iPhone App Review: The Miscellanea
Ok, the last post (weep) in my iPhone App Review series. Kinda just a sweep all of the random other apps I’ve got installed. (You already read the others? Twitter Client, Movie Apps and Accelerometer Games? Don’t you think you ought to?)
I downloaded AIM all excited and you know… it works. It’s nice that you can text people over AIM so that you can avoid the outgoing text charge. I haven’t used it much but when I did it worked pretty well. It’s just that without any kind of background operation, it really isn’t generally that useful. I could see it coming in handy while travelling if you just pop on to see if someone’s around, but as a general purpose tool, it’s, ok.
The Facebook app is even more underwhelming. Other than integration with the iPhone’s camera which is nice (although, not a huge deal since there’s a very reasonable normal mobile photo upload that you use without it) it offers less functionality than the iPhone friendly Facebook website. The iPhone site is quite quick (although not quite as fast as the app, granted) and shows you your events, your friend requests, and an easier to use interface to see all your friends’ pictures. The app, at least, was recently updated to support writing on Walls (how did it not support this to begin with? The iPhone site always did) and it does support Facebook chat which the site does not. But it seems crazy to me that with an iPhone site with a very reasonable and usable interface they’d devolve their iPhone app with a crappier UI.
Yelp, Urbanspoon and iWant
Yelp’s app is pretty darn good. It’s location aware so you can always find stuff near you or you can manually enter your location. Then it finds you nearby food and drink (and other services like banks, gas and drugstores) all handily laid out in map form if you so desire. Of course it shows you the ratings, gives information about the restaurant and lets you read the reviews. Strangely, I don’t think it lets you log in and leave your own reviews. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a very useful app.
Urbanspoon’s an app of a different color. It’s designed to help the indecisive among us. It has three scrollers one for location, one for cuisine and one for price - any or all three of them can be locked. Once you’ve locked (or left all open) the scrollers you shake the iPhone and it picks any unlocked options and then randomly suggests a restaurant to you that fits the bill. It’s pretty great! It’d be nice if it was location aware so you could press a button and it’d find and lock your current location, but you know, it isn’t hard to do it yourself.
iWant is similar to Yelp, but less good when comparing it to the categories that Yelp does. It’s got a simple, location aware interface and for food and drink, I think it actually uses Yelp but doesn’t give you nearly the information that the Yelp app does, just the basics, location and top level ratings. What it does provide, though, is a lot more categories, like hotels, car rentals, movies and various shopping categories. It seems pretty useful so I’m keeping it around.
The Rest
Lots of other stuff, I’m running Exposure (the free one) which is a nice interface to Flickr, easily showing your pics, your contacts pics, letting you explore new ones and even location aware photos so you can see shots taken near you (although, that so far has proven a lot less interesting than it sounded to me). I tried NearPics, too, which is all about the showing you shots taken near wherever you are. It has thus far been unimpressive, showing me photos of central park and the empire state building. Shrug.
Also grabbed Pandora which seems to work very well, even over EDGE. It streams in that sweet, sweet music right away. I mostly don’t use Pandora, though, but there’s definitely times in the past (mostly on long drives) where I would have loved it. I can see it taking a bite out of terrestrial and satellite radio, be cool if it took voice commands so while you were driving you could yell “Next!” to skip the song. Anyhoo, I wonder if the RIAA will take exception to it. Huh.
Oddly there’s four, count them, FOUR free flashlight apps (even a pay one! who the hell is paying for one??). The best one is FiatLux, it’s good because you can easily pick a non-white color and brightness. I could see picking a dim red light to see something in the dark without completely ruining your night vision. There’s also a Flashlight (by john haney software) that provides different colors and an epilepsy inducing strobe effect. But no dimmer. Bleah. Or Light which just has white. Or newcomer SOS Flashlight which has some colors (but no dimmer) and it’s SOS flashing mode. Eh.
Oh, Remote is awesome. It will be even more awesome when I get my AppleTV after I move, but even just the iTunes control is very, very great. Midomi is pretty neat, too, kinda hit or miss, but sometimes when you just need to figure out what song is running through your head, it’s just the trick. Also downloaded Shazam which seems to be similar to Midomi but for like if the song is actually playing somewhere. Haven’t had the chance to use it, though.
The VNC Lite app is also pretty sweet, limited, small screen size, but still it’s smooth and fast. Was able to get connect to my mac, close some windows, type in some terminals, very little lag. I was impressed.
Well, that’s mostly it. What’re you rockin’ on your iPhone? Did you jailbreak 2.0?
