iPhone Dispatch Blog

I’v been playing around with Soonr, an application that lets you access your Mac’s files on your iPhone (or really from any Web browser). You install something on your Mac, and then set it up. You can then browse to the site on your iPhone and access files in pre-determined directories. For text files, I was able to display them. I was disappointed that I could not play audio files though. You can also access your Mail and Address Book, which was the most useful feature. I was able to send mail from my computer, but unfortunately Soonr put a weird signature at the bottom of the mail. You can also use Skype on your computer to connect your iPhone to another phone via Skype, but that is only useful for lowering the price of international calls.
As a MacBook user, I won’t get much use out of this. When I’m traveling, my laptop is with me. But if I had a desktop machine that was always on, this could come in handy. Especially if they add more features.

A long time ago I had a Palm V. A nice little PDA that was easy to carry along. I loved to reformat Gutenberg project (copyright-expired) books and read them on it. I thought the iPhone would be a good book reader too, and sure enough a site has sprung up with a huge collection of Gutenberg project books, and perhaps others. The site http://TextOniPhone.com not only has that, but a nice iPhone-only interface where you can create a collection of favorite books and flip through them page by page. It even remembers where you left off in the book the next time you come back to the site. I recommend Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Mars” series. Good fun.

If you are a Web developer like me, this programmer’s calculator has some interesting function, especially for converting decimal to hexadecimal and back. Bit shift and logical operations too. I’d love to see more tools like this. Maybe one that helps you find hexadecimal colors, or one that formats PHP date() strings.

This is probably the most sophisticated game for the iPhone yet. Scenario Texas Holdem is a version of the game Scenario Poker already had as an OS X widget. It isn’t as graphics intense as iPod poker, but then who wants to download several megs of graphics over the Edge network?

Here’s an app that I’ve bookmarked: gasapp.com. It simply takes your zip code and tells you the price of gas in local stations. It uses a very iPhone-like interface, and even links to the Map application to show you where the station is located.