best and worst free iPhone apps for 2008

I’d been meaning to write this for a few days now, so here goes. All of these apps are, or were, free when I downloaded them. I have yet to pay for a single application on my iPhone—I’m cheap, and not every app I’ve downloaded has been free of major bugs, so at least if a buggy app is free, there’s no loss in deleting it from my iPhone.

In no particular order (although I’d probably give Twitterfon #1 since it’s just so well-done):

Best

• Twitterfon This is, simply put, the finest Twitter app on the iPhone, period. I’ve tried everything else, from Twitterific (too much fluff) to Twittellator (hard to read). Twitterfon is simple, yet does everything 99.9% of folks need to with regard to Twitter. The developer is responsive, keeps everyone informed via Twitter, and does everything possible to make this a great iPhone app. And it’s free. Amazing.
• NetNewsWire This is my RSS reader for both my iPhone and MacBook Pro, and it keeps getting better and better on the iPhone. If it just implemented a way to mark selected posts unread, it would be perfect.
• AirSharing I also use this quite a bit to dump files from my laptop onto my iPhone. If I’m traveling, which happens pretty often these days, it’s nice to have all my itineraries on my iPhone. Same with business documents and journal articles. It reads almost all common document formats, so PDFs, .xls, .doc, etc. are all fine.
• BlocksClassic A very nice implementation of the classic Breakout game, and it’s frequently updated with new levels
• Easy WiFi for AT&T This does one thing, and does it well. When I’m in an airport or coffee shop that uses AT&T Wireless, instead of having to go through the whole mess of entering my iPhone number into a Web page and waiting for a text message giving me access, Easy WiFi provides access with one press of a button. Very convenient.
• Facebook While I’d love to be able to view a friend’s contact list from my iPhone (hopefully this will be part of the forthcoming update I keep reading about), and it crashes on occasion, this is very useful if you use FB. I really like the fact that it syncs with the online database, so you only get notifications once.
• Google Mobile App The voice recognition is cool. And I think this has a lot of promise. I’d like it better, however, if it contained its own browser functionality. It’s a pain to click on a search result, go to Safari, then have to switch back to GMA to look at another result.
• LinkedIn Not as full-featured as it could, or should be, but it’s helpful enough if you use LinkedIn as much as I do
• Truphone Best attributes: it lets me make calls internationally for pennies over a WiFi network, plus they give you $4.00 free credit when you start. Worst: If you’ve used your iPhone for any length of time without a restart, it won’t work without restarting due to a memory leak issue. Truphone now supposedly senses if you make an international call from the iPhone and automatically routes it to the Truphone app, but I have yet to see that happen. Given how few people I know would be using this when I am, I’m skeptical of the value in free Truphone-to-Truphone calls, but it’s nice that it is theoretically possible.
• Wikiamo A nice Wikipedia application
• WordPress Kinda less useful without the ability to embed links (isn’t that a major point of blogging?), but for a quick post on the road, it’s better than nothing.

Worst

• NYTimes The worst. Absolutely the worst. Why? Because it is impossible to read a single NYT article without it crashing. This is something a lot of folks have been reporting since it first came out, and every time I redownload it and hope for the best, my hopes are dashed. This isn’t some lame app being developed by a 9-year-old in his basement; it’s from the New York Times. It could be great if only it weren’t so buggy. The Grey Lady needs to buy itself a decent debugging module. Shameful, even if it is free.
• iSushi Aims to provide the nearest sushi restaurants based on your current location. It doesn’t.
• Free Hangman This would have remained on my iPhone if only it gave a hint for the word you’re trying to solve. Otherwise, you’re just picking common vowels and letters and hoping for the best, which isn’t engaging after a few minutes.
• My Gas Wars This was supposed to provide local gas prices. It never found anything—totally useless.
• LabCal Crashed and crashed and crashed. Not the way to provide lab calculations.
• Blanks Nice idea: an app to quiz you and teach you new verbiage. But seeing the same words over and over again, and easy words at that, didn’t increase my vocabulary.  

earthscape: google earth-like app for the iPhone

I have an RSS feed I follow for new and updated iPhone apps, and I just noticed a new app called Earthscape that is free for a limited time and does much of the same stuff that Google Earth does. Obviously it doesn’t have the wealth of features that Google Earth does, but for a quick satellite view that can also be angled very easily, it works great (at least on a WiFi connection; on EDGE YMMV). Above is a screenshot. That’s our home in Wyncote, PA in the middle, just across from the nursing home and the Presbyterian Church. One interesting Wyncote tidbit: the poet Ezra Pound used to live on the street in the upper right.

Some other nice iPhone apps ‘ve found recently, in addition to the large number I’ve already accumulated (all free so far—I have yet to buy anything):

• Medical Calculator
• Air Sharing (sets up your iPhone as a shared volume over WiFi, so you can transfer documents to the iPhone, including Office and iWork formats; no editing, though)
• WhiteNoise (I use this on the red eye back from the West Coast, since it’s nice to drown out the airplane noise with sounds from the beach)
• Constitution and Declaration (I keep the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence on my iPhone so that I’ll know the instant the right wing further erodes my civil liberties)
• Space Invaders
• Cube Runner
• Hangman
• Tris
• Cross Light

living without a computer

I’m spending the week on vacation with the family down at Bethany Beach, DE. We’ve been coming here for years, and I always have a laptop with me. Until now. I decided to go without my MacBook Pro and get by with an iPhone alone. That’s how I’m typing this blog post.

To be sure, it is much faster and more accurate to type on a computer than on an iPhone. Going without a computer takes some adjusting. While our apt has wifi, it’s very patchy and speed is variable. AT&T’s coverage is terrible down here. Surfing the Web takes patience, and not all sites work as well with Safari on the iPhone as they do on a “real” computer. The iPhone also lacks a keychain, so having to remember and type in a lot of passwords is a pain. Some things will simply have to wait until I’m home.

I’m using the WordPress app to write this. The Web tool doesn’t work except in HTML view, so this is definitely nice. But limited. There’s no way to embed links with the app itself (for that, I have to tweak the code using WordPress on the Web). Image placement is also more limited.

Still, with some patience and creative approaches, one can have almost decent functionality this way. But I can’t wait to be back to normal.

quote of the day

How true—given how many times my iPhone crashes daily after the 2.0 and now 2.0.1 iPhone OS update:

”Jailbreak apps potentially undermine the security, reliability, and battery life of the iPhone, although Apple’s own iPhone 2.0.0 software has done a bang up job of violating all of those things itself as well.“

—AppleInsider, 8/6/08 

what’s on my iPhone (so far)

I updated my iPhone the day before iPhone 2.0 was officially released, and am glad I did it early, since Apple’s servers had all sorts of issues the next day. In any case, I was glad to see one VOIP application (TruPhone), that allowed me to make cheap calls over WiFi from Toronto last week (since they give you $4 to start, I have yet to spend a dime on my calls overseas). I also immediately nabbed the NetNewsWire application, which is a bit better than their mobile Web version, as well as Twittelator, which I think is a pretty good Twitter app. I initially downloaded Twitterrific, which I’ve used on my computer and thought it was pretty good, but the

iPhone version is horrible. Either you love it or you don’t, and I didn’t, so I use Twittelator now. 

Of course, there’s froo froo as well. iPint is nice at parties, as is the PhoneSaber. But there are useful things as well, like Yelp and BoxOffice. And also, doesn’t everyone need the complete works of Shakespeare on their iPhone for downtime?

where no geek has gone before

OK, that’s a bit much, but it does kind of describe my feeling right now as I’m updating my iPhone to version 2.0 in advance of the official release tomorrow. The link for the direct download (which requires iTunes 7.7) along with instructions is already well detailed. But suffice it to say that one always wonders if something will go wrong when using software that isn’t officially released yet by Apple. 

So far, the update has gone very well. Some things that one should know:

 

• The software will prepare the iPhone in a process that takes a few minutes. Be patient.
• At one point, the iPhone screen displayed a restore screen. That’s to be expected. Be patient.
• Before updating, whether using the unofficial way mentioned above or using an iTunes-based download and install process beginning tomorrow, back up the iPhone and also take off as many audio files and other things occupying a lot of space. You can add it back later, but it will make the restore process much faster.
• The installer download is 255 MB. Did I mention, “be patient?”

But when you’re done, after about a half-hour or so (depending on how long it takes to download the updater and how much of a backup and restore needs to be done after updating), you’ll have this:

diversión con AT&T en Monterrey, Mexico

I’m in Monterrey, Mexico for work, and of course brought my iPhone. I was also in two cities in Canada at the tail end of last week (Toronto, briefly, then Winnipeg), and used my iPhone there as well. While in Canada, I had no difficulty obtaining voice and data coverage by connecting to Rogers Communications, and frankly, didn’t really give it a whole lot of thought.

Until I arrived in Monterrey today. I turned on my wireless connection on the iPhone when we landed and got e-mail just fine. But when I went to make a phone call, nada. The call failed every time. I went online and realized how stupid I was. Unlike the situation with Rogers in Canada, I could not make a call in Mexico via roaming unless I enabled an international account through AT&T. Until that is done, the iPhone is essentially a brick with regard to telephone calls (data was working fine, however).

Problem is—how do you call AT&T from Mexico if your iPhone isn’t enabled for Mexico?

First I thought it was the prefix I was using (001, which is actually correct). Then I realized I had International Support enabled on the iPhone, so in theory I didn’t need the prefix. Theory didn’t exactly work, however, since I still couldn’t get anywhere unless I turned off International Support and entered the prefix. And even then, forget it—you just can’t make calls, period, until you contact AT&T.

I tried calling the 800 number for AT&T (as provided on their Web site for “international support signup”) multiple times from the hotel’s room phone, but the call would not go through.

At that point, I called the hotel operator, who then connected me with Internet tech support, which wasn’t needed. I then redialed the operator and specifically said “No Internet,” and she told me that you just can’t access 800 numbers from Mexico without paying $4/minute. So I was stuck. Following the operator’s instructions, I dialed AT&T’s 800 number using 880 as the prefix rather than 800, and it worked. Except that I was now in ”phone hold“ hell for a few minutes waiting for a person to come on. And when that happened, she still had to transfer me to the right person, who fortunately was willing to call me on my iPhone rather than incur yet another few minutes of phone time at $4/minute. 

The upshot of my conversation with AT&T: first, you need to buy the international plan at $5.99/month, which gets you a $0.59/minute phone rate. That’s exclusive of data—I went for the $59/month international data plan that gives me 50 MB/month. That might sound like a lot, but it isn’t—I used 10 MB apparently in two days last week in Canada just from regular e-mail and Internet usage. Oh, and voicemails cost as well, even if you don’t access them until you get back to the States. Text messages also cost if I send them, but surprisingly don’t cost extra if I receive them (which is better, in that respect, than back home, since when one goes over the SMS limit, text messages received cost as much as messages that are sent by the user).

Sigh…I’m in the wrong business. This is a nice racket. I’m not saying that AT&T is unique in this regard—they’re all gonifs (an Inuit word for ”thief“). But it’s ridiculous. They own the pipes, and aside from occasional costs for infrastructure upgrades, can rake in a decent revenue stream from their users. 

So there you have it; a lot of money every month for the ability to do business in neighboring countries on top of a $119/month unlimited data plan. There’s got to be a better way.

And I’d still love to understand why I can’t get the iPhone’s International Support to work. On the other hand, the view is beautiful (it’s so tempting to get to the nearby mountains and ascend to the summit), and at least I have connectivity, so it’s hardly the end of the world. Still, the wireless charges are annoying when I think of it. So I guess I’ll have to stop thinking about it once this post is submitted.

 

blogging on an iphone

I was bummed to find that the content field in WordPress doesn’t work with an iPhone. That is, I wasn’t able to type in the content field. But I just tried switching to entering text as plain HTML, and that works, since this is how I’m blogging right now. Which I great because it means I can blog more often, assuming I have anything to blog about.

Off to the ACOG meeting in New Orleans tomorrow for a couple of days. Should be interesting.

jailbreaking the iPhone

Once I got my iPhone, I really wanted to add some specific apps to it. On my BlackBerry, I had a Twitter client (TwitterBerry) and a mobile version of Newsgator, so that I could read my RSS newsfeeds and have them sync with NetNewsWire. Both applications were suboptimal, but they worked well enough that I got used to the idea of having quick access to Twitter and RSS feeds on my mobile device. 

So why not with an iPhone?

For most of the past two weeks, I was using Safari to enter and read Twitter microblog posts and my Newsgator RSS feeds. Not optimal, since Newsgator in particular is slow on an EDGE connection. 

My ex-PC friend, who is now a Mac zealot (go figure), started texting my iPhone nonstop to urge me to jailbreak my phone to be able to download and install a variety of applications. With pressure like that, I gave in and downloaded ziphone, which is really simple to use. And it works. In less than a minute, my phone was jailbreaked so that I could now install applications on my iPhone. I should mention that jailbreaking is not the same as unlocking the iPhone. The former is reversible with a software restore in iTunes and does not open the iPhone to multiple wireless carriers. “Unlocking” means that one will then be able to use the iPhone with T-Mobile rather than AT&T, and as such, the visual voicemail feature would no longer exist (since it is tied into AT&T). It is also apparently illegal (my ex-PC friend is an attorney and noted this to me in passing). 

So I now have the mobile Twitter client on my iPhone as well as a nice camera app that enables the iPhone camera to zoom. I still don’t have a Newsgator client, since the mobile version of Newsgator requires Java, which is not supported on the iPhone. I’m hoping Newsgator gets an iPhone client out soon, perhaps through the SDK. ePocrates is also probably going to come out with an iPhone version of its medication database, which would be pretty cool, although I rarely use ePocrates these days (at one time, it was an essential tool on my Handspring Visor Prism). 

So jailbreaking the iPhone is easy, fast and so far, pretty safe to do. And it opens the iPhone up to a lot of possibilities that are not present in a non-jailbroken iPhone. Glad I listened to the text message spam I was getting.

i’ve joined the iPhone generation

Along with opting for the new MacBook Pro, I had a choice at my new job with regard to smartphones. I’ve used a BlackBerry for several years now and while they have their quirks, appreciate the smart way it handles e-mail, the ability to access a clipboard for copying, cutting and pasting text, and its inclusion of autotext (I’m addicted to having abbreviations autoexpand to save me on typing things out in their entirety). My last BlackBerry was great in terms of downloading various applications, such as a NewsGator mobile client for RSS feeds and a Twitter client.

Everything I just mentioned is not currently possible with an iPhone, so why did I opt for one over a BlackBerry? Aside from the fact that my daughter Arielle would have killed for passing up an iPhone, I thought the iPhone long-term is just a better smartphone. And I think I’m correct. Surfing the Web is a much nicer experience on an iPhone than on a BlackBerry. It also has a camera, which most BlackBerries don’t, and syncs very well with my MacBook Pro. I did manage to keep my BlackBerry in sync before, but only by using third-party software and it was quirky at times. I have all my bookmarks handy, as well as my iPhoto libraries, MP3 files, etc. In fact, the only thing that I haven’t been able to sync are my Entourage notes, since the iPhone uses a different Notes system that doesn’t sync with Entourage.

At the same time, there is room for improvement. Aside from the obvious things like slow Web speeds when using AT&T’s EDGE network (which is what I used on the BlackBerry, but since many Web sites were optimized for the device, it didn’t seem as slow), I miss having autotext and clipboard functions. And it would be great to be able to have RSS and Twitter clients—hopefully that will be remedied soon with the SDK. I also wish I could be typing this blog on the iPhone rather than my MBP, but it turns out that the iPhone doesn’t seem to want to recognize the text field I’m typing in as a text field, which is weird since the iPhone’s browser is essentially the same one I’m using right now on my laptop.

Despite a few shortcomings, I’m sold on the iPhone, and am even wondering why I put up with a BlackBerry for four years or so.