iPhone apps S/D

I love my iPad and its supposedly shitty screen.

Oh no, if I hold it four inches from my screen I can make out a pixel. How will I read on this thing??

From my EYES rather.

apps guys, apps.

like, i'm begining to wonder about you cult of apple guys... you never really use many apps?

this is like a really glossy blackber

black beiber

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I have lots of apps but they are mostly iPad specific.

I use loads of apps.

Spotify is such an amazing thing since multitasking arrived.
Tube Exits makes every journey less stressful
Encyclopedia, the offline dump of Wikipedia, is a wonder (and great on tube journeys)
Tune In Radio is beautifully done
Drop7 keeps me entertained whenever I have a few seconds to spare

For the iPad, Amazon Windowshopper, Wikihood and Flipboard are all presenting information in ways that exploit the fluidity of the interface.

Others I use a lot: Shazam, Reeder, Kindle, Instapaper, Osfoora, Chambers dictionary, London A-Z, Dragon Dictation, Appbox, Flixster, Cineworld, Train Times, Tube Deluxe, Camera Bag, Find iPhone, Air Video, Remote, Shapewriter, CineXPlayer (have they fixed VLC yet?), Birds UK

What's wrong w/ VLC? Matroska?

After one of the updates, divx files would freeze every 10 mins or so.

http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=83793

(this is the iPad version, btw)

Ah, according to that thread, iOS 4.2.1 has fixed the problem.

What's the difference between Encyclopedia and Wikipanion?

I probably use Hipstamatic and Toy Camera more than I use any other apps, except maybe Yelp which is about six million times better in app form than the web version.

the only way that could be true is if the yelp app removes all of the reviews

the only way that could be true is if the yelp app removes all of the reviews

it sorta does? like they're not right there being annoying. I use it to see what's close/good, and get the phone number or w/e.

And you can call the restaurant directly from the screen, map the location and get immediate directions. And yeah the annoying reviews are much less obtrusive. Only thing that would make it better is if you could link directly to reserve with OpenTable app.

Yelp is a really cheap and effective way of viewing a message that says 'this service is not available in your country'.

so is spotify

Wikipanion is just an interface to WIkipedia.

Encyclopedia lets you download a dump of the core of Wikipedia itself, taking about 2GB. So you can browse a version (a few months old, updatable every so often) when you're offline. It's a bit messy sometimes, and you can only search by the start of the entry name itself, but for many purposes, it's quite adequate.

But the main thing is just boggling at having all that information stored on your phone.

$12 for free content + $1.19 for an updated dump of information? Rip imo.

(AU$)

Maybe. I don't know how to judge with these things – iPhone apps are so cheap that a relative rip-off doesn't really mean much to me. Five pounds is the price of a pint and a half in the pub. For that I can hold the ENTIRE CORPUS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE* IN MY POCKET.

*may not actually be true

I mean, people used to text some stupid number to get answers to a single question for a pound.

Fair point.

2gb for an offline wiki - how much does hd space does the iphone have? and how many gb is online wiki?

is shazam still 50p per song ID or does the iphone app do it for free? quite surprised no one has done a free ad-funded version of shazam, maybe the whole concept of using a phone to ID a song copyrighted to shamazbods.

all this is making the iphone sound v tempting. i hate apple's OS and 'charge for EVERYTHING' policy though, what are the strongest rivals with as many equivalent apps? could i read an e-book on a blackberry for instance?

Nothing rivals the app store, and you don't have to pay for everything. Loads of stuff is free. Maybe I misunderstood you.

android is the strongest rival and it suxx

Tube Exits makes every journey less stressful

o_O at myself that i have thought for ages that this should be an app (i used to have the map), have never actually checked.

there's no per-song charge for shazam

I thought you only get a certain number of free ones.

Yeah it's five per month, I think?

Yes, but Sound Hound is p much the same thing and also has 5 free a month. Get them both and you'll get ten!

I bought soundhound. I think it works better overall.

I think soundhound is unlimited free now.

iPad screen is fine for most things, but still strikes me as low-res for books, where I'm not comparing to iPhone but to print.

It has got a load better since they added Georgia though, which is made for relatively low-res screens, instead of the fragile rubbish version of Palatino they had before.

book

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/book_26x.jpg

kindle

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/kindle_26x.jpg

ipad

http://www.bit-101.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ipad_26x.jpg

Those diagrams tell the story pretty accurately. You can see the pixels on an e-ink screen but it's all so fuzzy and approximate that it doesn't actually matter. E-ink is far and away the best for reading.

they're not diagrams btw http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2722

Replying with 'wah wah diagrams who cares' would make me a giant hypocrite, so yes.

If you get Shazam Encore (£3.49) then you get unlimited tagging.

hd space does the iphone have? and how many gb is online wiki?

Well, it's flash memory, not hd, but either 16GB or 32GB. You can also still get the old 3GS as an 8GB model.

Online wiki? Dunno. The Encyclopedia app version loses all photos and graphics, as you might expect. However, it also loses information in tables, which I've most often noticed as a problem when discographies of bands are presented in that way.

btw (aa here) this is the same site's look at the Kindle 3 if anyone cares: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=2750

I must say I do most of my intensive reading indoors and in the evening, in a room lit only by a bedside lamp. Given that those are the conditions under which iPad has been found to outperform e-ink readers for readability, that perhaps explains my bafflement at the notion that it's hard to read on an iPad.

Yeah but books are not backlit so I don't consider that to be a disadvantage.

It's not so much that it's hard to read for me, it's just that I'm a snob and it bugs me all the time with its jaggies. I'm the same on Windows: its font smoothing annoys me so much I always install Safari.

Books are the worst. The shadows of the binding bother me. And not being able to change the font size.

And you have to turn to the index in the back to do a search on the text.

+ BeeJive is on sale at 50% off!
- Still cannot be convinced that $4.99 is a bargain for an IM client.

In the age of Twitter, it's not.