Sending contact details from your iPhone
One of the things I miss on my iPhone is the ability to simply send some contact details to someone else.
In this article, I’m going to look at four applications that – to varying degrees – add that functionality. All of them are available from the App Store.
James’ App Store Pick of The Week!
I’m really eager to see what John Carmack can do with the iPhone. Back in August, the designer of such classics as Doom and Quake stated that he believed the iPhone to be as powerful as Sega’s Dreamcast console and almost as powerful as the PS2 or original XBOX. Admittedly, Kroll and Cro-Mag are both beautiful iPhone games that are surprisingly attractive in their own right, but nothing on the iPhone thus far makes be believe that Carmack might be onto something. That was until I played Fastlane Street Racing by Atod AB.
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Google Street View
iPhone update 2.2 sees the introduction of Google Street View. This stunning virtual reality feature added to the desktop version of Google Maps last year was first shoehorned into the Android based G1. How does it perform on the iPhone? Let’s find out…
It’s hard to believe that the industry has moved from the basic cell phone with a crippled ‘sawn-off’ version of the internet to the iPhone with its near perfect access to the web and other internet services in just a handful of years. Whatever will the next decade bring?
Push notification as an App Store solution?
Background push notification is Apple’s solution to the problems created by refusing to grant multi-tasking to 3rd party applications. Keeping a persistent IP connection to the iPhone to forward third-party server notifications will enable IM clients and other social networking apps such as Twitterrific to operate in a much more useful fashion.
Obviously, this will be a welcomed addition to this powerful pocket computer. True multi-tasking would be the ideal, but with the iPhone’s limited resources Apple’s nifty solution – should it ever see the light of day – could be a dream come true.
Could the push notification service be used for more than instant messaging, perhaps even solving some other thorny issues presently worrying iPhone developers?
Chess, chess, chess
It all started when the John at ZingMagic, creator of Chess Professional for every other handheld platform since time began, buzzed me that Chess was now available in the iPhone App Store. I used ‘Search’ to find it and discovered another dozen versions of Chess at the same time. Wow. Talk about competition!
Hmm…. One way to rate how good or bad Chess Professional and the other chess applicatons really are would be to play them all using my legendarily bad chess skills. But a more reliable way would be to pit them against each other. Now, admittedly, in this piece I’m only pitting the newcomer against an identically-priced competitor ($1), but it’s still a valid and interesting test.
James’ App Store Pick of The Week!
Back in January I conveyed my excitement for the coming iPhone revolution…
“This month the iPhone will be transformed. At present the iPhone is a refined phone, a first class iPod and a capable internet device. By this summer it might well have been reborn as the smallest, lightest, thinnest and cheapest Mac OSX computer. If the iPhone SDK lives up to expectations, it could propel the iPhone into a completely new orbit, escaping even the Newton’s powerful gravitational field.”
It turned out that Apple wasn’t quite ready in February, but pent up demand and an extra few months of development overcame any marketing hurdles that the delay may have caused Apple.
Just jaw-droppingly well done…
Now, I know Apple iPhone fans have been known to get a bit… well, zealous. And as such, some of the writing on iPhone sites can be tarred with the ‘fanboy’ brush. But when scanning this post, bear in mind that I’m a hardened journalist who has specialised in Symbian OS hardware for the past 15 years. So it takes a lot to impress me.
We have written, here on All About iPhone, quite a bit about the iPhone App Store. No, it’s not perfect, but it has given an awful lot of creative programmers a real chance to shine. We all have our own favourites from the App store, and I’m looking past the legions of games, both good and bad, but let me run some of these less obvious applications past you…. Each is potentially jaw-dropping, capable of making a hardened fan of any other handheld device green with jealousy….
Facts at your fingertips – Trivopaedia – a plug!
Woohoo! Excuse my excitement, but as a non-C-programmer, it’s exciting to see All About iPhone’s first application hit the iPhone AppStore. I’ve been maintaining and fiddling with Trivopaedia, my ‘encyclopaedia of all things trivial’ for years and Stefan Wolfrum has done a sterling job in producing a basic iPhone conversion.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
It’s free, of course, as all versions have been since 1997, so there’s no reason not to have it on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Stefan’s planning all sorts of enhancements, I’m looking forward to seeing a search box in the interface, for example.
Trivopaedia for iPhone
Still, it’s a great start, you can download it here, or of course, in AppStore on the iPhone itself.
Comments welcome, back to me on the content at [email protected] or to Stefan on the interface at [email protected].
Halo (sort of) & Quake (maybe) come to the iPhone
With that hugely qualified headline, how can you not be excited?!
I have two gaming tidbits for you this morning:
(1) I mentioned a little while ago that Bungie had given their staff iPhones, and that there was an outside chance that a Halo port could be in the offing. Well, there is no news from Bungie, but Halo is coming to the iPhone (in a way) for jailbroken users.
The Chosen Two
Out of the box, the iPhone has just two free gaps available on the first page of the dashboard (application launcher). Unless you move things around, the bottom row will start with iTunes and end with App Store, but what comes next? Over the last few months my chosen two has included Evernote, iPlayer, Record, Tuner, Fieldrunners and the ever popular iChalky! However, in the last couple of weeks I’ve settled upon Twitterrific and Wikipanion. Of the ninety or so extra applications on my iPhone it’s these two that I want to find the quickest.
I have a feeling this particular chosen two will be hard to budge! What two extra applications have you promoted to the first screen of your iPhone?