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The story of a fashionable (former) librarian. From his love for New York to his Apple obsession, and everything in between.

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iPhone Apps

3 August 2008 144 views No Comment

The app I like the most so far (aside from games) is the Remote app by Apple. The ability to have an almost full feature control of your iTunes media is bloody awesome! It works like your regular iPod function in your iPhone, and yet it controls your whole library in your computer (or Apple TV if you have one). The best feature is that you can search and have visual feedback – which the original 5 buttons Apple Remote could not do. It also have the same icons used in iTunes, be it a folder, a playlist, a smart playlist, so it’s very easy to use since it’s exactly the same as in your computer. Not only that, it can also control your AirTunes speakers. So now I can just sit in my living room and control my music in my iMac without walking at all, you know how lazy I am, sometimes I even uses it when I am in my bed – i can’t even reach over to my wireless mouse and keyboard which are less than one feet away~hahaha~ Of course nothing is perfect, one problem with this remote is how it sort TV Shows – by alphabetical order of the episode’s name!! that definitely need to be fixed! Another problem is that it doesn’t control Frontrow. I used to use Frontrow quite a lot, so it would be great if it is supported.

Facebook’s 1.1 app is once again set an example of how to be a great application in Apple’s platform. All the essentials are there, not to mention the photo browsing aspect of it is just fantastic, even better than on the web.

Urbanspoon is an app that help you to select a restaurant – randomly by shaking your phone! You can lock your criteria like location or price range or cuisine. It’s fun and useful when can’t figure out what to eat~

AP’s Mobile News is another good one, just click on it and it cache the news quickly, then you can read them without signal like in the subway. I have no idea why NYTimes’ app take a hell lot longer to cache the news and most of the time it’s not completed and it crashes more often than anything else – in comparison, Mobile News is far superior in usefulness even without the fancy icons or unique contents. Of course I hope NYTimes can get better in time.

Other useful apps that is good but still need improvement including Twitterific (looking good but slow scrolling!), Last.fm (please scrob my music wirelessly!!!), Pandora (great looking but limited functions), AIM (sir-crash-alot!), BoxOffice (a better looking interface would be nice, but it is very useful already!), iWant (more categories!).

The App store has tons of apps everyday, but the ones that I think is essential is still nowhere to be found. (I am looking at you Google! don’t just give me a logo and a search field and call it an app!) a native Google Reader is what I wanted the most, don’t push me to use NetNewsWire for my default RSS reader, because I will if Google doesn’t act fast! Another app that i wanted so badly is a native blogger app! Rival blogging platforms like Typepad and WordPress already have apps on the iPhone for mobile blogging, granted they are 1.0 product and seriously need improvements, but at least they are there and have roadmap and upcoming features planned, but Blogger? they are staying in line with their usual style of doing everything slowly! in fact there’s no mentioning at all if they are going to release an app on iPhone! (I am getting quite disappointed at Blogger, but that’s rants for another post!)

I found myself still obsessing about the apps and browse the app store everyday to see what’s new and useful that I can get. I only hope Apple can act faster to fix all the bugs and crashes so that I can enjoy all kind of apps without getting frustrated by the frequent crashes.