Month: February 2011

The following are some of my less used apps on my iPod Touch, see the rest in Part 1 of this post

• Google Mobile App – Free from Google it features all the usual Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Search engine, Buzz etc.
• iBooks – Apples own Kindle app.
• Kindle – lets you read your Kindle downloads on your iPod touch useful if you don’t have a Kindle… yet! I haven’t really used this one much yet, but text is very clear on the iPod, although naturally the screen is some what smaller than a Kindle.
  
• Panorama – a simple app that lets you take panorama pictures by joining together multiple pictures taken with the built in camera, and it is Free
• Flickr – Access your Flickr account to share and view pictures
• Remote – This app lets me control iTunes on my iMac from anywhere in the house, not worked out why I would want to do that yet!!
• Skype – Like the desktop app it lets you have voice calls and now video calls with other Skype users on PC’s, Macs, Linux platforms.
• TV Guide – A free UK TV programme guide, a miniature Radio Times if you like.. and it’s free
• Wikipedia – a great free app for looking up the answers to quiz questions, or the details of an actor whilst you are watching TV!
• WordPress – Useful for updating WordPress Blogs like this one, you can edit posts and create new ones.
• Radio Player – a great free app for streaming UK radio stations to your iPod
• Fon Maps – This application is supposed to indicate the location of FON WiFi hotspots, but it doesn’t appear to work – Failure
• Heart Pal – I use this free app to track my blood pressure, it shows the highs and lows and an average figure too. I have a BP monitor that I take the readings with and then feed these in to the app.

Don’t hesitate to ask me for more information if you need it on any of the apps listed.

I got my iPod Touch back in late November last year. It has proved to be a very useful bit of kit. I don’t really use all of it’s functions, but I’ve been discovering new things most days/weeks.

There is a huge variety of apps available for the iPod Touch, some of them work ok, some not so ok because they are really intended for the iPhone which has a slightly different feature set.

So here’s what I’m using, most are free unless I indicate otherwise.

• BBC News – Essential for keeping up to date with World and UK news and it’s free
• Camera + – A much improved camera app compared to the standard one, this one lets you do some limited editing and adjustments to the pictures before you save them, share them by email, Twitter or Facebook. Sadly the resolution of the iPod Touch camera is a little limited, I don’t use it often compared to my small compact.  And for £0.59 this is a must have app.
• Dropbox – I’ve been a Dropbox user now for well over a year, can’t be without it so it makes sense to have it on my Touch as well. It’s a great way to always have your files, photos etc available on all your devices and PC’s
• Facetime – A great video conferencing tool, works great, better than Skype in most respects. It’s simple to use and great on the Touch because I can go walking around the house with it and show family and friends what is going on here. Free to download and free to use.
• Facebook – Easy to use, although I would like to see them include some extra features in to this, such as managing friends.
• Road Trip – I use this to record how much fuel we are using in the car and for our oil fired boiler!! Lots of apps available, after a lot of false starts I discovered the free Lite version of this which can cope with my requirements of entering things in litres, paying in Euros and still getting a Miles Per Gallon figure. Having satisfied myself that this app could handle my slightly unusual requirements I bought the paid version which can handle more vehicles including the boiler!! Which is just a bonus really.
• Target Weight – Tracks my feeble attempts to loose weight, nice and simple to use, basic graphics and stats but it is free and works quite well.
• Tumblr – I’ve only just started my Tumblr blog, but the app on the Touch makes it very easy to add posts on the move and adding pictures and quotes etc.
• Twitter – Just the standard Twitter app, it works for me.
• Week Cal – The standard calendar in iOS only has Day view or Month View, or a list view. Why they missed out the most obvious view… Week View I don’t know. This one is a paid for app, but it seems to do the job ok, although I still use my Filofax for everything calendar related!!!
• Battery Master Free – a simple battery battery level indicator, the iPhone 4 has a simple indicator in the status bar showing the percentage, something that hasn’t been shared with the iPod Touch yet.

More in Part 2 of this article.

I have had an iPod Touch for a few months now. Great device and it does most things I want.

However, this morning I discovered a flaw in the way some of the apps interface with the basic settings. I was looking for a simple app to log my car fuel consumption, what could be more difficult than that? Plenty of apps to choose from in the app store. But so far I’ve not found one that does exactly what I want… and here’s why.

1. I’m English, but I live in France. So I prefer my language settings on my iPod to be in English, but I also set my regional settings to UK, otherwise the calendar is in French….
2. I buy fuel in litres, but I like to know what my car is doing in Miles per Gallon, but set some of the apps to MPG and they ask for the cost of fuel per gallon.
3. Living in France I’m paying in Euros, but most of the apps, are using the regional setting to display my costs in GB pounds.

What I need is an app that has currency, quantity, cost, and units etc independent of the device settings. Anyone know of such an app?

In the mean time I will stick to my own spreadsheet, it copes with all these different units, language demands very easily!