Hello, and welcome to the fourth installment of iWant, iNeed, iRecommend. This is a monthly series that will, simply put, talk briefly and present the top ten iPhone and iPod Touch applications from that month. At the end of the year, the 120 mentioned applications will then go head to head to see which apps become the top ten for the year. If you would like to read my previous top ten lists, as well as all my other iPhone and iPod Touch application reviews, you can see them here. While this list is subjective (as are all top ten lists), I did my best to base this on actual use, not my own opinion. Enjoy.
10: Mathhammer 40K
There is a certain tabletop war game. One that millions of people around the world play, and one that I play almost every weekend. This game is called Warhammer 40K, and it is a game of odds, dice, and strategy. There is a style of the game where you calculate odds before you attack, to make sure that you have a good chance of winning. To do this, people created Mathhammer, a system where you enter all variables and the odds are calculated for you. While you can look at this on a computer, or do it by hand, most players were never able to do it at tournaments or on the road. Enter Mathhammer 40K, an application that will do it all for you. As I have been able to use it in many games, I know for a fact that my $4.99 investment has been well spent.
9: iRentMovie
Ahh Netflix, the company that changed how video renting would be done. Furthermore, this company even caused me to break up with my longtime rental place, Blockbuster. Until April, however, the service had never fully embraced the changing way people access their information and movies – their phones. You had to log onto a computer, log into the site, and then access all of your movies, add to queues, and even alter the queues themselves. No longer do you have to do that, as iRentMovie allows you to access, alter, and add to any of your Netflix choices with your iPhone or iPod Touch. The application even will show you the top ten lists and many of the best-classics lists. iRentMovie is a $2.99 app that goes perfect with your Xbox360, TiVo, or anything else you use to watch movies.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
CarMinder looks interesting if you have to be "on the cheap," but I'd also suggest users look at Car Care, which is what I used after doing a lot of research. I find it has a LOT more detailed information, doing everything Car Minder does plus displaying graphs of both gas price and gas mileage, plus a breakdown of stats such as total cost per mile, carbon footprint, best/worst/average fuel economy, etc. It's a great app - I haven't been disappointed yet.
On the "Iphone zoom" issue, this is almost a moot point. Given Apple's general attitude, I can see why they chose to leave it out. Digital zoom is a lossy process. Despite what people want to have us believe about the Iphone camera, it is actually surprising good for what it is. It takes very nice, colorful, sharp pictures for such a tiny little camera. I get consistently decent images from it, to the point that I use it all the time. Adding digital zoom would sully the quality of the camera - zooming simply means cropping the image, then enlarging it, which significantly lowers the quality of the image. When we're talking about 2 megapixel images to begin with, that's not a real good idea. The best results are going to be done on a computer in Photoshop or something equivalent. That said, I can see the use of something in camera for those moments when you just have to have it.
I just wish I could get all my camera apps in ONE app, as I now have several, the most used being Mobile Fotos (for Flickr upload,) Darkroom Pro (utilizes the Iphone's accelerometers to take a shot when the Iphone is perfectly still - great for dark places,) and iFlashReady (which applies one of three different sets of levels to add contrast to images - it really works great as long as the image isn't already too light.) If Adobe could come out with an iPhotoshop, I would happily pay a premium as a long, long time user of PS. I haven't found one that does it all, unfortunately. Hmm, maybe I need to learn to program for the Iphone . . .
2 - Tom Johnson
I have to rescind my support for iFlashReady based on the update that the developer put out, and that's based on one big problem: IFR now overwrites the original image rather than making a copy with the changes. A HUGE no-no. Incredibly stupid change. Until this functionality is reinstated, I suggest everyone look elsewhere, unfortunately.
3 - Adam
For self-learners, I've come across an extension list of 100 iPhone apps that can be used by self-learners.
4 - Robert M. Barga
@Adam
please don't link to something that really isnt that useful in my article
5 - Robert M. Barga
the thing is that the phone should have had a physical zoom. The digital works well, as it simply blows up using less megapixels, and it actually results in good image
i will check out car care, that one missed me.
6 - iFlashReady developer
Hello, Tom,
iFlashReady is not, and is not authorized to overwrite any source images. The only thing IFR can do is create new images in "Saved Photos" folder.
iPhone OS forbids any application to overwrite the source image. If you load a photo from another folder, say, "Photo Library", the result after IFR is written to "Saved Photo" folder.