The northlondonhippy

I read in the last week or so that there are now over 10,000 apps avail­able for the iPhone and that’s only in the last six months since the App Store opened.

Wow!

That’s a lot of appli­ca­tions for the world’s favourite, ultra-clever smart phone.

Some of them are com­pletely point­less and fun, oth­ers are very use­ful and some are just plain cool. I’ve gone a bit app mad and down­loaded loads of them, so many that I am going to run out space soon.

That’s ok, because at some point, I know I am going to have to cull my apps and lose the ones I hardly, if ever use. For now, though I’m all about the apps.

I’ve already reviewed some of my favourite apps, CLICK HERE to mag­i­cally travel back in time to those heady, crazy days, of August 2008.

Since then, I’ve found some even cooler apps to share with you. Some of them are free, some are paid for, but nearly all of them serve a use­ful pur­pose and most of them are used by yours truly on a daily basis.

Google Search
This app has been around since day one of the App Store, but the recent update added a fea­ture that will not only impress your mates, but actu­ally works.

The lat­est ver­sion of Google’s search app doesn’t require any but­tons, you put the phone to your ear, wait for the tone to cue you and then speak your search and it under­stands you and dis­plays your results light­en­ing quick!

Like if you say “ show me pic­tures of naked women”, it fills your screen with very pretty pic­tures. And if you have the “safe search” option switched off, you’ll get some hands free porn, which if you think about it, could have some appli­ca­tions of its own.

Seri­ously, its very cool and a quick demo will blow most peo­ple away.

Weather Bug
There are a lot of weather apps for your iPhone, but this one is my favourite.
You choose a weather cen­tre near­est to you from a list pro­vided and the app then dis­plays the tem­per­a­ture, wind speed, along with all the usual stuff like humid­ity and barom­e­ter pressure…in real time.

You can watch the wind change direc­tion and speed while the app is run­ning and it also tells you what the wind chill is, a use­ful tool when choos­ing what coat to wear. The app also pro­vides fore­casts for the next few days, but here’s the other killer fea­ture, it shows you the most recent satel­lite weather photo for your region.

This app is a must-have if you dig the weather, or like to know how cold it is out­side. Trust me, baby its chilly.

TV Plus
This one is really only of use to you if you live in the UK and sub­scribe to SKY TV and have a SKY+ box. For those of you who don’t know what I mean (my pals in Amer­ica!), its a com­bi­na­tion TiVO and satel­lite tv receiver and is my dig­i­tal plat­form of choice.

If you have a SKY+ and an iPhone, you will really love this one. TV Plus dis­plays the SKY pro­gramme guide for the next seven days, with descrip­tions for each pro­gramme, on every chan­nel. If you’ve signed up for a MySKY account, you can enter your details into the app, then, and here’s the killer bit, once you’re set up, you can enter record­ings into your SKY+ from any­where you have a con­nec­tion via wi-fi, EDGE or 3G.

I’m not sure if I am explain­ing this well. Say you’re at work and you’ve for­got to put a record­ing in for some tv show, it doesn’t mat­ter what. You can find the pro­gramme on the vir­tual pro­gramme guide on your iPhone and tap the record but­ton and through some magic voodoo jig­gery pok­ery, the record­ing just appears in your SKY+ plan­ner as if you entered it with the remote from the prox­im­ity of your sofa. Amazing.

Set up is slightly com­plex, but the step-by-step instruc­tions were very clear and easy to fol­low — I had it up and run­ning in no time. It prob­a­bly took longer to sign up for the MySKY account (free from SKY.com) than it did to set up the app and my SKY+ box.

Just be aware that the remote record­ings work best when you have more than 30 min­utes before the pro­gramme begins, oth­er­wise there don’t seem to be any lim­i­ta­tions. It’s well worth the price!

iTap
I wasn’t that impressed with iTap ini­tially, but since the most recent update, it really shines. Its a sim­ple app that turns your iPhone into a remote track pad for a Mac and just about any­thing you can do with a mouse, you can do with iTap, includ­ing right click­ing. iTap now also has a key­board, for remote text entry.

I have a Mac Mini con­nected to my tv and I can do most things with my Log­itech Har­mony Remote, includ­ing con­trol Front Row and iTunes, but the one thing I’ve never been able to do is put the Mini to sleep. With the lit­tle white Apple remote, no prob­lem, I press and hold the cen­tre but­ton and voila, my Mini is snor­ing. I can’t seem to come up with a way to repli­cate that com­mand with the Har­mony remote.

With iTap, I don’t have to, I can just start it and in two taps, my Mini is dream­ing of elec­tric sheep.

iTap requires a small piece of receiver soft­ware to be installed on your Mac, but it was very easy, just drag it into your apps folder, run it, then from the menu bar icon, select “open on start-up” to add it to your log in items. Then just for­get about it.

Mocha VNC Lite
iTap is great, if you can see your Mac’s screen, but what if you can’t?

There are many occa­sions where I need to do some­thing with the Mac Mini, while the tv is in use and I don’t want to switch over to the Mini to do some­thing quick and sim­ple. Instead I use Mocha VNC Lite.

VNC stands for vir­tual net­work con­trol and if you’re run­ning Leop­ard, its built into the oper­at­ing sys­tem and called screen shar­ing. Because it is built into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, its very easy to enable, just go into the pref­er­ence pane under shar­ing, click the screen shar­ing box and set a pass­word for remote login. Your Mac is now ready to be remotely controlled.

Mocha VNC Lite allows you to con­nect to your Mac and con­trol it, with the touch­screen act­ing as a track­pad with the remote Mac’s out­put dis­played on the iPhone’s screen.

With Mocha VNC Lite, I can start and stop down­loads, I can run apps, enter text through the inte­grated key­board, all from another room, or even in my back gar­den. I’ve only got it set up to work within my home net­work, but peo­ple who are bet­ter at the real tech stuff can prob­a­bly get it to work over the inter­net, from any­where in the world.

Its a free­bie, though there is a paid ver­sion, which I should buy myself.

iTalk Recorder
Griffin’s iTalk Recorder is another sim­ple, yet well designed and use­ful app that does what it says on the tin. It records sound, but it does it very well.

You can choose the qual­ity, from good enough to be broad­cast on FM radio to very low, but still listen-able and the length of the record­ing is only lim­ited by your avail­able flash memory.

Trans­fer­ring your audio to your Mac is a breeze, there is an appli­ca­tion that you need to install which wire­lessly con­nects your Mac to your iPhone and you just drag over the files you need.

This app is works so well that I bet I could use it to do vox­pops on the street that sounded good enough to be trans­mit­ted on the radio. Of course, I’d look like a dick, walk­ing up to peo­ple and mak­ing them talk into an upside-down iPhone, but you get the idea.

Air­Cam­Live­V­ideo
This app is extremely cool and I have absolutely no pur­pose for it, not even a nefar­i­ous one.

Air­Cam­Live­V­ideo turns your iPhone into a wire­less remote receiver for the built-in isight cam­era in your iMac or Mac­Book and it also works with the old exter­nal isights. It should work with other web­cams as well, though best to check before down­load­ing the app.

Again, you need to install a small piece of soft­ware on your Mac to trans­mit the images (and now audio too) from your Mac to your iPhone. Start the soft­ware on the Mac, run the app on your iPhone and away you go. It self-configures via Bon­jour and you can pass­word pro­tect the live stream to keep pry­ing eyes away.

Like I said, I have no prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion for this one, its just very cool and futur­is­tic. I also think its the most expen­sive app I’ve bought so far. It was a fiver, but now that I’ve reviewed it, bang that’s com­ing off next year’s taxes as a web­site expense.

Now — Geo-networking
This is a weird one and I’ve yet to really work out its usefulness.

This app lets you post a tag on a loca­tion in real time, and they only remain there for a day or so. You can also search for other people’s tags.

Post­ing appears sim­ple, you allow the app to know your loca­tion, put in your line of copy and hit send. Be care­ful what you post and where you post it, though.

The rea­son to be care­ful is that when you do a search, you can see what all the other peo­ple have posted, com­plete with direc­tions to get there. You don’t want to be sit­ting at home post­ing “sex avail­able, no charge”.

Or maybe, you do.

And yes, I have seen labels such as my exam­ple above posted on a map of the world. The app is global and should work wher­ever you are on the planet.

When you do a search, the app hands off some data to the iPhone’s built in map app, and you can watch a col­lec­tion of red pins descend across the global. Tap a pin to read the attached descrip­tion text, zoom in and see where they are or switch to the satel­lite view.

For me, its an easy, fun way to gen­er­ate addresses for play­ing with the new “street view” func­tion added in the iPhone’s soft­ware update to ver­sion 2.2.

The UK hasn’t been blessed with street view just yet, but most of the con­ti­nen­tal US has and guess where most of the posters on this app are from? Although bizarrely, Google did have some street views avail­able for an Ital­ian sub­urb and it does look like Lon­don will be added soon, which means I’ll be able to vir­tu­ally stalk myself.

And speak­ing of stalk­ing, tell me this doesn’t sound fun. Next week, I’m going to be post­ing “www.northlondonhippy.com” via this app, at var­i­ous loca­tions through­out Lon­don. If you’re really quick, and you can get there in time, you might catch a glimpse of me and my iPhone in action.

If you don’t, at least you’ll know that you are stand­ing in the exact spot where I stood when I posted it. If that doesn’t make the lit­tle hairs on the back of your neck stand up, I don’t know what will!

And that my friends and iPhone fans is my lat­est col­lec­tion of super-neat-o-cool iPhone apps, but it by no means com­plete. There are plenty of oth­ers I like and prob­a­bly my absolute favourite is yet to come. Enjoy!

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