matthearn.com

Since more and more people are going out and purchasing iPhones, and since I also have an iPhone, I thought I’d make everybody’s life a little better and talk about what applications I have and love. Here’s an abbreviated list:

• TwitterFon – Free – my preferred Twitter reader. Shows your whole timeline, but scrolls down to the first message you haven’t seen, so you can pick up wherever you may have left off. Can also track your conversations, so if someone replies to you days later, you can see what post they were talking about. Kinda nice feature.


• Facebook – Free – Meh. You can see people’s updates, post pictures, poke through a few things, but it’s kind of annoying, frankly. You can’t view other people’s friend lists to browse for people you might know. You can’t search for folks. The way it links to things is ridiculous; if someone makes a comment on something, and you click it, you don’t get linked to whatever was commented on, you get linked to the commenter. Little annoyances. I rarely use it, actually, unless I can’t get to my lappy for a day or two and want to see if I’ve missed anything important.


• iMafia – Free – Mildly entertaining game in which you steal money, rob banks, buy real estate. You log in every four or five hours, do a few minutes of stuff, and then log back out so your resources build back up. Not time-consuming, but still fun.


• WordPress – Free – Oh yeah man, WordPress has an app. I’m just starting to play around with it, but I can use it to post without having to open Safari and do it through a webpage, which is kludgey even on the iPhone.


• MLB.com At Bat – $9.99 – One of the few applications I’ve paid for, but I can use it not only to follow live games in a VERY detailed manner, but listen to the radio feeds for any game. Yesterday I listened to the Red Sox/Yanks game at work. Also has detailed player information, so if you hear that Jason Varitek just hit a home run, you can quickly bring up his stats. Useful for fantasy, particularly if you were dumb enough to draft Jason Varitek.


• Evernote – Free – If you’re not familiar with the Evernote application, you should. You use it to store notes, pictures, sounds, all kinds of stuff, for later follow up. See something in a store, and want to see if you can order it online? Snap a pic with your phone and store it at Evernote, then when you get home you bring it up on your lappy and search Amazon. I don’t use it as often as I should (mostly I just email myself).


• Dictionary – Free – The application version of Dictionary.com. Good search tools, reads the words to you if you’re unsure about pronunciation.


• Cleartune – $3.99 – The first app I ever decided to purchase. It is a chromatic tuner, accurate to fractions of a cent (1/100 of a semi-tone). An electronic device that does ONLY this costs 10 times as much. It is so awesome.


• Metronome – Free – Uh…it’s a metronome.


• Midomi – Free – Cute gimmick. If you hear a song you like, but don’t know the name or artist, open up Midomi, hold your phone to the speaker, and it’ll tell you what the tune is. Pretty accurate, although it’s not of much use outside of pop/rock/country. No knowledge of classical, for example.


• Slacker Radio – Free – Music program along the lines of Pandora, in addition to telling it a song you like and then having it guess at other possibilities, Slacker has prebuilt stations along normal lines (top 40, indie rock, buncha classical channels, etc.) There is a paid version that has no ads and allows you to “skip” as often as you want. Normally you can only “skip” songs 6 times an hour, although if you run out of skips and something by “Lady Gaga” comes on you can always switch stations. I also have Pandora installed, but rarely use it.


• Public Radio – Free – Finds and tunes into your local public radio stations. Wanna listen to NPR but no AM radio is handy? This is your app.


• Baseball – Free – The compiled statistics for teams and players dating back to the 19th century. Nice.

I have a lot of other stuff, but don’t necessarily use it much, or find cause to recommend it. I also have a lot of games, but c’mon, the iPhone is a business tool.