Our Favorite iPhone Apps

Our Favorite iPhone Applications
by Andrew Grinaker, VP of Biz Dev/Strategy

We recently completed a proposal for designing and developing a very cool iPhone application for a non-profit. It got me thinking about posting a blog about some of mine and our office's favorite iPhone applications.

Some background on my iPhone usage; I have had the original "Silverback" iPhone for the past 18 months and as we speak have roughly 35 Applications on my iPhone. I have downloaded more, but I usually will play around with them and then delete if they aren't used on a weekly basis.

Some background on the iPhone usage of our office; we have roughly 35% of our staff using an iPhone with half of those using the original iPhone and the other half using either the 3G or the 3Gs. Here are a few of our favorite iPhone Applications.

(In no particular order)

Urbanspoon "“ This one is widely known and gets lot of publicity and for good reason. Want to impress your friends with your knowledge of cheap Sushi in Kirkland? Pull up this application, filter your results to a certain price and restaurant type and the application provides the best option, equipped with one click to Google Maps for directions.

Amazon - Our in-house Flash and Action scripting guy made sure I listed this out. The best feature? Take a picture of a product that you are interested in, send it to them and they will get back to you with the product link you are searching for.

Pandora "“ Again, an application and service that people are very familiar with. The popular web service moved into the iPhone world and provided fans with streaming music via their phone. Very cool feature, but make sure you are connected to Wi-Fi or you may encounter some service interruptions.

Lose It "“ A calorie counter that makes it simple to track your meals and those late night snacks that you would like to forget about. To start, you punch in your personal information (height, weight, etc.) and then it provides a calorie budget. Moving forward, it tracks your progress via an interactive chart.

Mint.com "“ Most iPhone applications are about making life easier and in the palm of your hands. This application does that to perfection. Mint.com allows you to enter in your banking information and tracks your bank account information and supplies graphs and charts to categorize your spending by restaurant, grocery, gas, etc.

Shazam "“ Hear a song on the radio and can't figure out whether it is Soundgarden or Alice in Chains? Well, if you're from Seattle you wouldn't have that problem. But if you do, pull up Shazam while the song is playing and it will provide Artist, Song Title and the ability to purchase on iTunes. Very cool.

WikiTap "“ A scaled down version of Wikipedia, but just as effective. Simply type in a person, subject, location or any other word and it will provide a description to give you answers at the touch of a finger.

I am sure we will encounter a new application tomorrow that amazes us, but for now here are a few of our favorites. Enjoy!