On Saturday morning, Apple’s servers recovered enough to start serving the ipod Touch 2.0 software update, and — because I was left iPhone-less on Friday by Spain’s favorite telco, I spent the weekend killing both my iPod Touch’s batteries and my own bank account, alternating between playing Monkeyball on the beach and surfing the App Store. Here are some first impressions of the new iPhone applications.
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire Mobile is the read-only mobile version of the Mac RSS reader NetNewsWire, the grandaddy of news aggregators. Up until this release, the only way to read and keep your NNW on the iPhone was to use the online Newsgator site, which syncs feeds with NNW. The problem, which should have been fixed by a native application, was that it was slow and required that you be online to use it.
Sadly, the mobile NetNewsWire is almost unusable. It is painfully slow, taking up to 15 seconds to even launch, and when it finally appears, the interface is unresponsive. I thought that this might be to do with my 13,000 unread items across 281 feeds, but scaling these back (at the Newsgator site, you can choose which feeds are accessed by the iPhone) made no difference. Add to this the fact that mobile NNW updates feeds every time you open it, slowing things down even more, and a lack of caching of stories for offline reading, and it’s useless.
To be fair, I have read no other reports like this, so it might just be me. In the meantime, I’m back with the web client and the excellent Google Reader.
Price: Free
Product page [iTunes]
Exposure
Exposure is a Flickr client, from Connected Flow, the people who make Flickr export plugins for iPhoto and Aperture. It’s neat, and free (a $10 paid version comes without the unobtrusive ads). You can browse you own photos, those of your contacts or the general Flickr pool: The tagline is “2 Billion Photos in Your Pocket”.
The usual iPhone niceties are there: rotate the screen and the picture flips around too, but the killer app is the location awareness. Hit the button and Exposure will use the iPhone’s geolocation feature to pull down a list of photos near you and show you a list, with the exact distance from where you are standing. It’s a great way to check out an unknown area, and a good lesson that you should never geotag photos taken inside you own house.
Price: Free or $10
Product page [iTunes]
FileMagnet
This one is not just Mac-only, but Mac OS X 10.5 only. It’s a file transfer utility for the iPhone, and using it with the free client application you can wirelessly transfer files from Mac to iphone. PDFs, pictures and text files are supported, as are Microsoft Word documents. A built in reader on the iPhone lets you view but not edit the files, although you can delete the ones you don’t want. It’s fast, slick and cheap. The one thing it won’t do is let you bookmark where you are in a long file. If it did this, it would make a great ebook reader, too.
Price: $5
Product page [iTunes]
Remote
This is from Apple, and has the simplicity and polish you’d expect. Remote lets you remote control any instance of iTunes on your wireless network, and also your Apple TV. In fact, for Apple TV users it might be essential. Reports say that the Remote app is a lot snappier than using the Apple TV itself.
You can scrub tracks, view artwork, access all playlists, podcasts and videos. You can even choose where your computer is sending the audio if you use one or more Airport Expresses. Sorry for the enthusiastic review, but Remote is a must have, and it’s free.
Price: Free
Product page [iTunes]
Ultralingua
This is the one that demonstrates the danger of the App Store. Ultralingua is a translation dictionary, something far more useful to have on a handheld device than on a computer. The trouble is, it costs $30 (more, in Euros) and yet, because it’s so damn easy to buy software in iTunes, I grabbed it straight away. It really shows what a barrier all the usual PayPal and Esellerate services really are.
The software itself is great. I chose English/Spanish, as I live in Spain and my Spanish sucks. Ultralingua will perform the usual word look-ups, but they are hot-linked so you can jump around beween definitions to establish context. Just as useful is the verb conjugation service, which will give you the first person pluscuamperfecto form of the verb hacer if you want it (it’s había hecho if you’re wondering).
The trouble is, each dictionary costs $30. And this is even if you already own the desktop version. Which outlines another problem with the store: no trial versions. Some developers are putting out feature limited (or ad-supported) free versions, but not many. This needs to change.
Price: $30
Product page [iTunes]
All in all, the App Store is great and obviously far too easy to use. I have yet to test what happens when you try to put the same application onto a second or third iPhone. The applications are protected by Apple’s Fairplay, but then the Fairplay encumbered music from the iTunes Store can be put on an unlimited number of iPods.
Also, a hint: These screen shots were taken with my iPod Touch. Just press the home and sleep button simultaneously and a screenshot is dumped into your photo library. And one more thing. Buy Monkeyball. It’s hard to control, frustrating at times and impossible to pause while you use another application. But it is also as addictive as crack cocaine, and a lot cheaper.
Microsoft will be offering way more value for your dollar with their new Xbox 360 SKU that boasts triple the storage space of the original $349 console. It is not available just yet, but will be hitting retail stores in both the U.S. as well as Canada early next month onwards. Other than the 300% increase in hard drive space, gamers on a tighter budget will be pleased to know that the 20GB Xbox 360 in both mentioned countries will experience a $50 price drop to a mere $299 as long as supplies last. More on the development after the jump. 
