Apps – The five I use most

Brendan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:00:49 +0000

Without much ado, here are the five iPhone apps I use most:

Wordpress

I must start with most obvious, as a blogger- the Wordpress App is a must. Not because I actually post many blogs with it (mostly because I use custom fields, images, etc.) but the Wordpress App does let me write whatever I want in a user friendly format, and offline as well. Mostly this saves me from having to do everything from the safari browser. While much more limited than the actual Wordpress dashboard, it lets you do the basics: write, save, as well as add categories and tags- On top of that, it’s free!

Twitbird

While I’m not the most avid Twitter..er (though I probably should be if I’m trying to take this whole blogging thing seriously) I do enjoy getting updates quickly. This paid app also makes tweeting much more painless than it would otherwise be, since I can pull out my iPhone and tweet in line at the coffee shop or on my lunch break at work. There is also a Lite version of the app, which has less features I’m sure, but probably not anything all that vital.

Remote

Though this app seems to be on everyone’s list, Remote is definitely a must if you play music from your computer. With wireless control over your computer’s iTunes with visual feedback on your mobile device, this app has nearly unlimited uses. Remote can make parties less of a pain and dates much less technical, by simply touching your song or playlist on your iPhone or iPod touch you can keep your hands off the keyboard and let the fire log (screensaver) keep burning.

Cycorder

This amazing application allows iPhones made before the current 3G(S) models to use their still camera as a video camera. While the application does require a Jailbreak to use it, it unlocks a very important feature that should have been made available from the beginning. Unfortunately, the video can only be recorded at 15 frames per second (as opposed to the regular 29.97), but that is a small price to pay for having decent video quality on your mobile device.

Scrabble

I. Love. Scrabble. The iPhone version of Scrabble is an amazing buy at $2.99 if you’re a fan of the classic board game. The interface is easy to use and honestly, I never get tired of sliding the little digital tiles around. While I wish they would get rid of the ‘Best Word’ feature which makes the game way too easy to cheat, Scrabble is the best kind of distraction when you have some time to kill.

Well those are the five applications I use the most, what are yours? I wouldn’t usually do “Top Ten” type lists, but I do see the allure of breaking things down like this… especially when it’s something you can talk about- you may see more app blogs coming in the not so distant future.

The wasted potential that is: The Magic Mouse

Brendan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:43:20 +0000

Apple’s new ‘magic’ mouse that comes bundled with newer apple desktops is being praised for its technologically ‘advancements’ and sleek design. But is it really magic? Or just the mouse equivalent of David Blaine?

Taking a look at the so called ‘features’ of the mouse, it becomes immediately apparent that many of them are not really features at all, but have been around for a while.

First of all, left and right click are not features, they’re part of what a computer mouse is. This is especially true since you have to enable right click, by default it comes disabled. Also, the ability to zoom in while holding the control button has been around for a while. So really the only new features are the side scrolling (which actually was present on the apple mouse with the ball) and the swiping gesture to navigate.

Now to be fair, there is something pretty amazing about the Magic Mouse; nearly all of top surface of the mouse is touch sensitive. What makes this different is you can pretty much use the whole surface of the mouse (a little smaller than the surface area of the iphone) to scroll around documents. While this is totally cool, Apple doesn’t use it in any way other than a little more scrolling space.

Where’s my pinch gestures?? Why use the keyboard AND mouse to zoom in if you could just use one of the famous multi touch gestures? Also, why not introduce something totally amazing like landscape mousing? Custom gestures and commands? Imagine if you could control your zoom in Photoshop by pinching, or using the whole surface as a tiny wacom tablet?

Sadly Apple introduces an amazing piece of hardware but fails to implement anything other than traditional, and even obsolete functions. I bet in a few more generations we might see some of these advances, but by then we’ll have an Apple tablet PC and of course, the Magic Mouse will be obsolete.