Tuesday, July 28, 2009

iPhone Explorations - Update

So a few weeks back I talked about three new apps I planned to try out. Since then I've replaced one, continue to use another, and rarely use the last one.

Twitterfon is a great app; however, I found one that is even better: Twitterrific. Why is Twitterrific better? The biggest difference that I see is that Twitterrific allows you to compress text and URLs BEFORE you post. With Twitterfon and other Twitter apps, you have to go out to tinyurl or other tiny url maker to make the link smaller and then paste that into your tweet. You would also have to look for text that could be replaced with abbreviated text-types. With Twitterrific, you just press a button and boom - text is compressed, and urls are shortened. One feature I do miss on Twitterfon is the ability to look at Tweep's followers/followings. You can see how many followers/followings a Tweep has but you cannot view who they are. That is a minor drawback to this great app. I currently use it for my personal, church, and ky wine lovers tweets.

VR+ was an app I installed to be able to post voice recordings to Twitter, FB, Blogger, etc. I used it for about a week, and just realized that voice tweeting wasn't my thing. Recording voice is not always convenient because you cannot be incognito about it. You need to be in a quiet place, and preferably without others around - otherwise you could look nutty. Nothing wrong with the app if you're into posting recordings; it's just not my thing (for now at least).

BrightKite has remained the lone survivor of my exploration trials. There was a brief period where I forgot to use it, but a friend "nudged" me to remind me to post something. It is superior to Loopt, but Loopt has the live tracking feature which BrightKite does not (you have to check in before someone knows where you are). So I have kept Loopt so my husband and I can keep track of one another, but BrightKite remains my choice for location tweeting. It also works well with FB Connect, and you can even configure the posting templates to include hashtags for Twitter.

In summary: Twitterrific better than Twitterfon; VR+ good app if you do recording tweets; BrightKite superior location app.

A few other apps I've been working with recently that are still in the review stage:

  • BlogPress - best app so far for blogging from your iphone
  • DoGood - increase your good karma with daily "do goods"
  • Quicken - view all of your financial accounts via a quickie app
  • MemoryInfo - short on memory? games crashing? don't reboot, just use this quick app
That's it for now folks, have a good week!

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