Best iPhone Apps

Foreword

My elementary school in Minneapolis had sensational student assemblies. It wasn’t the stock parade of Just Say No and Scared Straight folks, or the usual collection of career-day speakers. We got a swami. We got a Secret Service agent. I’m just saying: We had great assemblies. One of them, though, stuck with me more than the rest.

It was 1977. I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he made music—electronic music, with big, heavy equipment. His gear filled the stage of our homely auditorium, and he sprang from machine to machine to make this weird music of blips and bleeps and eerie organ sounds. He knew how to warm up an under-10 crowd; Star Wars had arrived in theaters that spring, and he used his outrageously fancy equipment to boom R2-D2 sounds at us, all chirps and whistles. He owned us.

At the end, he stepped to the front of the stage. “One day,” he said, “all of you will be able to have a machine that does all this, makes music like this.” He pulled out his wallet and held it up. “And it will fit in your pocket.” I’ll never forget it: “It will fit in your pocket.” I was six years old, and it was the first time I really ached for a specific vision of the future. For me, the future wasn’t rocket cars. It wasn’t living on the moon. It wasn’t even R2-D2. The future was having my own little synthesizer, a computer in my pocket to make stuff.

And so I waited, for three decades, until the iPhone finally arrived in 2007. Apple’s fabulous device is the only thing that’s ever resembled my childhood notions of the 21st century, the first time the future finally got here. A computer. In your pocket. That helps you makes stuff. People are using iPhones to paint, to compose music, to write novels... and sure, to goof off, too, to connect with friends and interact with their surroundings in entirely new ways. Add to that all the magical things that we’ve already begun to take for granted: plucking information and video from thin air; taking commands by voice or touch; mapping out the world around us. Now we’re talking. This is what my mystery man from 1977 was getting at.

But the future came on so fast that it’s a little overwhelming. After two years of living and working with my prized iPhone, I’m still discovering and marveling at the things it can do. Nearly every iPhone owner I know is paralyzed by the options in the App Store, more than 70,000 apps at last count. We’re awash in the future.

I wrote this book to help you stay ahead of the current. I scoured the App Store to find the best apps that will make your iPhone shine and make you more productive, more creative, more happy. Try as many of them as you can, play a little, discover what your magical device can do. This is the future we’re talking about, after all. It’s here, and it fits in your pocket.

Happy downloading.

About the Author

Josh Clark is a writer, designer, and developer who helps creative people get clear of technical hassles to share their ideas with the world. When he’s not writing about clever design and humane software, he’s building it. Josh is the creator of Big Medium, friendly software that actually makes it fun to manage websites. In a previous life, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. Now Josh makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory www.globalmoxie.com. He welcomes your feedback at [e-mail].