I know I’m not the only one with this problem: You have this giant MIDI keyboard that doesn’t produce sound on its own, and most of the time, playing it doesn’t do anything. You have to launch logic, or mainstage, or ableton, or digital performer, open a new project, setup a new patch, and then start playing. In music classes, this can be a distraction, and compositionally, it can get in the way between you and your creativity.

I’d keep MainStage open all the time, but there are times when I don’t want a secondary keyboard sound when I’m using Finale or Logic. Ideally, anytime I’m not using Finale or Logic, I’d like MainStage to be running.

I’ve written a simple OS X application in applescript that checks every 30 seconds to see if Logic or Finale are running, and if they’re not, launches MainStage in the background. It takes up very little CPU and can run continuously. Here is the code:

If you’re on mac you can open that code in the script editor by clicking
here. (Thanks to Mac Developer tips for that trick.)

Download
I have created two downloadable versions, a regular version and a silent version that does not appear in the dock.

Note that the silent version is VERY silent, i.e. you do not see it in the dock, nor in the force quit window. A quick way to kill it is to run “killall applet” in the terminal, though this will kill other applescripts you have running as well.

A more precise way to kill it is to run this command in the terminal:
ps -ax | grep -i “keep mainstage”

Get the first process number listed (usually 5 digits) and then run:
kill XXXXX (where XXXXX is the process number)

You can point to either of these apps in your System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items to have them run automatically when you start your computer.

You should set MainStage’s startup action in preferences to “Open Most Recent Concert”. I have a simple concert with just a piano that I keep open.

Included in the download above are instructions on how to make the silent app run in the background again if you modify it.

Known Bugs with 1.0:
For some reason you have to force-quit the non-silent version, quitting alone does not work.

MainStage has an annoying behavior of grabbing focus once a concert has loaded. The script hides MainStage after it does this, but you will still see it briefly pop up when it launches.

The script will not launch Mainstage if you have Logic or Finale running but with no documents open.

The script may launch Mainstage at annoying times (such as shutdowns or software updates). I’d recommend just shutting down with mainstage running, and clicking “don’t save” if it asks.

iGog is developed by Wave Machine Labs, the same people who created the flagship drum replacement program, Drumagog. It is $5 and available in the iTunes store and also here.

I downloaded the demo and tried it out. The mic trigger mode is amazing! I made a demo of it on youtube:

It goes crazy when you sing into the mic too, which I forgot to demonstrate. The program saves MIDI, WAVs, and allows you to loop and sequence, so it’s a great program to have on the road or to create realistic sounding drum loops.

The only drawback with this app is that it requires headphones for mic triggering mode, and performance degrades in pad mode if you use speakers, which limits the possibilities for live performance. Mic triggering only works with one instrument at a time – it would be nice if, like Drumagog, it used frequency analysis to trigger multiple samples at once. Still though, for now the sequencing and looping make up for that.

With sequencing, I would like to see an undo function, or a track editor – once you’ve recorded, it’s added permanently, so it’s easy to mess up a good sequence with a bad take. If you’re recording on different instruments, then this is easy to fix later in the MIDI file with a piano roll, but it would be a handy feature on the road.

I always wanted to create a similar drum pad app using the iPhone’s accelerometers. I would have used the three axises to trigger different samples, so that you tap on the top for bass, side for snare, and back for hi hat. I’m pretty sure this app works better than my app ever would – it also works if you tap on the iPhone body. If they could combine accelerometer data into this app though and separate samples per axis, and also allow you to transit MIDI or OSC over WIFI, this would be the ideal drum trigger.

Still though, what an incredible app, and a great value for $5! In-app purchase of free and pay per download drum kits are also available.

There are two ways to do this:

1) Open up the piano roll for the selected region (‘P’)
2) Click on Functions > Transform
3) Click Presets: New Parameter set, Create
4) Choose Status = Control
5) Choose Data Byte 1 = 7
6) Underneath Data Byte 1 = 7, choose Fix and set it to 11.
7) Select and operate.
In this method, you can reuse this transformer you created.

The other way to do this is:
1) Open up the event view for the selected region (‘E’)
2) Click on all of the filter buttons except controller
3) Find an event with Num=7, Length/Info Volume
4) Click Edit > Select Similar Events
5) Click on one of the 7s in the Num column and change it to 11
All of the volume events should be changed to expression.

That sucks. The 3.0 SDK is still too restrictive. Imagine the amazing 3.0 apps that would come out if you could manipulate the output of your library. A real scratch interface for DJs. A live BPM counter. Reaktor-like stutter and loop apps. A pedometer that syncs music to your step. All of these ideas are things I wanted to try with the 3.0 SDK, and none of them are possible.

Likewise, accessories that come out are more or less going to be limited to one application. You could make a MIDI interface but it’s only going to work with your app. You could make a keyboard accessory, but it’s only going to work with your application. You’d have to copy and paste what you typed from your application to other apps. Even if you allowed other developers to use your keyboard framework to allow it to work in their applications, the keyboard still wouldn’t work in native apps like Safari, Mail, SMS, etc.

Apple, the iPhone is an amazing device, and you’re still being far too restrictive with it! Opening up the library to at least read access, allowing device makers to write drivers for their accessories, and giving users and developers at least limited shared file system access would do wonders for the potential for the iPhone.

I installed the iPhone 3.0 beta OS tonight and am pretty impressed. If you are a registered iphone developer ($99), you can download the beta and install it on your phone. A warning though – according to the PDF apple provides, once you install the beta you cannot restore your phone to a previous version. So if the beta sucks, you’re out of luck (!).

Luckily, so far it doesn’t suck.

The update comes with an .ipsw file and no documentation. Double clicking it doesn’t work – you have to option-click (or alt-click in windows, I assume) the “restore” button in iTunes, and then it prompts you for a firmware file and you point it to your downloaded .ipsw file.

Back up your phone first by syncing it before installing, and all of your data will be saved.

The install took forever – maybe 30 minutes to install the OS, another hour to restore my backup, and then another hour and a half to install all of my applications. But I have over 140 applications and the rest is filled with music, so I was expecting this.

The first thing I tried to figure out was where notes would sync on the mac. They weren’t anywhere to be found in iTunes. They weren’t initially showing up in Mail either, but I tried composing a new note in Mail and then the rest of my iphone ones showed up. In Mail, they look exactly the same as on the iphone, and you can sort them by name or date. When I resynced, it successfully put my new notes from the mac back on the iphone. Unfortunately, todo items in mail still do not sync with the phone.

Notes on the phone are searchable now, and the results show up as you type, which is great. Landscape typing in notes and mail is great too. You still can’t sort notes by name, which is annoying. But you can email notes, and now, you can copy and paste too! Copying and pasting worked between notes and between apps.

Mail has an awesome search function, and you can search by From, To, Subject, or All. Yahoo mail has a “continue search on server” function, for emails no longer on your phone, but it doesn’t seem to be working yet. Gmail and my other POP/IMAP email accounts do not have this function.

Spotlight is fantastic. It searches your contacts first, and then apps, emails, and music come up a second or two later. The interface is great, the little category icons butt up against each other and knock each other out of the way as you scroll. It doesn’t seem to search bookmarks though. If you hit home in spotlight, it brings you back to the first page (which is to the right of spotlight).

I thought I was missing some apps at first, because I have three blank spots on the first page, but I think it just consolidated my three blank spots onto the first page, when they were on other pages before. (Edit: My custom Xcode apps were not installed automatically.) Every time I restore my phone my apps also get resorted into alphabetical order, more or less. This happened again today. However, I was really impressed that my app data was maintained–Amazon Kindle still knew what page I was in my Reacher novel, and VoiceNote’s files didn’t disappear. Whew!

Copy and paste is great, and is more intuitive than I thought, though its behavior differs per application. In notes, double clicking brings up a character-by-character selection box that allows you to cut, copy or paste. In mail though, you have to double click and then hold to bring up the selection box. Just holding brings up a “Select|Select All” dialog.

When you’re writing a mail, clicking and holding moves the magnifying glass. Double clicking and holding brings up the cut/copy/paste menu.

In Safari, it’s the most different. You can still double click to zoom in or zoom out. Double click and holding, or just holding on a paragraph bring up the same copy menu. But this time, it’s contextual and based on paragraphs. A box appears with four dots on the top, bottom, left and right. You can drag the dots outward to expand other paragraphs or page elements, including photos and tables. However if you drag the side dots inward, the paragraph becomes a regular text selection. But you can’t edit the text selection start and end points. You can, it just wasn’t working on the particular page I was on.

The amount you can copy and paste seems to be unlimited. I copied the whole page of an NPR article, pasted it and emailed it to myself, and the images and layout came through perfectly in HTML format (using remote URLs for image srcs). I don’t think even outlook does this that well.

One disappointment: Since phone does not have a regular text field in the dialer, you can’t paste numbers into it to call.

Texting is much improved! There is a little camera icon where you can take a photo or “choose existing”, for MMS. I hear from gizmodo that MMS isn’t working yet–I haven’t tried. Also, doesn’t MMS support other content, such as videos? I wonder if the iphone supports receiving videos, sound, and animations. Still, sending photo MMS messages is a welcome addition.

There’s a new edit button in the threaded discussions, and if you click on it, each text bubble gets a dot next to it, similar to editing in mail. However, here you can delete or forward individual texts! You can even forward multiple messages — it appends them into one. Awesome.

The messages icon has changed–they removed SMS from it and call it Messages, since it’s an SMS and MMS app now. It looks kind of blank to me, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Voice memos is great–it’s a pretty app, with a mini analog VU meter at the bottom and a giant microphone. There’s a record button, which doubles as a pause button, and a stop button which doubles as a play/list recordings button to view your recordings. Memos are saved as m4a, which is impressive but annoying (aiff or wav would be better), but you can share them via email or MMS. Hmm. I wonder if other phones will support m4a. It probably converts them before sending them. Ok, so the voice memo program is how you would send an audio MMS to a friend–you have no option to attach an audio file in the messaging app. But as far as I can tell you can only send recordings from your iphone–you couldn’t send funny sound clips or music unless you rerecorded them. I still wish this phone had an accessible file system.

One downside to the voice memos – they don’t sync to your computer. Hey, actually they do. iTunes shows a new playlist on the iPhone called “Voice Memos”, but you can’t edit it or drag files from it. “Voice Memos” doesn’t show up in the iPod player on the phone, which is good. But the voice memos DO show up on your computer’s library in “Unknown Album” and in a Voice Memos playlist. Files are named with timestamps, such as 3/17/09. However it’s embarrassing that it puts them in your Library–imagine having your iTunes on shuffle at a party and then a memo comes up that says, “remind myself to fire Jenny,” or some personal journal entry or something.
I’m really excited for push notifications and turn-by-turn directions…We won’t get to see the fruit of this labor until the update is officially released and developers are allowed to publish 3.0 applications. I’m curious how push notifications will work (does the application get to do *anything* with the data coming in? Automatically or only if you allow it? What’s the limit on the length of data? I assume the popup notification allows you to open the application it’s attributed to, at least). Bluetooth sharing, custom protocols, bonjour, wifi sharing, voice and video streaming…this all looks very promising.

Google maps doesn’t look any different. I haven’t seen any fully embedded maps in 3.0 applications yet, obviously.

YouTube does not work! Every button in the application gives me the message “Cannot connect to YouTube”. When I click on the new “sign in” button I also get the same error. Embedded youtube links from safari do not work either. I assume they will fix this soon. (Edit: this is a bug that occurs when you restore a backup on the phone.)

The first time I launched voicemail, it called it directly, but when I hung up and loaded the voicemail tab again, then visual voicemail loaded.

So far, other than YouTube, I’ve only noticed two things in 3.0 that are worse than 2.2.1. One, there are a few additional lags that have come up–one was displayed prominently when they demoed the messaging app in the keynote. I‘ve noticed especially in notes and mail, there are some new delays clicking on notes or messages, and delays when the apps first launch.

The other problem was I had difficulty connecting to my WIFI network at first once I first booted the phone. Previously the iphone had had no problem, in fact it connected faster and more reliably than any of my computers. But tonight I’ve had to connect three times. It could be a coincidence or it could be a 3.0 bug–only time will tell.

The app store still needs improvement–it’s exactly the same, too hard to find anything except for top 10 lists of apps. And video, access to the file system, categorization of apps, flash, etc. would all be nice. But overall, I’m *very* happy with this update.

I found out the hard way this morning that the alarm clock no longer sounds or even vibrates if you have your phone in silent mode. (It used to). I just had this silent visual notification, “Alarm”, that I found 45 minutes later than I was supposed to get up. Thanks, iPhone! (My silent/vibrate-only ringtone on my home page should still work in normal mode).

Now you can turn off multiple audio notifications of text messages. Some people were thrilled when this was turned on, but I for one am glad to be able to turn it back off.

Camera has a new little thumbnail next to the shutter button that shows the last photo you took. It’s helpful to check if you took a blurry photo, but it just takes you back to the photo library. It’s also a little slow.

The iPhone seems to have a new way of handling WIFI authentication. At school for instance we have open WIFI but get redirected to a login page to log in with our school ID. Safari now has a new popup that shows this page. What’s amazing is that when I’m *checking my email*, a popup will come up with the HTML log in page to allow me to authenticate. I don’t know how it does this – the iphone must detect the redirection. Macs and PCs don’t even do this. When have you tried to check your mail and had Firefox pop up to allow you to authenticate with the router and finish checking your email?

Unfortunately, the pop up authentication doesn’t always work yet. Sometimes it like rotates itself and then you can’t see or type anymore. I can still authenticate with the original page in Safari though. I have noticed a couple more rotation bugs, such as in mail it sometimes doesn’t redraw right. It will be cool when they get this worked out.

Autofill is great. It was greyed out at first–I had to turn it on in settings. It’s pretty clever–it detects email fields and uses your mail account data to fill in possible from: addresses as you type, with a little cancel “x” button similar to spell check, but yellow. It has some quirks–I started typing an @ symbol thinking that it would change my email address, and instead it auto-filled and then put the @ after my email. And I wish it used a dropdown autofill of possibilites instead of just one. But overall it’s a big timesaver, especially with passwords and that WIFI authentication screen mentioned above.

Safari now has “next” and “previous” buttons for forms similar to tab and shift-tab on a computer. These are a great time saver. However the cursor seems to have disappeared in forms, so it’s hard to see where you’re typing anymore! There’s also still a bug where the shift button is enabled but not highlighted when you start typing in forms.

Commenters have mentioned that there’s a “Find my iPhone” setting in mobileme. I haven’t played with this and it doesn’t seem to be working yet but it sounds cool. Thieves beware!

Contacts can be sorted into groups, but you can’t edit groups on the phone, so I assume you have to do this on the computer. I would love to have a phone-number only group, and am going to see if I can do this on the computer.

I’m noticing that the iPod app isn’t finding some songs it should. Like if I search for Passiflora in songs it can’t find it even though it’s in my playlists and library, and it can’t find Babel Gilberto if I search in artists. However it does search better if I search in spotlight (well, it finds Passiflora, but not Babel). It’d be neat if you could make playlists based on searches, but right now it doesn’t even play the temporary search list you created, instead it jumps to the album of the song you selected.

Mail…I still wish there were two more functions: Mark as read and Mark all as read. I could do this with windows mobile and it was a huge time saver.

I’m finding a couple more lags in Safari and other native apps that are frustrating. But in general third party apps are also more responsive, and shut down immediately if you hit home after accidentally clicking on one.

Shake to shuffle: it wasn’t working at first but now it is. Sweet! I think you just have to wait for the first song to play a while. Sometimes turning the shuffle button on and off first helps.

Another addendum after another day of playing.

Running into more crashes as commenters have mentioned. The most annoying is when the phone app itself crashes. Settings crashes too sometimes, often after you click on a setting that’s supposed to bring up another column. I’ve had two big crashes, once where sound wouldn’t play in any app and I couldn’t launch Ipod, another where the screen wouldn’t turn on. Apple, do you have a bug report page for this beta?? So far it’s always been recoverable but it definitely feels buggy. Obviously it’s buggy since it’s a beta, but after a few days’ use the bugs are becoming distracting.

Still more cool features though…In SMS, instead of a big black screen blocking the keyboard and showing a giant progress bar when you send a text, a tiny progress bar animates and shows up at the top and allows you to keep typing while it sends the first one. It doesn’t play the outgoing ichat noise anymore though once it sends. Also, as many users have complained, it still doesn’t allow you to cancel an outgoing text, and often it autocorrects the last word I typed and I still claw at the screen while I watch the spelling error send and I can’t do anything about it. Still though, the small progress bar and faster texting is an improvement.

theiphoneblog.com mentioned that the podcast interface is different and you can now download over 10 MB podcasts over 3G! Indeed the interface is different, and I love the changes. You can listen to podcasts at 2X or .5X speed. There is also a convenient back-30-seconds button which is useful since the tiny progress bar isn’t accurate enough for long podcasts. There also is a little mail icon that doesn’t seem to do anything yet. The new/half listened to / old blue dot indicator also doesn’t always seem to be working correctly, but the podcasts do resume where you left off.

I did get the new WIFI authentication screen to finally work, and I LOVE it! I love that if I need to authenticate when checking my mail I can do it in one step. I still don’t know how they did this–maybe it pings a test site on port 80 first and checks for a redirect before the POP/IMAP/exchange networking starts. The autofill buttons show up on the authentication page, but currently it is not possible to save/autofill the fields since the save password prompt would ordinarily appear on the next page in Safari, and instead you’re returned to mail. Hopefully that will be fixed, and then this will truly be an awesome function.

Users are reporting that some third party apps no longer work, like facebook. Edit: oh, this blog is right, images aren’t showing up in facebook. I thought I was just having network issues. He says, “we should just call it book.” LOL. He’s also having the same “Cannot connect to youtube” problem I’m having. I’ve found a bunch of solutions for my youtube problem on the web but they all require jailbreaking. *Shakes fist at apple*…Do you want to FORCE me to jailbreak?

There are reports of getting a 3G tethering hack working, but it sounds too risky and experimental so for now I think I’m going to wait.

More updates:

Probably the most annoying bug is SMS crashing on launch a lot. Sometimes the send progress bar gets stuck too and you can’t tell if it’s sent or not. Today I tried to send a group SMS, and it treated it like a group MMS and as a result it couldn’t send the message. (Edit: You can get this to work if you turn off MMS completely in settings.) I did get an error message though with the option to try deleting or try resending.

Google maps seems to be less accurate (5 blocks off, typically) and crashy too. For a couple days I thought it’d completely crashed on this one directions screen until I finally waited it out and it eventually woke up again.

I’m confident that these bugs will be fixed by launch. However, the more I think about push notifications the more I worry. I *always* keep push email off because it’s *such* a battery hog. I tried turning it on again with 3.0 and the phone was dead within 4 hours. I don’t think I was even using it. It may have just been a bug where some app was continuously trying to connect, but if this wasn’t a bug and battery life is this dismal with push, I don’t see how it’s going to be practical. (Edit: many users are confirming a battery life bug in 3.0, maybe having to do with wifi and not push.)

These are mostly just beta bug reports; I’m sure it will get better. I’ve used copy and paste a lot and search some–I keep forgetting it’s there but it’s super useful when I remember, especially for finding apps.

What this does on the phone: You lose all your music and apps on the phone, obviously. But you also lose which apps and music iTunes is set to resync. Kind of a pain to set up again but not terrible. You lose all of your SMS and photos (hence my backing up above). Worst of all your app data appears to be lost (I had to do a lot of reconfiguring, and things like VoiceNotes are lost unless you backed up first).

Contacts, notes, and email were all resynced successfully. I had to manually set up my webmail accounts again and re-set up exchange.

This time, I installed a bare minimum of apps (it’s nice that you can keep them un-synced in iTunes and save them for later, so to speak). Even in 2.2.1, having 9 pages of apps = fail. Without that many apps, the phone is running a lot snappier.

Google maps seems to be running a lot better, though GPS is still sporadic. Mail is working well. Youtube works with the fresh restore! I had to reconfigure all of my phone settings and wifi. The annoying 30 second pause in settings especially in general > network is still there. All in all though the phone seems to be running better. A lot of the bugs seem to have cropped up when you try and restore from backup.

UNFORTUNATELY Youtube is broken and “cannot connect to youtube” AGAIN. This time I had restored from a backup from beta 1. Don’t really feel like starting from scratch and setting it up AGAIN, so I’m going to leave it for now.

I hear you can have 11 pages of apps now but haven’t tried. The only other bug I’ve noticed so far is WIFI won’t list your network in settings, but when you close settings you see it’s connected to your network automatically. Weird.

Facebook still cannot display photos. I don’t know if this is an API bug or an app bug.

One thing I keep forgetting to mention, is Safari is very stable and a lot faster. There has been some speculation that it is using a new javascript engine; All I know is that everything loads faster and it hasn’t crashed on me. Wohoo!

Then, when you’re back in your current project, or you’ve troubleshooted, or you’ve optimized, then you can click the “Enabled” checkbox and apply changes again.

iPod – I keep this on my home page of the iPhone because I don’t need constant access to it. As of OS 2.1 I can hit the home button to quickly get to the home page, and use double click home button or the headphone button to control it in a pinch. I like it a lot, though wish the podcasts would update automatically over wifi and would let me update even if they’re over 10 MB over 3G (what is error checking for after all?). Included with phone

Calendar – Great but I never remember to look at it. I wish I could display my upcoming appointments on my lock screen so I knew what was coming up (windows mobile did this on the today screen). I wish appointments automatically had an alarm set and didn’t just go off once (had a snooze). Included with phone

Photos – Nice. I turned off turning on iPhoto automatically when I plug in my iPhone because it was driving me nuts. Most of the time trying to email a photo crashes with no draft or copy in my outbox. Otherwise good. Included with phone

Camera – Since Photos and Camera are essentially the same app, they should really just combine it. But it’s decent, wish I could do macro photography and wish it recorded video. The camera should face you too for video conferencing but that’s a hardware complaint. The whole screen should be a shutter button though. Included with phone

YouTube – Pretty good. Should be able to download videos and clear searches. Included with phone

Maps – Great. Wish I could reroute dynamically if I got off course. Turn-by-turn would be great. Auto-lock prevention would be great (google maps for windows mobile did this). A retry GPS would be nice (often I have to restart maps to get an exact location). And when you click on your location it zooms too far in (hard to see where you’re going). But street view is amazing! Included with phone

Weather – great. Wish my dock weather widget on Leopard worked this well (or at all). I like having like 15 cities in there so I can view temps across the world at any time. Included with phone

Clock – good. Infinite alarms is nice. Wish you could save stopwatch results (too easy to delete them). Had to solve the no vibrating alarm problem (see my earlier post). Included with phone

Notes – SYNC WITH THE COMPUTER. Arrrgh. Also I need to be able to sort by date (size would be nice too). Titles would be nice too. Included with phone

iTunes – Never use it except for browsing and downloading podcasts (which is nice). Wish you could download files over 10 MB over 3G. Included with phone

Contacts – Why is this a separate app from the tab in the phone? It doesn’t need to be. Included with phone

App Store – Use it all the time. Wish you could view browsing history and have bookmarks. Included with phone

Phone – Pretty good. I keep this on the home page because I can access it by hitting home, or if the ipod is not playing, home twice. Wish you could filter out email contacts vs. phone contacts, it’s too hard to find people with a lot of email addresses in there! Also I hate dropped calls (I have to turn off 3G, and I can still tell when a call is about to drop). But otherwise pretty slick. Included with phone

Settings – Ok. I keep this in the dock instead of on the home page because I use it more often than iPod. Wish there was a hardware shortcut (such as pushing both volume buttons at the same time) to bring it up without closing your apps. I’m constantly turning on and off 3G (why is it three menus deep) and WIFI. I also wish home-volume up and home-volume down would adjust brightness from any applciation. Also this is a bad place for application settings. Included with phone

Safari – Decent. Definitely faster and sleeker than windows mobile. Javascript is impressive but why no flash? A lack of “Find” and copy and paste drives me nuts. Wish bookmarks synced with firefox, and autocomplete was smarter. It’s impossible to use autocomplete to start the domain and then keep typing after without going to the site first. The click and hold to drag the cursor around is too hard to use too. I wish you could lock the screen horizontally or vertically, but you can kind of do this horizontally by holding the phone upside down. Included with phone

SMS – Drives me nuts. I put this on my dock because I use it often but it drives me crazy. Wish there was a confirm or cancel button before sending a text, often it corrects me as I hit send and I claw at the screen wishing I could cancel sending the text. Examples: “Yo” turns into “No”, “np” turns into “no”, etc. WIsh you could MMS, wish you could forward texts, wish you could tell if an incoming message was delivered to a group or just you. Wish I could reply without leaving my current application. Included with phone

Facebook – Great! I hope for finer enhancements such as status comment threads but keep up the good work guys. Have this on my home page. Free

Air Sharing – Cool idea but don’t use it much. Too much work to set up the network connection with my computer and it sucks that all the documents are sandboxed (not the developers’ fault). Did have some file transfer errors. Not sure why this is on my home page, I don’t use it much (just wish iPhone had a disk mode and a transfer over air protocol built in). Free when I got it, may cost money now.

Zenbe – Great!! Use this all the time. I haven’t tried syncing yet, and am still looking for an all around iCal / gmail / zenbe tasks sync solution, but this is great for now. I only wish I could add tasks with enter instead of hitting done and then + all the time. Sometimes I accidentally put several tasks in one. Free

Pandora – Amazing. Wish I could read more about the artists but this application keeps getting better and better. Great work guys. Free

User Guide – This is just a bookmark. I may delete it. Included with phone

Anaconda – Good old snake days. Or Nibbles before that. Fun app, wish you could control the starting speed. Free

AOL Radio – Neat, haven’t used it much. Cool that you can find local stations. Free

AroundMe – Pretty neat, comparable to Yelp and Urbanspoon. Free

AstroTilt – Great! Really impressive arkanoid game. Impressive controls. Free

BJRunLite – Pretty fun alternative blackjack game. Easier than normal blackjack though. Free

Aurora Feint The Beginning – Amazing game. I played it like every day the first week I got it. The graphics and controls are outstanding. I have to give props to the music too, it’s really great. The gameplay gets a little old though, I haven’t played for a couple months now. Free

Blue Skies – Cute and impressive birds eye helicopter game. A lot of fun but easy to beat. I’d buy it if they added more weapons, enemies and levels. Free

AIM – Meh. Almost useless without background or push notification capabilities. Free

Black Jack – Fun black jack app. Better than BJLite, but the ads are annoying. Free

Chess Puzzles – Great. I’m not good at them though. Maybe a description of why there’s only one way to solve the puzzle after each one would help. Free

AirMe – Interesting. Upload photos from your phone using Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. Geotagging is nice, but I’m finding myself just using the Facebook app. Deleting. Free

Constitution – Pretty neat that you can have it in your pocket. I’ve used it like once though. Free

Calculatlor – Nice. Again, wish the dock calculator worked as well (my dock calc takes like a minute to load…faster to use my iphone). Included with phone

Lose It! – Amazing weight loss app. I didn’t think I’d actually use this but so far I am. It has a LOT of foods programmed in already (though sometimes it’s hard to find what you’re looking for, such as just coffee with sugar, not vending machine coffee). You enter all the data in yourself (including weight), but it’s impressive. Free

Bank of America – Decent. V1 was just their website in an app but it was still faster than typing their address in Safari. V2 is more customized for the iphone. There are still some display bugs but it’s a very handy app. I put this in the top left corner of my third page because it’s useful. Free

Crash Bandikoot Nitro Kart – Decent Mario Kart clone. I bought this but probably wouldn’t again for $10. It had 5 stars when I bought it but I’d give it 4. It’s impressive but hard to control, and I never finished the game. Very impressive use of openGL though. $10

Cube Runner – Neat primitive speed driving game. Challenging and fun. I played this all the time the first week I got it. Free

Dactyl – Like wack-a-mole but not as much fun. Kinda primitive like a web flash game. Deleting. Free

Stocks – Neat but I hardly use it. Wish you could delete it. Included with phone

Sleep Display – A custom app I wrote that sleeps my imac display. More coming soon.

Wake Display – A custom app I wrote that wakes my imac display. More coming soon.

DizzyBeeFree – Adorable, creative game. Cute sounds and graphics. Haven’t purchased the full version yet but the free version was super easy to beat. May buy the full version. Free

Earthscape – Impressive for coming out before google earth, and without google’s resources. However still pretty buggy and crashy. Deleting. Free

eBay – Pretty neat for watching or bidding. Search is somewhat primitive. Haven’t used it much. Free

eReader – Looks like an impressive app, but I haven’t found anything worth reading yet. Still trying to figure out how to import my own PDFs into it (it’s nicer than the native PDF reader). Free, but books cost money

Evernote – Everyone raves about this but it doesn’t do any of the stuff I wish it did. It sounded like it OCR’d photos you take but as far as I can tell it doesn’t. You can take all sorts of notes such as web clippings and photo reminders, but that just doesn’t make sense to me (I prefer lists). I suppose note syncing is nice but so far I’ve just been using notes and Zenbe (even though notes don’t sync, grr). Free

FlyCast – Radio, right? Haven’t used it (iPod, Pandora, and AOL Radio in a pinch all take precedence). Free

Fring – Haven’t played with it yet. Evidently you can make voip calls with it? I thought that was against the SDK. Anyway, still need to set up an account. Free

G-park – Decent. Used it a couple times. GPS use has improved. Take Photo / Add Notes is a nice addition. Wish it didn’t send you to google maps though for finding your car. $1

Hangman – Fun! Ads are a little annoying. Oh neat, now there’s 2 player mode. Free

AP Mobile News – Use this all the time! Keep it as the top app on my 4th page. Great app. Also wish old stories didn’t show while the new ones were loaded, because sometimes you want to click and then the new ones overwrite it. The ads have gotten less obtrusive though which is nice, and I like that it caches data for reading later if you lose internet. The new reload button is a welcome improvement. Free

G-spot – Interesting. Can calculate your direction and speed somewhat unreliably. You can share your location with others, though some of this functionality is being overlapped in google maps. Still, it was worth purchasing when I got it. $1

Grafitio – Pretty neat. Haven’t used it for a while but it’s amazing how many people use this app around you and leave notes no matter where you are. You can’t delete posts though (yikes!)…I accidentally publically geocoded my own apartment. Fail. Free

phpToDo – a bookmark to my phpToDo page. I was using this before I started using Zenbe.

GraphCalc – Pretty rad. I wish I had this when I was taking trig or calc. Free

iDoodle2Lite – Free doodling app. Pretty neat, I’ve used it once or twice. Free

iBowl – neat use of the technology (you swing the iPhone to bowl). Kind of easy. Don’t really play on my own but a fun demo app of the iPhone’s capabilities. Free

SGN Golf – similar controls to iBowl. Haven’t played it much but it’s impressive. Though I do worry about throwing my iPhone into the ceiling with these apps. Free

IM+ Lite – Kinda neat multi client chat app. Again, kinda useless without background or push notification support. I prefer using meebo.com in Safari.

iReversi – Pretty rad internet reversi game! Free

ITM MidiLab – Haven’t set this up yet, but a neat MIDI interface for your computer. Free

Karajan Beginner – Pretty rad music theory tutor / game. Most of it is pretty easy, I use it for the perfect pitch tests. Free

Obama ‘08 – Very nifty app during the election. They haven’t updated it though (you’d think they’d at least put the weekly addresses in there) so I’m deleting it. Free

Urbansppon – Fun app. Successfully guided me and my friends to the nearest gelato place. Shaking is awesome though it usually leads me to junk food. Free

Google – Voice recognition is amazing though often provides comical results. Still, it’s useful for finding quick answers especially when I’m driving. Doesn’t work with contacts yet. One great thing: If I don’t know how to spell a word and spell check can’t help me, I’ll use voice recognition.

Yelp – Pretty good. Wish its listings were a little more current (it’s taken me to old shut down places more than once). Wish you could rate places from the phone too. Still pretty useful. Free

Labyrinth – Awesome awesome awesome game. Finished the lite version so I bought the full version. Custom levels are neat too. No complaints. ~$3

Last.fm – Pretty cool. Holy crap, how does it have access to my iPod library? Wow, I’m going to use this more now. Free

LiveSportz – Pretty neat app for following MLB games. I mean I’m sure the MLB app is better, but this shows you who’s on base, what the count and score is, etc. Free

Midomi – Amazing. Really great at tagging live music just by holding it up to a speaker. I understand how that works, by uploading a sample and using an audio fingerprint database to analyze it and return the results. But how does it recognize the melody I’m humming??? That I don’t understand, unless they have a database of melodies too. Really impressive, though it primarily works on pop songs (wish it had film music and classical support). Free

Mondo – Fun solitare game by Ambrosia, one of my favorite software companies. Very decent, has every software game you can think of plus hundreds more, and a database of explanations, rules, and difficulty. I’ll never play all of them though. There are free alternatives out there now that probably make this not worth buying, but I play it every once in a while. ~$5

Super Monkey Ball – Terrible. Slightly better now that you can continue from where you left off but only slightly. The graphics are impressive but the controls are god awful. I’d delete this if I didn’t pay for it. Wish I could get my money back. ~$10

myLite – great just to have the lighter at rock concerts. Free

MySpace – pretty neat, but I don’t really use MySpace (the site) anymore. Free

Moonlight lite – Really impressive Mahjong game. The 3D display and two and three finger gesture controls are incredible. Still, I’ve never beaten this game, don’t have the patience. Free

Now Playing – Great! Faster than using the web for finding movie showtimes, though it doesn’t always support buying tickets. Free

Black and White – Great single player reversi game. Strangely, medium is harder to beat than difficult. But I can beat them all, so don’t play it much. Free

PakISound1 – Pretty rad monome-like composition tool. Don’t really use it for anything serious but it’s fun to play around with. Supports bass, synth and drums. Give me octaves and the ability to save songs and I’ll use it more. Free

Puzzloop Free – Fun game with a twist on bust a move. I beat all the levels, but the pro version has more. Free

Remote – Pretty damn nifty app for controlling iTunes. I’m writing some other apps for controlling other things too. Free

Shazam – Also amazing music tagging service. The youtube and iTunes links and album info are a really nice touch. Free

Simplify Media – Pretty incredible app that allows you to stream your music from your computer. Doesn’t always work though but great when it does. Free when I got it, now $3

reMovem free – Fun clickmania clone game. I remember clickmania, those were the good old days. Free

Scratch – cute mini turntable for scratching. Cute for demos. Free

SpaceMonkey – Fun, original catching game. I got bored after a while but I liked how each level brought a new aspect of game play. Free

StepTrakLite – A pretty impressive pedometer. My initial tests got it to work, but I haven’t actually tried walking or jogging with it. Free

Slots – Pretty, but what the heck is the point? Deleted. Free

Sudoku – Great! I can beat it on expert but it takes me a while. Nice improvements on notes with the latest version. Free

Tap Tap Revenge – Fun DDR clone, really impressive. Can’t believe it’s free. Supports downloading new levels which is neat. Free

TapTheBeat – A Tap BPM calculator that looks all retro (originally programmed for the newton!). Super useful and free. Sometimes I play games with my friends to see who can tap the fastest (I got 900 BPM+ once!).

Trailguru – I guess it maps your path or something with GPS and you can post it online. Sounds neat but I haven’t tried it yet. Would be fun for biking. Free

Tris – Pretty, free tetris clone. I get too frustrated with the controls though. Don’t know how anyone can play this or the official Tetris without bashing the phone in (not nearly as fun as playing with nintendo controls). Deleting. Free

Twitterific – Great twitter client. This is the only way I use twitter. Free.

Vegas Pool Lite – Impressive 3D pool app. Haven’t played a full game, I hear it’s pretty draconian with how little it lets you play though. Free

VNC – Pretty impressive VNC app with gesture support. Doesn’t always work and crashes on my dual flatscreen widescreen monitors a lot, but great for Free.

VoiceNotes – Awesome. Decent quality (though the iPhone mic is mono) and no time limit. Now that the voice notes are named by timestamp, even better. Sometimes you have to remember to save what you’re recording though or you’ll lose it. Syncing can be a bit of a trick (you have to set up a server on your computer)…it might be easier if you could email the note or something. But I use this a lot in the car for quick memos.

Where – Another yelp/urbanspoon/nearme app. Haven’t decided which one is best, but this one has slightly different items (like zipcars and starbucks). Free

Wikipanion – Great. The font on wikipedia.com is too small to view in safari and doesn’t double click to fill the screen easily. Wikipanion is easy to read and caches data I believe. Sometimes I forget to use it but it’s a great portal for looking up answers quickly. Free

Wordpress – Pretty neat that I can blog from my iPhone but I haven’t used it much yet. Free

AquaForest – Very impressive puzzle and doodling app. The fluid dynamics are amazing and the graphics are pretty. It slows down pretty quickly when you draw a lot of water. But a fun must-have app. Free

Luz Touch – Really impressive Risk game. I always seem to lose – but then I’ve never played Risk before. Free

RjDj Free/Album – Possibly my favorite app. It uses a port of PD and custom patches to remix live audio from your headset and vocode, echo and pan it into your head. It feels like you’re on drugs. Everyone I’ve shown it to is blown away. I bought the full (Album) version immediately. Absolutely amazing, especially eargasm. I wish they would update it with more patches though. Free / $4

Yahoo oneConnect – I guess it syncs your yahoo contacts with your iPhone ones. I haven’t tried it yet, I already have too many email contacts in my Contacts, and it drives me nuts when I’m trying to find a phone number.

FS5 Hockey – Really fun air hockey game. Genius use of multitouch – two players can play on the same screen. Ads are prevalent but worth it for this game. Free

MazeFinger – Pretty fun speed maze game. Free

Pac-Man Lite – Pretty fun. Lots of control alternatives but none rival the original controls. Wouldn’t buy the full version as a result. Free

JellyCar – Amazing, somewhat difficult puzzle/physics game. Unique/confusing controls (touch right side of screen for forward, left side of screen for reverse, double click to expand car, tilt to change weight) but amazing 2D physics engine. However a lot of the levels are frustrating (I keep falling off!). Free

FourFree – simple connect four game. Fun at bars and things. Ads are somewhat annoying. Free

Brain Toot Lite – Meh. Kind of like brain age, but I was never as big of a fan as most people were of that game. Full version may be better. Free

Trace – One of my favorite iPhone games! Primitive graphics mario-like game, but you can draw on the screen and dynamically change the level to solve the puzzle. Really creative game and fun music. 100s of levels, hours of entertainment. Free

MiniPiano Lite – Fun for checking quick pitches. I think the pro version has more octives. Free

Say Who Lite Dialer – Pretty neat! Wish google did this (or the iphone itself). However I always forget to use it. Hmm, I’m going to have to try the integration with google maps more now. Free

Mint.com – Scares the crap out of me that this much info is on my iPhone but pretty useful. I keep my iPhone on autolock after 5 minutes and 10 attempts will destroy all data. Theoretically if I or my friends do this by accident I can restore everything with iTunes. But for now, Mint.com is useful enough for the security risk. Free

Google Earth – Actually works now! Before the memory management was so bad that it would crash as soon as I tried to do anything. But now the autotilt is actually neat and it responds pretty well. Free

Elections – What a disappointment. This was supposed to keep me updated with the most recent election results on election night, but it ended up being like 5 hours behind. I want my money back. Deleting. ~$1

Backgrounds – Not sure why this is so popular, but it does have some nice backgrounds. They should credit who made them though. Free

DigiLite – Cute little drum app. Mostly a toy though, too laggy. Free

HoldEm – Apple’s flagship poker game. Really impressive, with good controls and two views, video portrait mode and table bird’s eye landscape mode. Supposedly the video characters have tells but I don’t know what they are. Difficult but fun. $5

Accelerometer graph – comes with the SDK. Really neat live scrolling charts of the three accelerometers. Free with SDK

TouchTerm – great terminal app. Free!

The Weather Channel – great for when you want more info on the weather. Includes severe weather alerts, maps, and videos. Free

Live Poker – for playing poker online. Kinda ad ridden. Free

Cube – a duke nukem clone. Couldn’t figure out the controls. Still very beta but impressive. Free

ESPN Cameraman – it’s that find the differences between the photos bar game! Great, fun at bars. Free

Night Stand – Nice little clock app. Impressive that it disables auto-lock. Free

Drinks Free – Keep forgetting I have this. Impressive list of cocktail recipes. Have to try this with my random bar sometime. Free

Joost – A little buggy but really impressive. Full episodes, music videos, and even features for free and no ads. I wish I wish it worked over 3G though (WIFI only). Free

USA TODAY – Just got it, haven’t played with it much. Not as nice as AP Mobile News but a nice alternative.

vSNAX – Another video client. Haven’t played with it much but I hear good things about it.

iChess Lite – Great! The computer is better than me at chess, so I keep cheating and taking back moves. Great chess game. Free

Classics – Very impressive eReader, with classic public novels. I’m enjoying Alice in Wonderland. Wish it had a larger selection. See google books’ iphone optimized site for more books. ~$2

Space Deadbeef – Short but amazing 2D sidescrolling flying game. Very pretty and a lot of fun. Free

Topple – Fun balancing game with funny faces. Free

Penguin Lite – Free and goofy puzzle/timing game. Clever and silly. I might buy the full version. Free

iRewardCards Lite – Interesting idea, barcode generator for storing barcodes on your iphone (such as club cards). Haven’t played with it much but I like the idea of getting even more things digital. Free

Rick Rocketson Free – Very impressive megaman clone. Free

Craigsphone – Some screens are unintuitive but I still find myself using this app a lot (better than the website). Craigslist for the iphone. Free

FreeMemory – Great app. I think all it does is load a bunch of memory and then unload it (you can do the same by opening and then quitting google earth), but I like the process view. I wish it worked for under 4 MB and over 20 MB though.

iShoot Lite – Like old school gorillas but more fun! Lots of weapons. Great game! Free

Cannon Game – Like gorillas and iShoot but not nearly as much fun. Deleted. Free

Paper Football – Pretty but not that much fun. After you get the hang of it it’s really easy. Free

Mancala Free – Pretty and fun, but I don’t think the rules are the same. I think if you land on an empty spot, even if your opponent’s spot is empty, you still get the last bean on your side. The AI is too easy as well. Multiplayer is great though. Free

Beer Pong – Heh, pretty neat. Haven’t played it much. Free

iHandy Level – There is a level that comes with the SDK, so I’m not really impressed with the levels in the app store. This one is free though, shows degrees, can be calibrated, and has a Z angle mode, so it’s decent. Free

DDR Lite – I don’t know why everyone is giving this app bad reviews. It’s a lot of fun. The 3D dancing in the background is impressive. Hope they do more levels.

The iPhone’s clock application is great, allowing you to set timers, use a stopwatch, and have unlimited alarms. But even if you put the iPhone on silent mode, when an alarm goes off it still plays the ringtone you selected at full blast. This is very inconsiderate if you’re trying to set an alarm at night without waking other people up!

Luckily, there is an easy solution:

• Download the Vibrate ringtone from the free ringtones section of my home page. (Check out my other free ringtones and music too!)

• Drag Vibrate.m4r file to iTunes.

• Connect your iPhone, and under iPhone>Ringtones check “Sync ringtones > All ringtones”.

• Click sync.

Now, when you set an alarm, choose Vibrate as your alarm.

Voilà!

Not really. It still works ok, but it definitely slows down the more apps you install. I actually found that FreeMemory ($.99 in the iTunes store) helps, but I think all it does is load 20 MB into memory forcing other daemons out and then unloads the memory it just loaded, freeing ~20 MB. I tried loading a memory intensive app like google earth and then quitting and it does the same thing (~20 MB memory free, according to FreeMemory). It sucks when you get down to <4 MB free and FreeMemory doesn’t have enough memory to free memory.

Anyway, I tried installing my 145th app today and the iphone didn’t draw a page 10 for me to scroll to, even though it looks like it has room for 18 pages, given the dot spacing. The application store showed the new app as “INSTALLED” but I had no way to run it. When I deleted an app it didn’t show up to replace the last spot, but it did show up after I rebooted the phone.

I’m sick of the phone still taking forever to sync, apps crashing, and not being able to jailbreak, so now that I’ve hit the app display limit I think I’ll start deleting some.

There are circuits out there for converting the 5V to the proper data pins and voltage, but I already had a 12V car adapter that would supply them. So instead, the goal was to supply 12V to my car adapter with batteries.

The solution:

2 6V lantern batteries
Alligator Clips
Female Car Adapter
iPhone Car Adapter
Cardboard Box

If you wire the batteries in series you get 12V. It works fine, though the adapter whines pretty loudly which worries me a little. Also, I am aware that batteries encased in paper and cardboard are a slight fire hazard. I’m only going to charge this outside while I’m watching it. (Any advice is appreciated, this isn’t much different than how the iPhone charges in a car is it?)

Thanks to Fred for his help conceptualizing this.