Saturday, January 3, 2009

iPhone Apps

Seems that its the thing to do at the end of the year to rate top iPhone apps you use. To date i've purchased ONE (1) App. And that one was a whopping $20. Which one? 

OmniFocus. A friend turned me on to a series of Apps by the Omni group. The apps are generally overpriced but work well on the mac. I was looking for a better to-do list manager and he swore by the product so I broke down and bought OmniFocus for the mac. It's been helpful in consolidating all my "to do" lists and get things more organized. The natural extension was to buy the iPhone version too (they sync with each other). The insult was that the iPhone App was $20. Its not worth the money. It has a horribly slow launch time (which evidently is better than it used to be) and takes forever to sync with MobileMe. The interface and capabilities are decent but if you want to quickly add a to-do item you'll forget it before the thing launches. I do use the app but mostly for To-do cleanup when on the road/waiting somewhere.

Ok, out of 7 screens of Apps (see full pile below), what is worth mentioning?

Rob's Top 10 iPhone Apps (free unless otherwise noted):

1) NetNewsWire - RSS reader, syncs with my other locations. Wonderful way to keep up on news etc. Great way to kill time waiting in lines, airport etc.
2) Shazam - For finding out what song is playing and remembering it so I can buy it later
3) WeightTrack - because I need to lose we
ight. I wish there was a better free one (its odd when its tied to the OKC stuff) but this one works and is fast & easy
4) GalCon Lite - only game i've liked enough to play more than once on the iPhone
5) 1Password - Password tracker syncs with the mac. In case I need my login info on the road (dont really use it for the iphone browser)
6) Flixster - for finding movie times quickly (Showtim
es has promise but has consistently been unstable for me)
7) Google - I had little use for the early versions which just launched a web browser page, but the voice activated search in it now is the bomb.
8) Dialer - A free working voice activated dialer for the iPhone that works
9) PhoneFlix - Look my Netflix queue
10) OmniFocus - Task manager that syncs wit the Mac. $20.

Apps i'm looking at that have promise:

1) Urbanspoon - a cool way to find restaurants (but not how I pick where to go)
2) Mobile News - AP news reader. Seems more conci
se than RSS etc. 

Apple apps that have little value to me:

1) YouTube - im not a big YouTube fan. I mostly use MobileMe to share videos with family
2) Contacts - its also accessible in the "Phone" app and before they made another app I got used to getting them there
3) iTunes - I dont buy music on the road (or update RSS feeds)

The rest of the Apple apps I use all the time.


2 comments:

DragonStyle said...

Have you tried 'Lose It' yet? It's free and I'd recommend it...

Rob said...

I hadn't seen it, I think i'd heard of it. Its nice, a bit overkill just for weighing in. Its a lot of work to track all the foods.

Its also missing an online sync/export function. WeightTrack can export to Excel from their web site. I like my data to have mobility.

Thanks for the tip!