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.

#2 – RTM

I am using the Getting Things Done method to organize my work, and Remember The Milk has been a nice tool for me so far. Its not great, but for me is the best of those that are available. The RTM app allows me to enter new tasks whereever I am, which makes this one of the most useful apps for me. The UI is still not ideal (too many clicks to change something), but it does the job.

#3 – Facebook

The iPhone made me a much heavier user of Facebook than I was before. It makes it rather easy to read live feed, add new stuff or browse the photos. I don’t use it for photo upload anymore since Best Camera, which has great Facebook support, came out.

#4 – Best Camera

This one opened new doors for me. Not only can I make the pictures I took with the iPhone look reasonable, it also excels at sharing the images. Mail, iPhone photo library, Facebook – all can be updated with this app. The only missing piece is flickr, but that’s easy to solve with the upload address flickr assigns to each account.

Sending my pictures to The Best Camery seems not worth for me, there are too many out there.

#5 – WeatherPro

I never was much interested in weather until I started sailing. It turns out that the wind forecasts are pretty reliable, even on the ever-chaning Lake Constance.

#6 – Dropbox

This app is a logical extension to the Dropbox world. I already used Dropbox for file sharing between Windows and Linux boxes, but now this is extended to the iPhone. Especially nice is that a file can be tagged as a favorite, which will then cause Dropbox to download the file to the iPhone. As a result, the file will be able off-line (which is important when you traval abroad, because it saves you from the outrageous roaming fees your provider charges).

#7 – BeejiveIM

I thought this would become my favorite, but somehow hasn’t taken off. Which is not the app’s fault – it is brilliant. It is a decent IM client, but the best part is that it holds your IM state even if the app is not running. So I always appear online in the Jabber network, and as soon someone sends me a message, Beejive will send a notification to my iPhone and I can reply.

The reason that it doesn’t work for me is more because IM seems to play less a role in my communication habits. That’s different for my workplace where I am a heavy user of Sametime, but ST one is not available in BeejiveIM.

#8 – LinkedIn

To me, this is basically an addressbook where everyone maintains his own record.

#9 – Skype

Skype is not allowed at my workplace, so this app allows me to chat and take calls using Skype. I also bought some SkypeOut credit, so that I can dial into the plain old telephone network. This comes in handy when I am in the U.S. where the roaming costs for my T-Mobile contract are way too high.

What is missing in Skype is a service that keeps me signed in and pings my iPhone if someone tries to reach me (like with Beejive above).

#10 – Trails

I use it for looking at my sailing and bike trails. I don’t record trails with it (although it is able to), just because I have a dedicated GPS logger that runs for days and records thousands of waypoints on a single battery charge. I wish I could say the same for the iPhone

What makes Trails great is the map cache – you can download any part of the map while online and use it offline (e.g. when abroad). Positioning, tracking, map visualization all work great with downloaded maps.

#11 – WifiTrak

Lists available WiFi networks. What makes WifiTrak special to me are two features:

• First, it allows “war driving”, i.e. it can continously scan for open networks, connects to them if found and then alerts the user. This is great for finding open hotspots while walking through a city.
• Second, its reception seems to be much more sensitive that the stock iPhone WLAN client. I had a number of occasions when the Settings app displayed no network, while WifiTrak showed one and even connected to it succesfully.

What I don’t like about it is that it seems to loose the connection after a couple of minutes of not using it. In that case, I have to go to the Settings app and re-connect to the just-found network.

#12 – XING

Same as with LinkedIn, but what I especially like is that you can click on someone’s phone number and the iPhone will dial right away.

#13 – ZugInfo

Having access to the timetables of Deutsche Bahn is useful for me. I take the train for business trips whenever I can, and this app enables me to look up the next connection while I am on the go.

#14 – dict.cc

On the PC I use the dictionary programs LingoPad and Beolingus (which are based on the same dictionary). For offline use I found dict.cc to be pretty useful.

Other good apps

I do own these apps, I have used them to some extend, and I think the concept is good. But somehow I did not use them as often as the ones above.

Bookmarks

Makes your delicious bookmarks available on the iPhone. I don’t use it very often, because I am used to the great integration of delicious into Firefox. Having this as a separate app (rather than integrated into Safari on the iPhone) makes it less useful for me.

Boxee

I only recently started to use the Boxee HTPC software, and the iPhone is rather nice as an advanced remote control. But with the lack of experience I cannot say much more about it.

FStream

I love listening to ETN.fm, and as a streaming client FStream works flawlessly. I just don’t use it very often.

Fahrplan

Not as good as ZugInfo regarding the UI, but the app is still pretty useful e.g. for the U-Bahn in Stuttgart.

Fernsehen (TV Spielfilm)

When I bought it, I hoped to better leverage the German fee for owning a TV set (GEZ). Did not work out for me – the program doesn’t get better, however great a TV guide might be. The app itself is rather nice, although not adhering to iPhone UI guidelines.

Flickit

I used to use this one to upload pictures to flickr, but since I came across Best Camera, I don’t use it very often anymore.

Free RSS

Before NetNewsWire I used this one as a feed reader. It is missing the “jump to next unread article” feature I love so much in NetNewsWire.

Last.fm

I do post selected tracks I am listening to to last.fm, but I found no real use for this app. If you like the artist radio function of last.fm, this app might be for you. Its main drawback is the same as any streaming app – it cannot play in the background.

MobileButler

Very good on checking your T-Mobile account (e.g. traffic limits). I seem not to exceed my prepaid traffic, so I don’t use it very often anymore.

Stanza

I wish I could read more. Stanza is a nice app for reading books on the iPhone, but I just seem not to find the right content.

NewsTapLite

I used to follow a number of Usenet newsgroups, and NewsTapLite is a good NNTP client (the lite version I own can only subscribe to a single group). What definitely needs to improve is how to mark a whole thread as read, and again I am missing “jump to next unread article”.

VoiceNotes

Before Voice Memo was added to the iPhone, it served me well as a voice recorder.

WordPress

I used it only once, but then this client for WordPress served me well.

heise.de

heise.de is one of my favorite news sites. This app does a good job on making the news as well as the heise forums available on the iPhone. But I cannot stand the UI and its clumsy way of dealing with discussion threads in the forum. Plus, I don’t need yet another Inbox. If only heise would provide full RSS feeds and not just teasers to the real news …

iHappyDays

The concept is good, and kudos for not opening another jar of data. iHappyDays reads birthdays from the iPhone addressbook. The trouble for me is that I need to open the app in order to see upcoming birthdays. I would even pay money for an alert system that sends me a message whenever a birthday of any contact in my address book is about to come up.

klickTel

Good as a phone book, but I don’t need it very often.

Doesn’t work for me

These apps are working fine, but seem not to fit my personal needs. I almost never use them anymore.

Air Sharing

I thought I would use this app very often, but the fact that I need to be on a WLAN in order to be able to access my iPhone as a data store simply doesn’t work for me. I guess it is much better for an iPod touch user.

AroundMe

Good concept, but it turns out that I don’t all these restaurants, pharmacies, shopping malls that are around me.

CodeWatch

Watching github with this app is not very entertaining for me. I like github itself, and the news feed is interesting, but I could not find a way to make good use of this app.

Dopplr

As useful as the Dopplr site is, the app does not provide enough added value for me.

G-Park

I loved it when I first heard about the app, but I simply did not find the need for it. I usually remember where I left my car, and if all fails I take a picture of the street signs at the next corner.

RssRunner

Could not find anything that Free RSS doesn’t do better.

Night Stand

As a clock it looks nice, but I prefer to not have the iPhone on all night. Would fit much better as an iPhone screen saver.

Qype Radar

Same story as AroundMe.

Sputnik Streaming App

I take this as an example of a useless iPhone app. It works, but it is ridiculous to develop another app that is nothing more than a branded, but crippled, streaming client. Instead of developing their own client, Sputnik (or the mdr) should have provided sufficient information on how to consume their program using a standard streaming client.

TouchTerm

I thought the idea of an SSH client on the iPhone was great, but I never found a need for it.

WikiMe

An iPhone-friendly wiki client is a good idea, but since Wikipedia offers a mobile online version, the browser is enough Wikipedia client I need.

Wikipanion

see WikiMe

Fail for me

These apps do not work for me at all:

GPS LTE

There is too much functionality crammed into this GPS app. It plays mp3s, records GPS tracks, is a map client, compass, logbook, etc.

Besides that, it takes ages to start, drains the battery and does not follow any UI standard at all.

Songtext

I loved it when I first used it: It downloaded the lyrics of the currently iPhone playing song and displayed it.

Too bad that the lyrics source was brought down by the content mafiaproviders.

On my wishlist

iKeePass

Before using KeePass, I never wrote down any passwords because it was a security malpractice. As a result, I used the same, albeit pretty secure, pass phrase everywhere – which is another security malpractice.

I love KeePass on the PC, and I am anxious to see iKeePass appear in the European iTunes store.

Salling Clicker

I used to use this remote control program on my old Nokia phone. It was great for controlling PowerPoint presentations using Bluetooth. Unfortunately, there seem to be no plans to create a version for the iPhone.

–

PS: Here is how I extracted the icons for this post: The apps are located in a subdirectory of the iTunes folder called “Mobile Applications”. An ipa file is really just a ZIP file, and opened with unzip it reveals a file called iTunesArtwork which really is a JPEG file.

All in one line:


find "/cygdrive/m/iTunes/Mobile Applications" -name "*.ipa" -exec unzip '{}' iTunesArtwork \; -exec mv iTunesArtwork '{}'.jpg \;


My iTunes data folder is in m:\ITunes. I am executing the script above in a cygwin bash, so that the iTunes folder becomes /cygdrive/m/iTunes.

With ImageMagick’s convert installed and in the path, I resized the images to be 48 by 48 pixels:


find . -name "*.ipa.jpg" -exec convert {} -resize 48x48 {} \;