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The percentage of my friends who have an iPhone is quite frankly incredible. So when we get together, once we’ve caught up on our latest news and got through a pint or two, the question inevitably arises, have you got any good new apps? Similarly when chatting to someone new who turns out to have an iPhone, the same kind of question pops up. The App Store is like a little club that we all joined, and sharing recommendations about the best downloads is a new game. So as to further ruin my conversation possibilities with my friends (one of whom says that my blog is great because she can keep up to date with my life without ever having to speak to me!) I thought I’d share the current contents of my home screen. Here’s part one…

Heading up the list has to be my suite of communication tools. Along my dock there only remains one of Apple’s default apps; Mail. Adjoining it are Tweetie, NetNewsWire and Facebook. The latter is the ubiquitous app for accessing the even more ubiquitous social network, so I shan’t tell you what you already know. I will however allow myself to vent one frustration: Why can’t I view events?! When out and about with my iPhone, one of the most frequent reasons I want Facebook is to check the time and location of some party or event I’m attending, but I have to revert to the web interface to do so. D’oh! Other than that (and the crashes…) it’s a nice little app.

NetNewsWire is my RSS app, and I couldn’t live without it. For the uninitiated, RSS feeds are basically a way to view lists of headlines from your favourite websites in a manner not dissimilar to email. There are better iPhone RSS apps to be honest, but NNW has one killer feature – sync. NetNewsWire is produced by Newsgator who have a Mac RSS reader and some Windows tools too, as well as a web-based reader. It scores for me because my free account remembers all the feeds I read and which stories I’ve seen already, so when I mark something as read on my Mac for example, it doesn’t get presented to me as new again on my iPhone. Sublime.

The most recent addition to my dock is Tweetie, which is in my opinion simply the best iPhone Twitter client there is. I’m a fairly new Twitter convert but I’m loving it at the moment, and a good app for browsing and posting updates is a must. There are good free alternatives like TwitterFon, but Tweetie has the most beautiful interface by far and lots of nice touches like integrated TwitPic viewing (it retrieves just the image for you rather than making you zoom the web page), saved searches, real name display (rather than usernames) in the tweet list and so on. Absolutely love it, and well worth the £1.79 cost. Incidentally, the developer’s blog is an interesting read too.

Not quite making it onto my dock, but still useful is IM+ Lite. It’s my favourite of the free instant messenger clients, mostly because it’s simple and easy whilst allowing me to use all my accounts (MSN, AIM and Yahoo, plus others available). Sitting close by on the home page is Faces, a visual dialer app. Let’s face it, the iPhone’s favourites list for phone numbers is a bit restricted; it’s text-based, and it only allows you to call rather than text or email. Faces cost me a whole 59p, and for that I get multiple pages of photo buttons to call, text or email my contacts. It’s very customisable and fairly easy to use, however it’s a bit slow to start up, and I’m not sure why it needs 3 separate modes to add, remove and reorganise buttons – a home-screen-style single mode to remove and rearrange would be better, perhaps with a “+” button just appearing when in this mode. However it’s good enough for now.

The final mention for this post goes to Zenbe Lists. There are a number of good list making applications for the iPhone, but Zenbe gets a spot on my homescreen because it was free, it’s simple and it allows me to sync lists with other Zenbe users. It’s particularly useful for shopping lists so that my flatmate and I don’t both buy milk when we run out! Sadly it now costs £1.79, but I think I’d still have it at that price, because it’s so useful.

More to follow soon. Let me know your favourites too!

Update: Part 2 here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Personal Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.