this app. See youtube video.
• iFart — App Store sensation, #1 most selling app for a while. It draws some laughs. See if you can trick someone with the sneak attack fart.
• Sonic Lighter — The first app from Smule is the ultimate lighter app. Very realistic. Launched during the US presidential election, you can pick a red (Obama) or blue (McCain) colored flame for your lighter. This was the first app from Smule with the globe view, but this time the globe view shows red and blue flames around the world representing the flames of Sonic Lighters around the world; based on this it’s clear that the mid-west is the most red, whereas most of the rest of the world is blue. Oh yes, another important tid-bit: the globe view would only be possible with some kind of location-aware/ positioning service, another feature of the iPhone.

MOST FUN GAMES

Although the big game houses have pushed out amazingly feature-complete games such as SimCity, Spore, Monkey Ball, and Brothers in Arms, I never seem to have the 20+ minutes required to really get into those games. Instead, I find myself playing a lot of casual games that are easy to get into and easy to get out of:

• JellyCar — Weird but fun game — drive your squishy car through obstacle courses. My girlfriend loves to see the car spin out of control with the tires getting longer and longer until they fill the screen.
  
• Super Sniper — Great flow and atmosphere in this simple game. Find, aim, fire, find, aim, fire, faster and faster.
• Topple — Quite a polished block building game. Uses multi-touch to rotate pieces, and accelerometer to “cheat” by adjusting gravity. Kind-of an inverse Tetris: build as tall as you can as quickly as you can. Another cool building game with incredible flow is Tower Blox.
• Tap Tap Revenge — Sequel to one of the first iPhone games (Tap Tap Revolution), imagine Dance Dance Revolution but with your fingers. Throw in a simultaneous two-player mode and you have a few minutes of fun.
• Rolando — Very polished cute rolling game, probably inspired by the PSP game, Loco Roco. The sounds and graphics are so cute. See youtube video.
• Sally’s Salon — Similar to Diner Dash but set in a hair salon; serve your customers, make money, and expand your hair dressing franchise all the way to Hollywood. Nicely done game, perhaps most fun for girls though
• Fieldrunners (7 Cities TD, The Creeps, Tap Defense) — A Tower Defense game that is, as you can imagine, incredibly addictive. Most people are absorbed into the game within 2 minutes, and don’t emerge again until 1-2 hours later. There are many other variants of TD in the app store, but I’ve only played the ones listed, and I prefer Fieldrunners (though some friends prefer Tap Defense).

BUNDLED APPS

When looking at apps on the iPhone it’s not quite fair to only look at 3rd party apps from the app store. Here’s a list of the apps that come bundled with the iPhone, sorted by their frequency of use.

• SMS — I belong to the people that prefer to SMS instead of calling, so the SMS app is incredibly important for me. I love the way Apple groups conversations with someone into one scrollable screen, kind-of like what you get when you IM someone. Other than that, it is not a very strong implementation, and though it has the most common features (send to multiple people) there are a few major drawbacks: no cut ‘n paste on the phone, no way to save as drafts, no way to forward messages, and once you hit hundreds of stored messages the app starts slowing down. You can get emoticons / emoji through some 3rd party apps, but I guess this will be turned on by default on iPhones soon. There’s no MMS support, but I never used MMS anyways.
• Contacts and calendars — No phone is complete with an address book, and it’s quite common now for phones to have calendars. Apple’s implementation is very nicely done, and synchronizes with your computer when you sync the phone with it. For a killer feature, however, buy MobileMe and turn on over-the-air syncing; I love the fact that any changes to contacts or calendar items automatically, seamlessly, and quickly propagate between my phone and computer.
  
• Phone — This is a phone, but when I think about it, there are so many other things I use it for, the phone feature itself is far from the most frequently used one. Apple’s implementation is nice, but nothing special. Using the touch display is not not as convenient as phone with buttons when it comes to answering and making calls, nor is it as accurate or easy to do with one hand. That said, it still works great. For extra fun, assign a big photo to contacts and see the photo fill the screen when they call.
• iPod / Podcasts — I am a slow reader, so I’ve found that I can consume more news and stories listening to them instead of reading on the screen or in a book. Today there’s tons of books available from Audible, and the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts on all kinds of topics. I listen to a lot of the TWiT network’s podcasts.
• Clock — The alarm clock wakes me up every day. More convenient than Motorola’s, slightly less convenient than Nokia’s (after you learned the keyboard shortcuts to set it).
• Weather — Extremely quick and beautiful way to check the weather before you put on your hats and gloves.
• Safari - While not fast, web browsing on the iPhone is a pleasure compared to any other phone I’ve seen. Apple has in addition gone through several extra steps to make it possible for websites to create an experience similar to a native iPhone app; website links can be saved to the home screen, icons can be customized, and interfaces can be customized to better take advantage of iPhone features. Most big websites, e.g., facebook, amazon, google, already exist in “iPhone editions”; just surf to them on your browser.
  Mail — I use it when I have to check mail on the go. EDGE/GPRS makes this a bit of a pain, though, and without search it’s practically impossible to find emails for me.
• Google maps — Although GIS information for Beijing is broken/missing, the satellite view works, and when I’ve been traveling google maps have been of great use to verify that the cab driver is taking me the right way, checking distances, for finding things, and getting directions, be them for walking, bus, metro, or driving.
  
• Camera — The camera that comes with the iPhone is crap. I use it only when I have to.
  

That’s it! Welcome any comments!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 18:05 and is filed under Exoweb, Lifehacking, Mac, Marketing, Mobile, Fun, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.