Gizmodo: iphone apps we like

iPhone Election '08 App: Watch Your Faith in America Get Destroyed in Real Time

matt buchanan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:59:00 EDT

If you're ever pulled away from the constant spew of talking heads, meaningless statistics and rhetorical bile parading itself as election news in order to fill the gaping 24/7 news cycle—you know, to do something other than wallow in political witticisms not half as sharp as as Jon Stewart's—the 99-cent Election '08 iPhone app will ease your withdrawal with slickly presented, constantly updating poll trackers, (theoretical) electoral vote counts (Obama's winning), and other stats by state, from the perspective of whoever you're rooting for—Scarlett Johanssen's email buddy, or the first candidate to successfully employ Emperor Palpatine's everlasting life clone technology. [iTunes via CG]

iPhone Apps We Like: Palringo is First Official Multi-Client IM App

John Mahoney — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:50:00 EDT

Palringo is a free multi-client instant messaging app for mobiles that hit the App Store over the weekend, and it's the first to officially support Google Talk/Jabber, on top of Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, iChat and Gadu-Gadu (if you're in Poland). You can also use it to quickly send photos from your camera or photo albums to anyone on any of your buddy lists, who will see an inline image (if supported) and a link to a bigger (but still compressed photo) on Palringo's servers. Not MMS, but the feature works as advertised. It's great I can use GTalk on the iPhone now, but again, this is something we've been able to do via jailbreak and Installer.app for a while.

There were a handful of multi-client IM apps available via Installer, my personal favorite being Fring, which also has the ability to do VoIP calls over Wi-Fi. You can count on Apple putting the kibosh on Fring in the App Store unless it drops the VoIP feature due to SDK guidelines, which is a shame.

Palringo on its own sports a nice interface (which is a little jerky at times, though), and it tosses all of your new messages via any client into a universal inbox in the bottom-left corner. Like the official AIM client, it vibrates on message receipts, even if your phone is locked (and Palringo is still active, of course, which is another thing the Jailbreak apps had on it). On other platforms, Palringo supports voice chat over its supported protocols as well (not VoIP)—that feature's not in the iPhone version yet, but is forthcoming says the devs. [Palringo, App Review Marathon]

iPhone Apps We Like: QuickVoice Voice Recorder Is Great For Field Journos

John Mahoney — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:40:54 EDT

If you're covering an event and already carrying a huge gear bag with a laptop, camera, emergency Cliff bars and all the rest, QuickVoice is a welcome replacement for a standalone digital voice recorder. We like QuickVoice as a late addition to our favorites for its pause feature, which allows you to start and stop recordings without creating a whole new clip.

The only hitch is you can't email the clips out from the phone, but how often do you actually need to keep your quick audio notes? Just break out the headphones, transcribe, delete. Done. [Ed. Note: I love emailing the clips from my Olympus digital voice recorder so I can email them to India and have them transcribed overnight.] Quality and range won't match a dedicated recorder, but definitely get the job done—I was able to hear my voice well enough to transcribe talking quietly from the other side of a 12-foot room. There are a couple other voice recorders in the store, but at $1.99 we're liking QuickVoice. [QuickVoice, Our Favorite Apps, App Review Marathon]