Over at Garibion.com is a post by Ryosuke Takeoka about his top five paid iPhone apps. Photo Rotate is number five. This gives me warm’n'fuzzy feelings. Thanks Ryosuke!
The iPhone is my favourite internet-enabled mobile device – and I’ve used quite a few; I write software for Windows Mobile devices at work (and I hate Windows Mobile). But I don’t wear rose-coloured glasses, the iPhone and Apple aren’t flawless. Thus I fill the holes by jailbreaking my phone (running unauthorised by Apple applications). When an iPhone firmware update comes out I patiently wait until the jailbreaking community has updated too. To jailbreak your iPhone browse through the iphone-dev’s blog. Once you’re jailbroken, Cydia is pre-installed, and serves as the equivalent to Apple’s AppStore for getting Apps. Here are my top five reasons to jailbreak my iPhone.
Swirly MMS
The lack of MMS support on the iPhone has been discussed greatly on the webisphere. Apple made a conscious decision to leave MMS out in favour of encouraging email (which can achieve the same result). However my wife doesn’t have an internet plan enabled on her phone. Now while the only MMS’s we send each other are usually of cute cats or dogs, its nice to be able to do so. Swirly MMS gives full MMS support for US$8, with a free 14 day trial. It works seamlessly and as expected. While you have to manually enter your carrier’s SMS network details, there are numerous listings for all the major carriers for you to reference. MMS notifications come through in a similar manner to standard SMS notifications.
Following on from Bed’s Top Five Essential iPhone Apps, here are my top five useful iPhone Apps. These aren’t used on a daily basis – but are useful to have around for when they may be required.
IM+ Lite
Its always handy to have an Instant Messenger application around. While I don’t need always-on-push instant messaging on my iPhone – having the ability to log on and talk to someone quickly can be useful. Just the other month I was relaying technical support to a work colleague while in a busy loud shopping mall. It was much easier via IM than trying to talk on the phone through all the noise. IM+ Lite isn’t fancy, but it supports pretty much all IM protocols (AIM®/iChat, MSN®/Windows Live™ Messenger, Yahoo!®, ICQ®, Jabber®, Google™ Talk and MySpaceIM) and is free.
There is so much crap in Apple’s AppStore. My pet peeve is all of the “Days until…” apps. These are all the same, you set a day and it tells you how many days there are left until your nominated date. Of course there’s a seperate paid app for every occasion, days until wedding, days until school, days until vacation etc etc.
However there is also some of the best software I’ve ever seen for a mobile internet device. Here are my top five, best value, most essential applications that I use regularly.
NetNewsWire Feed List
The best RSS Feed reader for the iPhone – this will sync with a free NewsGator account. Using the identically named NetNewsWire for OSX – this combination is the ultimate in automatically synchronised news reading. Read some items on your computer, go on a train, and keep reading – without worrying about coming across articles you’ve already read. And best of all, its all free.
