Tag Archives: iPhone applications

I admit it. When in desperate need of a mirror with no bathroom or other females in site, I try and tilt and twist my iPhone to get the perfect glare and touch up what needs to be fixed. It does the trick sometimes and is better than nothing, but today I found something that will solve all of my ‘need a mirror now’ problems forever. And no, it’s not carrying a mirror with me, why would I do that?

DLP Mobile has created a fantastic app for the new iPhone 4  – a mirror. How simple, but brilliant! The Mirror app will utilize the phone’s front-facing camera and hi-res display image to create the perfect and oh-so-handy mirror on your phone!  Also very cool is that the app will make color corrections and has light filters to allow viewing at night or in low lighting.

The app will go on sale on June 24^th, the same day the iPhone 4 is being released out into the wild. My suggestion to all those overnight campers in front of the Apple stores,  download the mirror app asap.

This might be reason enough to keep my iPhone around as an iPod Touch. CardStar is a new app that makes your life a lot easier.

My wallet is filled with various loyalty cards for retail and grocery stores. When I travel, I grab whatever cards are necessary (such as Delta and Hilton) and add those into the mix as well. My keychain has several loyalty cards that are beat to a pulp just from being on my keychain. In fact, my gym now only offers keychain cards. (What were they thinking?)

CardStar can put an end to all of that. You can add many of your loyalty cards, including the scannable bar code, to your iPhone and then the cards can still be scanned in by the cashier. Cool, right?  CardStar has a merchant list of over 130 companies. I noticed right away that they included Kroger, Sam’s Club, Hallmark, Trade Secret, DSW, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Delta Airlines. All of those are in my purse right now.

To make the application work, you just enter your membership number and the app does the rest. It also offers advanced options for adding cards not included in their merchant list – like my gym. Right now, the CardStar app is available for free from the iTunes App Store (iTunes link), although normally it’s 99¢.

While the application is currently only available for Apple mobile devices, they are developing versions for Blackberry, Android, and Palm.

by Michelle Lentz

I promise that bub.blicio.us is not turning into an iPhone blog, contrary to a fair number of posts you’ve seen here lately. What has happened, however, is that with the launch of the App store, the iPhone has turned into a viable mobile computing platform, a personal computer that fits in your pocket. We’d be remiss not to cover some of the excellent applications that are now available.

One of my personal favorites is Pandora, which creates personalized radio from the Music Genome Project. You may have played with the online version of Pandora, which works in the same way.

Once you have installed the iPhone Pandora app, it’s a matter of minutes before you set up your universal (accessible from your desktop and your phone) account. Once your account is set up, you can create your own radio stations. Enter the name of an artist or song you like. Pandora, using the Music Genome Project, analyzes the song and discovers similar songs. The end result is a radio station that plays everything you like.

The Music Genome Project analyzes songs based on rhythm, harmonies, and all sorts of things that all go into a mathematical algorithm. Similar songs have nothing to do with genres or artists. It’s fascinating, and it creates great radio.

You can help Pandora learn your preferences by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to each of the songs it plays. You can also bookmark the song or artist to hear them again, or purchase the song directly from the iPhone iTunes store.

Pandora runs over EDGE, WiFi, and 3G on the 3G and original iPhones running 2.0 software. It’s a free download from the iTunes App Store.
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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

It’s all the news. Literally. Everywhere I’ve turned on the Internet today, I’ve run into iPhone news. So much so that I caved and manually downloaded and installed v2.0 on my original iPhone. Why? I wanted the app store.

It’s almost 5 pm here and I’ve wasted the entire day playing with various applications for the phone. Some of them are useful, some are useless. Some I haven’t figured out yet. They were all free. And I haven’t even started downloading games yet. The Apps store has taken the mobile phone and extended it in ways I hadn’t thought possible.

So far I have downloaded some basics. Here’s a quick rundown:

- The Typepad blogging application allows me to easily blog to my Wine blog and instantly post an update to Twitter about the new post. Pretty nifty.
- Twitteriffic is a local Twitter client for my phone. It has a nice interface, so I look forward to using it.
- Pandora is amazing. I can stream music from self-created stations. Fantastic!
- The Remote application let me access my iTunes playlist from my phone. I hit the Play button and music poured out of my desktop machine. That made my day! I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but I’m highly entertained by it.
- I downloaded the uber-userful Jott application. I use Jott a lot as it is. Now it’s easier than ever to record off what I’m thinking. The iPhone application syncs with the web-based version.
- Along the same lines, I downloaded Evernote. I use Evernote online and on my local machine. Those locations now sync with my iPhone, which is fantastic. I tend to use Evernote in place of bookmarking when I’m researching things.
- I downloaded the simple but useful Google application that puts me quickly into search, maps, and other Google tools.
- The new Facebook application not only gives me notifications but also lets me use the Facebook chat function.
- AIM was a necessity. Sometimes you take that Twitter conversation off-Twitter, and it becomes an IM conversation instead.
- Whrrl looks fun, as does Loopt. As of right now, I’ve only downloaded Whrrl. None of my friends are on it though, so I’m missing a lot of the social part of the social application. I do love the idea of finding where my friends are based on Whrrl mapping.
- BoxOffice is a simple but useful application that will eliminate endless conversations about whether or not, and when, we should see a particular movie. It includes reviews as well as locations and times.
- I haven’t played with Exposure yet, but I understand it’s an easy way to access my Flickr account, and everyone else’s Flickr photos, through the phone. I’ve been waiting for an iPhone Flickr app.

Finally, I downloaded what is probably my favorite (albeit silly) application. Called UrbanSpoon, it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to help you find a restaurant – by chance. Select your city, style of food, and price range. Lock those in. Then shake the iPhone! The dials spin and a restaurant appears. I love this! My husband and I have these endless conversations – “what do you want for dinner? I don’t know, where do you want to go? I don’t care.”  Now I’ll just shake my phone and let the fates decide.

So there you go. I’ve wasted a day and I haven’t even started in on games. The world of the mobile phone is changing by leaps and bounds, all with the addition of extensible apps.
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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.