It’s been a while since I’ve been desparate enough to had a chance to do a nice “what’s in your toolbox” kind of post. In honor of the iPhone 3.0 upgrade, and Steve Jobs’ liver, let’s do an iPhone-toolbox post.
I’m unabashedly happy with my phone, because it’s strengths and weaknesses mesh pretty well with my actual needs. It’s not that great a phone, but I don’t use the phone that much. On the other hand, there’s never been a better gizmo for whiling away a long train commute.
So, here’s some stuff I use:
Instapaper (free light version, $9.99 pro version currently on sale for $4.99)
Instapaper has probably changed my web reading habits more than any other app since I started using RSS readers. It’s so simple that its almost hard to believe how useful it is. When I come across an article on the web I want to save for later, I click a bookmarklet. Later, launching Instapaper on the phone, the article shows up, with the images stripped away, and the text presented in a reader friendly format. (Sometimes you can help Instapaper out by invoking it from the printer-friendly version of a page…)
Using Instapaper has become kind of second nature — I always have a few articles ready to go. The Pro version adds a few nice features, including control of the display font and the ability to scroll the article by tilting the phone. The tilt-scroll sounds like you’ll need to be a gymnast or something to read an article, but in practice it’s a super-clean interface for reading long articles and letting the text scroll at your reading speed. Great app.
Birdhouse ($3.99)
Very well designed little app for what seems like a dumb use case — saving drafts of posts intended for Twitter. I mean, how much do you need to polish that tweet about the ham sandwich you had for lunch, amirite?
But, if you are trying to do a tip a day on Twitter (@railsrx), then having a nice place to store up ideas for future tips is great. The app also works as a slightly structured note-taking app, since it can email it’s existing draft population back to you.
Stanza / Kindle (Free)
The two leading general-purpose eBook readers, both of them are easy to use, and manage the task of making text readable on an iPhone. It’d be nice if there was some consistency in formats between the two apps, and also if you could buy books directly from the Kindle App (presumably that’s coming).
MLB At Bat ($9.99)
Obviously only if you are a baseball fan, but the app gives you access to live box score and play-by-play data, live audio stream of radio broadcast, video highlights, special goodies like condensed game videos a few hours after games and, plus live video streaming on a currently limited basis. That’s a lot of stuff. Add in the fact that the app is pretty enough to have won an Apple Design Award, and it’s a pretty fabulous package.
Twitteriffic (Free lite, $3.99 no-ads)
There are something like a zillion Twitter clients on the iPhone at last count, and which one to pick is basically idiosyncratic. It’s a mark of how fast iPhone development is going that Twitteriffic 1.0 won an Apple Design Award in 2008 and was completely blown away by newer clients six months later before regaining strong status with the 2.0 release. I find this has a nice blend of features and interface. (Tweetie, which is my desktop client, is also very good on the iPhone).
Of course, this all sounds serious — the big winners on the iPhone have all been games, there are all kinds of inexpensive, addictive little games I play. Here are a few: Defender Chronicles, The Creeps, Drop 7, Flight Control, Frenzic, Galcon, Peggle, Strategery.
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