Chapter 17

Ten Appetizing Apps

In This Chapter

Shazam

SoundCloud

TripCase

Evernote

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard

IMDb

Spotify

Apple iTunes U

Waze

WebMD

Killer app is familiar jargon to anyone who has spent any time around computers. The term refers to an app so sweet or so useful that just about everybody wants or must have it.

You could make the argument that the most compelling killer app on the iPhone is the very App Store we expound on in Chapter 15. This online emporium has an abundance of splendid programs — dare we say killer apps in their own right? — many of which are free. These apps cover everything from social networking tools to entertainment. Okay, so some rotten apples are in the bunch too. But we're here to accentuate the positive.

With that in mind, in this chapter we offer ten of our favorite free iPhone apps. In Chapter 18, you see ten iPhone apps that aren't free but that we believe are worth every penny.

We're showing you ours and we encourage you to show us yours. If you discover your own killer iPhone apps, by all means, let us know (email Ed at [email protected] and Bob at [email protected]) so we can check them out.

Shazam

Ever heard a song on the radio or television, in a store, or at a club, and wondered what it was called or who was singing it? With the Shazam app, you may never wonder again. Just launch Shazam and point your iPhone's microphone at the source of the music. In a few seconds, the song title and artist's name magically appear on your iPhone screen, as shown in Figure 17-1.

In Shazam parlance, that song has been tagged. Now, if tagging were all Shazam could do, that would surely be enough. But wait, there's more. After Shazam tags a song you can

• Buy the song at the iTunes Store
• Watch related videos on YouTube
• Tweet the song on Twitter
• Read a biography, a discography, or lyrics
• Take a photo and attach it to the tagged item in Shazam
• Email a tag to a friend

Shazam isn't great at identifying classical music, jazz, big bands, show tunes, or opera, nor is it adept at identifying obscure indie bands. But if you use it primarily to identify popular music, it rocks (pun intended).

As part of iOS 8, Shazam now hangs with Siri. So you don't even have to launch the Shazam app to benefit from Shazam's keen capability to identify a song. Just launch Siri instead.

The free version of Shazam offers unlimited tagging but also displays lots of ads. If that works for you, you're all set. But if you're like us, you may prefer Shazam Encore, which eliminates the ads and has several exclusive features, including premium recommendations.

We've tried other apps that claim to do what Shazam does, but we've yet to find one as good as Shazam (free) or Shazam Encore ($4.99 for a 1-year subscription or $5.99 for a lifetime subscription, for which we gladly coughed up the money). It has worked for us in noisy airport terminals, crowded shopping malls, and even once at a wedding ceremony.

SoundCloud

The SoundCloud app is your gateway to the largest community of sound creators in the world, whether you're listening to a comedy riff from Louis C.K., a demo of “All Things Must Pass” from the late Beatle George Harrison, or podcasts from Ed's USA TODAY colleague Jefferson Graham (see Figure 17-2).

SoundCloud claims about 250 million listeners a month. Through a June 2014 redesign built around bolder album (or other) artwork and simpler touch navigation — drag your finger to scrub through material — SoundCloud has placed a greater emphasis on listening to streaming music and trending audio rather than uploading your own. But SoundCloud remains a major repository not only for music but also the spoken word, even if you have to go through a few additional hoops these days to record and post your own creations. You can use Facebook, Twitter, and email to share your stuff and the stuff you listen to. You can “like” a recording too.

Since the redesign, you'll have to first grab a third-party app to record and upload your own material to SoundCloud. The folks at SoundCloud are pushing a free app called AudioCopy from Retronyms, which you can fetch and access through SoundCloud's own app. Other compatible recording apps are available too.

Indeed, if you have a lot to say or sing, SoundCloud is a great place to say or sing it. You can follow friends or celebrities and they in turn can follow you.

TripCase

We both travel more than most people and are somewhat set in our ways. In the old days, we used our computers to print boarding passes, hotel and rental car details, and any other info we might need while in transit. The printouts were strictly analog, so they didn't notify us (or anyone else) of gate changes or flight delays or cancellations. And, of course, they couldn't remind us to check in. Still, the system worked reliably unless we lost our printed documents.

What we wished and hoped for was a single intelligent repository for travel-related information, one that was smart enough to alert us of gate changes, weather delays, flight cancellations, and the like, and one that was easy to configure, convenient to use, and free. What we found was TripCase, which is all that and more. It's a free iPhone app (and a website) that organizes details of each trip in one place, with reminders and flight alerts delivered directly to your iPhone.

TripCase has a lot to like, but one thing we like best is that it's drop-dead simple to add your travel events — without copying and pasting or even typing. We merely forward our confirmation emails — for flights, hotels, rental cars, and other travel-related services — to [email protected]. TripCase parses the details, creates our itinerary, and sends us an email to confirm that our trip is ready to view in TripCase. We've forwarded confirmations from at least a half dozen travel providers, and TripCase has never failed to interpret them correctly. (And you can always enter details the old-fashioned way — by pasting or typing.)

After TripCase has your info, you can view it in the TripCase iPhone app or in any web browser. The app is well-organized, with a timeline view of the itinerary (as shown in Figure 17-3) and details a tap away (as shown in Figure 17-4).

TripCase includes an action view with flight alerts, reminders, and other messages. Any way you look at it, TripCase does most of the work for you. For example, if you need to telephone a hotel or an airline, just tap the convenient phone icon (visible for United Airlines in Figure 17-4) to make the call.

TripCase can even help you locate an alternate flight based on your original reservation should your flight be cancelled or delayed. And it reminds you to check in and print boarding passes 24 hours before each flight. Sweet!

TripCase's motto is “stress-free travel,” and while it may not make travel stress free, it definitely makes it less stressful.

Evernote

Before we even talk about the Evernote iPhone app, let's take a quick look at the problem Evernote resolves for us: Storing our little bits of digital information — text, pictures, screen shots, scanned images, receipts, bills, email messages, web pages, and other info we might want to recall someday — and synchronizing all the data among all our devices and the cloud.

Evernote (www.evernote.com) is all that and more, with excellent free apps for iOS, Mac OS X, Android, and Windows, plus a killer web interface that works in most browsers.

Notes can be any length, and can include text, pictures, and PDFs, and you can create notes by typing, dictating, or photographing. You can also add unlimited tags to a note, and create up to 256 separate notebooks to organize your rapidly growing collection of notes.

You can even annotate images and PDFs in Evernote notes using another free app from Evernote, called Skitch, which we also recommend without hesitation.

Getting words and images into Evernote couldn't be much easier, but the info will be useless if you can't find it when you need it. Evernote won't let you down, with myriad options for finding and working with your stored data. In addition to the aforementioned tags and notebooks, Evernote lets you search the text inside every note to help you find the note you need quickly. (Only Pro users get to search for text in PDF documents, though.) All these useful features are available from Evernote's main screen, shown in Figure 17-5.

Two other nice touches are worth noting:

• Notes are automatically tagged with your current location (as long as you create them on your iPhone or other location-enabled device), so you can filter by Places.
• You can attach reminders to notes and receive notification on the date and time you chose. Best of all, you'll be notified on your iPhone as well as on your other iDevices, Macs, and PCs, and on the Evernote website!

Our favorite feature is that Evernote syncs notes with all your devices and Evernote's cloud-based servers automatically. Bob likes Evernote so much that he recently upgraded to the premium plan ($5/month or $45/year), primarily to increase his monthly upload limit from 60MB to 1GB and to get the capability to search for text in PDFs.

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard

Who is Bill Atkinson? He had a hand (or both hands) in the first Macintosh computer as well as the MacPaint and HyperCard Mac applications. Today, he's a world-renowned nature photographer, which brings us to his app.

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard is a free app that lets you create gorgeous high-resolution postcards and send them by email or by the U.S. Postal Service. Email is always free. And though sending by USPS costs between $1.50 and $2.00 per card, depending on how many print-and-mail credits you purchase, the 8½-x-5½-inch postcards are stunning. Printed on heavy, glossy stock on a state-of-the-art HP Indigo Digital Press and laminated for protection against damage in the mail, they're as beautiful as any postcard you've ever seen.

You can create a postcard using one of the 200 included nature photos by Bill Atkinson, as shown in Figure 17-6, or any picture in your Photos library.

You can also add any of 400 decorative stickers and 200 decorative stamps, as shown in Figure 17-7. You can even add voice notes if you email the card!

If you take pictures and have friends, you're going to love Bill Atkinson PhotoCard.

IMDb

We like movies, so we both use the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) app a lot. In a nutshell, it knows everything there is to know about almost every movie ever made and many TV shows as well. For example, let's say you want to know something (anything) about the 1997 classic The Fifth Element. Just type Fifth Element, tap the Search button, and everything (and we mean everything) about the movie appears — release date, original theatrical trailer, a plot summary, synopsis, the entire cast, the entire crew, critic's reviews, user reviews, trivia, goofs, and more (some of which are shown in Figure 17-8).

But that's not all. IMDb also includes all movies playing in theaters nearby (or near any zip code), showtimes for movies playing nearby, shows on TV tonight, lists such as STARmeter (most-viewed stars on IMDb this week), star birthdays, DVD and Blu-ray discs released recently or to be released soon, and U.S. box office results, all accessible from a well-organized and customizable Home screen, shown in Figure 17-9.

We appreciate that we can read reviews, play movie trailers, and email movie listings to others with a single tap. We also enjoy perusing information and movie trailers for soon-to-be-released films and DVDs. You won't find a more comprehensive guide to films and you can't beat the price!

Spotify

Several editions ago, we touted Pandora Radio in this space because we both felt it was the best free streaming music service around. And in Chapter 8, we tell you about Apple's new iTunes Radio. Although Pandora and iTunes Radio are both really good, we've found something even better for those who love music (not to mention free music)!

We're talking, of course, about Spotify, the streaming music service that's taking the world by storm. Like Pandora and iTunes Radio, it's a streaming Internet music service. And all three play music you like for free. But their approaches to offering immediate access to music you want to hear are quite different, though they all share some traits. For example, all three services offer

• Millions of songs for free
• Paid upgrades to ad-free premium service
• Desktop (Mac and PC) and mobile (iOS and, except for iTunes Radio, Android) client apps, so you can listen to them on almost any device with Internet access

But where Pandora and iTunes Radio are like radio stations, albeit ones that learn your musical likes and dislikes and improve over time, Spotify is more like the world's largest free jukebox. Its motto is “All the music, all the time” and, for a change, the product lives up to the hype. Just search or browse until you find a song, an album, or an artist you want to hear, and then play it for free.

You can also create unlimited radio stations. You start by selecting a track, an album, or a playlist. Spotify then plays songs you should enjoy based on the tracks you specified. Like Pandora (and iTunes Radio), you fine-tune a radio station by tapping a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon onscreen.

You can create as many playlists as you like, and playlists can contain a virtually unlimited number of tracks. And while you can't currently create folders to organize your playlists with the iPhone app, you can create them with the Spotify desktop (Mac/PC) app and then use them on the iPhone, as shown in Figure 17-10.

Spotify offers a plethora of ways to find new music beyond searching. You can check out recommendations based on what you've listened to in the Discover section (as shown in Figure 17-11), listen to premade or self-made radio stations, see what your friends are listening to, or do old-school browsing.

Spotify offers over 20 million tracks, so you'll rarely strike out if you like popular music. In the last edition of this book, we said that Led Zeppelin and The Beatles weren't available at the time. Their entire catalogs are available now, as are most (or all) of the tracks by first-tier artists, including Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan, Roxy Music, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Neil Young, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Our editor suggested we list some newer artists, such as Miley Cyrus, Robin Thicke, Pretty Lights, Mumford & Sons, Katy Perry, Jay Z, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and Spinal Tap. So we did.

By the way, we threw in Spinal Tap to see if you were paying attention. Spinal Tap was a made-up band from the 80s mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap. However, Spotify offers at least three albums by this “imaginary” band.

And Spotify often has rare or seldom-heard live and studio versions of the songs you know and love, making it easy to fall in love with them all over again.

Here's the bottom line: When you know what you want to hear, you can probably find it on Spotify; when you want to hear new music that you probably won't hate, check out Pandora or iTunes Radio. Bob likes Spotify so much, it's the only service to which he's still a paid premium subscriber! Although you can listen to Spotify for free in random play mode with advertising, if you want to play any song at any time without commercial interruptions, you have to have a Premium subscription ($9.99 a month and worth every cent).

iTunes U

You can virtually sit in on a seminar at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, or thousands of other prestigious institutions — without applying for admission. The iTunes U app is a lifelong learner's dream, featuring more than 800,000 free lectures and other educational resources from around the world, many of them videos. Better still: You have no homework, no mandatory tests, no grades, and no tuition.

Apple recommends a variety of “standout courses,” as Figure 17-12 shows, ranging from Writing and Editing for News from Ohio State University to Biology: Life on Earth from noted professor E.O. Wilson.

Or you can browse on your own by category (Art & Architecture, Business, Engineering, Science, and so on) or by institution. It's not all Higher Ed either — you can browse K-12 schools and other institutions, including museums. You might learn about financial markets, study philosophy, or tackle a foreign language. The classes you subscribe to are stored in your library (see Figure 17-13) and frequently include handouts to supplement video and audio lectures. A very nice way to get smart.

Waze

Lots of excellent GPS mapping apps can help you navigate unfamiliar territory or just keep up with traffic. The iPhone's built-in Maps app has turn-by-turn navigation, of course. And we're fans of Google Maps (which used to be native to the iPhone).

Waze, which is now owned by Google, takes a different route. It relies on the social community — other drivers who have the Waze app — to report (by tapping one of the icons shown in Figure 17-14) accidents, speed traps, hidden cameras, and other bottlenecks.

And Waze is useful even when individual drivers don't bother to report these or other conditions because the app exploits crowdsourcing, passively leveraging data in real time from you and everyone else with the app to determine traffic and how long it will take to get from here to there.

You can request notifications when severe traffic conditions might intrude upon your plans. You can tie Waze to Facebook to navigate to Facebook events and see which of your friends might be heading the same way. And you can see each other's ETA. However, you can also remain invisible if you don't want everyone knowing just where it is you are driving to.

As you cruise around, or provide active reports, you can earn points that increase your level of influence out on the road. So you'll not only get where you're going but arrive feeling empowered.

WebMD

As the old saying goes, you have nothing if you don't have your health. Carrying the free WebMD app on your iPhone provides a rich repository of health and medical information in your pocket, as the app's Home screen displayed in Figure 17-15 shows.

Let's explore a few of these areas:

• Symptom Checker: First let WebMD know your age and sex, and then you see an illustrated male or female body so that you can tap on the area of concern. Tap the Flip icon, shown on the bottom-left corner of Figure 17-16, to go from a front view to a back view and vice versa. Pinch and zoom to zero in on a specific body part.

  Tap the appropriate body part (or tap the List button instead), and WebMD serves up a list of potential symptoms. Tap a symptom to detect possible conditions and find articles (on the WebMD website) that may help you out.

• RX Medicine: Among the tools you find here is one that helps you identify drugs just by their shape, color, or the letters or numbers imprinted on the pill, tablet, or capsule.
• First Aid Information: You can search for remedies, or consult a scrollable A to Z list to find treatments for everything from food poisoning to snakebites.
• Conditions: Another A to Z list. This time, the range is everything from an ACL knee injury to the West Nile virus.
• Local Health Listings: By using your current location (or entering another location), WebMD can help you find a physician by name or specialty, a pharmacy, or a hospital. You can even tap a phone number in any listing you find to add to your contacts.
• Tests & Procedures: Angiograms, MRIs, urine tests — it's all covered here.
• Medical Terms: This glossary is no shortcut to a medical degree, but you'll feel smarter after perusing these terms.

If you sign up for a free WebMD account, you can save lists of drugs, conditions, first-aid topics, and articles.

And while we're on the subject of health, why not check out the new Health app brought to your iPhone courtesy of the iOS 8 software upgrade. You can read more about Health in Chapter 7.