My 3rd Party iPhone Apps

It has been 5 Months since I fist got my hands on the glorious piece of aluminum, plastic and glass that we have all come to know, and love, as the iPhone. If I had a choice between my pinky toe and my iPhone I would have a seriously hard time deciding to keep my appendage. But it wasn't always like this...

The iPhone, fresh out of the box, is a great phone. Not only a phone, but an iPod, mini computer, planner and camera all-in-one. After the first month though, the novelty of the iPhone wore off and I was asking myself... "Is this it?" For $600 (later dropped to $400) I thought that my iPhone would cook me breakfast, pack my lunch, and make me dinner. Being a techie I demanded more from my product than the standard applications, and thankfully, along came a little application called "Installer". Installer is a way for you to get user-developed applications onto your iPhone, with the ability to breath new life into your iPhone whenever you want. When I first got Installer, I went crazy and downloaded everything, but now I only have about 20. Here are some of the apps that I am using now.

Customization

The first pic is my current Home screen. It shows you what you can do with all the apps in this category. What it doesn't show is that I can slide the page to the right and have many more pages of apps... I have 3 pages total. The second pic is Installer, the app I use to get everything else. It is organized and updated regularly, plus manages updates and uninstalls. The third pic is Customize and is used to change every small detail of your iPhone. If you notice, I changed the AT&T logo to iPhone, also changed the system sounds and icons, even the backgrounds of Calculator and Notes. The last pic is of Summerboard, an app that lets you install custom themes to your phone. It lets you use different icons and docks as well as customize their behavior.

Games

No cellphone is complete without some games, and the 3rd part developers have not let us down. From left to right we have: Lights Off, Yahtzee, Blackjack, Block, Connect 4, Minesweeper, Solitaire and the best game yet, iPhysics. iPhysics is a simple game where you have to move a ball into a certain area of the screen by manipulating objects around it. Everything acts with the force of gravity and realistic physics so if you want to get the ball up to a higher level, you need to make a catapult or a ramp or something... hard to explain but DEFINITELY get it!

Utilities

These Apps make the iPhone much more like a computer. There is the Screenshot app that I used to take all these pics, an AFP control panel, a full Terminal, a wireless iPhone to iPhone transfer utility called DropCopy, and of course, a full Dictionary (with thesaurus).

Web Apps

These are the apps that really make the difference for me, and make my life easier and more efficient. The iPhone should have had a native Instant Messenger Service, but since it didn't, Apollo came to the rescue. iFlickr takes photos and instantly uploads them to your flickr account. Since the iPhone does not have GPS in this model, Navizon can triangulate your position based on your nearest cell phone towers and is pretty accurate in my area! Netflix is a Netflix queue manager, and iScrobbler is a last fm client, streaming every song I listen to to a server that feeds the left hand column on my front page. My songs are updated in realtime, not just every time I sync.

Other Cool Apps

I don't use these ones much but when I do, I will be glad I have them. Who hasn't used their cellphone as a light source at one time or another? iLight simply turns your phone white to produce the max amount of light and is actually pretty bright. Tuner is a simple, but useful, guitar tuner.

There are literally hundreds of 3rd Party Apps out there and I have looked into most. For me, these apps are the ones I find most useful in my day-to-day operations, and they help make the iPhone everything it is today. If you want them for yourself, Google how to jailbreak your iphone and install "Installer.app". You will find plenty of instructions all over the net.

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