My 267 favourite iPhone/iPod touch apps (2008)

I’ve filled my iPhone with apps: time to prune. Let’s evaluate, starting with the apps I use most often:

Twitterrific ★★★★★ is an application for the Twitter messaging system. Twitter is useful for letting people know what you are doing or thinking more immediately than a weblog. As an example you can see my last three “tweets” on the sidebar of this weblog. I follow friends, newsfeeds and interesting people such as Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Jonathan Ross and Robert Llewellyn. Other such apps are available but this does all I need. Twitterrific caches messages so it’s useful to sync before going out of signal range, for your reading pleasure in the wilderness.

Twitterfon ★★★★ attractive Twitter client with small clear font. Twitterfon does everything from trends to nearby tweets in a logical way. I was using Twitterfon as my primary Twitter app now although now it has started showing adverts so I’m switching to Twitterrific. The adverts keep displaying even after clicking on the link which is annoying.

Nambu ★★★★★ is yet another Twitter client for the iPhone. This has a beautifully laid-out screen on which the last five tweets can be seen - more than most other Twitter apps. Favourite tweets can also be displayed and this screen includes direct messages. The search pane has advanced options, a history and trends. Optional panes are built-in for tr.im, pic.im, FriendFeed, Ping.fm, Laconica and identica. Tweets can be favourited or flagged privately. The only option I’d like to be added is to switch between real names and nicknames.

AirMe ★★★★★ takes pictures on the iPhone camera and uploads them to a Flickr stream. Your photo can be available globally in less than a minute! The iPhone’s camera has been criticized for having only two megapixels but I seem to have got some good pictures from it. The only caveat is that you have to set the title and tags — words used to search for images in Flickr — before taking a photo because AirMe will start to upload immediately.

MyRail lite ★★★★★ shows British Rail station departure and arrival boards, also station times for each train with a neat graphic. It can also search for the nearest stations based on map location. Absolutely superb. This is great when I’m travelling/commuting. Update National Rail have not renewed the licence for MyRail and it has stopped working. NR have brought out their own app which costs £4.99. This has upset a lot of people who have nonetheless bought the NR app because it is so useful for commuters, but then given it one star reviews on the Apple Store. Shameful situation.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary ★★★★★ is the world-famous English dictionary from the Oxford University Press, not as big as the Shorter two volume edition but still an awful lot of lexicographical goodness, and definitely not American English or some house style guide that would spell “authorize” wrongly. Probably worth £14.99 as the print version of the Concise edition costs £10.00 more. This 11th edition contains over 240,000 words, phrases and definitions. Many of the entries have a recording of the word being spoken. (NB Webster’s International Dictionary is also on iTunes, for £34.99. There is also the free WordWeb.)

Things ★★★★ is for “Getting Things Done”, a most simple-to-use (yet sophisticated behind the scenes) to-do list, or organizer, or notes application. It syncs over wi-fi with the same application on a local Mac. I’ve just bought this to replace the hundreds of bits of paper I have lying around the place.

Blue Defense! ★★★★★ is a superb shoot-em-up with waves of smoothly animated glowing things and bosses that split and flow towards the home planet. They must be destroyed using the constant firepower at the player’s command. The game is silent: no sounds to interrupt my music. Perfect. It may be worth buying an iPhone just to play this.

GeoDefense Lite ★★★★★ is a superb tower defence game. This means setting-up towers that blast away at creeps along a path with the intention of stopping them reaching and and overrunning the target. There are many types of sci-fi-themed tower in this game, it’s fast and the graphics are great. I’ve now got the full version.

Bloomberg. ★★★★ Maybe overlooked because it is for business, but this is a very well-designed application that can be configured to get the latest news reports about various regions albeit with an economic bias. ‘Muse’ news is often not about finance at all. And of course, Bloomberg does stocks, markets and commodities with beautiful graphs: it’s a very sexy way to watch the world go to hell in a hedge-manager’s handcart loaded with redundant bankers’ bonuses.

London Bus, Tube and Rail Journey Planner ★★★★★ includes a superb journey planner (linked to TfL) and details of routes, stations (incl. zones), 20,000 bus stops (with postcodes) and timetables, including first and last times. The app is focussed on busses but the planner includes all modes of transport including the river bus and walking! A nice touch is the Track me feature so you can see which stop you are at throughout a bus journey.

GeoDefense Swarm ★★★★★ Once you have conquered GeoDefense then Swarm is the next step. Swarm puts the same towers and creeps into an open arena without defined paths. The graphics and gameplay are superb.

Space.DeadBeef ★★★★★ is a great shoot-em-up with exemplary graphics, another proof that the iPod has really arrived as a gaming platform. A fast 2D aerial battle with only one life, but the game can be resumed from the last level. The first big boss, a metal snake, is really well done.

Alien Swarm ★★★★★ is a dream come true for me. A perfect clone of the arcade game Galaxian. It takes my mind back to a pub video game in Highgate. The money I wasted then… and the time I’m wasting now! One more go, hold on.

NetNewsWire ★★★★★ is an RSS reader application that I bought years ago for my Mac. Now it’s free and also works on the iPhone, very nicely. On a good day this will summarize many websites and let you home in on the latest news that interests you without having to spend hours on the web. It’s also great for grabbing lots of news and blogs when online and reading them offline later, on a train for example. Items can be clipped for later follow-up, and all the feeds synced through Newsgator or .Mac with your home computer. It’s essential to get into the settings and choose a unique name for your iPhone/iPod feed, and I would also recommend having rather less feeds on the phone than a Mac: my iPhone choked on 9,000 items, but is quite happy with 5,000. Web pages and YouTube videos are displayed from within the app. I love NetNewsWire.

Bix ★★★★★ is an excellent version of Qix, a classically simple arcade game in which the player has to draw lines to bound off over 75% of an area while avoiding bouncing balls - some of which give special powers when trapped. This works well on the iPod, with a simple flick to change direction. In this version there is no option to draw lines slowly for extra points nor are there fuses to chase the player: I expect these will come in a future version.

tvGuide ★★★★ is a cheap TV guide with an excellent layout, presenting a lot of information in a small space. Only flaw is that the schedules are split at 12:00 (AM and PM) with no overlap, like an atlas where the road you want is on the edge of the page. So frustrating! Maybe the programmers are early-to-bed types who go out for lunch.

TVGuide.co.uk TV Guide ★★★★★ shows a “now and next” listing for UK channels. Touching the channel links to a BBC iPlayer page in Safari. What’s great about this app is how easy it is to set-up the channels that you watch and exclude the ones you don’t, from a comprehensive list.

Centipede ★★★★★ is a great conversion of the arcade game and, as with Missile Command, Atari have added a version or two with modern graphics. After playing for a while, I can see spiders and fleas when i close my eyes.

OnBox.TV UK Lite ★★★ is a free configurable TV guide for the current day - pretty good but after midnight it will show tomorrow’s programmes. Update - not working and removed from iTunes. Lucky I got the free version. They may be back: OnBox.TV information.

Calc ★★★★ is an improvement on the built-in calculator: it has three sheets of functions and a tally-roll (paper tape). The ANS key inserts the result of the last calculation, literally a nice touch. But only eight significant digits? One of the smallest apps available: 96 KB.

Labyrinth LE ★★★★★ simulates a metal ball in a wooden maze. Perfect - so sensitive! Built in spirit levels.

PCalc Lite ★★★★★ is the best calculator: accurate, with 15 significant digits. Features RPN, degrees/radians, constants, unit conversions and “42” on the icon. Grab it while it’s free. The full version has more features such as hex and a paper tape.

Bloom ★★★★ is a superb generative music application from that nice Mr. Brian Eno, whose career I have been following since 1973. The app will make its own random music, or I can tap the screen to enter my own sequences, which then change gradually over time. Mesmerizing.

Sentry Alpha ★★★★ is a good space shooter with tilt control. I can’t get enough of games like this. This one scrolls down and has level bosses.

If you’ve been missing Inquisitor ★★★★★ since upgrading Safari to the new beta, then this is for you. Fast search with a built-in browser, great design, with news links supplied where available from Yahoo.

Tube Status ★★★★ displays the service level of the railway lines on the London Underground (aka the Tube), DLR, Overground and Rail. Touching a tube line displays the latest bulletins. Other Tube apps exist but this is simple and free. A paid version with a map is due soon: TubeDeluxe.

Weightbot ★★★★★ is for tracking bodyweight and it understands stones, the imperial measure in Britain! Everything about this app is polished and easy to use. Weightbot calculates BMI, draws lovely graphs and keeps a remote backup of weighings. Excellent.

Dr. Awesome ★★★★ is Qix for the iPod - move by tilting which works very well, being quicker than swiping the screen. The medical theme of viruses and mutagens works well in the game but I could do without my contact’s names as patients. Very playable.

Illuminations ★★★★★ is a great tilt-controlled arcade game with a fireworks theme - better than Asteroids! Quite fast and difficult with enemies often on an effective evasion course, so it is a relief to have smart bombs, like in Defender.

Antimatter ★★★★ is a great arcade game in which blue cotton buds - sorry, cosmic strings, must be hit with a stream of antimatter to change their colour to red. Progressively more difficult. Superb graphics.

iGo ★★★★ is the first Go game for the iPod to offer a computer opponent. iGo seems to play a strong game, maybe too strong for me as a beginner. A few games can be stored, but selecting them for play or deletion is very confusing due to bad interface design; however the board and game play is straightforward. (There are two other apps available that contain classic Go games for replay and analysis.)

Topple ★★★★ is a wonderful free game with differently-shaped cartoon blocks that must be turned and placed into an increasingly unstable tower - tilt might fix it enough to get a few more blocks on top to get the required height before it all collapses - great fun.

Azkend ★★★★ Lively, enjoyable match-3 game with some extra twists of its own. I like the theme of the game too: Tibetan Lovecraft.

Droidz ★★★★ The last time I played this, I used a keyboard and joystick. It’s uncanny how they have copied the sound effects and the gameplay of 1985 classic Paradroid in this arcade game, in which floors of a spaceship have to be cleared of robots. Starting as a lowly 001 droid, more powerful droids can be shot at or taken over in a separate mini game where each brain tries to turn relays to their own colour, and it’s here that cursor keys (or a joystick!) would be better than fiddly touch control. Still, a great recreation.

Whoa! This old post is far too long. If you want to read the rest of it, I’ve kept it online at my old Blogger hangout: Wibbly Weblog

21st Century Gizmo: iPhone

Dropping a battered plastic divider by my groceries on the checkout till, I realized how mainstream Apple is these days. The divider carried an advert for iTunes vouchers. When a relative buys me a voucher I shall know that Apple is the only game in town. Must drop more hints.

Why is Apple growing so quickly? It's all due to design and I want to explain what that is, why Apple is good at it and what an iPhone is, without sounding too much like a fanboy.

As if their online store isn't enough, Apple is the fastest growing retailer in the USA taking $1bn a quarter in their expensively appointed shops (more profit per square foot than Tiffanys!), only a few years after Gateway — a manufacturer of PC clones — abandoned their chain of stores.

The "bricks and mortar" shops were stringently redesigned after realizing the need to address users' needs such as music or film, so Apple abandoned their initial design where the shop was conventionally laid out by product type. This all happened in a mock-up and delayed the opening of their first store by months.

CEO Steve Jobs said Apple's high street stores were put in place for the iPhone, also that Apple had to lose its dependency on large retailers with little knowledge of Mac OS X.

Apple apply design rules to their operating system so it keeps out of the way and looks as elegant as the hardware. They also make their own applications which rule some market niches like online music, via iTunes and iTune's dedicated hardware aka the iPod, dictating their one-price policy to the music industry. They also dominate music production (no latency on a Mac), graphics and art, taking in magazine and poster production and video editing either with Avid or their own range of Pro applications. For instance editing video with soundtracks using iMovie is possible without reading a manual: intuitive functions belaying sophistication behind the scenes. It's also fun to make your own music using GarageBand, a product so gorgeously straightforward yet powerful it could only exist on an Apple.

These kinds of products and the layout of the stores reflect the Apple philosophy of seeing their users as producers (active) rather than consumers (passive). They create rather than watch.

Apple's design process follows the precept 'form follows function'. Apple keeps it strictly simple. For instance: the iPod. The design of this is brilliant not because it looks sexy — the appearance is a by-product of the design process — but rather because you can hold it in one hand and scroll up and down the lists and menus and notes only using your thumb. Jobs and co. sweated over the onscreen menu, simplifying and reducing it to the minimum. Physically there is no surplus material, no ridges or stickers; there's just what you need and that's it, so no black lines or gaps around buttons that are already a different colour and texture, and so on. It's hard to convey why anyone should want one, especially to people who weren't planning to transfer their music collection to a digital format, until they think about being able to access any track they like immediately, anywhere. All your music in your pocket. Just employ the opposable digit. Also the OCD and retentive folk amongst us can scan the cover art in (whenever iTunes doesn't have it) or program smart playlists in iTunes that flow into each other.

So to sum up: design is for hardware and software. Design is all-encompassing: beauty and efficiency comes from the way each component fulfils its purpose and fits into the overall structure. Executing design with style is art.

Apple's competitors' philosophy seems to be to build something just about good enough and sell it cheap. No need to delight the customer with refinements or to think about the user experience and how the programs could integrate... maybe they think they have enough of a captive corporate market, or habitual customers who only buy what they know. (Hello Aaron!) But Dell could never be like Apple. It is harder to be restrained than to add more features in order to give the impression of good value, while building down to a price. Dell's marketing department prefers that. It's also easier to use focus groups than trust to judgment.

The iPhone? It has Mac OS X. It can do things the iPod can, like photos, notes and calendars, or play music and video. It's a phone too, easier to use than any other phone. Most importantly, it has Mac OS X, and that is what differentiates it from other small portable devices. This means it can run widgets or exactly the same email or web browser program one finds on a laptop or desktop, or amazing new apps like Maps with search and live traffic conditions. So it can not only replace a cellphone, smartphone, iPod and maybe laptop, but also satnav? And imagine how well it will sync with all the personal data on your Mac. It is not a cellphone where each button always has the same function. It will regularly have new software. I believe it is a new class of device, namely a handheld computer. Obviously I can't get mine soon enough.

Many developers have been hoping to get their applications on the iPhone, but Apple has not yet released a Software Development Kit and shows no indication of doing so, however apps can be written with HTML/AJAX such as the widgets/gadgets you may already have on your desktop PC. Four examples have already appeared: a Twitter messaging client (now called Hahlo), a Digg client, an AIM chat client, and a shopping list called OneTrip which is quite good and reminds me of an app I once tried on the bulkier Apple Newton, which leads me to wonder whether Jarvis Cocker will finally abandon his Newton for the iPhone.

I'm already planning to download the shopping app and replace the options with my own and then host it on my site. I'm also thinking of writing a randomly rude quiz app, for which the interface is perfect.

The "soft" keyboard of the iPhone is the only doubt that I have at the moment, before the launch. I'm hoping to write rubbish like this while travelling on trains. Sure, I could use a BlackBerry or Hiptop or Palm or eMate, but I don't like their tiny keypads or predictive texting. The iPhone has a proper dictionary, like a laptop, but the keyboard is on the touchscreen so it will not have the physical feedback that one is used to when pressing an actual key. Apple say that when you learn to trust it you will fly. Initial reports suggest that this can take a day or two. I do hope so. I am reassured by the speed of Steve Jobs typing in his demo: "Sounds great! See you there" in 15 seconds. It would be fun to send grotesquely verbose emails or SMS text messages, something I could not attempt on a cellphone or most smartphones. Actually I can't even find the text function on my current phone — an ancient Alcatel — unless I have unread texts.

The iPhone has been called a God Machine and the new It Object. It is, I believe, the first truly 21st century device. After it launches on the 29th, Apple should take over the smartphone market and some of the cellphone market.

To learn more about the iPhone, I recommend watching Steve Job's keynote in which he introduces it as a three-in-one device. See how he mocks other phones and how difficult it is to make calls on them. Also see the ads. Go through the Apple/iPhone pages and view the many short movies. Regular Apple web sites like MacSurfer have iPhone news as well as the iPod sites like ilounge and iPhone Hacks, the iPhone being a widescreen iPod. Gadget sites like Electronista.There are also dedicated iPhone websites started by third parties: iPhonic, iPhoneworld and iPhone Atlas from the MacFixIt people.

Some articles:
Technology Review: The Secret of Apple Design by Daniel Turner (registration required)
iPhone and the Future by Frank Levinson
The iPhone keeps its cool secret by Mike Rogoway
The Unofficial Apple's Consumer Strategy
Entering iPhone Era: Marking Time in Mobile by Tomi T. Ahonen
Sun Tries to Jump on iPhone Bandwagon with jPhone by Daniel Eran

How Do You Like Them Sandwiches?
Apple is a Quiznos. It has the stores, employees, recipes, product variety, past success, reputation, and demand.

Suddenly it's obvious that the value of the iPhone isn't just that it has a clever grid of squarish icons on the front, or that it is a thin phone, but that it is an integrated product and part of an overall successful business.

Roughly Drafted: Tech: The iPhone, PDAs, Mobiles, and VoIP Telephony
The most uninformed iPhone article yet: Apple's Hype Phone by Laura Goldman
Apple's iPhone Rocks the Cell Phone Industry by Paul Carton.
January 2007: Analysis: iPhone will change the world "iPhone is a phone media centric device that confuses categories"