I’ve compiled 8 applications that I love having on my iPhone. There are some more, but I can only blog so much in one night and these are good enough. I don’t know who else checks this page, but the GVSU Apple club alone doesn’t have many iPod touch / iPhone users, so this might not be in high demand. If it’s well-received however, maybe I’ll do another.

For each application, click on the icon to be directed to the iTunes App store.

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Check Tubes: free

This is a handy little application for checking connection speeds! Okay well I suppose they’re all “little” but you know what I mean.

If I seem to have a slow connection on my mac at home, I can check the current bandwidth of the wifi with my iPhone, or I can go on the 3G network and see if that’s any faster.

There isn’t much more to it. You get a neat little summary after each check and can compare your recent checks to see if certain locations are worse than others – or whatever you can think of.
I use this one once-in-a-while, but more often than most other “junk” apps, so I believe it’s worth featuring.

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Space Deadbeef: free

Aside from a really stupid name, this game gets high marks from my highly critical rating system:

I played it. It was fun.

This is a side-scrolling, alien-blasting game. I expected it to suck my battery dry, but in fact, about ten or fifteen minutes of play only takes up a small portion. That’s more than I can say for a lot of other applications. This doesn’t use any data, so that is likely the biggest reason.  I haven’t kept many iPhone games around for very long, but this has a pretty high replay value in my opinion. Check it out.

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Daily Quote: $0.99

I will say right now that I would not pay for this application. I got it for free on a Black Friday ‘web-sale’ and I use it quite a bit. Well, only once a day. It has some good quotes. There isn’t much more to say. I think if you like coming across some new words of wisdom once in a while, look at this program or some free alternatives.  If you have a gift card or don’t mind giving up a buck, I’d say it gets used enough to be worth it… but I personally avoid paying for anything unless it’s a last resort.

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Twitterrific: free

I don’t really have to review this one do I? This is a client for folks who use twitter. So basically, it’s an application for cool people. It shows you tweets from people you follow within the last two hours, or the public timeline. You can post photos with an integrated twitpic uploader, you can update your profile’s location field with iPhone GPS or post a Google Maps link of your current whereabouts. Of course replies, direct messages, favoriting, and profile views are more common options also included in this app.

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Tweetie: $2.99

Whoa! Not only is this not free, but it’s more than the regular ole ninety-nine cents! Now now, hold your horses. There’s no cheaper bastard in the land than Robrogan here, and I’m considering making this purchase. On twitter, users that have experimented with iPhone clients say that this one is “the best.” Even in a review on the twitterrific app page, a user says that if you’re willing to pay, this is the best client. Go to the app page to read all about it if you want. Here are a few standout features for me: retweets, searching, trend-views, link sharing, get nearby tweets . . .

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Remote: free

This is a very simple, very easy application for controlling music on your mac. I don’t really need to explain this to you. You get on wifi, have your mac on wifi, and open iTunes. Using your iPhone or iPod touch, you can select a song/playlist and play it from anywhere in the network’s range. I can imagine this would be most excellent hooked up to massive speakers at a house party!

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FontShuffle: free

I’m one of those people stricken with the typography obsession fad thing… Whatever. I’m not going to justify myself. If you’re into this crap too, then you’ll love this application. You simply pick a font family, and then a sub-category of font, and if generates a list of fonts that fit that description. Shake your device to shuffle up more fonts of the same kind. Then you can type in a short message, and even save it as a photo. I think this might have limited interest, but it works perfect when I think of something clever and short that I would like to post as a tumblr quote, only in style!

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My SUPER favorite application so far!

Remote Buddy for iPhone/iPod touch:

19.99 € (about $27)

Yes, this is a lot of money! It’s a mac application, not just a hand held app. I use my regular IR remote in addition to this application. I’m using the trial currently. After the first day I really wanted to be able to keep it. Sadly, I couldn’t find a way to steal it *cough cough* so I just might pay for it when the trial runs out. There are some handy features and I recall doing a whole video podcast episode on this application a few years ago when Nick and I had a podcasting site…. but aside from that, let’s talk about the iPhone app!

• Remote: this looks like the IR remote. up/down/left/right/pause/play. You can use it to open and control applications with different behaviours specific to the application.
• Keyboard: simply put, you can use the iPhone keyboard to type in a text field on the computer. I’ve never found a place to use this, but it sounds cool!
• Menu: A list of your applications (that can be controlled via the remote) shows up on your phone, you can execute programs from your hand, dude. Seriously, play with this feature now.
• Trackpad: The new macbooks have a glass trackpad, and now so do you for any mac you have. And it’s wireless! What’s more, you get a live (but tiny) view of your monitor sent to the phone for orientation.
• Music: this is like the Remote app above.
• Camera: I love this, even though it has limited necessity. Your iSight webcam is streamed to your iPhone/iPod and with the click of a button it will save a picture for you.
• Movies: This doesn’t work very well for me because the files have to be in a certain directory, but in theory, it would be like a movie version of the “Remote” app above.
• EyeTV: Again, I can’t use this one because I don’t have EyeTV. I imagine it would be awesome if I did though.

So now. I actually use two, maybe three of the features on here and I still feel like it’s worth the money. If you can find more uses, it’s definitely a winner for you. Sorry for sounding like a salesman. I’m not affiliated with them, I promise. I simply love the application.

No, not this guy!

It gives a bit of a description once you begin to install the application:

There are quite a few guides to explain this program, and I’ll get to those shortly, but to give you my bit:

Quicksilver is a program to use on your mac as an application launcher, yet it has the potential for many more features.  If ye hath fortitude, there are many add-ons and shortcuts to learn which give you control of many applications on your computer within the powerfully concise domain of a select few fingertips.

If you aren’t around to see Mike show off the program at our meeting, allow me to illustrate a few uses.

• I double-tap on the apple/command key, hit “p” and ENTER! The popup window barely has time to display and hide again, and the program photoshop is opening. (It does this by the way, because of all programs starting with P, I use photoshop the most, and it has learned my preference.) That is an example of quicksilver as an application launcher. Yes, I love the dock and still use it, but this is much faster than browsing an application folder.

• Hit the triger keys to call upon Quicksilver, and then with a couple more keystrokes, you can pause or skip songs in iTunes.

• Or perhaps, type imdb, then supply a query, hit enter, and WHOOOSH! your browser opens up and directly accesses imdb, giving you the search results.

The above image is what the program might look like as you call it open, and start typing “Mail.” To the right, is the allowed action (which you can also change), but hitting enter will perform the action.  So in this case, Mail will open.

The program is highly customizable as aforementioned. The launch window above might look completely different…

There is such an example of a differently customized launcher. As you can see, “itunes” was typed in, and the program provided iTunes (indicated by the application icon) as a result, and “open” in smaller font to the right indicates that hitting “enter” will run the program.

Where to download (free):

Go to http://blacktree.com/ and click Quicksilver, and then the download button.

This should work just fine. If you are interested, there are more recent versions being released via google code (the one on their homepage is static, meaning, they aren’t making any new versions there). For a possibly more recent version, check the google code page.

How to:

Okay, this is an awesomely, multifaceted program of awesomeness, how do I use it?

Have no fear, Mike will explain! If you’re in the meeting, that is. If you missed it, then I suppose it is my responsibility to do that for you.  Because of the many features, and my hesitation of confusing people, I will point you in the direction of some very useful wiki (guide) pages.

• The Blacktree guide page

You should start there for anything from a quick introduction, to advanced uses. Just follow the contents.

• Macify

This looks like a very well put together guide for new users of Quicksilver. I does a lovely step-by-step for you AND has screen shots so you don’t lost.

Yaaaay, pictures! inorite?

• A guide from Macrumors.com

This is a wikipedia style guide that also explains the program and its functions.

Customizing the appearance:

Well, there are a few places to go to download different looks for quicksilver. A simple google of “quicksilver themes” should prove quite fruitful.  I recommend Julius Eckert’s site for a few of his very snazzy renditions.  Watch this youtube clip to see a video demo of one of his designs:

If you are a bit lost about how to install and apply these new looks, go take a second glance at the Macify guide I posted above.

Extra surprise!

via Mr. Eckert’s website, I think this is (kind of tricky at first) an interesting web-service!

http://chosr.com/

Delteated!

Okay, sorry if I lost you on the strongbad reference there.

We started out by talking about application deleting. AppZapper and AppDelete are a couple. Yes, you can drag something to the trash to uninstall, but this only works for those applications that don’t have “ties” to the rest of your system. Most programs save data such as preferences and passwords in other locations on your computer.  To keep things extra tidy, we’re recommending you get the free program called AppDelete.

But be careful that clicking the icon takes you to the version 2.1, and go check their home page for a new version if it’s been a while.

Not much else to be said for this. Install the program and then drag unwanted apps to the appdelete trash can.

Internet media, Boxee

So this is pretty awesome. You can watch TV and junk via this application

I was busy scouring for images and this little video clip while Mike was explaining things, so there’s lake of text. Click the image for the website, or watch the vimeo video below for a brief intro.

It is in private alpha right now, which means that it is very selective with users right now. Although if you’re at the meeting, Mike can probably get you an invite code.

Delicious Library

This is really cool. You can use your iSight to scan the bar code on books, comics, movies, or whatever other media items you have that can be found on Amazon.com and it keeps a database of it for you, but in fancy Apple fashion. It talks to you. It checks things in/out like a real library if you want to use it like that. Chances are, this is useless to you and furthermore, it is $40.

Click to see larger

Name Mangler

This application can be helpful for renaming, or adjusting info on lots of files at once. Just check it out and play around.

Twitter utilities!

• Qwitter sends you an email when someone stops following you and lets you know what the last tweet they could tolerate form you was.
• Twitterank is just another site that gives you a numerical value to your meager, internet, “social” existence.
• StatusTweet is a service that sends out Facebook status updates of select Facebook friends. (psst, we made created this one). Click the HELP link for an explanation of this one.
• Search[dot]Twitter is a really good searching site to look for whatever you want throughout ALL (public) tweets.

Thaaaaat’s All!

P.S. Just so the reader knows, as I take notes, I have to skim over some of the applications and comments mentioned.  If you want more, make sure to come. Every Wednesday at 9pm! Leave a comment if you’re not on the mailing list and want on it.

*** Sorry, readers: despite efforts in either the normal OR html editing mode, this little wordpress wants to ignore the s p a c i n g I try to apply. This explains why some application description ends up next to the wrong image and such.***

So this week, Mr. President was absent and yours truley (Rob) got to present on some applications and web links that can be handy for a mac user. There probably isn’t enough time to go through all of these in the meeting itself, but below you can find some info on each one.

Web Applications (iPod touch & iPhone)

Yes, there are plenty of great applications to download and play with via iTunes (or the device iteself), but you have to store that on your device and possibly pay for it. So, since Apple is nice and friendly, they did some elbow work of putting together a page for us users to browse applications that are provided by websites. Mind ye, the downside to this is that you will need an internet connection to utilize it.

Enough word-junk, just click the iPhone above to browse the webapps and note their URLs and put that into Safari on your handheld. Enjoy!

Calendars for your iCal

Next up from the Apple site is something that may not interest you in the least, but I’ve used it a couple times. Click the image below to go to the calendars download page and browse all sorts of prefabbed calendars. Download whichever interests you (I have mexican holidays for example), and add it to your iCal.

And now for the applications:

• Appfresh

This program helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X.

• Caffeine

Prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers.

• CamTwist

This one might be a little more advanced if you’re not the sort of computer user to just “play around” with a programs settings. That’s where all the fun in this little app is! In brief, it takes your iSight (webcam) video feed and puts it through the program to apply special effects and such. I have used it in the past when streaming live video to add a caption at the bottom (such as you might see on news programs). Make sure to set the capture device or webcam input on whatever website you use to “camtwist.”

Download here, whatever version is most recent.

• Disk Inventory X

This program reads your drive and gives a graphical result of how much space your files take up. This is handy if you’re running low on space and ever wonder “where does it all go?!”

(sorry guys, no fancy image for this one)

Go to their home page and watch the little movie clip for a good explanation. The free download is there too.

…and much, much more.

Whelp, I ran out of time writing this. I will save more goodies for another week.

Stay tuned.

Last.fm – music stats and free personal radio

You can use this site to listen to free streaming music based on what YOU like. It keeps statistics on the songs you listen to and if you download their mac program, you can have it keep track of what you listen to in iTunes and even songs that you listen to on your iPod.

Ummm…. then we mentioned grooveshark again. Check the post below!

Then we went over the fact that Mike has a Halloween party this Friday. Superhero themed.

Play windows media files (such as .wma/.wmv) on your mac:

One way is to download and run it in VLC player. The method we discussed was getting Flip4Mac.

Click “DOWNLOAD NOW” for intel on this page.

Personally, we use VLC for watching videos all the time! Check out their home page and download that for free if you like. It’s very versatile and should play almost any weird file you have.

/post

Store.

Dot.

Apple.

Dot.

Com.

Not a lot of specific commentary here… we just rambled about what seems interesting about the new models.

Glass trackpad, no buttons, four-finger gestures, the inside specs (faster video and such)….

Grooveshark

In the search bar on the home page, type a song or artist that you want to listen to. It’s pretty easy to figure out, but the gist is that you can find almost ANY song to listen to and pay it straight from this site for FREE! Yay free! Another bonus is that while you’re listening, you can browse around and “add to queue” to set up a playlist of listening awesomeness.

You can sign up for free and get this application that sends your music to the website (to help expand their library of songs to listen to) and the way this is free is that if you want to download a song, you buy it for $.99 but hey, you can stream for free, so don’t worry about spending money.

———————- TOPIC CHANGE ————————

Someone brought up Applescript and we decided to talk about it some other day but then instead we ended up talking about it today. I was busy writing the above paragraph and wasn’t paying attention at all. Guess that means you should come to the meetings!

Okay and that’s all for the meeting.

PS, I got an iPhone for my birthday. It’s really cool. My grades are totally going to plummet. Thanks Apple for making an amazing device.

Want to be extra nerdy and learn some cool hotkeys?

Check out this page from apple for a very comprehensive list!

First off, let me inform the readers that all of you not at this weeks meeting missed out on homemade pumpkin pie! Okay, continue reading.

Oh, and if you have questions about this week’s topics, post a comment on the article!

Adium – chat program

If you want a program that can utilize:

• AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac))
• MSN Messenger
• Jabber (Including Google Talk and LiveJournal)
• Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
• Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
• MySpace IM
• Lotus Sametime
• Novell Groupwise
• QQ
• Gadu-Gadu

It’s rare to have all of those chat services, so even if you only use AIM, this is still a nice program to have for its good looks and various features. Currently I believe that iChat excels in video chat, but you can do video chat with Adium via an outside web service. So, Adium doesn’t lack video, it’s just not quite as good as iChat in that domain if you have AIM (and the same goes for yahoo video chat on the yahoo mac client).

In short: download this program!

It’s free, it’s customizable. That’s the fun part. Go to the extensions page and browse for cool backgrounds, message window themes, even sound packages.

On each page there is an Install button and a Download button. Either will work, but if you want to quickly start using something, the install button cuts all the steps for you.

Growl

Short and sweet: this program gives fancy little popups like the example above for various events on your computer. YOU customize it, so it depends on you. You can set it to respond to many applications. Some examples:

• Pop up when you get an IM behind some other window.
• Pop up when you receive new tweets (on twitterrific).
• Pop up when a new song on iTunes starts playing.

…and so on.

A lot of programs automatically utilize growl, but if you want to specifically add or remove an application, just open up your system preferences and then click Growl down in “other” category. Then click the applications tab at the top of this window and you can configure each application’s actions, or remove the application.

End official topics.

We rambled about random applications to possibly talk about in other meetings.

Then we watched a recent video of our unofficial member, Josh Windisch, “bucket.”

Grab-up:

It lets you take images of your computer screen and uploads them for sharing purposes. I’m sure the video can explain the best.

Click here to download the program for free.

- http://grabup.com/

Time Machine:

Too easy to explain… plug in your external hard drive! The mac should guide you from there. Here is Apple’s page about the feature in the Leopard operating system.

iWork:

• Pages – For typing papers full of grammar.

• Numbers (like excel)

• Keynote (like powerpoint)

For all of these, click FILE –> export, and then pick “word” or whatever you want to save it as, so that all those lame-os on windows can open it. Also, if isn’t by default, make sure that you have the option of appending the file extension on there. Even though it may be a word document and Macs understand that, if you give it to someone on Windows, their computer has no idea what to do with the file unless it can see a “.doc” at the end or “ppt” etc.

iPods!

• Random new nano sighting.

You shake it, it shuffles. How cool?

(very.)

• Fixed iPod issues.

Mail

How to set up mail.app with the student email.

There is some info on the Grand Valley site for doing this, click here.

Here is the gist of things for IMAP (don’t really want to use POP):

• Full email on first page (xxxxxxx@student.gvsu.edu)

• Incoming mail server:
  imap.student.gvsu.edu

• outgoing settings are :
  smpt.student.gvsu.edu

• In the authentication thing below, just check the box and enter your student (blackboard) username and password.

should be done!

Just wait a while to connect.

PS. Make life easier and get a gmail. I personally set my student mail (since I barely get anything there) to be forwarded to my personal google mail address. If you don’t have one yet, set it up, it’s a nice email service! If you want to know how to do gmail on your Mail application, check out this fancy tutorial.

Get gMail!

Hello all,

yes this is quite belated, but here are the topics and links referred to in the meeting. I’m trying to get things a bit more up to date with the website this year. So hopefully only these few posts will be out of date.  If you miss a meeting (you really shouldn’t, but just in case) you can hopefully find all the cool websites we looked at, or download and figure out the interesting programs we found.

Movies we want to watch as a group some time:

Any other suggestions, leave it in the comment box.

• Watched funny clip on io9.com
• “Scifi Love Question“

Quicklook – the OS X feature that gives you instant previews of common document types. Try selecting a photo on your computer, and without opening the file, hit your space bar; that’s quicklook.

Some dandy hotkeys for doing a screen capture (taking an image of what’s on your screen)

command + shift + 4 = use cursor to make a selection of desktop to ‘capture’

command + shift + 4 + space = hover over the window you want to take a picture of

command + shift + 3 = image of whole desktop

“stacks” – a folder on your dock

Open up a finder window and drag a folder (such as your documents or applications) to the doc near the trash can and it should let you set it there. Once placed, clicking on it will give an expanded view of the folder contents. Handy for getting your docs and such quickly!

…Rambled about iPods again

Meeting officially over, followed by comments, questions, random fun

• We want to know how to send student email to mail.app

• Time machine

• iWork?

• Grand Rapids Apple user group

• No pants on the bus!!??!

• zomg

• Watched some old youtube clips

• Mentioned Gawker

Thaaaat’s all, folks!

Oh PS… that really MESSED UP clip by Rob on Vimeo.