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Useful iPhone Stuff

Entry 842, on 2008-08-30 at 21:17:35 (Rating 1, Computers)

I've been using an iPhone for a few weeks now so its probably time for an update on using the phone in general and especially a quick list of some of the more useful extra applications. First, most of the initial reliability problems I had seem to have gone. The 2.02 version of the iPhone OS seems to have cured most of the problems I had, although there are still occasional crashes when installing on the phone.

So, apart from a phone, what other functions are most useful? The built-in web browser, Mobile Safari, is really useful but some complex sites don't display properly even though they do in Safari on the Mac. The built-in email program is also useful for basic email functions but it also isn't quite as functional as an email program on a computer. Texting on the iPhone is much easier than most other phones because of the keyboard and the way sent messages and replies are displayed is nice.

So what about those applications? Apple's "Remote" program is really cool. It allows controlling iTunes on a computer over a wireless network. My computer is connected to my stereo system so I can control it from anywhere in the range of my network. The phone shows the complete iTunes library, album artwork for the current track, and all the standard controls.

StarMap ($16) is the best astronomy program I have found for the iPhone. It creates a map of the sky for any place and any time showing stars down to magnitude 10, the planets, and deep sky objects. There's also an ephemeris which shows useful information like the position of Jupiter's moons.

Units is a free unit and currency conversion program. It replaces two separate programs I used previously and that's useful because I have so many apps now that I'm trying to reduce the clutter!

I use "YouNote" as my note taking program. It handles 5 types of notes: text, photos, sound (usually voice), pictures (drawn on the screen), and internet sites. Its free and handles tags, searching, and automatically records the location of the note using the GPS.

WeDict is a good, basic, free dictionary which makes looking up the meaning of words really easy and fast.

FileMagnet ($6.50) makes transferring documents between a Mac and the iPhone easy. Once the documents are on the phone they can be easily viewed. File types supported include PDF, JPEG, text and RTF. I believe Microsoft Office documents also work but I refuse to use Office so that doesn't really interest me.

Well that covers the highlights of my first page of extra programs (out of three pages) which are just general-purpose programs. Maybe in a future blog entry I will go on to discuss my favourite Internet programs and games.

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