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Useful iPhone Stuff 3

Entry 883, on 2008-11-05 at 20:06:11 (Rating 1, Computers)

Apparently there was some sort of political event in the US today and I'm sure many people are commenting on that in their blogs, but I'm going to discuss something completely different, something far more geeky... the iPhone! (again)

It has been another month since I talked about useful iPhone applications so now is the time for an update. First, I must tell you about a big problem with iPhone apps in general. That is there are too many good ones! I have decided to limit myself to 72 (there are various technical reasons I have chosen that particular number which I won't go into here) extra programs (as well as the 15 that Apple provides) and the hard thing is deciding what not to install.

Most of these programs are free but I have a few paid apps as well. I have tried to find multi-function programs recently so that I can replace 2 or more existing apps with one new one. For example, I now have one program to do unit conversion and currency conversion instead of the two I used to have; and I now have one program to play chess, checkers, and reversi, instead of three. Maybe Apple needs a better system to handle large numbers of programs instead of scrolling between the up to nine screens available on the phone currently.

So the big highlight recently has been Google Earth. This is like the same program on your computer except it has a touch interface. I spent quite a while "walking" around Ayer's Rock (Central Australia) by just using gestures. Its really cool and very natural. The image quality in some areas is good enough to make the experience very realistic, but a wifi connection is necessary to get good speed. This program is really fun and a big time waster. Because it uses the network and the graphics processor a lot it also drains the battery quite quickly.

Another program I installed recently is WorldView. This gives you easy access to thousands of web cams all over the world. You can easily create a set of favourite places and get the latest pictures from web cams at that location. I even use it to look at the weather outside my office because I'm currently in a temporary office with no external window! That's the ultimate geeky use of technology, isn't it!

As an example of the abundance of good programs have a look at the Wikipedia browsing programs. There are at least 3 really good ones and I can't really decide which one I like the best. I'm currently using Quickpedia because it creates a convenient navigational system and caches commonly used pages for quick retrieval but the others are also very usable.

My favourite game at the moment is probably Lux Touch. This is an implementation of the classic Risk world conquest game. I have go to the point where I am skillful enough to win almost all the time so I would like to see varying skill levels to make it more difficult. Apart from that its still very entertaining and winning is never that easy.

I use Air Sharing to make transferring files form my Mac to my iPhone easy. It creates an Appleshare file sharing point on the phone and files can be just dropped onto the phone just like any other server. Once they are there Air Sharing allows common file formats (text, PDF, JPEG, GIF, Pages, Numbers, KeyNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others) to be opened and viewed easily.

The current version of the iPhone hardware and software is very good. There are certainly still some deficiencies but its surprising how rarely these are a significant issue.

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