Favorite iPhone apps: Robert’s take

Now that Steve, Victor, and Mike have all made their opinions clear, I get to tell you what apps I use most on my iPod touch.

My first favorite is Exposure, an app that lets you browse Flickr photos. Personally, my favorite thing to do in a boring phone meeting is to browse Flickr’s “Featured” category, and find new wallpaper for my iPod. Which leads me to my only feature request: it doesn’t let you save images to the local “Saved Photos” album. (What you can do, however, is open the image in Safari, and save it from there.) Exposure does much more than this, too — browsing photos taken nearby, or searching for photos by keyword. Exposure is a great image browser all around, and it’s free, but ad-supported. A premium version (sans ads) is $9.99.

The second is time:calc. It may seem a little strange, but I’ve always wanted a calculator that figures time instead of decimal numbers. As a freelancer, some of my contracts are retainer-based, so I have to calculate how much time I have left for a particular task after work has been done. time:calc does this effortlessly: just enter hours, minutes and seconds, and use mathematical operators as you would a normal calculator. For video editing, it also includes support for time code in a wide variety of frame rates. time:calc is $1.99, and well worth it.
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New iPod Nano Mock-up Takes the Sting Out of the New iPod Nano

I can’t speak for everyone in the room, but I’m not all that excited about the possibility of the iPod nano returning to its long, skinny origins. Originally repulsed by the latest iteration of nano, the deformed, squat body won me over the first time I actually held it in my hand. And it instantly made the styling of its thin predecessor seem like a vanity device—a lipstick-like accessory, not something designed to easily play my music. Anyway, these concept mock-ups by flickr’s Umpa reminded me that skinny is still pretty hot. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 4% [?]

Spore iPod game now in iTunes

iPhone-wielding gamers rejoiced when EA announced a version of Spore for the iPhone, set to debut in September of this year (check out our hands-on with Spore). This week, click wheel iPod owners got a leg up, as Spore: Origins is now available in the iTunes Store [link].

Origins, as the name implies, lets players experience the 1st level of the game, in which you guide a single-cell organism through the primordial ooze. Game play is straight forward: Use the click wheel to guide Jr. around, and the center button to eat other organisms he finds. No word on sharing your progress with the full game once it’s released on September 7th.

If you really can’t wait, you can also download the desktop Creature Creator. Spore: Origins for iPod costs $4.99US.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Is This Case for the New iPod Nano?

We’re not sure whether this case is for the real upcoming iPod nano or it’s just a speculative fabrication. but its elongated design mimics the same style of the Kevin Rose rendering that we came out last week. I’ll tell you though, if Apple released a short, fat iPod just to go back to the tall, skinny design, it’s confirmed—Jonathan Ive really is exploiting the public as part of some larger, demented bet with Steve Jobs. [Alibaba via MacRumors]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Apple’s tasty calculator mistake

In a recent tip, Apple reader Dr. Drang told us about a bug he found on the iPhone/iPod touch’s calculator. According to his research, when you type π × 2 + 5 = into the calculator you get 11.283… (the correct answer). However, when you reverse the Pi and 2, entering 2 × π + 5, the answer given is 7.

This error can be demonstrated by entering Pi (3.141592654) manually, instead of using the Pi button — you will get the correct answer each time. Therefore, this error only shows up when you use the Pi button.

So, be sure to read up on this bug from the tipsters website before you use the calculator for anything too important.

Thanks for the tip, Dr. Drang! [Read]

Popularity: 2% [?]