Archive for the ‘iPhone’ Category

Favorite iPhone apps

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

These are the apps that people may not know about, and/or are the ones I consider to be “best in class” at what they do.

  • WhatsOn – TV Listings. Allows you to set up various locations, configuring the channels shown in each,and allows you to set shows as favorites so you get a nice list of what’s airing. Makes it really easy to find the channel number.
  • Paper Toss – Free game where you throw a wadded up paper into an office waste basket. watch out, because there’s a small fan that’s will blow the paper in one or direction or the other. They also make
  • Ragdoll Blast – puzzle game where you blast ragdolls out of a cannon trying to hit a target, but there are obstacles in the way, such as walls, or sticks that need to be blasted out of the way.
  • Tweetie is my favorite twitter app, but I’m checking out TweetDeck’s iPhone version. it has the concept of “columns” that you swipe left or right to get to, and the columns can be your timeline, DMs, mentions, or searches.
  • iTrans NJT Straightforward train schedules for NJ Transit.
  • Crosswords – Guess. :) Best interface and downloading of puzzles
  • Now Playing – Movie times, with Netflix if you want it. Seems comprehensive but I use…
  • iPhlix Netflix management. Multiple queues, and instead of loading a whole queue, it offers to load 25 at a time. Also lets you default to Search view for quick searching.
  • MovieStar – Did you know there’s a IMDb app? I didn’t know until about a week ago. it’s not official but it’s pretty good.

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Cool stuff in iPhone 3.0

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Some little known improvements added in iPhone OS 3.0… Some stuff here is listed at Apple’s site but only for some context. Thanks to James O. for confirming pre-3.0 behaviors. :)

YouTube – You can login to your YouTube account to access your own favorites, but also:

  • Bookmarks in the YouTube iPhone app are merged with your YouTube favorites.
  • Your YouTube playlists and subscriptions are fully available and editable on the iPhone.

iPod

  • Podcasts no longer have shuffle as an option (which makes sense for most podcasts), therefore they will play in order without having to turn off shuffle mode.
  • Scrubbing speed is adjustable by sliding your finger up and down the screen (for instance, “grab” the slider, move your finger down, then slide left and right to scrub slowly, or slide back up to scrub more rapidly).
  • Podcasts have a 30-second instant replay button.
  • Podcasts can be played at 2x or .5x speed (I believe only Audiobooks allowed this previously).
  • Search is now available (just like Remote, and several other apps in 3.0).

General

  • Search is a double-press-home option.
  • Search targets are customizable (you can omit Audiobooks, for instance).
  • Camera app’s “roll” button shows your last pic.
  • Rotate Stock app to get bigger chart. You can tap a point to see the price at that time.
  • Notes (and possibly other places) will parse addresses for linking to Google Maps.
  • Screenshots view is integrated into the description page. Scroll down and immediately scroll left/right.

Phone app (and/or Contacts)

  • Outgoing calls have an special icon in the list view.
  • The line items with multiple calls (”Josh Forman (3)”) will list duration and time of each call in a nice table format.
  • Share Contact option emails a VCF.

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I feel like I have a new iPhone

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Go here and follow frgough’s advice. It’s nice to have some new tracks for a change instead of just having my top-played, top-rated, and a few static playlists. I’m hearing stuff I haven’t heard in a long time.

Also I finally bought byLine (http link | itms link), a Google Reader client. I held off because I thought I wanted to have separate views for each feed or tag. It now has a tag view; no feed view but I can live without it. (I’d use the feature if it was built-in)

What really sold me is its built-in browser with Reader controls. This allows you to visit a full web page linked in a feed item, and then star or share it. Safari likes to refresh a tab upon re-entry at seemingly random times (that is, you can be away from a tab for a minute and it won’t refresh when you come back to it, yet be away for 10 seconds at another time and it does refresh). This causes the item I just read to disappear from the listing (because it’s y’know, been read).

I also like how I can swipe an item to mark it read. I can mark a bunch as read leaving a few unread so i could refresh and see just the ones I’m interested in.

Posted in iPhone, tech | 1 Comment »