Another two handy IPhone apps – Shazam and Stanza

I’ve got a couple more IPhone apps to add to my previous list of apps.

Shazam

This is the IPhone version of the popular phone service. Just open up the app, tap on “tag music” and it’ll have a crack at identifying whatever music you’re listening to. Seems to work well so far, although I haven’t tested it with anything obscure or in noisy areas.

Conceptually this is pretty close to what we’re working on here at Pixsta, but with audio rather than pictures.

Stanza

A free E-Book reader.  You can get access to lots of public domain content, as well as select paid content from some publishers. Very handy for reading those stubborn classics on a cramped tube train. Currently reading a Bertrand Russell book that I otherwise would never get round to.

Great Iphone apps

Okay, so yesterday I had a bit of a rant about the Iphone’s wooden syncing policies amongst other things. It’s not all bad though, far from it.

Here are some of the great apps I’ve come across so far:

Seadragon

This the Iphone version of Microsoft’s Seadreagon engine, a mechanism for navigating very large images, including nested images to an infinite (or at least unstated) depth. It’s ultimately pointless but geekily fun.

TubeStatus

This shows you the current status of the tube lines in London. Fatalists might suggest that this is pointless, but I’m an optimist, which means that I hope one day this will enable me to stay in the pub rather than waiting on a jammed platform on a line with severe delays.

MyRail Lite

This shows you the status of the overground train lines in the UK. It also hooks in to Google Maps to show you where stations are, find your closest ones, and give you directions to them.

Chess With Friends

Does as it says on the tin. Play by mail chess for the touch-screen generation.

TouchPhysics

The Iphone version of the lo-fi classic Crayon Physics. I’m still waiting for Crayon Physics Deluxe.

Microsoft Worldwide Telescope

Microsoft recently released Worldwide Telescope, a download that allows you to view a virtual night sky, zoom into it, and rotate it around your viewpoint. Great idea, but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting after seeing their Seadragon demo and Google Earth.

The child in me was hoping for a night sky that was full of images rather than just one at a time, and the physicist in me was hoping that they’d normalised the spectral range of the images so that you could view any part of the sky in whatever range of the EM spectrum you wanted, and adjust that range using a slider in real time.

Now that would have impressed me. Don’t be disheartened MS WWT team, this is the 21st century. We’re a tough audience.

Like Facebook without the crap

When I was first told about Facebook, I asked what was so good about it. Apparently I could upload photos, and “connect” to my friends. I said “so what”.

Later I tried it, and it was quite addictive. Not because of the photos, or the friends that I could keep in touch with the old fashioned way, but because of the news feed. I could get bite-sized chunks of news and feel in touch with people I otherwise wouldn’t see.

It’s the mini-feed that makes it addictive. The apps and endless invites are frankly boring unless you have time to burn.

Services like Twitter and Friendfeed provide that same ambient contact without the rest of the cruft, without the data-lockin, and without the endless stream of zombie bites, ultra-mega-wall spam and “gifts”. I say the same ambient contact, but it’s actually better.

Facebook news feed

This is a sample of my Facebook news feed. It’s fine, but compare it to the level of detail in my Twitter feed. The Twitter feed is user-linkable, has avatars, allows broadcast replies, direct replies, and favourites.

Twitter feed

None of this is anything facebook can’t replicate, but really I don’t see the attraction of going back to their closed eco-system when the open internet offers the best bits, but without the crap.