iPhone apps S/D

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.

Twice as much on the iPad! Bloody hell.

Get meebo, it's great.

Oh I use that now and it's great except that it doesn't do group chat, and it also has this annoying habit of generating a new chat session with someone when I already have one open.

NOSEDIAL

lol

8mm app is very cool. Cheezy test vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW4nYFunxjA

I think I'm going to spring for Cyclemeter (this is pretty much *the* de facto bike app w/r/t route tracing and stuff, right?)

Does anyone have recommendations for portable chargers? I want to get something that'll give my phone a bit of emergency juice with a pair of AA's (NOT a rechargeable battery pack), but all the stuff I've found on Amazon seems really sketchy.

I've been using cyclemeter and it's totally accurate for routes, but a bit iffy for altitude.

for some reason cyclemeter and strava (using gpx data from cyclemeter) give me really different stopped/moving times. but yeah i like cyclemeter.

I ride with a cycling computer on as well and the trip times are always longer on cyclemeter than on the computer (albeit only by a couple of minutes per hour) because cyclemeter seems to take longer to notice when you've stopped moving at lights / junctions.

I tried a couple apps and gave up on them all, the iphone data is all sketchy at best (nb: i have at&t as service provider, not sure if that's what's driving the variances between the iphone and my garmin gps data).

The GPS chip in the iPhone isn't as good as those in a full on GPS. I've read it's not as sensitive and suffers from a small antenna so you pick up fewer satellites and get lower resolution, this is all to save power. You can get a sleeve from magellan which dramatically improves on the GPS performance but I think you have to use their app.

That said, I think the start stop on the garmin will default to the speed/cadence sensor if you have one.

(also nb: i know there is a difference between topo and true gps)