Tag Archives: iPhone

Last Guy on Earth to Subscribe to Spotify

This is how I used to feel about music 2.0. Now I’m more than will­ing to spend $10 a month to lis­ten to what­ev­er I like, give or take. I will say that the playlists fea­ture is pret­ty great, espe­cial­ly now that I’m not a music edi­tor who would’ve been tasked with assem­bling them. Tedious work, that. That said, I’m enjoy­ing the Pitch­fork Top 100 songs playlist right now. Point me toward good playlists and I will add them.

I’d love to see them add a book­mark fea­ture so I could cat­a­log titles I find as I surf around the web. Think Instapa­per, but for music.

Current iPhone Home Screen

First & 20 start­ed out as one of my favorite iPhone blogs. It had a clever premise: ask tech all stars to share their iPhone home screens.

They haven’t been pub­lish­ing much of late, but I’ve checked back from time to time any­way. Thought I’d share mine again, too!

I just rad­i­cal­ly reset what’s on the home screen and where. I float­ed text, email and phone from the dock into the top row, replac­ing them with apps I use much more often, like Twit­ter, Reed­er, Things and the cal­en­dar app. It’s tak­ing some get­ting used to, but makes much more sense based on frequency.

The sec­ond row remains more or less unchanged. It’s home to my social web apps, with Instapa­per thrown in for those times when I might not be able to access the web. Learned that while rid­ing the NYC sub­way a few week­ends back.

The third row is where I’ve bun­dled apps into con­ve­nient cat­e­gories. News and Enter­tain­ment are pret­ty self-explana­to­ry. Con­tacts is just an easy way to toss the con­tacts app, LinkedIn, and Bump togeth­er on the home screen for con­ve­nience’s sake. Util­i­ties is a broom clos­et for the apps you need but aren’t all that spe­cial, like set­tings, Safari and the calculator.

The bot­tom row is for enter­tain­ment, too. The iPod app is self-explana­to­ry. I keep the Com­cast app at the ready. It lets me know when some­one’s call­ing my house so I don’t miss any calls. Han­dles my r‑DVR, too, which is real­ly great. Tuner­fish is an app I’m real­ly excit­ed about. It’s like Foursquare for tele­vi­sion, com­plete with fun badges and a suite of social fea­tures which lets you share what you’re watch­ing with friends.

Why have I left a space open? You’ll find out soon enough!

What Are Your Favorite iPhone Games?

Man, I loved me some Com­modore 64 as a kid. Hell, we had a Vic 20 before that, but the games were prim­i­tive! To be entire­ly hon­est, I was pret­ty much only play­ing edu­ca­tion­al games when we had that, so maybe I’d have fonder mem­o­ries if I was­n’t play­ing word games on it.

I remem­ber ask­ing to “play com­put­er” on rainy days grow­ing up, and when I did, I’d haul ass upstairs to play games like Bruce Lee. Now I’m play­ing on my iPhone and the mag­ic’s gone. The inter­face makes it near­ly impos­si­ble to car­ry out the repet­i­tive moves that once made this game so much fun. What went wrong?

I’m reach­ing out to you to find out your favorite iPhone games. Sure, nos­tal­gia let me down once, but I’d love to check out old Nin­ten­do games like Super Mario, or the weird stuff I could­n’t afford like Neo Geo games and so on. Share your favorites in the comments.

A Tale of Two Upgrades

I’ve been pret­ty adamant about how much I love my iPhone. Since Char­lie joined us last year, it’s been my go-to device for all things Inter­net and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I still break out my much maligned Mac­book for the heavy duty usage, but the iPhone does what I need for the most part.

It’s an old, 2G iphone that came out in ’08. It’s banged up a bit, but the screen’s still intact, which is more than I can say for most iPhones I’ve seen of that vin­tage. I near­ly jumped to the 3G when it was first announced. What can I say, I have a thing for GPS! But now I’m glad I did­n’t. iPhone 4 is the device I’ve been wait­ing for. Can’t wait to get my mitts on it. The new cam­era, com­plete with HD video, makes it per­fect for tak­ing on vaca­tion. Every­thing about it sounds like the phone peo­ple start­ed imag­in­ing once they held and played with the iPhone when it first launched.

Did I pre-order mine? No. Why, you ask? Because of AT&T. What a night­mare! Do I qual­i­fy for unlim­it­ed data at $30 per month? Yes, I do! But do I real­ly need that much? How does this affect the plan I cur­rent­ly share with my wife? There are so many ques­tions about how to get the appro­pri­ate plan that won’t result in gazil­lion page sur­prise bills at the end of the month. Fun!

Buried beneath the inces­sant iPhone 4 cov­er­age was the intro­duc­tion of a brand, spankin’ new Xbox 360! It’s qui­eter, mean­ing I won’t have to set the sub­ti­tles for every movie I watch on the thing. It has wi-fi, which means I won’t have to use a wonky adapter that did­n’t work well enough to keep Net­flix Watch Instant­ly titles from buffer­ing non­stop. But that’s not all: word is that Red Ring of Death will be a thing of the past! Glo­ry be! The best part? I can sell what I have right now for $205 at GameStop, which gets me with­in strik­ing dis­tance of the $299 price tag.

I should have both of these items in house by the end of the month. I can’t wait!