waffle

I’ve been a vocal critic of the kind of bullshit that Apple makes you agree to if you want to distribute applications on the App Store, and the idea that it’s the only way to distribute applications for the unwashed masses. (”Enterprises”, which Apple defines as companies with more than 500 employees, can distribute apps locked to specific phones, as can any iPhone developer in the Program via the Ad Hoc model. But there’s no “anyone can run this” flag anywhere outside of the bundled apps; even the App Store apps are signed specifically for your device when you download them.)

That said, App Store is pretty remarkably a good way to distribute apps. One tap to install them, and one tap to uninstall them, including every piece of bookkeeping it has spawned in the meantime. The next-gen Installer.app needs to ape this closely, especially the part where you don’t wait for two minutes for your sources to refresh at the start. I guess it’s no wonder I’ve installed a bunch of apps already. Here, therefore, are a bunch of mini-reviews:

Super Monkey Ball

The accelerometer is far too sensitive. You can’t save and resume in the middle of a world. It once crashed the entire device on me when I plugged in headphones. This game is the iPhone to iPhone’s game lineup — more or less revolutionary and with a number of snags which you’ll ultimately forgive because it’s just more fun than any self-pronounced alpha-specimen of its kind has ever been. In the first five minutes, it does more to demonstrate the kind of new gaming you can experience than the DS and its two screens, microphone and stylus has done in two years. Every other mobile phone game — or even portable game — on the planet just got a very tough act to follow.

Shazam

It’s a stupid name, but it works like Track ID, which has been on Sony Ericsson phones for two years now. You record a few seconds of music (settable, longer means greater accuracy), Shazam sends this to a server in the cloud and back comes name, artist, album and cover art. Has worked flawlessly on any original recording I’ve thrown at it, but it’s not pattern matching so if you hand it a new version of an existing song, it’ll probably choke on it. When you hold your phone up to the speaker (although often, this isn’t needed), a vibration is sent when enough music has been recorded, so you don’t have to hold the phone at an angle where you see the progress on the screen, which is a nice touch. I really have no idea how they finance this, since the app is free, but apparently they’ve been around since 2002 so it seems like they won’t go away too soon.

SimStapler and Hold On!

Hours of fun. Maybe. Perhaps. Shut up.

Currency

Good, except it focuses on one master currency and several target currencies. I’d like to see another mode allowing for a set of specific conversions. (What’s the SEK to the USD? The USD to the SEK? The EUR to the USD? The GBP to the EUR?)

Vecka

It apes the popular Swedish site vecka.nu and shows one thing: the current ISO week number. Since iPhone’s Calendar misses the week numbers, this may be interesting to some.

Enigmo

Completely brilliant.