Familie Uhlig

Achim treated himself to an iPhone and asked me for a list of my favorite apps. Since this wasn’t the first time someone asked for my opinion, I decided to write it up.

Before going into the details, I need to say that I don’t claim to have a good overview over what apps are available. So this is more like a list of my personal favorites than a directory. I ordered it by personal preference.

Here is the outline:

• My Personal Favorites
• Other good apps
• Doesn’t work for me
• Fail for me
• On my wishlist

My Personal Favorites

#1 – NetNewsWire

I am a news junkie. I subscribe to more than 200 feeds, and NetNewsWire makes reading them fun. There are two features that stand out: First of all, it is very easy to mark an item as read and skip to the next unread item. Secondly, it allows to mark a whole feed as read, so that all known articles do not appear as new anymore. Plus it syncs with Google Reader (incl. unread marks) – this makes it very easy to add new feeds or continue reading on the PC.

There is only one con – it has advertisements in the article list. If there was a way to pay for the app and get rid of the ads, the app would be the best thing on earth.

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I have been playing with quite a few social network sites in the past (Xing, wkw, LinkedIn, flickr, last.fm). An issue I have with XING in particular is that with a free account, XING does not allow me to export my connections (at least I did not find a way to do that).

After Sebastian convinced me (and, apparently, a few others too) to create a profile on Facebook, I was faced (no pun intended) with the same problem again: How do I synchronize all my contacts between the various sites? After all, most of my professional contacts are on XING. But how can I invite them to Facebook without manually entering all names and addresses again?

This time I decided to solve this issue. I created a Greasemonkey script that steps through all pages of my XING contacts and puts a list of email addresses onto the last page. This allows me to copy and paste them into e.g. Facebook.

Here is the script: xing_export.user.js

Disclaimer: I only tested it on my personal profile, and only with the account language set to German or English. If you give it a try, please let me know how it worked out.

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