Category: Tech

My Top Ten Apps for New iThing Owners

A friend recently got an iPhone and was asking me what apps I’d recommend. Caught on the hop, I was hard pushed to say which of the hundreds of apps I’ve installed on mine might be of interest to her. I’m an app junkie and install vast quantities of the things on a weekly basis – many of which, it must be said, aren’t up to much.

Anyway – I decided to spend a little time carefully analysing my catalog to come up with a top 10 of apps I’d recommend to friends starting off with their first iThing, and here it is:

  1. Skype – If your iPhone includes a data plan, you could save some money by making your calls over Skype instead of from the mobile. You can also IM on iPod Touches that don’t have mics.
  2. Eirtext – Again, if you have a data plan but have to pay for texts, save a few bob using this app instead. (ETA: This app appears to have disappeared since this article was written.)
  3. TV Guide – One of my genuinely favourite apps – I’d pay for this if it wasn’t free, but it is. Follow the link for more gushiness.
  4. Remote – Assuming you have a computer with iTunes that you’re syncing your iThing with, this app acts as a remote control for your iTunes media. Save your iThing disk space for fave tunes only, and play the rest from your computer/laptop when you’re home. (We have speakers set up on Airport Extremes at 3 points around the house, so can choose where the sounds will appear and make them follow us around. Way cheaper this way than some of the home entertainment systems available.)
  5. Shazam – If you’re listening to the radio and thinking “I love this song – must find out who it’s by and pick up the album”, Shazam can listen to a few seconds of it, identify it, and give you a link to buy it in the iTunes store. The free version has a limit on the number of uses per month.
  6. Facebook – Is anyone not on Facebook these days? As you’d expect, this is an iThing interface to your Facebook account. You don’t get all the bells and whistles of the normal version (for example, you’re not warned of upcoming birthdays unless you check the event calendar, so you’ll most likely get in trouble for missing one – sorry agan Nick!), but it’s a grand app, and a must have for FB addicts, like me.
  7. Echofon for Twitter – Not so many people on Twitter, but if you are, this is my favourite of the various apps I’ve tried. You can register multiple accounts, and do all the usual stuff with each of them.
  8. Kindle – No need to buy an actual Kindle to read Kindle content – provided you’re out of the glare of the sun, you can do it on your iThing. And if you’re reading across multiple devices (Kindle, laptop, iThing), they’ll sync to the last page you were on across all of them, unless you’ve told it not to. Nifty. I like to have a couple of classics with me in case I get trapped somewhere with nothing to do.
  9. RTÉ News Now – Lets you keep up with the top stories in News, Sport, Business and Entertainment, or watch a live stream of RTE News Now.
  10. Angry Birds Free – The free sampler for Angry Birds. Eventually, you’re going to want to just kick back and play a game on your iThing, and it might as well be this – all the cool kids are playing it. Catapult birds at pigs in bizarre constructions and see how many you can kill. Simple yet deviously tricky all at once. Go on – you know you want to.

These aren’t necessarily my top favourite apps of all time. The list is intended for people getting started with an iThing for the first time, and they’re probably already smarting from having parted with serious money for the pleasure, so all the apps on this list are available for free (though several have paid upgrade versions). They give a general feel for what you can do with your iThing.

If you have a favourite free app you’d consider a must have for new iThing-ers, and I’ve missed it from this list, please mention it in the comments below.

General recommendation from an app addict: If you see an app you think you might like, and it’s free, download it quickly! I have several apps I couldn’t mention here because they’ve since vanished from the iTunes store, which is a crying shame because several of them are much better than still-available paid apps that do “the same thing”.

TV Guide App

This is a review of one of my absolute favourite iThing apps – the tvguide.co.uk TV Guide. It’s free, it’s customizable, it has bells and whistles aplenty, and it has saved me a fortune in weekend newspapers that I only bought for the TV listings. There’s a website too, for those without iThings, which looks fine in IE and Chrome, but is a bit messed up in Firefox.

TV Guide app on iPhoneThere are different versions for iPhone and iPad and both make the most of the screen space available.

The iPhone version shows the times and titles for the current and next 2 programs on each channel. Click a channel to get full program summaries.

The iPad version has a more magazine-y feel to it with scrollable listings at the bottom of the screen, and a picture and program summary at the top of the screen for whichever program you’ve selected in the listings.

TV Guide app on iPad

Both versions allow you to customize your channel list to show only the channels you have (or only the ones you’re interested in), and they include Irish channels plus regional and HD variations for the UK channels. Since we’re on a free-to-air setup and don’t get a number of the standard UPC/Sky/Whoever channels, this is great for us – no skipping through reams of irrelevant info.

Once you’ve selected which channels you want listings for, you can then order them to suit – I’ve put our favourite channels at the top so they appear on app launch.

If you are a Sky subscriber, you can set up login credentials, which I believe will allow you to remotely set up recording.

Some of the bells and whistles:

  • When you select a program in the future, you can ask for an alert to remind you before it starts (how many minutes before the program starts the alert pops up is customizable in the settings), or if you have a Sky account set up, you can set it to be recorded.
  • You can add programs to your iThing calendar, post about a program to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, or email info about a program to someone.
  • You can check when else the same program is on again – brilliant if you’ve missed the start of a show or have just discovered a new series you want to OD on for a bit.
  • You can also rate programs (the app shows an average viewer rating for each listing), and add them to your favourites (in which case listings for those particular programs appear at the top of the main listings page ahead of all else).
  • You can search the current day’s listings, or listings for the coming 7 days, for any program title – great for when things get rescheduled due to sports and the like, or you’ve missed if the 2-parter you’re watching is over 2 nights or 2 weeks.

In short – it’s wonderful, it’s free, go get it!

Web Apps – the New Knitting

I have a habit of picking up hobbies, getting obsessed with them for a while, then moving on to the next thing. A couple of years ago it was knitting, right now it’s web apps.

The Seed of an Idea

Gardening, though, is one of the hobbies that’s stuck, and I’m still at it many years on. I don’t grow vast quantities of anything, but I like to have a go at most things just to see how they go, and home grown definitely tastes best.

I garden in containers, mainly. Ever since I For the last few years, I’ve spent the first week or two of each vegetable growing season trying to figure out what I should plant in which pots to reuse the compost the “right” way, and wishing that there was a nice friendly little app I could refer to that would tell me: “oh, your old carrot trough? you should stick some tomatoes or potatoes in there this year” and the like.

Well – at the moment I’m in a “when hobbies collide” zone, and decided that while I’m on a web app buzz, I’d go ahead and write the damned app since noone else seemed to be doing it.

How it Works

The app gives you two options: tell it what you grew last year and it’ll recommend what you can grow in the same spot this year, or tell it what you want to grow and it’ll recommend where you should plant based on last year’s planting.

The current version works on a common 5 year rotation. My research indicates that there’s more than one, so it may not match what you’re already doing. If you’re nosy, you can take a look at the page’s code and figure out what the original 4 year rotation was before I updated to a 5 year one, and see how they differ.

Have a go of the app!

Note: If you want to skip a vegetable category, you can select one of the recommended crops and plug it back into the app to skip forward or back a stage. For example, if I want to grow broccoli and the app recommends I plant it where I had legumes last, but I haven’t planted any legumes, I can select “beans” as the crop I’d like to plant instead and see what would have been planted in the same spot 2 stages ago, then stick my broccoli there instead.

Credit where Credit is Due

To allow iThing users to download the web app, store it on their device and use it natively, I used Google’s Mobile Bookmark Bubble. Considerably less hassle than going through the iTunes submission process.

To refresh my poor tired mind on things HTML and javascript, www.w3schools.com was of great value.

The Joy of SodaStream

In the last few years a reincarnated SodaStream made an appearance on the Irish market. What a blast from the past! Back in the day, mine was one of the families lucky enough to own one of these fancy devices, but thrilling though the process of fizzing the water was, we weren’t mad about the resulting drinks.

At that time, the drinking of fizzy water would have been something of an oddity, so the main aim of owning a SodaStream was to recreate commercial fizzy drinks at home for a fraction of the cost. But the range of real fizzy drinks we were familiar with was somewhat limited: Fanta, Coke and Pepsi, TK Lemonade, Club Orange and 7Up would have been about it.  As a result, SodaStream’s offerings tasted funny to our limited childhood palattes and the novelty wore off quickly.

Nowadays, we’re used to a much wider range of weird and wonderful flavours in our fizzy drinks, from the big name producers, to the sometimes weird and wonderful imports in the smaller ethnic shops around town, and homemade fizzy drinks using an ever increasing range of cordials and juices. Fizzy water is a proper drink in its own right too now.

Chez Murphy-Malone, we’ve been largely making our own fizzy drinks at home for the last few years using cordials, juices, and bottled fizzy water bought in bulk from the supermarkets. We’d treat ourselves to pre-prepared fizzy drinks every now and then for a bit of novelty/variety, but mainly stuck to the mix-it-yourself solution. The bottled water, though, took up a sizable amount of valuable space in our kitchen and didn’t hold much aesthetic value.

But what bothered me more than the storage issue was the amount of plastic waste we were generating. It’s become less noticable in the last couple of years now the fortnightly green waste collection includes plastics, but it used to be a bigger deal when we had to transport one or more sacks of empty (and crushed) 2L water bottles to the bring centre every month.

SodaStream comissioned a report on the impact of soft drinks on the enviroment which can be found here. It doesn’t actually go into the details of the impact of producing a SodaStream machine, but provided you’re in it for the long haul, I reckon it must balance out relatively quickly.

Cost-wise, if you’re buying cheap fizzy water and paying ~50c a litre, 180L will cost €90. To buy a SodaStream and refill the cylinder twice at Argos prices is €91. For the extra euro, you’ll save yourself schlepping around and recycling 45 plastic 2L bottles.

Note: At the time of writing, Argos are selling the white SodaStream for 1/3 off at a mere €43.32, if you feel like breaking even a bit quicker.

When SodaStream relaunched here a few years back, the only place I could find them was in the Argos catalog, which sold starter kits, but not refills, so once you’d fizzed your first 60L, you were done. I briefly looked into the logistics of exchanging cylinders by post, and contemplated bringing them back as hold luggage from holiday destinations, but it was all a bit messy and awkward so I just wrote it off as a nice but impractical idea. In the latest Argos catalog, though, they included a listing for refills/canister exchanges, so my interest was revived. On checking the store locator on their website, I discovered that there are actually a few stores in Ireland now stocking SodaStreams and doing canister exchanges, so having paid a visit to a couple to make sure their listings weren’t outdated/fictional, I decided to look into swapping pre-fizzed water for the DIY kind.

I picked up a lead test for our water for a tenner on eBay, just to make sure we weren’t going to poison ourselves. That was negative, so when we finished our last bottle of fizzy water I took the plunge and swapped the large chunk of floorspace we’d been using to store bottles of fizzy water for the small patch of countertop space which now homes our shiny white, fizzy water and fart noise making toy.

In principle, a canister provides 60L of fizzy water (fizzed 1L at a time these days instead of 250ml). I’ve not been monitoring the actual volumes we’re getting, but we’re still going strong on the original canister 6 weeks later and no sign of it giving up. When it does expire, there’ll be considerably less hassle involved in transporting the expired canister and shiny new refill than the number of large bottles of sparkling water it would’ve taken to keep us busy in the meantime!

Of course, the real eco-friendly solution would be to stop drinking fizzy water already, and I’m sure I’ll get there eventually, but for now, I’m enjoying my SodaStream and the reduced environmental impact of my fizzy drinks habit.

Tracking App Performance

As mentioned before, last Summer I was involved in designing and creating Points Calculator – Ireland – a fabulous iThing app that everyone who ever has or ever plans to sit the Leaving should download forthwith, regardless of whether or not they have an iThing to play with it on. 😉

This post is about ways I monitor the ongoing performance of the app, and may be of interest to anyone thinking of launching an app themselves.

Apps for Apps

The first way I monitor our app is by using the following two apps:

ITC Mobile

ITC Mobile ScreenshotThis app is provided by Apple, and allows registered app developers to check their sales figures for different timeframes covering the preceding 26 weeks (for the preceding day only, or for the preceding 1, 2, 5, 13 or 26 weeks).

Figures are updated once a day (around 1pm Irish time), and you can choose to see your stats broken down in a variety of ways:

  • Sales of all Paid Apps
  • Sales of all Free Apps
  • Stats for in App purchases
  • Stats for updates rather than new downloads
  • Stats by product (new sales or updates)
  • Stats by market (new sales or updates)

Tapping the number of sales/updates in each view cycles though:

  • the absolute number of sales/updates for the period
  • the trend for the period, as a positive or negative number
  • the trend for the period as a positive or negative percentage

A graph at the bottom of each screen gives a more visual representation of the same information, and turning your iThing to landscape orientation presents just the graph in a full screen view.

It’s a nice little app, and since the numbers come straight from Apple you can have faith in the accuracy of what it tells you. We saw an expected peak of downloads between LC results and the week of CAO offers, then an unexpected jump around Christmas and New Year, presumably indicating that a fair number of LC students got iThings for the first time as presents or in the sales.

PositionApp

Position App Screenshot
This is a paid app, but I’ve had hours of entertainment from it so found it worth the small cost. It highlights the movers and shakers in the iTunes App Stores, giving current ranking and relative movement in the charts.

Default views are of the Top 100 and Top 300 apps in all genres, and there’s a customisable page for your own list of favourite apps, which can be any apps at all from the iTunes iPhone App Store (at the time of writing they don’t monitor stats for the iPad App Store), so it’s a nifty way to keep track of your competition or random apps you’re interested in.

I track our app and other similar and dissimilar apps in the Irish Education market. In the past week, I see that several education apps I’m monitoring have suddenly reappeared on the radar after an absence of several months, from which I’m inferring that students are suddenly downloading relevant education apps in a bit of a pre-mocks panic.

Other Ways to Monitor your App

Aside from the apps above, I also have Google Alerts set up to let me know whenever our app gets a mention, and I check periodically in the iTunes App Store.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts Setup
Google Alerts allows you to configure searches that Google will perform automatically. New results that match your criteria can be mailed to you, or added to a feed in Google Reader. You can restrict the types of results Google returns for your keywords, for example by saying you only want to see news stories or blog posts featuring your terms. You can also specify that you want to get results immediately as new matches appear, or at daily/weekly intervals.

As with the PositionApp, I use alerts to monitor mentions of our app, our competitors’ apps, and LC points calculators generally.

Timing is Everything

As far as I can tell from the alerts I’ve been receiving, they seem to be sent at the same time of day that you create them, so bear this in mind when you’re configuring an alert and set it up at the time of day you’ll get most benefit from receiving the updates.

App Store(s)

It’s worth having a look at the iTunes App Store from time to time too to see how your app is doing.

When you go into the apps section, you can choose to view iPhone or iPad apps, and each has different listings and a different chart, so if your app is available on both platforms, check both charts. Our app ranked higher for longer in the iPad chart than in the iPhone chart, most likely due to the lower number of apps in our category rather than absolute numbers of downloads.

iTunes Flag IconYou can also view charts for different countries by scrolling right to the end of the iTunes Store screen, clicking the little circular flag icon and selecting the flag for another country from the next screen that appears.