My Favorite 12 iPhone Apps

Thanks very much to Winter for her guest post yesterday. Couldn’t have picked a better person for wrapping up the Summer of Love. I’ve gotten so used to only writing four days a week, I may have shot myself in the foot here. But it’s back to seven a week for me now. I’m slowly getting the hang of my new job, so I hope that I’ll slowly be reclaiming some of my lost hours.

CONTEST

A reminder that the annual Birthday Dares Spectacular Contest is back underway. Leave me your birthday dares on THIS POST and I’ll pick five of them to perform on video for my birthday. Those five people will get prizes, which I’ll figure out soon.

Deadline: Friday, September 5th, end of day, Eastern time.

iTunes

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My Favorite 12 iPhone Apps

Yeah, another iPhone post. Sue me, I love my iPhone. I’ve had it a couple/few weeks now and it just rocks the fucking house. Here now are my favorite applications for the iPhone, which I’m pretty sure also run on the iPod Touch, though don’t quote me on that.

These are the ones I come back to again and again. I’ve already tried tons of apps. Some are winners, most are meh. Fortunately, there are tons of free apps out there, though some of the good ones do cost a few bucks.

Click on any of the pictures for a full-size view.

1. Texas Hold’em - This is one of my favorite games. It’s not free ($4.99), but it’s awesome. I love playing poker and this is a really good game. You play tournament-style Hold’em and the graphics and controls all rock. You can view the game two different ways…in portrait (up and down) or landscape (sideways) and get two really different feels depending on which you play. You’ll be astounded in portrait mode, playing against 8 other opponents. They actually filmed real actors and digitized them into this game. But it’s a tad slow after you finish being awed and you’ll quickly want to “graduate” to landscape mode. That offers a top-down view (shown) and far quicker gameplay. Everything feels authentic, including doing a double-tap on the felt to check.

2. Showtimes – Incredibly simple app, but those are usually the best ones. This one does nothing but tell you movie times for your local movie theaters. You just type in your ZIP code and away you go. A full listing of all the movies in your town. Great app, and it’s free.

3. Trism – One of the most amazing games ever. If you’ve played Bejeweled, a great game for sure, then you’ll have the basics of Trism down in no time. But the basics just don’t begin to describe the game. It takes full advantage of the iPhones accelerometer direction-sensing thing. The object of the game is to knock out the tiles, known as Trisms. You do that by sliding Trisms around until you get at least 3 of the same color touching each other. You slide rows and columns sideways, up and down, diagonally…whatever. When three or more same-colored Trisms touch, POOF! They disappear and the ones above the empty holes slide down to take their place. BUT…turn the game in any direction and gravity takes effect. This changes which trisms will slide down. Hard to explain, maybe but it’s a very addicting game. Costs $4.99.

4. Twitterrific – I’ve tried several Twitter apps for the iPhone and none of them does EVERYTHING I want. Twittelator is pretty damn cool, but the print is a tad small for my old eyes. Twitterrific comes the closest to what I need in a Twitter app. The print is easy to read, the user interface is friendly and easy to grasp. There are four “buttons” on the bottom of the screen. From left to right: Refresh, Twitter, Info, and Settings. Like most apps for the iPhone, you scroll down the list of tweets with your finger. When you find one that you want to reply to, double-tap on it (the iPhone equivalent of double-clicking) and you’re taken to that person’s tweet and profile, where you can do your @ reply thing. Very simple. Works great, and it’s free. Course, you have to put up with some relatively unobtrusive ads in the free version, but that’s fine with me. You can get the paid version for $10 and that gets rid of the ads.

5. Solitaire City - Yeah, another game. There are tons of solitaire games for the iPhone because, let’s face it, it’s got the platform that just screams for something as touch-friendly as solitaire. Drag and drop cards with your fingers, etc. Some of these apps are free, some aren’t. I’ve tried a lot of them already and I like Solitaire City the best. It’s $7.99, but comes with a bunch of different games: Klondike, Demon Pyramid, Golf, FreeCell, Spider, and more. Lots of fun, really intuitive and you can compete against yourself and also see the high scores from around the globe. Plus, you can play it in portrait or landscape. The touch that really made it for me is that there’s a left-handed option, where it places the stockpile on the left-hand portion of the screen instead of the right. Thoughtful details like that make this the solitaire game to beat.

6. NetNewsWire – This is my feedreader of choice for the iPhone. Yes, there is absolutely no problem using Google Reader in the iPhone’s Safari web browser. I’m sure it works just fine. Only thing is, I don’t USE Google Reader. I use FeedDemon, the offline equivalent of Newsgator.com. I’ve talked about FeedDemon before here and I love it because it automatically syncs up with my Newsgator account. That way, if I’m using someone else’s computer I can log in and still see my feeds. Yeah, you can do that with Google Reader, too, or any other web-based reader. It’s a matter of personal preference. I like being able to read feeds offline, just in case the Net is down. At any rate, NetNewsWire syncs up with your Newsgator account, downloads all the stories to your iPhone in a very simple, easy-to-read app. Love it.

7. Jott – Jott is another very simple application, but what it does, it does very well. In short, Jott is a way to record your thoughts and put them into lists. But you do it with your VOICE. The speech-to-text engine with Jott is nothing short of amazing. Speak whatever you want to convert to text…you have up to 15 seconds to do it. When you’re done, Jott automatically sends your recording off to the Jott site, where it does all the conversion and crunching. Takes a few minutes, but the next time you come back to Jott you’ll find that all those words you spoke into your phone are now easy to use text in your iPhone. You can use Jott to send emails to friends by simply talking into your phone, create to-do lists, whatever. Very useful app that I use almost every day.

8. Yelp - Yelp.com is a very recent discovery for me, but I love it. To put it simply, Yelp is a review site. You’ll find reviews for everything from restaurants to mechanics to theaters. Whatever. It’s very helpful, especially in a big city, to be able to search for the nearest mail center or Jewish restaurant. REALLY useful when you’re visiting an unfamiliar place. Yelp makes this happen and the iPhone app is incredibly useful. Let Yelp use your iPhone’s GPS locator to find your location, then search for the nearest barber or pedicurist and – BING! – little pins drop down and show you where the places are. Tap on any of them and the establishment’s name pops up on-screen. Tap the name and get whisked away to the place’s review page. You’ll see a familiar five-star rating system, the place’s name, address, AND phone number. Tap the phone number and you’re instantly calling the place on your phone. Amazing functionality. You can also read the full list of reviews, left by everyday people just like you and me. Yelp isn’t very handy for small towns…yet. But that’s only because there are far fewer people to review places in small towns. I’ve started reviewing restaurants here in Sebring and I hope more people follow suit. Love this app. Free.

9. Stanza – It’s an electronic book reader for your iPhone and it is incredible. Fairly new to the App Store on iTunes, this free app allows you to find and download a TON of free classic books to your phone and read them at your leisure. Yes, I prefer the paper books and always will, but you’d be very surprised to learn just how easy Stanza is on the eyes. I’ve downloaded a few books to start with, like “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells and “1984″ by George Orwell. Many books are in the public domain, though most of them are classic works. You’ll find all of Shakespeare. You’ll find many books in the online catalog, as well as a group of newspapers and magazines like “The New York Times,” “Wall Street Journal,” BBC News, and “Wired Magazine,” among others. The reader is really user-friendly. Tap on the right side of a page and turn the page. Tap on the left and move to the previous page. Or simply slide your finger from right-to-left to physically “slide” to the next page. You can also customize the font, the font size, and the page background colors. I find the white too blinding for reading in bed, so I changed the background to a nice grey that’s a lot easier on the eyes. One really nice feature is the auto-save. If you have to exit Stanza to answer a call or use another app, fine. Next time you start Stanza it remembers what you were reading and takes you right back to where you left off. Fantastic app, and it’s free.

10. Wordpress – Maybe you don’t use Wordpress for your blog, but lots of people do, including me. This app is great. You can do most anything you need to do when it comes to posting to your blog. And it’s a free app. Great for writing posts when you’re away from your computer. Write posts, manage photos…it rocks.

11. Quordy – This is my current fave. Come back to it over and over again. Ever play Boggle? It’s one of my favorite games. It’s like doing a word search on steroids. The object is to find as many words as possible in two minutes. You get 16 letters in a 4-by-4 grid. Your form words by linking letters together. The letters have to be adjoining, either up-and-down, left-and-right, or diagonally in any direction. You literally trace your finger along the letter path you want, creating words. When you lift your finger off the screen, the word is dropped down into your word list and you move on to make another word as quickly as you can. You score points for each word…the more letters the word has, the more points you get for that word. In the screenshot here you see that the person spelled “hotes.” I can see a bunch of words here, including reef, beef, bots, store, and west. How many can you find? Oh, and plurals count, so in this case, “bot” and “bots” count as two separate words. This one costs a few bucks, but it’s highly addictive. And you can challenge your friends to a game online, too. Provided they also have the app.

12. MotionX Poker Dice – My other current fave. Another great game that is nearly flawless and it’s a really fast play if you’re looking for something to do for a few minutes while waiting on a train or something. The goal is to make the best poker hand with five dice in three rolls. Similar to a really short version of Yahtzee, you have to beat whatever hand the dealer gets. If he has a pair of Queens, you need at least a pair of Kings to beat him. So on and so forth. Highly addictive, plus there are many different sets of dice to unlock along the way. And you get “gems” for passing certain milestones. For example, you get a gem for getting a five of a kind with every possible dice combination. (There are 12.) Love, love, LOVE this game. There’s a free version, but this game is so good it’s well worth the $5 price for the full version. The ONE thing I don’t like about it is rather nitpicky. When a text message comes through your phone, the game pauses. That’s normal with most iPhone apps. However, when you dismiss the text message, the game doesn’t go right back to playing. You have to click a “RESUME” button. Yeah, I know, nitpicky, but if they’d get rid of that, it would be the perfect game.

And there you have it. Hope you find a few new ones here that you’ll like as much as I do.

What are your favorite apps?

Filed under 2HRadio, Contest, Famecrawler, Local Goings On, Tech, Video Games, iPhone | Comments (16)