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Back in August 2008, a mere month after the iPhone was released, I published my list of apps that I used.  I had quite a list back then and still have the personal rule that I won’t have more than 4 pages of apps since it’s too hard to find them.  I try to organize them by most used kept on the front page, especially now that the iphone allows you to use the home button to flip to that first page.  Here is what I currently have on the iPhone, other than the included apps.  You’ll find that there really aren’t any games on here.  I prefer my games full screen on my PC or plasma TV rather than shrunk down, but to each his own.

1. Todo – list and project tracking (paid app) that links with Toodledo, or optionally with Remember the Milk.  
2. Evernote – Note taking app that includes photos and allows searching photos and PDFs.  The best part is that it syncs with the Evernote web site so that your notes are safe.  Unlike the built-in iPhone Notes app that syncs with nothing and risks the loss of all your notes.  Here is just one of the many uses.
3. Nambu – Twitter and FriendFeed application that I replaced Twinkle with.  It includes posting photos via pic.im, tr.im as well as Identi.ca, Laconi.ca based streams and Ping.fm.  It’s being very actively developed along with a desktop version.  This seriously works a lot like TweetDeck, so it’s really useful.
4. Livestrong – Weight and diet tracking application.  This is part of my new year’s resolution.  My exercising is still very irregular, but adjusting my diet helped me lose almost 20lbs now.
5. Characters – World of Warcraft character tracking app.  I play it a lot, but this probably doesn’t belong on the front page anymore.
6. Facebook – Great app that complements the Facebook site for interacting with friends from high school.
7. LinkedIn – Great app that complements the LinkedIn site for interacting with professionals.  Not as shiny as the Facebook app and a fair bit buggier.
8. Mint.com – This is THE application for tracking personal finances.  I can’t rave enough about this. Put all your credit cards, loans, bank accounts, 401Ks into their secure system and get the depressing outlook all in one screen.  The web site has great graphs and stats on your usage and can really help remix your finances and identify spending habits that can be trimmed.
9. Brightkite – This is part of my flow for posting to my social networking sites.  Brightkite posts to Flickr, which is monitored by FriendFeed which posts a list to it into Twitter.
10. Phoneflix – tracks my Netflix queue for whenever someone recommends a movie.  It could use some interaction with imdb.com.
11. Amazon.com – Lets me check prices instantly while in stores.  Why pay more than I have to?  The interface is just right for quick browsing.
12. Wikipanion – This is a better interface for looking up facts than directly hitting the Wikipedia site, which is frankly half of what you are looking for when searching through Google.  Wikipedia needs to work on their mobie device interface, but this makes up for that.
13. iHaloStats (web link) – This tracks my Halo acheivements.  For linking to my Twitter account, I use http://twee60.com/.
14. DISQUS (web link) – This lets me moderate comments on my Wordpress web sites which use Disqus for comment management, as well as post replies to those comments. FriendFeed monitors Disqus as well, so these make it into my Twitter stream as well.
15. Ebay – I can do auction searches and keep tabs on my sales and account status.  You know… for when you get that mail that tells you “Your accesses has been limited.  Pleasing to click link below to updating your account.”
16. MonkeyChow (web link) – This is a web link to my RSS reader’s iPhone interface.  Very useful for catching up on the latest news when on the go.
17. Wordpress – I really only use this for composing draft posts to my various web sites.  I find that Wordpress’ real web interface is much handier for finalizing posts.  It works well for jotting down blog ideas before they escape my brain.
18. Now Playing – App for looking up reviews and movie times.  Very handy.
19. Last.fm - I don’t use this as much as I’d like, but now that WXRK has switched to pop and hiphop, I’ll be using it much more.
20. 1337pwn – Great for checking up on XBox live friends and gamer scores.
21. FriendFeed (web link) – This is just for those occassions that Nambu doesn’t render something right for FriendFeed.
22. Twitter (web link) - This is just for those occassions that Nambu doesn’t render something right for Twitter.
23. Simplify – Wonderful app that taps into my music collection at home to extend what I physically have on my iPhone.  It requires the SimplifyMedia app running on a system at home, which I have running on a Windows XP VM.
24. BofA – not as useful now that I use Mint.com, but sometimes the actual Bank of America site posts charges quicker than Mint.com can catch it.
25. Mint (web link) – (not the finance app) Web site analytics for http://www.shokk.com from haveamint.com
26. Bookmarks – Del.icio.us bookmarks app, which works well with the built-in safari browser, and posts to Twitter.
27. Remote – Very useful for controlling my iTunes playlist without going over to the computer.  I just wish it could access DAAp sources somehow, like the one streaming in my home from Firefly Media Server.
28. NewAmBible – I like to catch up on my faith every now and then.
29. Constitution – I like to catch up on the rules of the state every now and then.
30. Palringo – IM app for iPhone.  Has been sitting there waiting for Background Notifications to make it useful.  For pete’s sake, my crappy Blackberry 8700 could do it for a number of chat services, why can’t this do it?  What is broken in the iPhone architecture?
31. Easy WiFi - This came in use while traveling.  The airport had AT&T WiFi, which is free to iPhone users, but for some reason I had trouble logging in.  Luckily I had downloaded it while it was free.
32. Drinks Free – Every once in a while I like to host a get-together for friends, mostly in the summers when I can use my deck and the nice deck bar.  This has soooooo many drink combinations.
33. iTalk – Great for voice notes.  This functionality really should have been built into the phone frmo the start.  You can pull the voice notes off the iPhone with the Mac app.   Again, my Blackberry does this right out of the box.
34. Dog Whistle – We got a dog last year and this seemed like a good idea for training the dog.  Now it just serves to annoy the kids since the dog just looks at me funny.  Luckily it was free at the time.
35. Pandora – Same story as Last.fm, though I wish it linked into social networking apps more.  The service is a little too simple, but it often carries music that Last.fm might not have.
36. iBreviary – Another faith based app.
37. RK Free – I’m still looking for a replacement app for using when I run ever since I gave up my iPod nano that was used with Nike+.  I’m jealous that Apple put that functionality into the 2nd gen iPod Touch but did not make an accessory to do the same for the iPhone.  We’ll see soon how this performs.
38. iThoughts – Mind mapping tool.  I haven’t made great use of it, but it has potential.
39. ZumoDrive – this was a great alternative to all those apps that required you to share files while on a LAN.  Not only does this app mean you won’t have to store the files on the iPhone itself, but you can share between PC, Mac, and iPhone when no wireless is available.
40. Watchmen – this probably won’t be on my phone much longer, but it’s a tie-in to one of the greatest superhero movies ever.
41. Kindle – this is to keep me from buying a real Kindle.  No PDF support?
42. FlightTrack Pro – Came in very handy while traveling this month.  Also posts to TripIt.com which is monitored by 
43. TagReader – This is a curiosity that I found on the back of the Halo Wars box.  I haven’t really seen any other uses of these tags, but it looks interesting.

Recenty Apple announced that iPhone OS 3.0 would be detailed soon, probably for release in July with the new iPhone model.  I think everyone would agree that managing the apps is a giant pain in the ass.  There should be a list view in iTunes or on the iPhone itself where we can bulk delete these rather than letting them collect.  Managing the installed apps should not be this hard.

This post is in reply to the article Will Twitter Replace RSS.

I use Twitter to watch human feeds, because you cannot follow too many people before being able to lose track of what is going on.  I believe the maximum number of personal connections someone can really truly follow is around 100.  Twitter allows some enhancement of this, but the number really stays the same before the stream appears to have a lot of noise.  Add the fact that most Twitter clients show profile pics, including on the Twitter web page itself, means that you can only show 5-8 tweets before needing to scroll up or down.  Following too many people involves a lot of clicking and scanning rather than interacting, especially if you follow any of the top/vocal accounts.  This quickly gets old and unmanageable.

I read about 330 feeds in my feed reader.  These are active feeds that in total generate over 1000 posts each day.  Much of this is professional and news notifications that I would have no other way of accessing without hitting all 330 sites to look for updates.  To wade through that many without some sort of organization would be madness.  My feed reader MonkeyChow provides that organization with feed groups so that I can read webstrips at one moment, quickly switch to Mini Cooper feeds, or view the whole stream.  Twitter does not provide any organization or filtering at all to the river of news – in its simplicity it provides nothing more than public or private replies.  Systems like FriendFeed can organize this into groups, and the ability to provide discussion around these is fantastic.  Although FriendFeed is my favorite way to deal with the aggregation of the various social networks, it is still not organized for scanning through hundreds of articles.  It is built for 2-way social interaction, and alerts or robot posts do not belong there.  My RSS reader does not provide the 2-way communication that Twitter provides, so those alerts belong in my feed reader.

My metric then for determining whether something goes into Twitter or the RSS reader is if it requires that 2-way communication.  Anyone using their Twitter account to post ads is not providing a 2-way communication, and thus it is worthless to me.   But someone posting updates and then actively discussing them provides a lot of value to me.  Robert Scoble makes an excellent point of this here.  Twitter is a phenomenal tool, but there are a lot of goofy tweet tools out there, especially some of these monetization schemes, that are trying to shoehorn services on top of Twitter that are just making it seem stupid.  Keep it simple.

I’ve just now added support to MonkeyChow to post to a Wordpress blog.  In fact, knowing that some people maintain multiople Wordpress blogs, you have the choice of up to three at this time.  In prefs, you will need to enter the URL of your site, and a nickname for the site.  For instance, I’ve entered www.shokk.com/blog and Shokk into my prefs.  No need to enter the http:// or trailing slash.  If there are any strange characters such as ? or & in the URL, it will also not work, in the interest of security.  The site nickname will show as a tooltip in case you forget which order the icons were saved as.

As long as you are logged into your blog, you can click the link and the Press It! window for your blog will appear to let you post that title and link.

In the future I plan to make the number of blogs you can post to more flexible, but for now three seems like a nice number.  If you find yourself needing more, comment below and I’ll consider the priority of this feature.  The latest update can be found in the tarball directory and includes the previously mentioned twitter and iPhone support.  As always, it is available through SVN from https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow by issuing the command

svn co https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow

The MonkeyChow RSS reader now has built-in Twitter support.  You can click the Twitter icon for an article and it will automatically post the link and title to your Twitter account.  In order to see the Twitter icon for articles, you will have to enter your Twitter email and password into the Preferences page.  This is immediately available through SVN (see below) and the tarballs page.

For those using svn, please do the following to grab the latest.

svn co https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow

As Sourceforge changed the URLs for their repos, those of you using the older repo URL will have to do something like this…

svn sw –relocate https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow

before doing

svn up

Enjoy!

[Continued from 5 Things I Hate About Twitter]

1. Keeps you consise
   Twitter limits you to 140 characters, like the old 8-bit SMS communications.  We tend to get very wordy and I’ve found that I can write the same post in fewer characters than I could have if I didn’t have those limits.  My posts fit the defined fishbowl and saves everyone time when scanning their tweets.  While FriendFeed is really growing on me, I miss the consiseness.
2. Simple interface, standard look
   Unlike other social networking sites (*cough, cough* MySpace), you can always expect that your Twitter profile page will be arranged pretty much like that of anyone else.  The text box will be where it needs to be, all the tabs will be the same, info to the right, and so on.  This is part of what makes it fast to use.  The iPhone interface is even simpler: it opens links into new windows keeping the twitter page the same so you cn move on to the next tweets.
3. API and Interoperability
   Twitter has made its API public so there are now a lot of desktop apps to choose from, including the Digby IM client I use.  I’ve recently taken advantage of the API myself in introducing Twitter support for Monkeychow as I now have a Twitter source tag for my application.  Coming soon!
   Because of the API, this is also an area where Twitter has left a lot of crumbs on the table for others.  Other services are microblog aggregators and broadcasters.  Other services are handling the tweet organization for communicating with groups.  It seems like something they could be doing better.
4. iPhone apps
   On my iPhone I count three (Twittelator, Twinkle, Twitterific).  Portability is a huge plus for a social networking app, and here we have a lot of choices.  Using location information from the iPhone 3G GPS is also very useful.  We’ll have a lot off apps riding on top of Twitter that will help others get a fix on your location.  So, if you say you’ve found a neat Thai restaurant on Main St, your buddies will know where it is.
5. They were first to the party!
   There is a lot to be said for being first on the block to do something.  So it stands to reason that it has a good layer of applications covering it and a lot of popularity.  This is also likely the cause of the punishing loads Twitter has been  experiencing since anyone and everyone can hit it frequently.  They’ve implemented limits on how many times the server can be hit per hour, but it hasn’t saved them.

Compared to the “Things I Hate” list this was a little harder.  Coming up with things that are not in the vein of “it just works” isn’t good enough and because Twitter is such a simple app, there aren’t a lot of features to like.  The ones that I do like, I REALLY like, but there seem to be fewer of them.  It goes to show how easy it is to be a griefer.

Having grabbed an iPhone 3G on Friday, I spent some time over the past few days making tweaks and changes to what was already done to support the previous model iPhone. Below are the results. As you can see, the iPhone 2.0 firmware now seems to support the .ico image format which was a really ugly eyesore with the previous version. These changes affect iPod Touch with the new 2.0 firmware as well. The tarball with the latest updates is available here.

Just added a bunch of code which has been uploaded to svn and rolled up in the latest tarball to add support for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is the beginning of the use of different style sheets which will lead to preferences for different styles for your web view. This also fixes a long standing bug that affected devices such as Treos and Blackberries where the checkboxes would not allow you to mark articles as read. My next task will be to tackle another long standing bug, the login cookie problem which requires you to navigate to the /monkeychow page after login in order to see the feed pages.

UPDATE 2008-25-05: The login bug was embarrassingly easy to fix. It’s now in SVN and the latest tarball.

It was almost two years to the day that I purchased my 4GB iPod Nano and just a couple of days after post this. At the time it seemed like a lot of space, but I really filled it up pretty quickly. Apple advertises 1000 songs on that unit, but it really turned out to be more like 550 songs out of what I listen to.

So I have been longing for something bigger since around September, but having just bought the car I wanted to hold off on splurging on another pricey product. Last year the iPhone and iPod Touch caught everyone’s attention, and then a few months ago my dad picked up an iPhone. So now that I was recently in the market for a new mp3 player, I started looking at these two. The iPhone, while I consider it the perfect convergence tool, carries that recurring monthly phone plan and has 16GB of music space in the new version. I feel that the product still has some time to grow before it will actually be perfect, but it sure is close. I also thought that with the amount of music that I have on my drive, I would need more than 16Gb of space. So the new iPod Touch, with its similar interface and 32GB of space seemed just right. The battery life is really great, especially since it charges any time I use it in the Mini. And after adding tons of music to it, I’m only up to 9GB – but I’m still only part of the way through my collection and there is a lot more to add.

I now use it for an alarm since there is the occassional power outage that makes my alarms loose track of the time. The usefulness of the WiFi capability is astounding. As soon as I wake up and shut off the iPod alarm, I hit the email, weather icon, and then browser over to see my weather station on wunderground (KNJHILLS9) – without having to wait for a computer to boot up. That takes 1-5 minutes, and then I jump into the shower. It really is a wonderful bonus in the product. There is just so much more that they’re going to be able to do with this product.

So what’s missing? For one, I have a daap streaming server in my home that I can access through iTunes. It would be great if I could access that through the WiFi when I am in range. A good RSS reader would be really nice. I currently use Monkeychow, which works in Safari for Windows, but I’ve had the same problems with it that I’ve had with other mobile browsers on Treos and my Blackberry and just have not had time to get through the code and fix it. The buttons that look really nice in the MonkeyChow web interface on Firefox and IE are terribly small on the iPhone and I will have to think about how to redesign that and how to handle the hundreds of articles that a feed can have. The default 50 articles per page seems like a bit much on that screen.

I also have a samba server in my house from which I could be watching movies on this nice little screen when my other set is taken up by the kids. It could have better access to social networks. A camera. A quick blogging tool. Some of these are real “pie in the sky” desires and not real needs, but the sky is the limit now that wireless networking has been added to the product and everyone is going to want a lot more. A lot of this is covered in their online apps, and a lot of sites like the above i.wund.com have Touch/iPhone compatible displays to make the browsing experience easier.

I still feel that the iPhone is the perfect product, but the Touch will do in the meanwhile. And if anyone has a good podcast to recommend for the morning drive, please recommend in the comments. I have about an hour commute and like to listen to something interesting in the morning and music on the ride home.

A recent query from a MonkeyChow user about reblogging got me to rethinking about how it is currently implemented in MonkeyChow. This is not the first time someone has asked me about automatically feeding a blog system like Wordpress with the reblog/recycle feed from MonkeyChow (rss.php). I had previously looked into this back when WP was at v2.0 and rejected a WP plugin called WP-o-Matic because it really hosed my test blog, but this sounded like the ideal tool.

Fast forward to WP 2.2.2 and it seems like the plugin now works as advertised with WP! A blog without frequent posts usually drives people away. I originally wanted to use this type of a tool to boost my post frequency, since I do a lot of reading and make good use of the Recycle box for this site. But this is a quantity vs quality issue and I finally decided that high volume posting was not what I wanted. I find it annoying that some bloggers post minutia as new articles, rather than adding on to an existing article or post in their own comments. However, there are uses for such a tool.

So one of the things that was missing in the MonkeyChow reblog RSS feed was article bodies. That was added this morning to the rss.php. By combining WP with WP-o-Matic, and aiming at your MonkeyChow reblog feed, you can now have a reblog publishing platform. For any article in MonkeyChow where the Recycle box is checked, WP-o-Matic will automatically pick up the article and post it to WP. This can be seen in action at my test blog: http://www.swordcery.com. One of the problems I’m seeing is that there is no link back to the original article, so attribution is an issue.

For this site, I do a similar reblog action with the SimplePie WP plugin which automatically posts in the sidebar to the right.

Update: I found these instructions, which make use of the Get Custom Field Values plugin to make the titles work with proper link attribution. Note that this works for the entire blog, since the change replaces the original function, otherwise we would need to come up with some sort of conditional statement for making the title work with WP’s original the_permalink function, or this one.

To get the source link to work in the post, grab this plugin, install it and activate it.
Plugin Name: Get Custom Field Values
Version: 2.1
Plugin URI: http://www.coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/#getcustom

Then paste this code:
<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>
in the loop on your template index.

This code puts the source URL as the link for the post title. Example:

<h3 class=”storytitle” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”><a href=”<?php echo c2c_get_custom(’wprss_link’); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>