Results tagged “iphone”

I install quite a lot of games on my iPhone. Some come, some go. After a little cleanup yesterday, here are the ones I decided to keep.

Of those, I'd say I've played Plants vs Zombies the most, closely followed by Doodle Jump, and Orbital. The two newest games are Leap Sheep - which is hellishly addictive and The Incident.

Do you game on your phone? Which are your current faves?

• I noticed a lot of people on their bikes this morning. People who bike to work in Phoenix in the summer are either extremely dedicated or completely mad. For the sake of their co-workers, I really hope their offices have showers.

• Amazon's iPhone app is extremely well designed and easy to use. It even made me grin when I viewed my empty cart.

Did you catch that? My cart lives to serve me. I tried to get it to make me a cup of coffee but there appears to be a bug.

• I finally finished Dan Brown's, er, masterpiece last night. The story was entertaining. I'm going to leave it at that. Now I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Compared with Mr Brown's tome, this is a little more brain taxing. And tiny font alert! They really need to try and fit more words on a page. Good lord I'm going to need a magnifying glass.

• I used craigslist for the first time last night. My immediate thought was "ahh, my eyes" as the page partied like it was 1997. Not exactly pleasant to look at and not immediately intuitive to use. Or maybe I'm too stupid to figure it out?

• Netflix streaming was down last night. The horror of it. The site itself was slow, then it worked, then it was slow, then it was down. A quick check of twitter showed hundreds of "is netflix down?" and "no netflix wtf ttfn bbq?" type posts so I knew it wasn't just me. Got to love twitter for the real time info.

Last year I flirted with the idea of running a half marathon at the beginning of 2010. Unfortunately I got about as far as buying a rather excellent pair of running shoes and that was about it. I'm good like that. So back in February I finally decided to get off my bum and actually start getting up early and running before work. And you know what, to my amazement, I've stuck with it.

Now, I'm not a morning person. At all. So getting up ridiculously early was, well, ridiculous. But I persevered and eventually got used to it. For one thing, If you plan on running outside in Phoenix during the summer, your only option is to be outside before the sun comes up. And even then, at 5:00am it can be still in the 90s.

One thing that I've found helpful is the Nike+ iPhone sensor thingy. You need a Nike+ compatible pair of shoes.

And then you buy this little sensor thingymabob.

And you put it in the sole of your shoe.

When you fire up the Nike+ iPhone app it automagically senses the sensor in your shoe. While you're running it can give you all kinds of feedback on how far you've ran, your pace, your goal. It even talks to you in your headphones to give you some encouragement. The music volume lowers and a lady says "you're at the halfway point". Kinda cool.

When you're done killing yourself running, the same lady tells you how you did. If you've done a particularly good job, fastest mile or farthest run, a famous person (Lance Armstrong or Paula Radcliffe) will tell you how much you rock.

Then when you sync your phone with iTunes it sends the data to the Nike mothership and you can view your account to see all sorts of pretty graphs & schedules & goals & stuff. And I like that.

The overall goal here is to get in good enough shape for the beginning of next year and those half marathons. Could happen.

I take a lot of photos with my iPhone and of the many Flickr apps in the App Store, the one I love the most is Flickit Pro.

Among its many features, one of the things I love about it is the ability to select more than one photo at a time when creating your upload queue. Kinda like this, you keep selecting and then tap 'Done' when you're, er, done:

Nice, simple, and ever so handy. Well, at least it was.

Today I noticed that Flickit Pro had a new update and after reviewing what the changes were: "optimized for iPhone OS 3.2" and "new icon" I thought, sure why not.

And to my surprise, the multi image selector that I knew and loved had been removed. Not knowing if this was deliberate or a little oopsie, I sent an email to the developer, Michael Bernardo, to find out.

What he sent me in response is an interesting insight into the App review process by Apple.

Unfortunately I had to remove the multi-selection feature. It was rejected by Apple during my last update. You can read more about it at my blog.

And it made for an interesting read.

What makes this frustrating from a developer perspective is that Apple had already approved Flickit Pro many times over. What makes this frustrating from a user perspective is that it now appears to be a feature regression in an existing app. I know I'm not going to be the only user that wished they hadn't "upgraded".

I've read horror stories about seemingly arbitrary App store rejections but this is the first time I've been impacted by it. And more importantly, the first time that I wished I had a phone with an open marketplace for apps without the need for anyone's approval.

Siteadministrivia

If you're one of the few who actually visit this site instead of reading in a feed reader, you'll no doubt have seen a "Photos" link in the header bar above that for the longest time, just sent you to Flickr. I've always thought that was arsey and just didn't fit at all. So I've changed that.

Clicking Photos now takes you to a local page on this server instead. It's all auto generated using the Flickr API, phpFlickr, and some dodgy PHP code I wrote last night to glue it all together. I write Perl code for a living so hacking away at something different appealed to my inner geek.

Apps I Use The Most

My current iPhone home screen has the apps I find I use almost daily.

Around Me - finds things, er, around you. Most handy.
Todo - best "todo" list manager I've found. Bar none.
Tweetie - I've tried just about every Twitter client for the iPhone and this is the one that appeals to me the most.
Flickr - Nice "official" Flickr app, little crashy but still useful.
blog - web app, uses the iMT plugin to control Movable Type blogs from iPhones.
Reader - web app, mobile version of Google Reader. Solid, fast.
Flickit Pro - best iPhone Flickr app I've ever used. Love it.
SplashId - keeps all manner of information nicely locked up for you.
Simplenote - the official iPhone note app blows chunks. This one doesn't.
CameraBag - apply filters to your photos. Lovely Helga filter.
Nike + iPod - tracks running progress via chip in your shoe.

If you have a smartphone, what apps do you find you use the most and have you organized them onto your home screen? No? Just me then?

A Little Vacation

For the next 10 days I'll be thoroughly in vacation mode as my family are crossing the pond tomorrow. I've gotta say I don't envy them the flight. Still, these days you can catch a direct flight from London to Phoenix so it's not as long a trek as it used to be. Hope they have decent movies to watch and their iPods are fully charged.

I've had my iPhone 3GS for about a week now and not surprisingly, I like it. I like it a lot. Then again, I am hopelessly late to the smartphone party and anything remotely better than my old Razr is going to feel like I swapped my Commodore 64 for a MacBook Pro. The 3GS is a great phone. It's fast and for the most part just bloody works.

My old phone contract expired a couple of months ago and since then I've been pondering which phone to get next. I spent some time playing with a Palm Pre, a Blackberry Storm, and a Motorola Droid. Of those, only the Droid seemed like it was almost good enough to own. Almost.

So, my one week in "far too soon to be giving this kind of writeup, but doing it anyway", er, writeup.

The Apps

One week in doesn't give anyone enough time to compile a decent app review so I won't even try. But what I have found that I like so far, and shown on my home screen are the following:

Google Earth
Evernote (iPhone port of my fave note taking, organizing desktop app)
AroundMe (finds businesses, er, around me)
TweetDeck (iPhone port of my fave desktop Twitter client)
Flixster (movie showtimes, information, and theater locator)
Shazam (music identifier)
Wikipanion (better than navigating Wikipedia in Safari)
Reader (mobile Google Reader)
Flickit (all round mobile Flickr gadget & uploader)
Last.fm (for listening to music streams)
IMDb (for movie junkies everywhere)

Most importantly, I replaced the Apple Mail client with the mobile version of Gmail. Which you must do immediately.

The Keyboard

The keyboard really isn't that bad. I thought that my big chubby digits would be a problem and to a certain degree they are, but the auto-correction is scarily accurate and I've found myself typing emails & texting at quite a good pace.

The Camera

The cameras in phones suck. All of them. The question then becomes, how much does it suck and can you live with it? Surprisingly, for a phone, the camera is not entirely made of fail.

Obviously it's no DSLR, but it's no slouch either. So that coupled with the rather spiffy Flickit app to upload directly to Flickr makes for a rather nice 'on the go' pic taking experience.

The Games

I haven't spent much time trying out various games because I really haven't gotten much further than Orbital. I'm hopelessly addicted and it might just be the finest $0.99 I ever spent.

Check me out with a high score of 40. Ahem. I didn't say I was any good at it.

Stop Waffling

Ok, it's fast, it works, I'm happy with it. Can't really say any more than that.

After owning iPods for years, and a MacBook Pro for just over 12 months, today I added one more to the Apple collection.

This replaces my old, beat up, downtrodden Motorola Razr that I've held onto for years. I'll be honest though, it was a bloody good phone that served its purpose well.

Now, off to the App Store I go and start downloading. What would you recommend? What are your must have apps?