As I Xi It v2.3

Having returned from my travels around Sweden and with many other trips in the pipeline for the rest of 2010, I thought it’d be appropriate to review my top three travel apps for the iPhone. A must have feature in travel apps is the ability to have them run offline without having to use data roaming which can be pretty costly (at the time of writing, O2 charge £3/MB for data roaming in Europe and £6/MB for the rest of the world).

When planning a trip, it’s always handy to have all your flight details and confirmations at hand. To keep organised, I recommend WorldMate. It’s free and the cool thing is that you can just forward your confirmations and booking details to either your unique WorldMate email address or the generic WorldMate email address (having linked your email address with it) and it’ll pretty much set up your trip itinerary for you. You can also manually tweak your itineraries for things like meetings or visits to museums and whatnot.

If you really want to travel light (no such thing for photographers hauling kgs of kit), you could leave your Lonely Planet and Rough Guide at home and replace it with TripWolf. Just select the city or country that you’ll be travelling to and download the guide before departure. Since TripWolf is based on integration of info from the Marco Polo guides and user generated info, it’s pretty much a constant work in progress so you should have the latest info everytime you update it. Most of the guides are free to download within the TripWolf app, but there are some places for which you can download a premium guide for a price, I think it’s something like £4/5. I assume it has more detailed info than the basic guide.

There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the local culture by learning the local lingo. To save on having to bring a separate phrasebook, I recommend Lingopal. Unlike the traditional paperbacked phrasebooks, it speaks to you! You can download individual language apps, a few are free and most are paid (only 59p each), there’s also a dedicated app to help you flirt in all their different languages as well as the complete bumper pack of all the phrases (travel, essentials, flirts, insults etc) in 44 languages. It has some pretty humerous phrases including Sophie’s favorite “Oj! Jag tappade glassen… Kan du slicka upp den?” and some of their insults are quite priceless like, my favourite, “Om jag skulle vilja höra från ett ashål hade jag släppt mig”.

I’ve just been testing the voice search on the Google app for my iPhone and I can’t say that it’s as good as I’d expected. When I asked it to ‘search Xiyu’, it returned with ‘sexy z’. I also tried ‘Xiyu online’, but got nowhere close. Now, granted that those aren’t very standard things to search, so next I tried ‘Applied Environmental Microbiology’ and it returned with ‘applying for men to microbiology’. Now, while it’s fairly close phonetically, it’s not really close enough to be of much use. Nice try Google, but I think I’ll stick to good old typing for the time being.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

Now I thought seamless integration of my iPhone with my computer as a remote was cool, then I came across Apple’s own app which lets me control my iTunes via wifi! Works mighty well too, I’m almost tempted to get a Macbook Pro now.

See here for more info.

Today I came across the coolest app ever for my iPhone, it works pretty darn well and best of all, its FREE!! It’s the Logitech Touch app which allows you to control your computer like a touch pad over wifi. All you need is the software for the computer you want to controll here and install the Touch Mouse app onto your iPhone. If you search for “Touch Mouse”, it should be the first app that comes up.

It was surprisingly easy to set up, all I did was install the software on my computer and then opened up the app on my iPhone, selected my computer which it automatically detected and voila, all done. So now I can use my computer with ease while I’m on the exercise bike! How’s that for multitasking?

Since my mobile (cellphone or handphone for non-Brits) contract has terminated, I upgraded to the very shiny black 16GB iPhone 3Gs. I’ve got to admit that when thinking about which phone to upgrade to, I was a little apprehensive about picking the iPhone since it’s just so common. But having delved closer, I can see why it’s so popular. It looks good and is fairly easy to use. I like that it uses iTunes so I’ve only got one piece of software to deal with my iPod and iPhone. No need to have multiple software to clutter up the computer.

There are some way cool apps you can download for it. My favourite so far is probably Urbanspoon with its scope feature giving that augmented reality feel to it. There’s also What Knot to Do by Columbia, the outdoors clothing people with a guide on knots! Language Translator is pretty good too and the auto detect language tool works fairly well when I tested it with what few languages I know.

I do miss real buttons though. The on screen keyboard is fine, but takes a little getting used to it. Not sure how well it’d work for those with fat fingers.

This is really neat! Click here. I used it on the photo below. I think it gives it a bit of a kick. It’s like the software version of a Lensbaby.

Today I’ve been testing out Google Chrome and it’s pretty quick. Way quicker than Firefox. Nice and lightweight, perfect for my netbook. 

It’s neat, simple and does the business. 

There’s not much else to say really.

Well, I spent most of the evening installing Windows XP. It was pretty straightforward, just set the netbook to boot from a USB CD-ROM and away I went! Every thing seems to work. Everything apart from the built-in microphone, but that’s not too important since I don’t think I’ll actually use it. If I’m to Skype, I’ll probably use a headset anyway.

Installed all my programs including this new thing called WeFi. It’s quite neat, it tells you where the closest WiFi hotspot(s) is(are) while you’re WiFi-ing about. Also, if your chums are set up for it, you could see where they are and how close or far they are. If you’re often using public hotspots, I highly recommend this little app.

On a separate note, it’s snowing outside. It’s October and its snowing in London. Brrr… I can’t say that this was anticipated.

WordPress appears to have yet another new release.

Still on the trail of a pretty desktop, I installed Yahoo! Widgets. It’s a widget engine where you can download add-on applications to do all sorts of useful stuff like tell you the weather, latest news headlines and other such exciting things. It’s not bad, but everytime I download a new widget, Firefox crashes a few minutes afterwards which can be quite annoying if you’re installing lots of widgets.

Here’s an updated screenshot of my desktop. I’ve got Gorgy Clock, Info 101 and Yahoo! Weather up. I always like to know the weather forecast. There’s a Tube status widget too, but its kinda ugly looking. Note that I’ve managed to find how to hide all my icons (right-click somewhere on the desktop > Arrange Icons By > Hide Desktop Icons).

I’ve been looking through Lifehacker and came across their Windows Desktop Show and Tell article showing some pretty cool looking desktops. They all looked so minimalistic, cool and kinda Mac like. I thought to myself, “I want that” so off I went in search of some icon docking application things.

I tested out two – ObjectDock and RocketDock.

ObjectDock has more bells and whistles than RocketDock. It also needs a minimum of 256MB of RAM to run and 20MB hard drive space whilst RocketDock only needs 10MB and the installation file is 6.20MB. Both of them are visually aesthetic but I opted for RocketDock in the end since it was the lighter weight application.

If you thought a skinned Windows toolbar was cool, this is even cooler!! I’ve shifted my XP toolbar to the top with autohide on. The icon dock sits on the bottom and I’ve autohid that too for more screen real estate. It just pops up when required. Most of the icons on my desktop are gone, all that’s left is My Documents, My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Bluetooth Places and an application I’ve just downloaded. I’m just wondering how to hide them.