Grocery IQ

Posted August 7, 2009 - 5:10pm by Craig Motlong
GroceryiQ1Developer: Free State Labs, LLC
Category: Lifestyle
Version: 1.5
Release Date: July 22, 2009
Size: 8.6 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating 8/10

Birdhouse

Lost in the deluge of make-a-list applications out there is the fact that some of them are almost worth the money. Take Grocery IQ, for example. Its recent update has improved on the original idea and created a grocery-list app that works almost as well as pen and paper.

Grocery IQ is a grocery list, allowing you to make a list at home and tick off items when you put them in your cart -- a task more easily done undigitally, on the surface. But Grocery IQ takes it a step further, allowing you to customize the list by category, then organizing your categories by the order in which you walk through the store. So all of your fruits and vegetables are listed under "produce," all your dairy under "dairy and cheese," and so on. This seems like a small thing, unless you're grocery challenged like myself, and have spent the better part of an hour racing across the store to pick up something in an aisle I forgot.

iFlorist

Posted August 6, 2009 - 3:48pm by Marc Peter
iFlorist1Developer: ideas2mobile
Category: Lifestyle
Version: 1.1
Release Date: July 25, 2009
Size: 7.2 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating 9/10

Birdhouse

Sending flowers has never been so easy. Or cheap. For $0.99 you can send as many beautiful bouquets of flowers in an unlimited combination of colors and sizes to as many of the women in your life as you want to. Or men.

iFlorist is an elegantly designed app with a smooth, easy to use interface. Everything about the app has a laid back, relaxing feel down to the tunes you can play in the background as you DIY design flower art to email to your harem. Or girlfriend. Or wife. Or boyfriend.

Update and Re-Jailbreak Fears? No Worries.

Posted August 6, 2009 - 3:30pm by Marc Peter

It's true that once you have jailbroken and added Cydia apps to your iPhone, it's hard to imagine not having them anymore. Doing anything to compromise the presence of these apps on your phone is downright scary. Have no fear, go ahead and update to 3.1 and rest assured that you will still be able to use all of your Cydia apps.

DVR Remote

Posted August 5, 2009 - 5:10pm by Craig Motlong
DVRremote1Developer: Stutsman Software
Category: Utilities
Version: 2.01
Release Date: May 16, 2009
Size: 1.9 MB
Price: $2.99
Rating 9/10

Birdhouse

 I love my TiVo. I really do. I like the interface, the ease of use, the web-enabled programming, the little bloop-bloop-bloop-KADOOP noise that it makes when I'm browsing my shows. I don't mind that I'm getting overcharged for something the cable providers would be giving me for free. It's the way I roll.

But one of the things I don't like about my TiVo is the remote. It looks and feels okay, but when I use it, I have to lean forward and sideways while twisting my arm into ligament-damage territory. Fresh batteries have no effect. And one of the things I *hate* is that when I want to search for a specific program, it takes me half an hour to hunt-and-peck each of the letters to spell it using the up-and-down arrows.

WeatherPro

Posted August 5, 2009 - 1:29pm by Craig Motlong
WeatherPro1Developer: MeteoGroup Deutchland GmbH
Category: Weather
Version: 1.5
Release Date: October 24, 2008
Size: 4.9 MB
Price: $3.99
Rating 8/10

Birdhouse

There are two kinds of weather people in this world. The first kind are the people that just want to know a little bit about what to wear that day, and for whom the iPhone's built-in Weather app works just fine. Then there are the people who want to know wind direction, dewpoint, air pressure, relative humidity, and real-time storm tracking and satellite images. For those people, there's WeatherPro.

Bliss

Posted August 5, 2009 - 1:19pm by Marc Peter
Bliss1Developer: GOSUB 60
Category: Games (Charity)
Version: 1.1.7
Release Date: July 7, 2009
Size: 5.3 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating: 100/100

Birdhouse

I have a very personal beef with breast cancer, as do millions of people worldwide.

I have bought every item of pink gear available whose proceeds go to cancer research. Baseball hats, beach towels, water bottles, dog leashes, t-shirts, tennis balls and on and on and on.

Now there's an app for it.

Bliss is a Tetris style game, it's fun, it costs $0.99 and everyone should buy it. Every time you play the game and win a pink ribbon code Mobile Deluxe donates $0.05 to the Beautiful Day Foundation.

Some Crucial Utilities From Cydia

Posted August 4, 2009 - 6:08pm by Marc Peter

Cydia offers the jailbroken crowd a lot of options for Utilities that really bring out the best in the iPhone. Here are a few that I have grown so used to having I don't know if I could really do without them.

Backgrounder. Backgrounder does just what it sounds like it does, it allows you to run multiple apps at once. Just hold down the home button for a few seconds and Backgrounder turns itself on. Use another app, then come back to the previous app, it is still running right where you left off. Hold down the home button again, Backgrounder turns off.

Newsflash

Posted August 4, 2009 - 3:05pm by Marc Peter
Newsflash 1Developer: Kevin Karsch (University of Missouri)
Category: News
Version: 1.0
Release Date: April 26, 2009
Size: 0.6 MB
Price: Free
Rating 10/10

Birdhouse

Newsflash was developed by students at U. of Missouri for the Donald W. Reynolds Institute's 2008/9 iPhone Competition, an event sponsored by both AT+T and Apple. With those credentials it should be obvious that this is not your run of the mill slapped together test project indie app. Newsflash is a high caliber news application that hides behind a home-made indie looking interface.

Trivial Cribbage

Posted August 4, 2009 - 11:48am by Craig Motlong
Trivial Cribbage titleDeveloper: Trivial Technology
Category: Games
Version: 1.1
Release Date: December 29, 2008
Size: 4.7 MB
Price: $0.99
Rating 7/10

Birdhouse

 

Cribbage was the perfect game for the pre-iPhone era. It's a card game with pegs, which makes it not super-graphics-intensive, it requires a pretty simple mathematical formula for a decent AI, and it doesn't require too many controls: tap, swipe, drag. So what if you don't want to play Hero of Sparta or The Sims? What if you want to sit back and play a nice, simple game of cribbage?

You can. But, at least with Trivial Cribbage, it does feel like you're playing on a dumber phone.

VOX3000

Posted August 3, 2009 - 6:18pm by Marc Peter
VOX3000 1Developer: The Retronyms
Category: Entertainment
Version: 1.0.1
Release Date: July 15, 2009
Size: 4.5 MB
Price $0.99
Rating 10/10

Birdhouse

The Retronyms are a groovy bunch of iPhone developers. They have some cool apps out in the App Store, and VOX3000 is one of them. Their repertoire runs the gamut from multi person complex to short, simple, even a chimp could do it. VOX3000 is the latter app.

VOX3000 is a speech synthesizer. Just type what you want to have spoken into the keyboard and hit speak and your iPhone recites the text back to you in computer voice.

I fired up VOX3000 and immediately did what I assume everyone else does at first, I made my iPhone say "LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER", "Danger Will Robinson!", "I'm afraid I can't do that right now" (HAL), and (this one dates dates me)"BEEDEE BEEDEE BEEDEE Buck!"".