my favorite iphone apps
Posted on July 26, 2008
Filed Under iphone | 2 Comments
after holding out and suffering with my treo 650 through the launch of the first iphone i couldn’t help myself when the iphone 3g came out and had to get one.
it’s awesome.
sure, it crashes at least once a day, apps randomly stop working, it doesn’t record video or send/receive mms, the on-screen keyboard takes some getting used to, and apple has draconian software policies.
however, imho, the pros outweigh the cons.
by far the #1 app for the iphone is the safari web browser. combined with faster 3g networking and taking advantage of wifi where it’s available, it makes my treo seem like a commodore 64 by comparison – not that the commodore 64 wasn’t a great machine in it’s time.
my second favorite app is airme. with lots of out-of-state family who don’t get to see my kids very often i can take pictures of moments with my phone which typically would be lost before digging the nikon out. that in itself isn’t impressive but what is impressive is how it immediately uploads to flickr so my family can actually see the pictures instead of them staying on my phone until i get around to uploading them.
next up is tuner. i’m a news junkie. it drives me nuts whenever i can’t listen to npr, preferably via kut, when i want to. tuner lets you tune into any free mp3 stream on the net and kut has a great stream 24/7.
when i’m coding and want to listen to music – typically techno – i turn to the variety of streams available through pandora’s app. the quality is good and there’s something for everyone.
one of the things that made the iphone 3g nearly irresistible for me was the likelihood that it would be jailbroken like its predecessor. sure enough it took about two weeks before a jailbreaking app for macs was available. i wasted no time liberating mine from apple’s lock over what i could install. what makes this particularly appealing for this linux geek is that under the hood the iphone runs mac osx – apple’s variant of freebsd – which isn’t linux but still has a command prompt, a compiler and a nice selection of my favorite tools.
the jailbreaking utility provides a convenient package manager for installing non-sanctioned software. the nes emulator available through this is awesome and already has consumed too much of my time. the pacman game – macman – is also cool. i was also quick to install the terminal app – my preferred working environment. it gives you a command prompt for the bsd system from which it’s possible to ssh to a server, run scripts, etc
after installing python and the sample python app i was pleased to discover while reading the sample code that apple uses sqlite for a few of it’s databases including contacts, calendar, and sms messages. it took me about 20 minutes to write a script to purge all text messages – should be handy the next time a server decides to spam me with 200 text messages before someone can silence it.
i’m eagerly awaiting a video recording app – and will gladly pay for one. a bonus goes to the one that can auto upload to flickr or youtube. there’s an app already for the first iphone running the 1.x software so hopefully it won’t be long.
mms would be nice but with airme it isn’t that big of as deal without it.
i’m travelling next month and will post how ad-hoc tethering works.
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you already set your iPhone free? that’s probably one of the many reasons it crashes on you regularly :). two things have really been bothering me since upgrading my iPhone to the 2.0 software. first, my volume keeps resetting itself to off & i’m missing lots of calls. secondly, the speed of the camera now totally sucks. it takes a good extra 5 seconds to switch to camera mode & between taking pics. i do like additional applications & if my install wouldn’t have been such a nightmare i probably wouldn’t be so soured about the volume control & shutter speed of the camera now.
heh – it was crashing a lot before the jailbreak.
yeah, i agree about the camera speed. that’s my biggest complaint with airme as well.