I was reading the The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars and did not find it useful, because it was mostly about games or things that apply to people only in USA. So I was wondering if I had my own list.

Stanza

My most favorite application is the Stanza app for reading ebooks.

It’s because of Stanza that I actually started to read more! Mostly because I can read a book anywhere and any time I want to. I also discovered some great books such as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse because I could explore and download in a few clicks.

Maps built-in application

Google started giving driving directions in India a few months back and it rocks!

RunKeeper

The ability to see your pace at exactly every moment during a run is very handy. And I don’t have to carry any extra device because I’m already carrying my iPhone which also happens to be my iPod which I listen to while running. And the best part of the RunKeeper Pro app is that it announces by voice the distance and speed every 5 minutes which gives me the boost I need if I slowed down.

RememberTheMilk and Evernote

The RememberTheMilk app is one of the slickest iPhone apps I’ve used, but I started making daily todo lists which is a bad idea, so I wanted to think in terms of notes instead of lists, so I started using the Evernote app which was exactly what I was looking for.

The best part about Evernote is that I always have a notepad to jot things down whenever I have a thought. And after I started using Evernote, I realized this happens more often than you think! And it has gotten more useful with the 3.0 version of the app. For example, imagine searching for notes by the location where you created the note! Or make voice notes. Or saving photos of an article in a magazine and searching for the text in that article inside Evernote. Or sending a link to Evernote via email. And so on.

There is also the official Wordpress app for writing blog posts or tinkering with drafts.

MobileStudio and Dropbox

Whenever I need some files that I might need to use on-the-go, I transfer it via FTP to the MobileStudio app and then access it on my iPhone.

For example, in one incident, I was able to quickly open the tickets I had saved as a PDF on my phone since I didn’t have the actual printout.

Oh, and having Dropbox access online via the browser means I have all my files accessible any time.

TimeJot

See my earlier time tracking article.

tv.burrp.com

If you thought there was never interesting on TV, just visit tv.burrp.com and find out what’s on TV right now. It’s very very useful.

burrp.com

Find restaurants on-the-go. Once, a friend and myself were in Koramangala looking for a place to eat, and we discovered Fiorano Ristorante via burrp, and had nice authentic Italian food.

Reach people

I never have to worry about how to reach a person any more, I have all the methods – phone call, SMS, email, Skype, IM, Twitter. You name it, we got it.

TED Talks at night

It’s hard to turn off the music or movie and force myself to sleep. So I end up taking my iPhone to bed and watching a TED talk or two before sleeping.

Ambiance

There’s actually an app for listening to rain sounds or the crackling of a campfire or sounds of that sort. It comes in really handy when you just want to shut out all the noises outside and you’re not in a mood to listen to music. It gives you the background noise that you always wanted.

WordBook

Having a very handy dictionary on your fingertips is handy when you want to check if the word that you’re using means what you think it means.

Torch

Yeah, the Torch app comes in handy these days because of the frequent power cuts in Bengaluru.

Wishlist: ngpay

The one app that is missing on the iPhone is an ngpay app. I once called up their customer support and asked if they had plans for an iPhone app and they told me that “Sorry sir, the iPhone doesn’t support third-party applications.” I was speechless.

There’s an app for that

There are a lot of apps out there to use.

I’m just glad that I finally got a kinda-PDA device that I always wanted. Now I never get bored waiting for someone because I can actually spend that time finding out the latest news and I can check Wikipedia for the members of a rock band during a discussion with friends

While I was cycling today, I had an interesting thought.

I always have my ol’ iPod Nano with me while I’m cycling. As usual, if I want to listen to a song again, I click the left button to repeat, if I don’t like a song, I click the right button to skip to the next song. But while cycling, I have to do this without looking at it. It is possible because I can feel the click-wheel and it has a good feedback so that I know when the press has worked.

Compare this with the touch-screen rage – can a person use the iPod Touch/iPhone without looking? From my limited usage of a friend’s iphone, I do not think it is possible.

It makes me wonder which is really the “Touch” – the one I can use without looking (using only sense of touch), or the one that has a touch-screen UI (requires both sense of touch and sense of sight)?

From New York Times, November 26, 1991:

DOS computers, made by I.B.M., Compaq, Tandy and about a million other companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans will note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not connote a higher life form. There is strength in numbers, however. The White House uses DOS computers.

I read the iCon book recently and have been wondering what makes people (like me) so fascinated about Steve Jobs?

• He didn’t create any great technology or product, it was people who worked with him who did all that, for example, Steve Wozniak and John Lasseter.
• He was a leader, a manager, that was his role. He’s an inspiring leader, is that why he’s admired?
• Or is it because he’s ruthless in executing his visions and ideas?
• Or is it because he gives such enrapturing keynote speeches that they are now called “Stevenotes”?

I guess it just goes to show that he’s a man of many contradictions.

The best example that I’ve come across of how he can inspire people is his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 (the official video is available for download using iTunes). This speech was so powerful that I know of one friend who quit his job after hearing that speech and decided to go chase his dreams. That was a huge risk but guess what, he’s doing much better than before now.

The book has some interesting accounts of how Steve came to India in search of “truth”, wore a lungi, went travelling in cities and deserts, and even meeting a baba in the Himalayas (which itself is quite a story). Another story was how he hung out with his New Age buddies at an apple farm in Oregon, which is eventually how the company was named Apple. Then there are the accounts of how Steve demanded absolute loyalty from his friends to accounts of his taste in the kind of ads that Apple made and so on. It was a good read.

The bottom line is that he led Apple and Pixar and collectively changed three major industries for the better – the computer industry, the animated movies industry and the music industry. And he has battled cancer and survived. All this in a single lifetime. And he’s only fifty. That’s why I admire him so much.

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product.

Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day!

I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss.

In fact, it works with any device that charges through USB, whether it is your iRiver, or any mp3 player, or your mobile phone!

Some more cool features:

• The ion is portable, you can carry it around anywhere, especially to places where you will not have access to a computer.
• Do you really need to switch on your computer the whole night just to charge your iPod?
• You can listen to your music when your iPod is getting charged by the ion, instead of staring at the ‘Do not disconnect’ message.
• An awesome looking product. A great companion for the iPod.

All this for just Rs.399 only. As a bonus, you get solid reliability because the ion has a voltage regulator circuit that protects your device from power surges. Most existing charger products out there do not have such protection.

We’re going to get the product out in the stores soon, but^* the quickest way to get an ion is to buy it online right now!

We’ll also be trying to get the posters put up in all the IT companies so that more people get to know about the ion. If you can help us with this, please do drop us a line, we’d be glad to hear from you. If you want to grab the posters yourself, you can get the digital version and set it as your wallpaper and help us spread the word about ion

If you are curious about how the ion was born and how it was transformed into a real product that we are holding in our hand today, you can read about the interesting history of the ion.

Last but not the least, if you have any sorts of questions, doubts, queries or feedback, please do write to us.

^* Due to various circumstances, ion will not be available in stores, it will only be available online!

Jeff Han’s “touch-driven computer screen” is so cool. That would make things so much easier to organize my photos, heh. But I wonder how ergonomic it would be since we will have to be looking down at the screen all the time and it would not be at the eye level.

I can imagine how editing of home movies would be so much easier with this, and of course more interesting games. It would also mean no keyboard and no mouse.

Then Apple brings some design fu into this… and lo, the iPhone. The interesting thing is that they have 200+ patents on it, will anybody else be able to do a multi-touch interface? Relatedly, I wonder how Steve Jobs can argue that DRM is bad while patents are okay…

Anybody interested in buying my PowerBook?

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The only reason to sell it is because I hardly use it any more, even though it’s in perfect working condition.

For those interested, I might throw in my copy of iWork for free (which costs a separate $79).

To recap on the features:

It is a 12″ Powerbook with Mac OS X 10.4.8 Tiger. It has a 1.5 GHz RISC processor (apparently, equivalent to a 3GHz CISC processor such as Intel/AMD ones) with 512 MB DDR RAM, 60 GB hard disk, Combo drive which can read DVDs and write CDs, a GeForce video card with 64 MB dedicated video RAM, Airport Extreme for wireless networking, Bluetooth built-in, very clear speakers, keyboard with big keys, and much more.

Update : Sold!

A happy moment for me – my old jeans fit me again.

The 5 km jogs (5 days a week) have finally paid off. I have now progressed to 8 km (almost every) day – 1 km walk + 5 km jog + 2 km walk.

It’s almost funny how, 6 months ago, I used to struggle for just 1 km.

My only company during jogging is my iPod. Sometimes I listen to podcasts (such as Inside the Net). Sometimes I listen to music. There’s really nothing like listening to Yeh Hai Meri Kahani (K Rap Mix) and jogging at night under the lights in the track field.

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” — Lance Armstrong

Just discovered a new shortcut for the Dictionary in Mac OS X Tiger – Press Cmd-Ctrl-D and voila, it shows the meanings of the selected word in my browser!

P.S. In case you are wondering, I’m reading the RSS feed for Sepia Mutiny.

Update: The shortcut works everywhere, not just the browser.

Update: Premshree has written a Greasemonkey script that does the same for you on Firefox, although I don’t know if it’s okay by OneLook’s TOS since it does site-scraping.

Note: Pictures, courtesy of the community at Flickr. All rights reserved by the respective owners.