This post started life as a list of a few recommendations for Mark Thompson, who doesn’t seem to have many of my favourite iPhone apps at all. Having got started, though, I got bored of writing it and gave up. I then saw to my horror that Mark had gone and posted his own list of 10 favourite apps (including two I’d recommended to him, Instapaper and Reeder) – and now Will Howells has added 10 more favourites, and Nick Thornsby 10 more to that. It’s almost turning into a meme.
So, I’m sure you’re thrilled to learn, I’ve revived this post and finished it off. Behold: a list. Every one of these apps is, as far as I’m concerned, the best in its class. Featured below you will find the best Twitter client; the best RSS reader; the best book reader; the best shopping list manager and the best game, amongst others. If there’s an app on there you don’t have, you’re doing it wrong. That is all.
Pastebot
Tapbots, £1.79 — Pastebot is, to me, like the glue which sticks the whole iPhone experience together. Quite simply, Pastebot manages clippings of text and images that you’ve copied and pasted from anywhere else on your iPhone. Copy some text or an image, open Pastebot, and Pastebot will import it into the library, where it can be stored, retrieved, edited and organised.
Even better, though, this app has a full image editor built into it, so you can copy an image, put it into Pastebot and then crop it, apply filters, set the brightness and saturation and then copy it elsewhere. You can also edit text within the app, with Search & replace functions, smart quotes, upper/lower case conversion and even HTML functions like wrapping the text in HTML tags and decoding and encoding HTML entities. And, if you have a Mac, Tapbots have made a companion app for the Mac called Pastebot Sync which transfers clippings between phone and Mac over a WiFi network. You just run the program, connect the phone, and anything you copy on the Mac will be transferred over to the phone.
Also, this app is beautiful. If you don’t have Pastebot, you don’t have a real iPhone.
Groceries
Sophiestication, £1.19 — Groceries makes putting together shopping lists simple and easy. It’s clearly been made with a focus on ease of use while walking round a shop. Items on your list are sorted automatically into ‘aisles’, and tapping on an item strikes it out. You can create multiple shopping lists – so you can, for instance, have a ‘Tesco’ list and a ‘High Street’ list, allowing you to separate items by location. You can also send lists to other people by email, and automatically import lists from emails back into Groceries, giving you the ability to share shopping lists quickly and easily.
I suppose the most ringing endorsement of Groceries I can give is that this app is basically the only reason my wife’s iPod Touch gets used for anything more than music.
Movies
Flixster – Free — In my experience, it’s unusual for the free application to be the best one, but Movies by Flixster must be the exception which proves the rule.
Movies is one of the great ’showing off’ apps – want to go to the cinema? Open up Movies, it’ll bring up a list of the closest cinemas to you. Then you can find showtimes, trailers and reviews from Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster. And if the movie you’re looking for doesn’t appear to be on you can search all local cinemas, including independents, to see if you can find a screen that’s showing it.
IMDB
IMDB.com – Free — OK, yeah, another free movies app. We’ve all used the Internet Movie Database before, I’m sure. I have trouble using the IMDB web site on my iPhone since the text is very small, and the search boxes are difficult to hit with my fat fingers. Of course, my iPhone is exactly what I end up using when I’m sat in front of a movie and want to know what film I’ve seen that actor in before.
Thankfully, three days ago (on Feb 17th) IMDB brought out their very own iPhone app – and I’ve tried it, and it’s good! It’s really easy and quick to use, and perfect as a handheld reference for when you’re watching a movie. In fact, it’s everything I’ve been wishing somebody would make for IMDB for months and months, and it’s free!
In fact, if only IMDB had cinema listings for the UK it might make Filckster irrelevant. If only it had a nicer icon. It’s like a little ugly rash on my home screen. Eurgh.
National Rail Enquiries
National Rail, £4.99 — If you ever find yourself wanting to catch a train, you want to have this app with you. National Rail provides live departure boards for all of the UK’s train stations, including details such as which platform the train is leaving from and what time it is expected to arrive. The app also lets you see the live progress of a trains along its route, so if you’re on a train you can see where on your journey you are right now.
Also included, naturally, is a pretty powerful journey planner, allowing you to save favourite journeys and look up train times. The app can also display the location of any train station on a map, and has a neat ‘next train home’ feature, which uses your iPhone’s current GPS location to find the nearest station to you, then plans a route back to your ‘home’ station.
The only thing it doesn’t do is make reservations. But we can’t expect everything…
Tweetie 2
Atebits, £1.79 — Admit it, you do have Tweetie. Everyone has Tweetie. I don’t need to go on about Tweetie – Mark and Will both included Tweetie as well. It is, simply, the best iPhone Twitter client, and probably the closest you can get to a perfect iPhone app. This app, if you’ll excuse me sounding like a complete luvvie for a moment, has actually altered the UI grammar of iPhone apps for me. Every time I get to the top of a refreshable list, in Facebook or even in Mail, I tug uselessly on it in the vain hope that this will make it refresh (you’ll see what I mean when you try it). I keep swiping my finger sideways across rows in tables in other apps to try and find hidden options, and usually end up disappointed.
If you use Twitter at all, Tweetie is just the obvious choice.
Reeder
Silvio Rizzi, £1.79 — Mark did an excellent job of reviewing Reeder, so I won’t go on about it, but this is, so far as I’ve been able to tell, the best RSS reader app out there. I’ve heard good things about Byline, which has been around longer, but I can’t see what could top this beautiful, fast, easy and full featured.
I’ve used a few RSS readers in my time, from the Google Reader web app to the self-hosted Fever (still awesome, but quite slow) to NetNewsWire (which I still use on the Mac). None of them have suited me as well as Reeder.
Eucalyptus
Things Made Out of Other Things – £5.99 — Eucalyptus is a book reader. The iPhone isn’t short of these, but Eucalyptus is the best. When reading in Eucalyptus, you could almost believe that you are looking at a picture of an actual book. Text is properly typeset – justified left and right with hyphenation to prevent huge gaps appearing between words. The page-turn animation follows your finger with such pleasing realism that I often find myself idly fiddling with the corner of the pages whilst reading; far better than some other book readers which simply seem to play a video of a page turning when you want to move on.
It doesn’t have all the features of its free competitor Stanza – Eucalyptus won’t let you import your own books, for instance, or download books from anywhere other than Project Gutenberg. Thankfully, Gutenberg has such a wide variety of classic literature that it’s tough to get too upset about this. There are now also dedicated versions of Eucalyptus for commercial books, including one for The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which includes a whole bunch of extra content as well as the book (The whole series is available for purchase in-app, at £4.99 a pop. Admittedly, that’s a bit too steep for me…)
Ramp Champ
The Iconfactory/DS Media Labs, £1.19 — Ramp Champ is a ball game. An addictive, frustrating, challenging and temperamental one. It’s quite a difficult game to describe, and it’s even more difficult to explain why I like it so much. Before all of that, though, this app is also truly gorgeous. The graphics are absolutely stunning and the sounds and music are perfect (you can actually buy the Ramp Champ soundtrack as an album from the iTunes Music Store). Even the icon just oozes style.
To play Ramp Champ you flick balls up a ramp, aiming at targets and scoring points when you knock them down, and collecting fairground tickets which can be exchanged for prizes – but the complexity rapidly ramps up (sorry) as you progress through various goals and challenges. The app comes with 4 ramps, each of which has three challenges, and you get a trophy for your shelf every time you complete a challenge. You can buy more ramps in ‘Ramp Packs’ which each contain two new ramps and cost 59p. Some of the challenges are quite obscure or cryptic (‘Tip over the canine bovine’ springs to mind as a particularly tough nut to crack) and all of them are a challenge to achieve – sometimes requiring a run of 9 perfect throws to hit moving targets. It’s the combination of puzzle and skill game which makes for such a time-consuming addiction.
Ramp Champ comes highly recommended from me – and also from my 4 year old daughter, who is a surprisingly skilful ramp champion for her age…
Glyphboard
Neven Mrgan, Free — Ever been frustrated by the fact that commonly used unicode characters like ™, ©, ½ or ✔ and even less common ones like ♫ and ☺ don’t appear on the iPhone’s keyboard? Fear no longer, for Glyphboard is here!
Glyphboard isn’t actually a native iPhone app and you don’t have to download it from iTunes – all you need do is point your web browser at the app’s website and tap the ‘+’ button to add it to your home screen. Once opened, it displays a grid of semi-common characters which aren’t on the iPhone’s standard keyboard, and you simply tap on a character to copy it and paste it wherever you like. Simples!