You may have noticed most iPhone apps (actual apps, not transvestite websites with hairy HTML poking out behind ill-fitting iPhone lingerie) are poo. Specifically, most iPhone apps are dog poo that’s been eaten by a particularly nasty dog, then been pooed again prior to being set on fire. Here’s twelve that aren’t.

If you’ve been using Installer for a while, you’ll notice that some apps are ‘Featured’ to show that they’re good, if by ‘good’ you mean ‘written by someone who hangs around in the same IRC channels as the AppTapp people’.

Installer is your gateway to a world of apps where you can:

• Make farting noises. And burping noises. And giggling noises. Hours of fun for the under-5 iPhone-owning crowd.
• Use MobileScrobbler, the alleged Last.fm client, which, after playing 159 songs on our iPhone, can recommend approximately zero songs.
• Always wondered what it was like to have ants crawl all over you iPhone? Us neither.
• Play iPhone native versions of well loved favorites, like that Tetris app where you have to tap the screen 80 times every time you’d like to drop a brick into the pit. Funny, we didn’t remember that on the original.
• Pretend to view PDFs, because the ‘PDF Viewer’ actually has no user interface and doesn’t respond to anything.
• Use a PlayStation emulator to fulfill your Splinter Cell cell dreams on the road, as you take on the role of Sam Fischer returning from his latest mission to slowly present a slide night for his relatives about what it was like back when he wasn’t using a crappy emulator.

Remember that VNC app you never used on your Windows Mobile phone? Now you can not use it on the iPhone.

OK. Most iPhone apps are brain-damaged demo apps that has no business being packaged for consumption by the general public and serve no function other than to waste people’s time with a false promises, inevitable letdowns, and shonky coding. Glad they all run as root then.

But some aren’t - here’s the list.

What Apple Left Out

Navision puts a damn dot to show where you are on Google maps, provided you’re lucky to live in a city where the cell towers are mapper. I take this as a subtle hint to everyone in Melbourne that they should give up wearing black and speaking properly in favor of twang, Toohey’s New and race riots. Apple are apparently adding similar functionality to iPhone 1.1.3, but Navision gives it to you now without bricking your iPhone again.

Lost in a strange neighborhood? Just pull out your iPhone and get direction from a nearby mugger.

If you have multiple friends, and wish to hang out with them at the same time, iSMS allows you to, Steve-forbid, text multiple people at one.

We made these people up, so it looks like people invite us to things.

If you mates prefer sending you stupid crap via MMS rather than the current official stupid crap medium of Facebook Funwall, you’ll want SwirlyMMS so you can actually view the bastards.

ApolloIM is a fantastic app for both people who want to chat using their iPhone, but we hesitate to recommend it being that we can’t find anyone who actually wants to chat using their iPhone. Could be worth it if your mates all have similar apps and use it as a cheaper alternative to SMS.

Showing Off

Lose friends. RealArtist lets you manipulate the most recent image from your camera by dragging around someone’s bits with your fingers. If you remember Kai’s Power Goo, you’ll have a good idea of the results. If it weren’t for Mrs Venturecake, we’d be using this to make fun of girls in bars then demonstrating how to input their digits into our contacts page.

Ray in RealArtist. At some point we’ll get around to editing his picture.

Remind someone of their childhood. Sketch is a similar to an Etch-A-Sketch, but differs in that Etch-A-Sketch is a registered trademark owned by the Ohio Art Company and Sketch is not. Draw pictures with your fingers. Shake your phone, an feel a satisfying vibration as your drawing is erased. Sure, it has no practical purpose except for showing off. This does not matter, because showing off is fun.

Games

Gamble. iBlackjack. It’s Blackjack. It’s for the iPhone. Were a thousand virtual dollars down already, we’ve left our virtual kids in the virtual carpark and we’re loving every minute of it.

Our favorite sin on our favorite gadget.

Save energy. Lights out was iPhone’s first native game, and while its formula is simple, it manages to up the difficulty enough to remain interesting. Since the general quality of iPhone games is so abysmal, the fact that some of Lights Out’s levels may, in fact, be unsolvable, is forgivable, provided they fix it in the next version.

LightsOff. One of the few iPhone games not in the ‘tap the screen to hear a bodily function’ genre.

Relive your Childhood. Remember those wooden ball bearing mazes you had as a child? Labyrinth puts ones in your iPhone without requiring any glue or cutting tools. The maze is tilted by tilting thee actual iPhone, and the ball bearing bounces realiztically with gravity and friction. It’s the best game using the iPhone’s tilt sensor we’ve played, can be easily picked up and put down quickly when you’re bored,and levels rangefrom the pathetically easy to the criminally difficult. There’s a quick two level demo, and seven dollars gets you the full versions.

The latest version of Labyrinth has a significant reduction in both muppets and David Bowie.

Use an emulator that doesn’t suck. The PSX emulator is too slow. The NES emulator is too, well, NES. But the Gameboy Advance is just right. The well-named gpSPhone (clearly something called ‘gps phone’ must play videogames) actually works with most GBA games. In fact, it has a remarkable ability to work with only good games, playing Sonic Advance, Super Mario Advance, and Metroid fine, while managing to avoid Mortal Kombat completely. gpSPhone also saves games perpetually, allowing you to handily pause the game before walking out into traffic.

Now the bad news: it crashes about 10% of the time you use it. Oh well.

You’ll also need a file called gba_bios.bin popped in gpdPhone’s application folder, which, being a decent human being, you’ll get from your own Gameboy Advance using a soldering iron and not by typing ‘gba_bios.bin’ in the top right hand corner of your web browser when I finish this sentence.

This is Sonic Advance 3. It’s an Actual Fun Game. It’s being played on an iPhone.

Tools

Sync music wirelessly. The SSH service and Amarok allows you to add, delete, play songs and playlists on your iPhone over WiFi. We told how how last week. Linux users only for now, Mac and Windows users get to feel the love later this year when Amarok 2 comes out.

Sync contacts wirelessly Funambol’s native Sync client allows you to sync your iPhone to Evolution, Outlook or another device over Wifi. If you don’t have a Funambol server at your business, the myFunambol website provides a free hosted account. Contacts only for now, Calendar, Notes and Tasks are coming soon.

SummerBoard Themes

This boring theme that steals Apples artwork is the best we’ve seen. Did we mention Springboard themes are a exercise in lowering expectations?

The best theme designer for the iPhone is, oddly enough, Apple itself. Yes there are a lot of original themes, but many have small graphical errors - dock reflection that aren’t the icons above is common, and themes that are too directional don’t work if you have one icon that isn’t themed sticking out like a sore thumb. Both of these themes steal liberally from other Apple.

Touch has the more colorful artwork (and reflections) of an iPhone touch, and Neurox Leopard is the best of the OS X themes and the most professional theme in general.

Got any recommendations

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under iPhone, Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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