Mike Flacy

Here is a quick preview of my most recent Twitter application addiction. It’s a GPS aware app for the iPhone.

I picked up my 3G iPhone last Friday.  The consumer madness was in full swing at the AT&T store.  They had 40 iPhones in stock and about 60 people in line.  I snagged the 8 gig model and spent the rest of the day checking out the applications on iPhone.  Here are some of my favorites:

Shazam: This music app is great for people who are clueless to the names of songs and artists.  It can listen to any song playing on the radio or over a loudspeaker and identify it through the iPhone’s microphone.  You can mark the song for download on iTunes, watch any Youtube related video about it or send a link of the song to your friends.

Box Office: This simple app takes your GPS location and finds all the movies / theaters in the area.  It offers the Rotten Tomato rating for every movie and can be organized by rating or title.  Most importantly, it offers fast access to the showtimes in all the nearby theaters.

NetNewsWire: This is the fastest way to read RSS feeds on the iPhone.  I can rummage through posts on 15 sites when I wake up in about 10 minutes.   Just be careful to keep up with the feeds otherwise there will be a huge number posted on the icon all day.

AOL Radio: Turns the iPhone into a radio with 200 stations of music.  You can bookmark stations and mark songs for download on iTunes later.  The sound quality is extremely good for a web based radio.  Pandora is also pretty good for specific artist preferences.

Tap Tap Revenge: It’s Guitar Hero for the iPhone.  It’s only 3 buttons and four songs, but there are four levels of difficulty and the possibility of downloadable songs in the future.  You can also shake the iPhone to hit the right beats instead of tapping the screen.  Lots of fun and it’s free!

Graffitio: This app uses the GPS to figure out where you are and looks for nearby restaurants, bars, stores, parks, events, etc.  The apps creates persistent online graffiti walls for you to write notes about the business.  You can also read notes from people who have been there before.

• Still up in the air about the 3G iPhone and it’s only a few days away.  It’s going to raise my phone bill another $30 a month.  I really don’t mind that much, but I have plenty of wi-fi access for net browsing.  Maybe I’ll try canceling the 3G data plan after I sign up.  I will get 150 more texts messages though; yet I’ve never broken 40 in an entire month.

• I’ve been looking at apartment sublets in Chicago lately and feel like moving there for a couple months or two.  I picked up a part time gig at Mahalo recently writing guides and it’s fairly lucrative for the amount of “work” I have to put into it.  Anyway, I’m weighing my options while stockpiling money like Scrooge McDuck.  Maybe it would be cool try some sort of urban nomading for a while; limited to cities without the need for a car.

• I’m not going to E3 this year.  I have the press pass ready to go, but flights were ridiculously expensive this year.  It was going to cost me something in the range of $1,200 for airfare, hotel, various expenditures.  Boooooo!

• I totally want a Flip Mino so I can start cranking out some Vlogs.  I played with one at Best Buy and just loved it.  The video quality isn’t HD, but the quality is darn good.  My Canon digital camera shoots average video, but the microphone just plan sucks.  Plus the Mino takes about an hour of video.

• And if my sister is reading this, the answer to your last question is SHIRTS!  I’m completely dependent on your fashion sense and survive from Christmas to late July on whatever clothing items I receive from you.