It’s Sunday and time for something a little less serious.
iPhone apps.
Friday I had a one-on-one with my boss, who is a gadget-hound and geek of the highest order. I mean that as a compliment; that’s how it should be in IT. And things have been going very smoothly at work, so I didn’t have much to talk about or requests to make, and when that wound down, my boss pulled out his iPhone 3GS and asked me if I had any cool new apps to recommend to him.
He knows I’m an Apple fan, and that I tend to keep up more on the Apple side of the tech divide than the Microsoft side. It’s fun and awesome, because at work we are massively majority Microsoft on the desktop, but if any questions or issues come up with Mac OS or iPhone, my boss will steer those my way.
Then last night, over at a friend’s house, his wife was asking me what cool iPhone apps I have, too. Apparently the hunger for “the next cool app” is high among iPhone users.
In any case, I looked over the apps I use the most, and realized that most of them are utilities, designed to do a specific task and do it well: I use Quicken to track my money, I use Livestrong to track my diet, Runkeeper to track my running.
The few “cool” apps I have, I actually rarely use. Shazam feels like magic: listen to this song and tell me the title, artist, and lyrics. It’s fun, but I don’t use it all that often.
Dragon Dictation feels like magic, too: transcribe what I’m saying. And it doesn’t fail very often, but when it fails, it’s very humorous. You may think I don’t use it often, and you’d be mostly right. I did, however, use it more in the winter when I was outside, wearing gloves, and needed to send an email or text, which is surprisingly often considering I’m a high text-sender.
(There are gloves out there that let one use a touch screen while wearing them, though, and I’d love to get a pair. Hint, hint.)
My “marquee” cool apps, though, I can really only show off at home: I have a handful of apps that let me control my entertainment system: play music, play a video, let guests pick a song from their iPhone. My major wish is that I could afford a way to let me power on the whole thing with my iPhone, and get rid of the remaining remote control, too. I’m sure there’s an app for that, too – I just can’t afford an upgrade right now.