First Week with the iPhone: The Apps (part 2)

Here’s the second part of the iPhone app roundup. Just like the first iPhone app review post, I will be doing a quick description and review of the apps listen on my iPhone pages . Also, assume all of the apps are free unless otherwise noted.

Page 3 – Food and Fitness

Starbucks[iTunes link] – Make your own overpriced coffee. This app shows where Starbucks locations are around your current location. Finally, there are descriptions for the various Starbucks coffee blends.

DailyBurn[iTunes link] – Track your workouts and calories. This is the iPhone app for the larger dailyburn web app. The iPhone app makes it easy to find and join workout programs with others. There is a exercise finder feature to see a list of exercises for different body areas. The exercises have descriptions of how to do the lift and some have a video demoing the lift. The Nutrition Log is also a great feature to help track all your calories conveniently. It gives a dashboard view of your daily calories along with the breakdown of fat, protein and carbs. If you are needing a good fitness app, this is it. It beautifully marries workouts and calories to deliver exactly what one needs when getting serious about losing weight or getting buff.

Nutrition[iTunes link](paid app) – I bought a while ago when my wife was doing Weight Watchers. It’s as massive collection of the nutritional information from restaurants, mainly US. The DailyBurn app usually finds the item I’m looking for so I rarely have to use this one. One feature that it has over the DailyBurn is that it doesn’t require an internet connection. Personally, I’m sticking with DailyBurn because it has the workouts with it and because I can track my info through a main webpage.

SixPack App[iTunes link] – A collection of exercises you can do. Each exercise shows pictures of how to do it, what muscles it uses and what to be careful not to do during the exercise. It’s free because it’s heavily ad supported, so that can get in the way.

Lose It[iTunes link] – A calorie tracker. Input the food you ate and the exercise you did. It doesn’t add anything over what the dailyburn app does. After doing these reviews I decided to delete it since it’s just duplicate functionality.

RunKeeper Pro[iTunes link](paid app) – RunKeeper uses the iPhone GPS to track your running. It has been pretty accurate from my limited trials. There are audio cues along the to way let you know how you are doing on distance and time throughout your run. One thing that recently got added was the ability to track your treadmill running with this app also, so you can get a complete idea of how much you are running each week. The app is pricy, but if you are a runner, then it’s worth the price, so long as you have good GPS coverage where you run. I hope the app improves mainly on its options for audio playback during a run. Currently you can only pick from a playlist in your iPod. When you start your run the playlist stops, but when you stop your run it keeps going. Also, I would prefer to listen to an audiobook while I run instead of music, so I wish the app could run in the background so that I can use my audiobook app, Bookmark, while running.

UrbanSpoon[iTunes link]– Helps finds restaurants by giving options around you and letting you filter by price or cuisine type. A good app for those times when nobody will make a decision on where to eat. Just let the app pick.

All Recipes[iTunes link] – All Recipes is a fantastic meal finder app. Search for meals and get the recipe, nutritional info and reviews of the meal. Another nice feature is what the app calls Spinner. You search for a meal based off of three criteria: Dish Type(entree, appetizer, etc.), Ingredient(Beef, vegetable, etc.), Total Cook Time. After the three criteria are chosen, the app returns meals based off your criteria.

What’s Fresh[iTunes link](paid) – View fruits and vegetables that are fresh around the county. Great for people who like to eat/cook food that is in season. It lets you choose different months and states to see what comes in season then.

Harvest[iTunes link](paid) – Harvest gives descriptions on how to select and store produce. Don’t get caught bringing home an overripe avocado again. A very useful app for people who do lots of cooking and want to learn more about getting the best from fruits and veggies.

Grocery IQ[iTunes link](paid) – This is a grocery list app. Add your items to the list and the app will organize the list by items found in the same isle. You can reorder the isles based of which grocery store you are visiting. This app is ok for what it is, but I was hoping for much more. It contains a good selection of products in its database so finding the food to add to the list is easy enough. The app makes adding these items and checking them off the list pretty effortlessly. My problem is the way it handles stores. This app makes you add items to a store list, such as Publix, then that Publix list can be customized to organize the aisles that the store is arranged in. So if I add my items to my Publix list throughout the week, and then happen to be near a Kroger, my list is out of order. I would much rather add my items to a general “grocery list” and then when I walk into a Publix, the app is smart enough, through location-based services, to recognize I’m in Publix and organize my list for Publix. If I went to Kroger then the list organizes for that store. The app is still worth the price, and I know that it would be a pain to develop what I’m asking for, but it is something that would make the app more intuitive and useful.

Locavore[iTunes link](paid) – Locavore is similar to What’s Fresh, by giving a list of what foods are in season near me. This one also has a Farmer’s Market angle by giving a list of Farmer’s Markets that are around my current location, so that I can go get my fresh foods. I purchased this one before I bought What’s Fresh. Had I bought What’s Fresh first, I would probably have just stuck with it. The two are very similar with What’s Fresh being slightly better.

Page 4 – Mostly Designer or Freelancer Related Apps

Pandora[iTunes link] – Streaming Internet Radio. A good selection of stations, all seem to be of good quality.

Shazam[iTunes link] – Hold Shazam up to some music that’s playing and it will tell you the song being played and give you some options to purchase it.

DropBox[iTunes link] – Dropbox is a cloud-based storage service. Install dropbox on multiple machines to give them a dropbox folder. Whatever you put into that dropbox folder is available to the other machines with dropbox on them. With the iPhone app, now I can see those files on my iPhone. The app does what it’s supposed to do, but since most of my stuff in my dropbox is more backup type items, mainly code, I rarely ever have a need or ability to view them from my iPhone. The app would be fantastic if it could allow my iPhone to be treated as a mountable drive. I know there are a few apps that do that already, but having that tied to my stuff in my dropbox would be exactly what I’d want. If it could do this, then I’d put my must have executables in a folder on it so that I can always get access to them.

Flickr[iTunes link]- View others Flickr streams. Upload and manager your own Flickr stream.

Sketches[iTunes link](paid) – A glorified doodle app. The app provides a decent selection of brushes and colors to make doodles with. Overall, the app feels overpriced to me. I would consider buying it’s main competitor Layers[iTunes Link], but I use this one so infrequently that I doubt I’d use the other one more.

WordPress[iTunes link] – Control your blog from the palm of your hand. This is the second version of the app. The first one was mediocre, by not provided an interface that felt designed for iPhone usage. The second version is a huge improvement in that area. Controlling comments, posts and pages is now intuitive. Personally I wouldn’t want to write a post from my iPhone, but I would use it to make a typo correction or if I needed to publish/unpublish something. This app is perfect for managing comments though. If you’re a WordPresser, then it’s a no brainer.

Skype[iTunes link] – Make skype calls with your iPhone. I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t be of much service in the review department.

What the Font[iTunes link] – This one is definitely more for the designer types. Snap a picture of a font, upload it and it will try to tell you what typeface you are looking at. I’ve tried it a couple times, but it didn’t work well for me. I’m not positive, but it seems as though most of the typefaces it recommends are ones that must be bought from a foundry. So perhaps this app gets some affiliate money if people buy the typeface. If it’s doing that then the list of possible results is going to be limited. It’s a free app and fun to play with at least. Hopefully its accuracy will improve.

Evernote[iTunes link] – The app version of the popular note taking/tracking evernote.com. This app lets you take voice notes, text notes or picture notes. I’m not a note taking person, but I do use this app to help catalogue inspiration for me. Since evernote uses tags for the notes, I will snap a image of something that inspires me, such as a texture or pattern, and tag it with whatever I associate with it.

WHERE[iTunes link] – WHERE is essentially a dashboard of pertinent local information. Start up WHERE and it will show you things like recommended restaurants, current weather, gas prices, news and traffic updates. The app is a good example of the power of harnessing multiple data feeds and presenting them in a useable manner.

Mill Colour[iTunes link] – Mill Colour allows you to alter the color and tonal values of images. It’s a very powerful app considering it’s free. If you can’t or don’t want to take your images into Photoshop for minor color correction, then Mill Colour is your guy. It comes with a nice collection of preset filters. You can also get very granular and tweak individual controls such as, lift, gamma and gain.

Photoshop Mobile[iTunes link] – Adobe’s official Photoshop iPhone app. This app is similar to the Mill Colour app, but provides a few extra things. The app will let you crop and rotate image. You can adjust the exposure, saturation and tint of images. The app also provides a couple of filters to give your image a sketch or soft focus effect. The app is a quality free app and a good complement to the Mill Colour app. Hopefully Adobe will update the app with more filters to choose from.

MiniBooks Lite[iTunes link] – MiniBooks is an app that lets you manage and use your FreshBooks account. FreshBooks is a popular online accounting and invoicing service. This lite version lets you do most things you’d desire, such as make an invoice, view client information or input timesheet details. The lite version doesn’t have a way to track expenses. The app is not officially supported by the FreshBook group.  It hooks into your data by using FreshBook’s puplic API. Give this app your API key and you’re good to go. A useful app if you are a frequent FreshBooks user.

Page 5 – The Apps I never use but can’t delete, expect for Bump

Bump[iTunes link] – Bump your iPhone with someone else who has Bump to exchange contact information with that person. The app works well and lets you choose what information you’d like to share with others. I never use it, but you never know when someone might wanna bump. I don’t want to be embarrassed by not being able to bump back with them, so I keep the app here.

That’s it for the app reviews. I still have to do my iPhone accessories review and then you’ll be free from the iPhone related post for the foreseeable future.