Alright gang, this is for all those people out there who got an iPhone 3G for Christmas, or even just had one for a while now but want to know what apps to get. There’s a ton to choose from, and it can get a bit expensive too. I have researched, tested, and played around with each one of these so I can tell you these are the best because I use them!

I will be breaking this up into categories to make it as easy as possible, I must warn you though that some of these applications may require you to jailbreak your iPhone, but not to worry I will note that for you. Overall there’s only a handful of apps that require Jailbreaking so it’s all good if you don’t want to “void your warranty”. /rolls eyes

Top Photo Editing Applications: Naked Touch
Naked Touch is my choice for editing photos on the go. Its no Photoshop of course, but its most likely the closest we will get to it. The app will allow you to import or export photos from your gallery or photo roll, as well as your facebook, flickr, or tumblr accounts. With tools like Cropping, Focus, Noise Reduction, Shadows & Highlights, Curves, Contrast & Brightness, White Balance, and Color Balance you should be covered for touching up photos.

Top Twitter App: Tweetie
Gatta give some love to the twitters right? I’ve been through a lot of twitter clients on the iPhone and I can say that Tweetie takes the cake. With easy navigation to get where you want to quickly, all your basic twitter options at the tap of a finger, and advanced tools available to you Tweetie will be staying with me for a while. Buttons on the bottom to access your recent tweets, replies, messages, favorites give you the ability to get to them quickly. A “more” button also gives you tools like viewing your profile, people you follow, people following you, trends, and search functions. The real icing on the cake though is the ability to have multiple twitter accounts in this app. If you twitter and have an iPhone, this is the client to get.

Top Instant Messenger app: BeejiveIM
We all have an instant messenger service, whether it be AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN Live, MySpace IM, or Yahoo! Messenger. Folks, BeeJiveIM app can do all of those. The ability to add multiple accounts of said service(s) all running at the same time, an area to view all your current chats, favorite buddies, list by account or group, or search are some of the other tools that BeeJive offers you within the app. It has come a long way from being unstable and is now a very reliable app.
Tip for you Jailbreakers: Download and Install the “Backgrounder” Service from Cydia to have BeeJiveIM run in the background while you do other stuff on the iPhone, that way you stay online.

 

Top IRC app: Rooms
Having been an IRC junkie back in the day its pretty rare that I go back into a server and stay there with the occasional boredom bug I get once in a while. Mostly for nostalgic reasons I hop on IRC. No matter, I still want the best IRC app out there – enter “Rooms”. Boasting the ability to give you options like auto-connecting to particular servers & rooms, having a browser to view the different channels, and the good ol’ console if your more comfortable in that. Some other nice features I love are being able to change your font and font size, personalizing your quit message, saving your chatlog, auto correction, and being able to force the app to “stay connected” even after you turn off the screen. Being able to be in multiple rooms at once is nice since all it takes is a flick of the finger to the right or left to see that room.

 
 
 

Top Streaming Music app: (tie) Pandora and Last.fm
Tired of AOL Radio? I know, as cool as it is to be able to listen to radio stations locally or even from abroad your still listening to commercials and that all adds up to wasted battery life. Pandora and Last.fm both top my list for the best streaming music app, one of the main reasons is because if one does not have what I’m in the mood for, usually the other does (and visa versa). First, Pandora. Pulling its music from the Music Genome Project you can create whole radio stations based around songs or artists you choose. Being able to rate your songs a thumbs up or thumbs down helps with fine tuning that station so Pandora learns exactly what your taste is. Being able to bookmark a particular song or artist, allowing you to create a whole station out of that one song for later is another feature. And of course you got your basic stuff too like being able to buy that song from iTunes, or Emailing that station to your friend.

 

With Last.fm, your able to obviously link to your account and have the songs you listen to be updated to your profile. Starting new stations is as simple as pushing a button and typing in the appropriate Artist/Tag/User. Some handy features are knowing if the artist your listening to is currently “On Tour”, being able to “Love” or “Hate” the song, as well as tapping an Info button when the song is playing to find a wiki on that Artist. Info given includes their Bio, their tags, similar artists, events coming up for them, and the top users who listen to them. If I had to pick a winner out of these two I would have to go with Last.fm because of its social aspect which Pandora lacks.

 
 

Top Research app: Wikipanion+
With wikipedia being a great source for information (however reliable it is) its not a bad idea to have Wikipanion+ at your side. Having quick access to any article by typing it in, being in a layout that is easily accessable with a tap of a button on the “Contents” button, and a option to change the font size this lil’ app will have you getting through Wiki articles in no time. One more great little feature is saving the wiki links within articles by adding it to your Queue. That comes in handy when your not near a cell tower or wifi access point.

 

Top Cooking app: iFood Assistant
I love good home cooked meals, but I love it even more when I know I actually cooked them right. iFood Assistant helps you with that by giving you a many options to choose from for your cooking needs. Being able to simply browse recipes, ideas for dinner, snacks & treats, shortcuts and tips, to actual full length videos showing you step by step on how to cook a meal. Whats better is that it boasts a shopping list, a recipe box, and being able to search for dishes if you don’t see what you were looking for! It even geolocates your position using GPS to show you your nearest grocery stores! I’ve tried out a lot of apps and this one has the most features and tools out of them all. Since Kraft made this app, you might notice a few subliminal hints to buy their products which is pretty harmless since you don’t *have* to. (ex: the cooking video chef might tell you “…place the Kraft American Cheese Slices on the meat like so…” instead of just “…place the cheese slices on the meat like so…” See? No biggie.)

Once you choose the meal you want, it shows you the prep time, total time, servings it makes, nutrition info, the ingredients you’ll need (it places it in your shopping list for you), and any comments by other users regarding that dish. The length of detail Kraft went into making this app is truly amazing. If you love cooking, this is the app to get.

 
 

Top Geocaching app: Geocaching
If you missed my previous blogpost about Geocaching you can take a look at it here. Feeling adventurous and want your iPhone to be of more help? Geocaching.com made an app that does just that. It geolocates your position, and auto-signs you into your account which then shows you a list of all the caches in your immediate area. Picking one is as simple as tapping on it. You can view a description of it, see comments left by other geocachers, its coordinates, hints (automatically decrypted), a search area to lookup trackable caches, and of course all the regular info you would expect to find on that particular cache like difficulty, terrain, and inventory. It also allows you to save a cache for later in case your short on time. This is well worth it if your a frequent Geocacher.

 

Top VNC app: Jaadu
Need to access your computer at home while out and about? Jaadu is the app to go to, with its easy controls and layout (and good support) you can see your desktop (mac or pc) right on your iPhone. Zooming in/out, Adding/Saving Servers, and ability to have it rotate the screen are all handy. Keyboard use is easy too, as you just point to the field you want to type in, tap, and then pull up the keyboard to type what you want and “enter”. Remember kids, you’ll need a WiFi or Good 3G signal to keep this baby runnin’.

Top Wine app: Drync Wine
If your a wine export or just getting into wine tasting you’ll want a little help every now and then to guide you in picking a good wine. In comes Drync Wine app. Features that can get you to remember important things like “what did that wine taste like?” or the average rating for a particular wine. Not only can you add wines to your virtual cellar, you can take pictures with your camera to document the labels and color. Oh, and it has a neat little feature with the tap of a button, tweets your wine your drinking to your friends that moment.

 

Top Skype app: Fring
Use Skype to call your friends and family for cheap? Would it not be awesome if there was an app for the iPhone that did that so you can get around paying for gone-over minutes? There is, its called Fring. This can also be considered a Instant Messenger app as it allows you to connect to other IM services but I’ll be focusing on the real meat and potatoes of this app. Now if your a non-jailbroken user you can only make Skype calls while on WiFi, but if you have access to Cydia go download “VoIPover3G” which tricks certain apps like Fring to think that your on WiFi when your infact on Edge or 3G.

  

Top FTP app: FTPOnTheGo
Being able to login to your website via FTP is essential to some and this app delivers. Keep bookmarks of your servers and login credentials, view the folders and files you have in a friendly finder type menu, create new files, upload pictures from your album, rename, delete, or view files are all features available. Only downside to this app I’ve seen is not being able to change CHMOD stuff, but other than that its a gem.

 

Top Tethering app: PDAnet
Exclusively for Jailbroken iPhones, this app will allow you to tether your iPhones data connection to your laptop via a Ad-Hoc WiFi network. Its pretty straight forward, simply turn on WiFi on both your laptop and iPhone, create an Ad-Hoc network through your laptop, connect to it with your iPhone, launch PDAnet, and your laptop has internet no matter if your on the beach, train or bus so long as your iPhone has connection. Be wary though, if AT&T catches you tethering you could get quite a hefty bill next month so use this only if your in a pinch and don’t plan on downloading torrents or playing WoW.

 

Top Video Recorder: Qik (for streaming) and VideoRecorder3G (for Hi-Quality saving/playback)
Ah, The great mystery of the iPhone. Why is there no video recording application? Well, for us jailbroken users there is. Theres two routes you can take: Streaming, and Saved. First up, lets talk about Qik which is a great little app that has gone through many version to fine tune it. By having an account on Qik.com you can link up to it with this app and record video and stream it LIVE to your Qik profile page where others can view it as it comes in, chat about it and download it in flash or mp4 format. Qik has some pretty nifty features on their website too like linking to 12seconds, Youtube and other sites so you can export your video you just captured instantly to those websites.

 
 

But, what if you don’t care to stream it online for others and you just want to record video for your personal use to save to your computer later? VideoRecerder3G will do the trick with its hi-quality video and audio recording. After you finish your video you can retrieve it by either sFTPing into the iPhone, uploading it to Youtube, or sending it via Email. It allows you yo rename your videos, can start auto-encoding right away or can save the videos in either MPEG-4 or MOV format. If you choose MPEG-4 format you can choose the quality of encoding from Lowest, Lower, Better (default) and Best as well as the brightness of the video. It also boasts the ability to let you record in different modes like 320×240, 240×320, 384×288, and 288×384. File sizes usually range around 60MB for an hour of recording time. VideoRecorder3G is one of those jailbroken apps that are not free unfortunately, but I believe is worth the price, the free trial allows you to record up to 30 times with 30 seconds each session – afterwards you would need to buy a license for $20.

 
 

Top File Downloading App: dTunes
An app that lets you download music, videos and torrents is quite possibly one of the finest gems out there, dTunes gives you this. The newest version installs Terminal along with it, which we will be needing if you decide to use it for torrenting purposes. The app is cut up into three sections, first under the Music tab it takes you to Seeqpod which allows you to search for artists and songs on the web, dTunes then captures/saves the mp3 to a folder on your iPhone for playback later. Under the Video section it takes you to TinyTube.net which shows videos in MP4 format, where dTunes gives you an option to save them as well. Finally under Torrents it takes you to TPB and you can search for various torrents there. The way it works is once a torrent is found and downloaded you start it by opening the torrent (which makes it active) then exiting the app and going into terminal and typing a simple command “./gettorrent” without the quotations. Soon it will start the transfer and once completed you’ll have the files back in dTunes where you can play them (assuming your downloading video or music). Once you’ve finished transferring your files to your computer via sFTP you can delete them from within the dTunes app easily.

 

Other Misc. Top Apps:
Well, there were still a couple of apps that did not make my list because well, they didn’t really have a category of their own, or they might simply be for entertainment purposes. I did not go over games because I believe everyone has a different taste so I’ll leave that department up to you. (although if you must know, I love Monopoly, Rolando, SimCity, Price Is Right, Uno, and both the NES and GBA emulators.) I also did not go over any sort of theme or skinning app that changes the look of your iPhone OS such as Winterboard or 5-Icon Dock. These are all good apps/addons but they will be for another post, I wanted to target actual applications for specific purposes. Finally, if you don’t agree with some of my choices for the apps I picked in the categories above, then by all means leave a comment or drop me a line to tell me of a better app in that category and WHY. Maybe you’d like to see a category that you didn’t see here, I’ll be sure to cover it next time. I’m always open to trying out new apps and trying to find “the best” of the best.

Final Note: I do realize there are ways to get these apps for free and sources you can add that lets you download/install certain apps without paying a license but lets just keep that to ourselves and Google shall we?

 

Remember when metal detectors were all the rage? The thrill of being able to find something someone buried or lost underground that might be valuble? Usually the beach, or a park would be a good place to start if you wanted a good chance of finding something. Well, not anymore.

Geocaching, an outdoor treasure hunting sport where participants use a GPSr to seek out caches (containers) all around the world. With literally hundreds of thousands (and growing) caches placed in hundreds of countries there are limitless adventures you could be drawn into to find a cache. A geocache can hold something as little as a note or trinkets, or even other valuble items for you to find. Usually the rule of thumb is, if your going to take something from the cache you need to leave something behind of equal or greater value. Most geocaches also have a logbook so that you can record your visit.

Using the Internet to find websites that list geocached coordinates, you can then use your GPS device to help you track it down. Some websites like Geocaching.com have a social aspect to it that will allow others to post hints or comments on that particular cache. This can be very helpful especially if that cache has been muggled with (a term which implies its been taken or moved by a non-geocacher unaware of what it was) so that you know ahead of time before venturing out and never finding it.

Geocached items can range from trinkets, toys, cds, books, coins, buttons, to more personal valubles that are sentimental to the previous geocacher who was there. There are also Travel Bugs or Geocoins that can be found which are items that request to be “carried over” to another cache so that it can keep moving. A log is kept and updated online by the person who found it so that the original owner can see where that tagged bug or coin has been. These Travelbugs or Geocoins can travel sometimes hundreds of thousands of miles, even to other continents and across the world.

Geocaches range in size, difficulty and location but most importantly are always intended to be found. So, if you wanted to take a little geocaching adventure what would you need?

a handheld GPSr (Global Positioning System reciever)
a Flashlight (if it gets dark)
some trinkets or goodies you would like to exchange

Its wise to do your research first before heading out in order to obtain the coordinates and have an idea of some sort to know what your looking for. Grab a free account at Geocaching.com and do a search for your address or zip code to find nearby caches.

I use my iPhone 3G to do most of the work, both obtaining the coordinates and locating it. A few apps that I’ve tested and find useful would be “Geocaching”, “GeopherLite” and “iGCT”. All of which can help you find geocaches, act as a GPSr, and decode any encypted messages you might stumble across along the way.  However if your budget is tight and can only choose one, go with the “Geocaching” app.

By Geocaching you experience going out to places and finding not only the items but actual locations that you may have never knew about. Scenic trails, quiet areas of solitude, and other peaceful places that can only be found if – the Geocache is found.

Happy Hunting!