Nov. 7: There’s an app for that

Time for another list of iPhone applications without which I cannot possibly live.

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Brief digression: I just searched my blog for all the previous iPhone apps I’ve recommended and I didn’t find any. This has to be wrong, because I know I wrote a list once upon a time; does the Blogger search function really suck that much? I found a few applications I had written about, but none that I had installed and loved so much that I forced my friends to get them too. However, I did find the post I wrote in April 2009 in which I announced my iPhone purchase, and after reading it again, the following are points that I find worth making:

• I still hate the iPhone ringtone options.
• Outlook notes can now be synced.
• I figured out how to organize my phone’s photos.
• The invisibleSHIELD solved many of my fingerprint frustrations.
• I’ve adjusted to the touch keyboard and now text like a champ. Yay me.
• I’m super-pissed at reading about my high hopes for our new, fancy mattress that had been delivered the morning I wrote the post. It did nothing to help my back pain. I’ve slept on it just a handful of times. FML.
• I met up with Ed for dinner soon after I got my iPhone—I specifically remember asking him lots of questions, because at that point I was feeling overwhelmed with its features. This past Thursday night, when Ed and I got together for dinner again, we were trying to remember how long it had been since our last date, and figured about a year had gone by, which is shameful. When I read this post just now, I was relieved to find that it had actually been only six months! Still shameful, but we apparently are NOT each other’s worst friends. Whew.

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Back to the iPhone application recommendations.

• I still like Twitterific as my Twitter app. Honestly, though, I twitter so rarely anymore that it’d have to really suck for me not to put up with it. I’ve noticed a lot of other Twitter apps being used and for all I know they could be much, much better. For me, though, Twitterific works just fine. FREE.
• AroundMe uses your location to let you search and find nearby restaurants, stores, etc. It’s handy and easy to use, and more accurate than Nigel Fingerbottom (our British-accented, pompous Garmin GPS). FREE.
• Pandora Radio is personalized music fun. FREE.
• Concerts (by iLike). Ed just told me about this one. It shows all upcoming concerts in the area, and since I’m not the newspaper reader I used to be (and tend to find out about concerts long after they’re sold out or over), I LOVE it. FREE.
• Triazzle. It’s a challenging puzzle game that requires a great deal of concentration and strategy. We’ve had real Triazzle puzzles and I enjoy them. The iPhone version “comes to life” when the correct pieces are matched up. $2.99, although there’s a free “lite” version.
• Toy Story Photo Hunt. This is like that Highlights Magazine thing where you find the differences in two pictures. I just checked for the price on iTunes and it wasn’t there. The game was advertised as a promotional thing for the recent re-release of the Toy Story movies; maybe it was just temporarily available? Too bad for you.
• Skee-Ball (by Gravick FreeVerse). Realistic and waaaay fun. Earn tickets and redeem them for crappy loot, just like at Chuck E. Cheese and Great Wolf Lodge! Only 99¢.
• HuffPost. This is the iPhone version of the Huffington Post. Free.

The other iPhone apps I enjoy but could probably live without:

• Scrabble. $4.99
• Yahtzee Adventures. Fun variations on the classic dice game. $2.99
• Wurdle. Boggle-like game. $1.99
• Wikipanion (free) is a lite version of Wikipanion Plus ($4.99). The plus version has a queue that’s perfect for reading a wiki—pretty cool.

Writing these up makes me think it’d be even more valuable if I kept track of the applications I download/install and then immediately delete. Oh well. Are there any iPhone applications you adore? Please share!