Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

Ginny asked me about my favorite iPhone apps this morning. I get this question a lot, so I thought I’d just share my answer to her in a blog post. Thanks for the inspiration, Ginny. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while!

• Feeds is awesome if you use Google Reader, and just awesome for RSS feeds in general.
• eBuddy is new, free, and AWESOME. It’s an IM app that uses push, so you can set it to wait for 5, 10, or 15 minutes after you exit it so stop being “on.” Hard to explain, but it’s really good. Interfaces with all the popular chat clients.
• ReQall is badass for speaking to do lists and converting them to text. Worth experimenting around with. I love it for talking in things I need to do when I’m driving!
• My favorite Twitter app is Tweetie. Tweetdeck is nice, but crashy sometimes.
• Camerabag and Autostitch are the shit for photography fun.
• Audioboo lets you post talking directly to Twitter.
• Are you a Last.FM user? If so, the app is great. (For the record, these are so easy to find by looking them up on your iPhone or in the iTunes app store, that I’m going to stop doing all the leg work at this point in my blog post!)
• I have three radio apps I use: Slacker, Public Radio (for listening to Tara on WCPE!), and Radio Paradise.
• For reading when I’m out, I have the Kindle app, Instapaper (free AND paid are both good – takes a little learning to get going, but it’s so badass, it’s ridiculous).
• Do you use Tumblr? If you do, then the app is excellent. I recommend it highly, for posting and reading.
• Shazam is fun to have, cuz why not? And it’s free.
• Card Star will blow your mind. You won’t have to carry around those little keychain cards anymore. It really works.
• Shopper is good for grocery lists.
• Evernote is handy as hell.
• Local Picks is (to me) the most useful of the location-based sites (better than Yelp or Urban Spoon if you ask me)
• Produce Guide and Locavore are good for being healthy. I love the little quiz in Produce Guide.
• Birdhouse is good if you have a bunch of things you want to tweet, but you don’t want to flood your stream. You can save as many as you want. I don’t use it a lot, but when I need it, I’m glad I have it.
• iMapMyRide is great for biking, and I know you can use it for walking and running, too. It tracks your route, speed, etc.
• Now Playing is so good when you are thinking of taking yourself to a movie. It interfaces with Rotten Tomatoes, which is my favorite movie site online. It’s purely data based. So instead of averaging the reviews, it simply culls all reviews of a given movie. Each review is considered GOOD or BAD. Then it gives you a percentage of how many reviewers liked it and how many hated it. If more people hated than loved a movie, I’d rather not waste my money!
• i.TV is good for finding when stuff is on TV. I use a TiVo, and I can schedule recordings right from my phone.
• Bebot is silly and fun and awesome and just a trip to play with.
• Games I dig are Solitaire City Spiderette, Peggle, Quordy, and Drop7. The kids are really into Flight Control, but I’ve been trying to resist addiction to another game.

There are many more I love and have on my Mac at home for when I feel like adding stuff back, but I don’t like more than 4 pages of apps at any given time. More than that, and I can’t find anything. My main rule for myself is to keep the stuff I use most on page one. Page Two is for Camera Apps, Audio Apps, and Reading Apps. Page Four is for Games and Entertainment Stuff (TV/Movies). Page Three is all the other Utilities I use.

My Current Page One

That’s my iPhone way. Everyone’s is different, but mine makes me superhappy.