Useful Free iPhone Apps

Now that I have a shiny new iPhone, one of the many things I’m doing is finding cool free apps to extend my phone’s funtionality. There are, of course, an incredible number of paid apps as well, but being a poor college student, I’ll focus on the free ones that you may not have heard of.

There are certain free apps that everyone should already have by now, so I’m not going to cover them in great detail. Facebook, one of the Twitter clients, and any IM services you use (AIM and Y! both support push notifications, by the way) are must-haves.

Music

Shazam – Identify music that’s playing. Can be difficult in environments with a large amount of ambient noise, but is capable of identifying even rare music.
Pandora – Listen to music on the fly. Sadly, you have to keep the app open while you’re listening.
AOL Radio – Listen to local radio stations over the ‘net. For Atlanta, this includes 92.9 daveFM, Dave Roots, News-Talk 1380 WAOK, and V-103. I’d care more if they included WREK in that list. I never thought I’d ever recommend anything owned by AOL other than Winamp and Engadget, but here we are…

Web/remoting

WordPress – Lets you edit, publish, delete, etc posts and pages, as well as approve, edit, and delete comments on any WordPress blog. Very elegant interface. Most of this post was actually written with this app.
bamAnalytics – Google Analytics app Lets you get a quick view of the most important analytics information.
VNC and RDP by MochaSoft – These let you remote into a system, if you didn’t already know. If you know what these are, you’re probably already looking them up in the app store.
Remote – Lets you remotely control a copy of iTunes on a network. Fairly neat if it’s set up and you have a use for it.

Images

Flickit – simple app to upload images to Flickr from your phone. It’s not as simple as I’d like, but it works.
xFractal – Fractal generator, with Mandelbrot, Multibrot, Julia, Newton fractals, four available color schemes, and some manually adjustable settings. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know what a fractal is.

Math/science

Quick Graph – lets you graph multiple functions in 2d or 3d. My main beef is that they don’t have a factorial function, but I’m okay with that, it’s free and keeps me from having to dig out my TI-86.
iHandy Level – it’s a level. Not much else you can say about this one.

For the lulz

FML – If you need a quick dose of schadenfreude, fmylife.com has a mobile app.
SpinTheCoke – You flick a coke bottle, and it spins. Yes, an app version of Spin The Bottle.
MyVibe – The funniest of the bunch, for which you can really say, yes there is an app for everything – it’s got one button in the middle of the screen, and some intensity controls on the right. You figure it out.