iMapMyRide uses the built-in GPS in iPhone 3G to track and record every mile you ride. Duck out your music to learn your distance and speed. When you’re done, the application can upload your route and time directly into your profile at MapMyRide.com.
Home Sizer Decorate with iPhone. Before you go to the flea market or the home improvement store, enter the name and dimensions of each room in your house and let Home Sizer calculate usable square footage.
Rocket Taxi This app locates you via GPS or Wi-Fi and finds taxi companies near you. Choose a company by star rating, bookmark your favorite companies, map your start and end locations — even get a fare estimate. Then tap once to call a cab. And don’t forget to rate the company you choose so others can benefit from your taxi savvy.
Gas Cubby Find the best gas prices near you with GasBuddy, the app that knows the cost per gallon at stations wherever you go. Whether you’re a hypermiler or simply want to stay on top of your oil changes.
Texas Hold'Em Go all in on the most realistic handheld poker game ever. Texas Hold ’Em pits you against virtual opponents or with up to eight of your friends over a Wi-Fi network. Read your tablemates’ tells to win the pot and gain access to exclusive rooms with higher stakes. Drag your chips to go all in. Flick your cards to fold. Double-tap the table to check. And when you want to switch between first-person and top-down views, turn your iPhone to landscape or portrait mode.
FlyChat is a new iPhone app that allows you to converse with strangers who share common interests. Think Twitter in an audible form. Sounds harmless, but I think this app could get a bit weird.
Here is how it works: you type in a message and attach it to a "fly". That message then is sent to your selected stranger and global location, That individual from a far off land will then have access to your profile information including picture. The recipient will then have the ability to ignore or respond to your message. The company would like us to think of this app as a “high-tech messages in a bottle.”
This type of social network focuses on making new connections with less emphasis on your current friends list.
An app like this could be useful to the traveler who does not know anyone in their destination city. Maybe they could get useful information from locals about restaurants, hotels etc... Obviously I would not recommend meeting a stranger from another country for lunch, that is definitely creepy.
iPhone apps are becoming very popular at colleges these days, There are literally tens of thousands of choices. Below is a list of five top picks...enjoy.
1. Dictionary.com This free app has just over 250,000 word entries and a built-in thesaurus. It performs audio pronunciation for comparative words. Your not getting through college without a dictionary.
2. Kindle for iPhone The popular Amazon creation works with both the iPhone and iPod touch. This app will let you peruse the entire Kindle library give or take a few newspapers. It has Amazons Whispernet capabilities so most Kindle owners will enjoy its syncing ability. This is a free app and it will help students keep up with their assigned reading
3. Pi Cubed Don't throw away your graphing calculator yet. This app will help you form real-time equations. It has the capacity to hold 150 annotated equations pertaining to a broad array of scientific subjects. Students may like that the equations are presented as if they were written on a chalkboard. This app is well worth the $9.99 price tag.
4. News Fuse You can stay up to date without browsing every internet news outlet. This app will gather news from up to 18 different sources, no need to download several separate news apps. It's a pretty striped down app as far as features go, it just gets the job done. It goes for $0.99.
5. Tweetie When students feel the need to tweet during lectures, there are many twitter apps to choose from. Tweetie appears to be the go-to choice due to its ability to post links and pictures through multiple accounts. It costs $2.99
In a world teeming with increasingly similar tech products, Apple is one company that seems to have no problem churning out standout products. This might be attributed to sleek designs, fun features, and friendly interfaces--or maybe you want to chalk it up to good ol' marketing tactics. However, in the case of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, there's one attribute that undeniably separates these devices from the masses: the ever-expanding cadre of third-party applications. You can find everything from cookbooks and weight-loss trackers to games and productivity tools, but the area in which the iPhone and iPod Touch really excel is music, and there are hundreds of applications to choose from in this category.
To help you sort through the mass of options, we rounded up five of our favorite iPhone music apps. To keep things simple, we limited our scope to free selections that have a heavy focus on full music playback. Not everything included here will be a perfect fit for every iPod user, but you're sure to find something that will float your boat.
1. Pandora
Pros: Straightforward and easy to use; saves user data to account; nice interface with prominent album art; good music selection.
Cons: Skip limits; pop-up ads on every track; no community features.
The gist: If you only get one music streaming app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, make it Pandora--it's a great introduction for those who are anxious to hear some new tunes.
2. Last.fm
Pros: Plentiful community features and perhaps the best-tailored music recommendations; let's you add individual tracks to playlists for calling up later; lets you tag tracks and purchase directly from iTunes; no ads that we noticed.
Cons: Interface isn't as straightforward as those of Pandora and Slacker; not as valuable to users who aren't involved in the Last.fm community; a bit slower than other music apps listed here; skip limits.
The gist: With all its features, tabs, and buttons, the Last.fm application is one of the most in-depth and dynamic streaming music applications available for the iPhone.
3. Slacker
Pros: Straightforward and easy to use; saves user data to account; nice interface with prominent album art; heart and ban buttons to tailor playback to your liking; station listing page is graphically pleasing with album thumbnails.
Cons: Skip limits; no community features.
The gist: Sound quality, speed, and access to tunes are the most important ingredients in a mobile streaming radio app, and this app has them in spades--it's a worthwhile download for anyone who wants to less ads than found on Pandora.
4. imeem
Pros: Unlike other music apps, imeem gives you "cloud" access to part of your own library; includes useful sections that spotlight artists and recommend music based on your tastes; offers a sharing feature; has a nice interface that's easy to browse.
Cons: Limited by the usual Internet radio restrictions (skip limits, inability to play songs by the same artist back to back); access to your library is limited to 100 tracks unless you pony up a yearly subscription fee.
The gist: Beyond the appeal of streaming your music collection form the cloud, the rest of the Imeem application falls somewhere between the simplicity of the Pandora app, and the more personalized, social approach of Last.fm.
5. iheart radio
Pros: Let's you listen to radio stations from most major metropolitan areas across the U.S.; sound quality is generally better than standard FM radio; less commercials than standard FM radio; includes a fun "Shake It" feature that randomizes stations.
Cons: Station list is dominated by Clear Channel and other corporate offerings, meaning you won't find any cool, indie frequencies here; quality for some stations is poor.
The gist: If you love Top 40 and miss some of the hit stations from where you grew up (or where you went to school, etc.), iheart radio provides a portal for you to enjoy that content again.
Honorable mention: Shazam
Pros: Identifies songs playing over the air with the push of a button; shows album art for identified tracks; offers links for directly purchasing the song through iTunes or watching the video on YouTube.
Cons: Only works for recorded music; doesn't work well in noisy environments; often can't identify fringe music.
The gist: Shazam is a great download for people who are constantly wondering "what's the name of that tune?" while out and about.
Apple Inc. said users of the iPhone and iPod Touch media player have downloaded more than 1.5 billion programs from the company’s online store, signaling demand for the applications is accelerating.
The pace of downloads has picked up since Apple reached the 1 billion mark in April. The App Store now has more than 65,000 free and paid programs available, up from more than 500 when the site was introduced a year ago, Apple said in a statement today.
Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said the application site’s success will make it “very hard” for competitors to catch up. Research In Motion Ltd. and Palm Inc. set up stores in recent months offering programs for their devices and lag behind Apple in the number of applications available.
RIM, which opened its App World in April, said the number of programs on the site doubled to about 2,000 as of July 6. Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, doesn’t provide download figures.
Palm, which began selling the Pre handset in June, has about 30 programs on its site. Several thousand developers have applied to build programs for the Pre, Pam Deziel, vice president of developer relations, said last month.
Apple, which also makes the Macintosh computer, rose 76 cents to $143.10 at 9:37 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The Cupertino, California-based company’s shares had gained 67 percent this year before today.
Market-Share Gains
The iPhone went on sale in June 2007, and Apple added the App Store after developers clamored for a way to create programs for the device. Apple is the gatekeeper for the site, approving which programs are distributed. It takes a 30 percent cut of each application sold and distributes free programs at no cost.
In June, Apple released a faster version of the iPhone, selling more than 1 million in the first weekend. There are now more than 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch users who can download games and programs for the phone that do everything from tracking the weather to simulating a Zippo lighter to keeping tabs on calories consumed.
The iPhone’s share of global sales of so-called smart phones doubled to 10.8 percent in the first quarter, outpacing RIM’s growth, according to research firm Gartner Inc. RIM boosted its share to 19.9 percent. Nokia Oyj dominated the market with 41 percent, while Palm ranked outside the top five.
To contact the reporter on this story: Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net.
An app called TwitVid launched on the iTunes App Store today, enabling iPhone 3G S owners to record "video tweets" and post them to Twitter just as they would with photos, links, and text. The app is one of the first to make use of the new iPhone's video capabilities, and is made by a pair of Canadian college students and their venture-backed startup EatLime. The app is tied to a companion site, TwitVid.com.
While EatLime and its video-tweet competitors can't be faulted for taking advantage of Apple's newly unlocked iPhone features, there's something to be said about the regressive nature of "video tweets." What was once hailed as rapidly consumable, quickly-written and unobtrusive, the text-based tweet is evolving into something entirely different: A multimedia note trailing a ten-second time-waster that has to launch a video site just to present itself. Keeping up with Twitter just became a lot less fluid.
As Digital Beat notes, the TwitVid news comes on the heels of a sizable $5.5 million fundraising round by mobile video site Qik.com.
Prescriptions, X-Rays, Even Eye Tests on a Smart Phone Screen
By DEVIN POWELL, Inside Science News Service July 13, 2009 —
Doctors are increasingly bidding farewell to their classic sidekick -- the pager -- and opting for smartphones that do more to help them practice medicine.
A recent report by the healthcare market research firm Manhattan Research in New York shows that 64 percent of doctors are tech-savvy, using mobile devices made by BlackBerry, Palm, and Apple.
Although medical applications are a small fraction of the myriad of "apps" available for smartphones, they are one of the fastest growing categories and are finding their way into hospitals, clinics, and medical schools.
Medical apps make up a little more than one percent of all apps, but the downloadable medical apps are becoming so useful to doctors that the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., now requires all of its students to carry an iPhone or iTouch.
Here's a look at some of the more popular and unusual apps developed for medicine and public health for the iPhone and other mobile devices:
Pocketing Prescriptions The most popular medical application for the iPhone by number of downloads is Epocrates, a free portable database that contains pictures of and information on 3,300 pharmaceutical drugs. It has been available for several years on mobile devices like BlackBerrys and Palm Pilots and was downloaded 50,000 times during the first three months after it was released for the iPhone. Physicians at hospitals such as Georgetown University Medical Center carry around the app to double-check for potentially dangerous drug-drug interactions when prescribing treatments for their patients. An expanded version also provides information about diseases and laboratory tests.
Itty-Bitty X-rays Featured in Apple's commercials, OsiriX allows radiologists to view and carry around their patients' X-ray scans on an iPhone. The X-ray images can be sent from phone to phone via iChat.
While the iPhone's tiny 480 by 320 pixel screen is small for making a diagnosis, physicians can zoom in and out or transfer the images to a Mac computer to study them in full detail.
OsiriX also displays PET, MR, and CT scans, as well as ultrasounds. To ensure confidentially, the images can be stripped of information that could be linked to a patient.
EyePhone Brazilian ophthalmologist Renato Neves has adapted seven eye exam tests to be administered from the iPhone's screen. The chart of letters that tests vision acuity, usually mounted poster-sized on a wall, has been scaled down for the small screen held at an arm's distance.
Standard tests for color blindness have also been reformatted for the iPhone, as has Amsler's grid, a field of crossing lines used to check for problems like macular degeneration.
Zapping Cancer The "level" application on the iTouch -- normally used to hang a picture properly -- has been adapted to help radiologists aim X-rays and destroy tumors.
During chemotherapy, radiologists often use beams of X-ray energy to kill cancerous cells inside the body. But many cancers -- especially those of the lungs, livers, pancreas, and breast -- become hard-to-hit moving targets when a patient breathes in and out.
Two radiologists at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor figured out how to use data gathered by the iTouch accelerometer strapped to their chests, which measures the angle of the devices, to calculate their breathing rates.
They will present the app, which could be used to time X-ray blasts to coincide with exhaling, at a medical physics conference this month. It is called "iBreathe" (which happens to be the name of another app that turns the iPhone into a breathalyzer).
Tracking Swine Flu As the H1N1 influenza virus ("swine flu") swept across the globe, IntuApps in New York, New York developed a public health app that allows people to track its spread. The app, which is still awaiting approval by Apple, brings together information drawn from a range of different sources on the web.
A Google Maps plug-in shows the locations of outbreaks, while feeds from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide information about how the virus works, the current threat level, and government advisories.
FingerBeat is a virtual instrument inspired by retro synthesizers & samplers, designed for creativity & self-expression. A homage to dance music and pop culture, FingerBeat is a classic for absolutely everyone.Only on iPhone & second generation iPod touch*
eBuddy, the Dutch startup behind the eponymous mobile communication tool I dubbed the swiss army knife for instant messaging when it debuted an application for the Android platform last May, is announcing one hell of an iPhone application today. For context: eBuddy is a free mobile app that enables users to communicate with others using AIM, Facebook Chat, ICQ, Gtalk, Windows Live Messenger etc. in one, aggregated interface.
The application for the iPhone and iPod Touch the company is announcing today has quietly gone live in the App Store last week, but hasn’t been promoted in any way since until today. It brings a very strong competitor to the likes of Nimbuzz and fring, both of which have had native iPhone applications for a while now. Where eBuddy differentiates is in its support for Apple’s Push Notification Service, which allows a third-party server to ping the service in order to push out notifications to your device over a persistent IP connection.
You can see how that comes in handy for an instant messaging tool, since it basically acts as a replacement for text messages. When you exit the app, you’ll still be able to receive incoming messages from your contacts regardless of which IM client they choose to use (apart from Skype, but that’s another story), for 30 minutes initially.
At a later stage, the company expects to prolong this push notification window but strives to maintain a balance between a longer time and not putting too much strain on the device’s battery life.
I’m told that eBuddy already saw about 2 million people using its product from the iPhone or iPod Touch before the app actually hit the App Store, thanks to the web-based eBuddy Lite Messenger tool, but the free native application that was just released will likely convert most of those users to it in a short period of time.
In fact, many seem to have already done so despite the lack of a marketing push: according to stats provided by app store analytics startup Distimo, the eBuddy for iPhone application is currently already ranked #1 in 21 countries, within the top 5 in 31 countries, and within the top 10 in 37 countries in the free social networking application category.
Of course, a massive user base doesn’t equal massive revenue streams, especially not when you’re giving away a product for free. I asked eBuddy how it expects to make money from its mobile applications (they’re already doing quite well on the web version, I’m told), and CEO Jan-Joost Rueb said he wants to see an aggregate mobile app user base of 10 million uniques before they roll out monetization efforts like advertising and paid premium apps.
Rueb expects to hit that milestone by the end of this year based on its current growth path, so basically if the company can attract 4 million more mobile app users on top of its current 6 million ones, they’ll start deriving revenues from them in Q4 2009.
If you've seen a string of notifications pop up on your screen and then gracefully fade away, you've probably seen Growl; it's the open source & popular system-wide framework that allows applications to let you know when something happens. For instance, a Growl notification might appear to inform you of a newly-arrived email, new mentions on Twitter, a change of song in iTunes, or a download completing in Safari or Transmission.
The notification itself is a customizable pop-up that can also include an auditory notification as well. Growl is very flexible; it allows you to choose exactly which events trigger a notice, or pick a particular notification style for a specific event. Growl includes support for hundreds of OS X applications and is one of the first items I install on a new system.
Probably the only feature that could make Growl even more awesome is if it were to support forwarding notifications to an iPhone or iPod Touch running 3.0 via the new Push framework. Enter iPhone application Prowl. it is a Growl client for the iPhone that sends your Mac's Growl notifications out to your iPhone.
Because Growl is installed on your Mac and Prowl on your iPhone, the requisite link between the two means there is some configuration involved in getting going with Prowl. You can't download Prowl onto your iPhone or iPod touch and be ready to go immediately.
To use Prowl you must first have Growl installed and then create an account at the Prowl website. An account is necessary for the Prowl plug-in on your Mac to know where to send the notifications. Once the client application is installed on your iPhone and configured it is simply a matter of setting your Growl notification style to use "Prowl" rather than your default.
Usage/configuration Prowl immediately begins working and any notifications that appear from Growl are automatically forwarded on to your iPhone. You can configure Prowl to use a different notification style for notices that appear on your Mac. It is also possible to have Prowl only forward notices of a specified priority. Prowl even lets you decide when to keep the notices on your Mac, when to send them to your iPhone or when to have them them show up on both. This works by configuring the option to "Only send to Prowl when computer is idle for more than X minutes." By using this option you can tell Prowl that after X minutes of inactivity it should begin forwarding notifications to your iPhone. While the computer is still active, however, it will use the local notification style. Leaving this option un-checked means that all notices will appear on your Mac and your iPhone or iPod touch.
Performance In my testing I found that Prowl worked exactly as planned and the notifications appeared on my iPhone very quickly. When my iPhone had been in standby for about 20 minutes, there was a 3-second delay between the actual event and the notification appearing on my iPhone -- not bad at all. When I was actively using my iPhone the notifications arrived almost instantaneously. For example, downloading the latest release of redsn0w with Transmission, I heard the familiar sound-effect of my torrent download completing, and before the "ting" had ended my iPhone was vibrating with a new Prowl notification.
Conclusion I was extremely impressed with Prowl and the elegance with which I was able to view Growl notifications on my iPhone. If you are already using Growl then this application is an easy $2.99US purchase. Growl is also common with individuals running their own closet servers -- if this is you then Prowl is a must-buy. For example, you could have Growl notifications on your closet server show up on the office Mac and also forwarded to your iPhone when you're away from home. Prowl is written by Zachary West, who is also one of the developers of the beloved, multi-platform chat client Adium. Prowl is a great application, and I am extremely pleased with the results I had in my testing.
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iMapMyRide
Home Sizer
Rocket Taxi
Texas Hold'Em
1. Pandora
4. imeem
