Useful iPhone and iPod Touch Apps
I am definitely a gadget guy. I have some pretty cool electronic stuff that makes my life easier and more fun. I have a programmable Harmony Remote to to control my home entertainment system. I have some seriously cool photography gadgets (such as a wireless remote to fire the camera itself and a whole set of Alienbees remotes to fire flashes off camera). I have a GPS datalogger that I can use to create tracklogs to show where I’ve been, and also to Geoencode my photos.
These gadgets are cool, and very fun, but they all pale in comparison to my iPod Touch. This thing is seriously cool and I use it all the time. I use it to listen to my favorite music and to Podcasts every day during my drives to and from work. I use it to quickly check my email and my Twitter feeds when I have only a few minutes and can’t get to the computer. I check the current temperature and the weather forecast all the time! Occasionally, I even play games on it (and I’ve heard that it’s a better gaming maching than even the Nintendo DS), but I’m not much of a gamer so that’s not all that important to me.
One of the most amazing features of the iPod Touch and the iPhone is the ability to download and install applications from the App Store. There are Apps for almost anything you can imagine, and there are more being produced and released every day. While you have to pay for some of them, there are also a great many that are free. And just because they’re free doesn’t meant that they aren’t good either. Some of my favorite apps are free, or at least very cheap. Here are a few of them:
- GooSync – This free App allows me to sync my Google Calendar to and from my iPod. I use Google Calendar to manage all of my appointments and important events, so it was a no-brainer that I would want to be able to take that with me on my iPod. I don’t understand why the native iPod calendar can’t sync with external services, so GooSync is a perfect alternative. Note that there is a premium version of GooSync available for $14.99 hat has a lot more functionality, but I don’t need that so I stick with the free version.
UPDATE (June 18, 2009) – I now sync my iPod Calendar directly to my Google Calendar. Check out the tutorial on how I do it. - Byline – I also use Google Reader to manage all of my RSS feeds and wanted a simple way to sync those feeds to my iPod. This is another feature that I would have expected the iPod to support natively, but until it does Byline works very well. The one thing it can’t do that drives me crazy is to allow me to mark articles as “Unread”. I like to quickly scroll through my feeds and have a quick look at all of them, and then mark those that I want to read in depth later as Unread. This should be a simple change though and I have hopes that they will eventually make this improvement. This App costs $4.99 and I had no problem paying that after trying several other apps for Google Reader. Byline is by far the best of the bunch.
- Sudoku – This is a free Sudoku App that helps me get a quick fix with the popular Sudoku numbers game when I’m bored or I need a diversion. There are lots of other Sudoku apps, this was just a free one that I found. It works well so I keep using it.
- Sportacular – For any sports fan this app from Citizen Sports is the bomb! It quickly and easily allows you to see the current scores and standings for all your favorite sports teams. It has a huge list of sports and teams that you can follow, from pro to college, from mainstream to obscure, and it is always up to date with up to the minute news and results. And it’s free! This app rocks!
- iBird Explorer Plus – Any serious bird watcher (or photographer that shoots birds) must have this application. It has an easy to use search function to help you find and identify the birds of North America. The included range maps and photographs are essential for confirming the true identify of the birds you see, while the playable audio files are also extremely useful to help identify birds by their song. This app is not free (and at $19.99 it is by far the most expensive app I have purchased) but it is a great example of why some apps are worth buying!
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[...] Up until now I’ve been using Goosync to manage my Calendar on my iPod Touch. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the only way I could find to sync my iPod with my Google Calendar, which I use for everything. In fact I just recently wrote about using GooSync as one of my favorite iPod Apps. [...]