iPhone Apps à la Kat

If you like to play Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook (you know who you are), you will likely have figured out that lots of your friends whose scores seem astronomically high to you are getting these scores on their iPhone/iPod touch. You want this app. Yes you do. Okay, they don’t have any of those weird coin things, but it makes up for it in higher scores. I play it every day (a lot) and it is far and away my favourite iPhone app.

I’ll admit to being a bit of a late adopter when it comes to Twitter. In fact, I’m only just now starting to get my bearings in this new frontier of social media, and part of the reason for that is Tweet Deck. It integrates your Twitter and Facebook feeds (as well as Twitter mentions and direct messages) into one easy to understand grid. The iPhone app is slick and easy to use. If you’re on Twitter, I recommend this one.

If you’re like me and used to while away hours at work playing solitaire on your old-school PC (who, me? Waste time? Never!) then take a look at the new face of solitaire: iPhone style! I tried out a bunch of different solitaire apps and landed on Solebon as my favourite. At $1.99 it’s a steal with literally dozens of different kinds of solitaire games, but the free version (Sol Free) is probably all you really need.

I love Facebook, and I love the recent upgrades to the Facebook iPhone app, especially the push feature, which means I don’t always have to be logging in to see if anyone’s commented on my status (vain, yes).

This is my favourite of the flashlight-type apps. Turn it on and your screen turns white, generating enough light to read by in a darkened room, or just enough to navigate your way back upstairs after turning off all the downstairs lights. I use this one a lot – but beware, it doesn’t time out so if you fall asleep while reading to Just Light, you will drain your battery.

Kinda like a Weight Watchers journal, this is app lets you track your daily intake of calories, fat, fibre and lots of other nutrients. It helps you set goals, keeps track for you and even charts your progress. You can add friends to your profile so that you can encourage each other (research shows you’re more successful at weight loss if you do it with a friend).

There are a lot of word-scramble type games out there, and WordWarp is the one I settled on. It has a simple interface and a neat definition feature that links you to the wikipedia definition for each word. It also has a suggest a word feature, in case you make one that’s not in their dictionary but you think it should be. It’s fun.

One thing they don’t tell you when you buy your iPhone is that your kids will be forever hounding you to play with it and begging you to buy games for them from the app store. I have succumbed to several stupid requests (iDrag Paper being at the top of the list – literally just a roll of toilet paper that you unroll by dragging your finger across the touch screen. Fastest unroller wins. Kids love it) but Plants vs. Zombies is one of those games that I am actually glad I bought. It’s silly, but fun and addictive. By PopCap games, the maker of Bejewelled: how can you go wrong?

This one’s likely to go the way of the dodo as more and more people snap up iPads, which have apples proprietary iBook Reader software installed, as well as an iBook store. But for now, I’ve found this to be the easiest way to read books on my iPhone. The screen scrolls for you (which means no need to turn pages) and the scroll speed is controlled simply by tilting the device. There is a fair selection of titles, including a number of classics (from Homer’s Odyssey to Pride and Prejudice) available free. For now, I like it, but I’ll probably just delete it when I get my iPad (wish, wish).

Another kid pleaser, but also a fun way to while away time if stuck waiting in line somewhere, this is the classic Where’s Waldo challenge built into your phone. Not for the faint of vision, though, as many of the things you find yourself searching for seem microscopic on the small screen.