This shit is crack cocaine
So i think the developer of Plants Vs Zombies got access to some super secret API for warping the space time continuum. I use it at the gym to make 30 mins of cardio feel like nothing – it’s awesome! (i wouldn’t recommend playing it while on a treadmill though).
$2.99 on the app store & totally worth every cent. Go git it!
It’s my first, and it’s certainly not perfect but as they say “release early / release often”. Since i come from a web development background the Objective C language has a ridiculous learning curve, so a few months ago i learned about http://www.appcelerator.com and am having a blast with this framework. Special thanks to Nolan Wright & Kevin Whinnery from Appcelerator when i got stuck! Lots of cool features, fixes & improvements planned for the next release – stay tuned! [ Download ]
Well it’s been about a year since i got my iPhone, and i’ve installed probably at least a hundred apps (most of which i quickly uninstalled). Here are my 20 favorite apps today, not including any games.
1. Evernote (free) – cloud based text/photo/audio service [iTunes]
2. Truphone (free) – voip [iTunes]
3. Flixster (free) – movie showtimes / info [iTunes]
4. Weathereye (free) – better than the stock weather app in my opinion [iTunes]
5. Remote (free) – great when hosting parties [iTunes]
6. BeejiveIM ($9.99) – best IM client i’ve seen, supports push [iTunes]
7. Tweetie ($2.99) – best twitter client i’ve tried (and i’ve tried alot) [iTunes]
8. Facebook (Free) – actually makes facebook enjoyable, although app is due for a major update [iTunes]
9. AroundMe (Free) – as the name implies very simple but effective tool to find ATM’s, gas etc [iTunes]
10. Prowl ($2.99) – push notifications for Growl. Read my post on it here. [iTunes]
11. MLB 2009($9.99) – Not cheap, but streaming video of games (even over 3G) is awesome. [iTunes]
12. Auto-Stitch ($1.99) – take a bunch of photos, tap em and this app creates a pano automatically. [iTunes]
13. Shazam (Free) – what’s this song called? [iTunes]
14. Shopper ($0.99) – Great if you’re not the pen & paper grocery list type [iTunes]
15. Tip ($0.99) – tip calculator [iTunes]
16. Groups ($2.99) – great for MobileMe users to organize their contacts [iTunes]
17. Trails ($3.99) – log your bike ride, hike, etc and upload to everytrail.com[iTunes]
18. Guitar Toolkit ($9.99) – Tuner, metronome, chord fingerings, etc… [iTunes]
19. Flickit (Free) – take photos, open flickit – tap your photos to upload to flickr [iTunes]
20. SportsTap (Free) – push notifications for sports teams you follow [iTunes]
Couple Notes: This will only work on a mac (as it requires the Growl notifications), assumes you are running Tweetie on the desktop and you will have to purchase a $2.99 iphone app called Prowl (but it’s well worth it, read to see why) and you must be running the latest iPhone firmware. A few other caveats, while the technology used to get DM’s & mentions to your iphone is push, Tweetie on your mac does not use push (it polls every few minutes)…So depending on how your iphone is setup for email, you may receive the notice of a DM before the Prowl push notification (thanks to commenter Ryan for pointing this out). Also, i believe this will only work (as far as i know) if the mac you are syndicating notifications from is online 24/7.
Mac Setup
Step 1: Goto the Prowl Website and setup an account / install their Growl notification plugin on your mac.
Step 2: Open the “system preferences” pane on your mac, and access the Growl settings (should be under ‘other’).
Step 3: Click on “display options” and select the Prowl style. Enter your username/password you used to register as per above. You can also configure Prowl to only send notifications to your iphone after your computer goes idle (awesome). Click on verify just to make sure it is connecting properly.
Step 4: Click on “applications” while in the Growl settings. You should see a list of apps. Find Tweetie and click “configure”.
Step 5: If you now click on notifications you should see there are 3 behaviors that trigger Growl notifications in Tweetie: timeline, mentions & DM’s. What you most likely will want to do is either set your DM’s (and/or) your mentions to use the Prowl display style you just installed.
iPhone Setup
Step 1: Head to the app store on your iphone and purchase/install the Prowl app [ iTunes Link ]
Step 2: Boot up Prowl on your iPhone and enter your Prowl username/password.
That’s it! You should now get a push notification anytime Tweetie receives a DM or mention. The cool thing about this is you can use Prowl with any mac applications that trigger Growl notifications (i.e Transmission, Dropbox etc etc)
Update July 8, 2009: Check out OmniGrowl for a great app to handle push notifications for other things like weather, news, traffic, flight status etc…
A mix of tech, news, politics & comedy.
I should add, my favorite podcasts are actually Diggnation & Totally Rad Show. However these ones my wife & I watch on TV at home each week.
Website Grader is a really good tool to benchmark your site on some SEO best practices. I was just grading a client of mine this morning, thinking how it would be good to keep a history of their progress when it hit me.
What i do now is take a screenshot of the grade, using the Evernote screenshot feature and automatically it is dated so i can use Evernote to keep track of our progress (or lack thereof).
I have been using Evernote lately for business meetings and i’m loving it. I hate taking notes. If you have an iPhone (or other supported device) you can let it do the heavy lifting for you. When the meeting starts, i capture the discussion as a “voice note”. The mic is pretty good at picking up someone speaking even across the room. Typically there is some scribbling that has been done on the whiteboard as well. After the meeting, i’ll just take a shot of the board with the camera as a “snapshot note”.
Now when i need to refer back to the meeting i can access virtually everything that took place. Love it! All the content is stored on the Evernote web service, so it syncs with your Evernote desktop client as well which means whether you are at your desktop or mobile device your data is accessible.
The only complaint i have, is that voice notes are limited to 5 minutes in length. So right now i have to quickly save every 5 minutes and start another ‘part’ to the meeting. I suspect this may be a limitation of the iPhone SDK though.
Evernote is a free download for Mac & PC and is available here.
The iPhone client can be found in the app store.
