Top ten iPhone apps for people who could build iPhone apps (but who choose to make web things instead)
It’s the time for gratuitous top-ten lists. This year it’s my favourite iPhone apps …
- Tweetie 2. Something about this app feels like the pixel-perfect Amiga tools of my youth. It’s bouncy, shaded, textured, and downright beautiful. Oh, and it posts to Twitter too.
- Reeder. It’s the Tweetie of news readers, slick, and usable. It backs on Google Reader, and unlike NewsStand it syncs quickly and lets you mark things as unread for the longer stuff you just need to read on your desktop (or from a quieter place).
- PasteBot. Another bouncy, pixel-perfect tool that is surprisingly useful, especially for developing web apps.1
- Dropbox for the iPhone. It’s a window into my frivolous backup, the clippings and screenshots that are my piles of web and art inspiration. The seamless sync with my multiple desktops and phone is just plain nifty.
- QuadCamera. It’s my most used toy camera app for my 3GS. It’s a photo booth, story board, and abstract tool all in one.
- Groceries. Just plain handy.
- Lexic. An addictive Boggle-Tetris-Convertbot mashup, sporting a handful of unique game modes, and many hundreds of hours of playability (for word geeks at least).
- Drop7. A very simple concept with a very retro look. It took me a long time to eclipse my early strategies and scores, but it’s well worth the time and cognitive distress required to get to 500k.
- HoldEm. While I’m not a fan of this game’s portrait mode, it’s landscape mode is perfect. I’ve practiced on the AIs for more hours than I care to admit.
- Ramp Champ. The art direction in this iPhone game is downright inspiring. Textures, shading, and campy icon work. It’s a fun I-have-5-minutes-to-wait sort of game, and is still a good time filler hundreds of plays later.
- It makes testing long URIs on the iPhone a breeze. ↩