My Favourite iPhone Apps

Today’s the day that my parents both got new work phones; iPhones none the less, I’d promised to put together a quick list of the essential apps (in no particular order) and thought I’d share it here for my fellow iPhone users, as a matter of interest if you do have an iPhone or iPod touch please share your favourite apps in the comments if you think I’ve missed something! =)

Remote – Free – Allows you to control your iTunes library or AppleTV remotely over your Wifi network.

NetNewsWire – Free – Uses the NewsGator RSS reader service which will sync between the iPhone, Web and Desktop (mac/pc) apps.

Facebook – Free – A handy way to access your facebook account on the go.

Twitterific Premium – £5.99 - A great twitter client, there is a free version with ads but for me it’s worth the money for it to just get the tweets I want.

TapDefense – Free – Possibly the most addictive strategy game you’ll ever play, massively good fun and fiendishly hard to begin with, don’t give up though!

Units – £0.59 – Massively useful unit converter; convert lengths, weights, speed, temperature, currency, time and loads more quickly and easily.

Sodoku Unlimited – £1.79 – The best application for killing five minutes waiting for a meeting or five hours on a train journey to Paris, I had no idea how much fun Sudoku was until this app taught me how to play; I massively recommend this app.

Shazam – Free – When you hear a song on the radio, in a film or playing in a shop, just whip out your iPhone open Shazam, it then listens to what’s playing and tells you within seconds what it was with a link to buy it on iTunes; SO very useful.

Tap Tap Revenge – Free – Essentially this game is Guitar Hero for the iPhone and much better than the official release; great fun and you really can’t argue with the price.

Tap Tap Dance – £2.99 – If you like Tap Tap Revenge then you will LOVE this, the updated design makes it a joy and the music catalogue is a boost too, highly recommended and massively addictive.

Fortune – Free – Fun little fortune cookie app, you can submit your own fortunes to the database and other users will receive them as you receive those submitted by others, not useful but good clean fun.

Lightsaber Unleashed – Free – Everyone’s favourite way to get the ‘okay, now that’s cool!’ reaction from their friends when you turn your iPhone into a lightsaber.

GPS Tracker – Free – Using the free instamapper service your friends and family can follow you online on long journeys, I use this on my 5 hour  drives to and from university so that friends and family know how long I have left on my journey. NB. App needs to be running in order for tracking to work, a bit of a battery killer on long journeys too.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

While we all have to wait a few more hours until the real Apple Keynote, you just have to love The Onion sometimes; I am SO the customer in this video lol.

Mac Geek note; in the video the spotlight icon in the top right and the blue hint in the top left show that the MacBook Wheel is running OSX 10.4 Tiger and Apple ships all new machines with OSX 10.5 Leopard which has black icons now.. *geek snort* lol. Note to self; get a life! :)

NB. For the easily confused; this is a joke video made by The Onion who make fake news articles for the funnies. To clarify; THIS IS NOT REAL! Glad we got that cleared up lol.

Merry Christmas from Apple

As anyone who knows me at all will know; I am a fanatic Apple geek! Everyone will know the iconic Apple ads by now and since it’s Christmas time they’ve released a couple of new Christmas-ey ones, I thought I’d share my favourite; you really can’t help but love PC can you?

Apple’s Latest iPod + iTunes Goodies

For the last week, every single Apple geek with a Digg account has been speculating about what Apple would release on September 9th, 2008. What we got wasn’t anything all that un-expected for those of us who are dedicated to worshipping the rumour mill, but there’s some pretty exciting stuff all the same, it’s run-down time!

1. iTunes 8 – We’ve all been using iTunes 7.x for what feels like years now and now FINALLY apple’s given it a bump. There’s not that much that’s new about it really; slightly updated user interface; you can now browse your music by looking at a wall of album covers which is nice. After that though there’s Genius; a new music recommendation engine which will create playlists of music trachs which go well together. This is based on data Apple asks your iTunes account to send to its servers and then makes suggestions based on what other iTunes users from all over the planet have put together, so far it seems to work pretty well. The update also allows you to download HD TV shows for $1.00 more than Standard Definition though I am yet to see any HD content in the UK iTunes store. You can download the update now and if you’re a mac user make sure to run software update to get the latest version of Quicktime (and then again to get the FrontRow update too..).
2. iPod Classic – Now only available in a 120GB size; essentially the small classic now has a bigger hard drive and the thicker one is gone forever.
3. iPod Shuffle – The shuffles weren’t actually mentioned by Steve on stage but they did get a small update by taking on some of the colours of the new nanos, which brings me to number four.
4. iPod Nano – The new iPod Nanos are back to their original form-factor; tall and thin. This fourth generation of the Nano is their thinnest iPod yet and boasts a tilt censor which allows you to switch into coverflow by turning it on its side. It’s also useful for changing the viewing angles of photos or (and this is the fun bit) shuffling your music by shaking it; I’m not sure what’s going to happen if you go jogging with this thing; a new track on each step could get to be a little tiresome, though I’m sure you can disable it. And of course the new colours, which for my money are MUCH better than the old pastely ones are BRIGHT! They’ve got a new advert too which is pretty nice.
5. iPod Touch – The touch has a newly sculpted design which makes it even thinner than it was previously and is now curved (like the iPhone) on the back. It comes with software update 2.1 which is free for iPod touch owners running 2.0, or £5.99 for users running 1.x who wish to upgrade. The new software doesn’t add much more than 2.0 did in the first place, though it does add support for iTunes’ new Genius feature which could be pretty useful. Also all new iPod Touch models come with a built in receiver for Nike+ which is a pretty nice little addition.
6. iPhone 2.1 – Ever since first-gen iPhone owners installed 2.0, or 3G owners got their new phones, we’ve been waiting for 2.1 to be released and finish off all of the odds and ends which weren’t quite right upon release, well there is good news ahead. Come Friday Apple is releasing the 2.1 update which will take us from 2.0.2 to 2.1 and hopefully make the iPhone 3G as much of a pleasure to use as the original iPhone was.

Apart from ALL of that I don’t think there’s that much more worth mentioning and I don’t think I forgot anything. For full coverage check out the streaming video of the event and see the presentation for yourself.