Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, everyone, Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and sitting next to me, as always is senior writer Jonathan Stricklandhi, HOWI everyone? Uh uh? Today we want to talk about some applications and these are very very very tiny applicate well, most of them are very tiny applications, just a few pixels wide by a few pixels high, right exactly. Um. In this case, we're talking about the iPhone UM. And a few months ago we probably wouldn't be talking about that, so uh, you know, we really wouldn't have had much to talk about because it was limited. But the with the birth of the iPhone three G, the next generation iPhone, they opened it up to everyone to create their own applications. Right. And when we say opened it up to everyone, there's some limitations there, but we'll get into that later. That's true. That's let's let's focus on the positive before we jump right into the negative. Well, the nifty thing about iPhone and in my case, the iPod touches the ability to use other applications. You're not just using it to make phone calls or shoot pictures who are listening to your music. Um. These third party applications can be anything. Um, there's a whole list of them. You have e books, you have productivity software, games, more games, still more games, completely useless, but still fairly entertaining. Distractions Yep, yep. For the iPhone, which has a GPS system, you can actually figure out where you are and get get maps, which is very useful. Um, calendar software, stock you know, keep up with your stocks. But let's let's let's let's talk about some specifics here. I mean, okay, we've got a lot of categories here. Go ahead, pick one of your apps to talk about. We can do a little back and forth and if that doesn't work and we'll we'll take it all right. Um. Well, Uh, one of the major categories we've got that both Jonathan and I agree is a very cool thing is music. Yes, definitely, And um, you know both of us use streaming internet radio. UM, and I know that Jonathan wanted it to talk about these, but one of my favorites, you asked, um, Pandora. Yes, yeah, and both of us use that on our computers and I use it on my iPod Touch too. So if you're wondering what Pandora is, first of all, you need to get online and check it out. Absolutely, it is a really interesting especially you need to check it out before it goes away. Um. But it's a really interesting service. The idea here is that it's part of the Musical Genome project. And what the people behind Pandora have done is they have analyzed music. They take a music track, they listen to it, they analyze it, and when I say analyze, they write down essentially every single kind of aspect they can think of that describes that, um, that piece of music. It's kind of like tagging a photo, right, you know, you're tagging this piece of music, so that you're describing it in different ways, like what you know, what time is it recorded in, what kind of musical instruments are there? Is it a male vocalist, a female vocalist, is instrumental? What genre does it fit in? And what you would do is go to this service and put in a song or a music group that you like, and then the service looks for other musicians other songs that are similar to what your your your kind of your seed, the thing that you've planted to say, Like, for instance, I have a I have a I want to be Sedated radio station. So it's off of the Ramote song I want to be sedated. So there's a lot of yeah, well I also want to be sedated, but there's a So what it does is it looks for other songs that are similar to that in some way, and it it can it can go pretty far. Like you can get some music that comes back that you're like, how the heck did this ever get linked to it? And it will tell you. So the iPhone application it does the same thing and allows you to access this great service and you get an internet radio station that you can shape. You can tell it if you like a song, you can tell if you don't like a song, and it won't play that song again. UM, And it builds a radio station based on your likes and dislikes, and so it's it's pretty darn nifty. I think that's true. UM. Speaking of tags, last dot fm, which is a competitor of Pandora's UM. They do things a little differently, but they also offer their own free Both Pandora and last dot Fm are free UM radio apps, and you can go buy a tag or buy an artist and listen to streaming music online. Um. Another one is a O L Radio. Uh. Those are those don't give you as much control, but you do have access to a O L's radio lists, and it's another free app. It actually, even though I've never been a big A L fan, a L Radio the little app is actually pretty nice. Um. And another pretty cool one is a Stitcher, which is also available online. You know, you don't have to have an iPod or iPhone to use it. Um. But it's sort of a talk radio version of this. It actually sort of stitches together streams of different material, Like you might get a news feed and you get something from Fox News and then CNN and then NPR, and they'll be all put together in one stream, and they're different genres in there, which is kind of nice feed not necessarily interested in the in the musical aspect in it, But there are plenty other music programs. I got two more that I'd like to talk about kind of figured. One is Shazam. This is actually a request I got a request from from a fan who wanted to hear a little bit about Shazam. So Shazam is this, uh, this app that allows you to identify a song just by holding your iPhone up to um speakers where the song's coming out of it. I'll analyze the song and tell you what the title is. So if you've ever been, you know, walking by a store, or you're in the car and the radios on and there's this great song playing, but you have no idea who does it or what it's called, this will identify it for you. And it even gives you a link so that you can purchase the song through iTunes, so that when you get home songs waiting for you, you can just sink it right up and there you go. You've got it on your iPhone now, which is that's pretty cool. And the other one is medomi Now Medomie. You don't even need to have a stereo system playing the song. It identifies the song based upon your humming or singing that song. So I thought I would test this out. You can actually test it out online, you know, regular computer, as long as you have a microphone. Right, as long as you have a microphone, you can visit the website Medomi's website and test it out. So I did. So here are the test results. The first title is what I sang. The second title is what it identified. So it started out pretty well because the first thing I sang was Weird Science by Oingo Boingo, and it came back as weird Science. It's like, okay, that's cool. So then I tried to Istanbul not Constantinople made popular by They Might Be Giants. That also came back positive. It's like two for two. But then things went a little south. I tried to land down Under. It came back as I Want to Hold your Hand, which you know, I like that song, but it's not the same one. And then I tried rocket Man and that came back is Runaround Sue, and then the Kicker I did Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, and I came back as the girl from hippan Ema. Yeah, so not flawless or my singing or the application. Not sure. Actually no, I know my singing is not flawless, but well you know it, uh and maybe because the only song you know is the Girl from Eponema, it could be. But Don't Fear the Reaper and the girl from Hippanema, Westly. Okay, you needed more cowbell? I obviously I had a fever and the only prescription UM. Moving on, Yes, I was going to talk about social networking, which is a very very popular category. Facebook is one of the you know, free downloads that's very popular. You could see a list of the downloads available for the iPhone on the iTunes store, whether or not you have them, just if you're curious to see what kinds of stuff, because there are literally thousands of these things on here. That's true. Facebook is very popular free when they the original version of it, I tried with my iPod and I wasn't crazy about it. The newer version is uh, it's pretty nice. It gives you access to the Facebook applications um. But there are other things that uh take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities, like looped um, which is again another application that's online on your computer, but it uses GPS, so it's a combination GPS enabled I guess um social networking service. So you could say, well, hey, I'm in downtown, I'm near this bar, you know, and your friends might meet you there, or somebody might say, you know, hey, are you so and so and say no, I'm not. How did you find me? How did you know where I am? Exactly? Um. But a very unique application for the social networking capabilities of the iPhone is something that one of the presidential campaigns is doing this year. There is an application called Obama for America and whether or not you're a fan and we'll vote for him. There someone created an application. It allows you to make calls based on the people in your address book. It stinks with the iPhone address book and you can go ahead and dial people in there, so you can make calls for the campaign. If you're a supporter, Um, you can find events in your area. Uh, latest campaign news, things that speeches that he has made. You know, where is he now? That that kind of thing. And I have the feeling, um, that you're going to see more and more candidates taking advantage of this in the future, you know, especially considering organizations like Twitter and and you know, Pounds and some of the others are being used as campaign tools just by the the average person. You know, people are posting things and hey, um, you know the candidates have their own Twitter accounts, but uh, you know, I think you might see specialized applications like the one that Obama's campaign has come up with this year. It's kind of a different way to use these things because it is so specifically geared toward, you know, an event. Yeah, it's it's interesting that that politics is kind of catching onto this whole viral marketing thing that things like the movies and and and advertising has been on. They've been on to this for a few years and actually like a decade now and politics is just now catching up and um, and yeah, the iPhone is becoming a tool for that kind of thing. And and you were talking about social networks, we should also mention there are other ones that you can access through the iPhone, including LinkedIn or or Twitter. There are many Twitter just like there's just like on your desktop, there's there's dozens of Twitter applications. Tumbler. Yeah, there's a couple of Tumbler applications. And of course if you have if there's a brand new site that that you haven't yet found an application for in the iPhone, well, first of all, rest assure that will be one eventually. And second of all, it has a version of Safari on it, which is Jonathan's favorite web browser. But you can you can visit the web and that's a built in application too, So um, that's that's pretty cool. You can, you know, you don't have to wait for the application or if you're prefer like I used it the New York Times application for a while to check out the news, but I actually like the mobile web page that they use, so I I got rid of the application and just go to the New York Times. I've seen that in several reviews actually, where where in there are cases where the application really just kind of replicates your experience of going to the website, which seems kind of silly when you've got the browser built into the device in the first place. But we'll probably see less of that as time goes on, as people begin to really grasp the best way to leverage the iPhone and not just try and make a you know, replace something that it can already do. Um. And there are some neat apps that that turned the iPhone into something other than what it already is, you know, beyond just a phone. Um. Yeah, yeah, I've got a couple I'd like to talk about. Okay, Well, there there's you mentioned e books, there is there's applications to turn your iPhone essentially into an e book reader like books for example. That's an application that lets you do that. But there are others as well. But beyond that, there's a there's an application called remote which turns your iPhone into a remote control for iTunes and for Apple TV. So if you have an Apple TV, you can use your iPhone to actually control the your Apple Apple TV remotely. Um. Then you have things like there's a graphic calculator application that lets you plot functions if you uh so choose. Yeah, they're all kinds of educational things like flash cards and language you know, language tools holp you learn new languages to those are the same sort of category. Uh, there's a Mandel brought let's you plot Mandelbrot sets. That's a little Jonathan Coulton shout out there for any Joco fans. But yeah, you know you can actually get that that application and see what Joco was singing about. It's it's pretty cool. Actually, Um, there are tons of these. Uh, did you have any other useful ones you wanted to talk about before you jump into the silly ones? Actually, yes, there I have a couple. Um. One of those is uh sort of a favorite of mine. Um, been a fan since the max switch to S ten of the Omnigroup. They used to make applications for the next operating system and migrated and one that they have UM for the iPhone is called omni Focus. It's actually for the Mac too, but UM, the omni Focus is a productivity application. UM. But it is you know, it helps you organize yourself and keep yourself straightened out, which I need a lot of help with. UM. Yeah, UM, you know, just because I was gonna not come to the podcast session today, you know, he's just anyway. UM, But omni Focus is a really really cool one. UM. There are lots and lots more of them out there. I just happened to be an omni fan. UM and this other one, and this was probably the first of what I expect will be many. UM. When I switched to the iPod Touch, I was kind of bummed out because you know, when I plugged in my old style hard disk iPod, I was able to use it as a hard drive. So if I had, um, I'm in grad school right now, if I had a paper that I needed to be working on and I wanted to take a look at it at lunchtime, UM, at work, I could, you know, plug my my iPod into the computer and take a look at it. Well, you know with this one, I couldn't. And I was going, why did you know? How come Apple took that away? Well they did. But there are other applications that are bridging the gap. And Avatron makes one called air Sharing UM and you can use it use air sharing to upload and download files wirelessly, uh to your iPod or iPhone. And it's really useful because you can, you know, for example, uh, some I've got some free e books that I downloaded, and you can you know, move them over and look at the PDFs without having to get the third party application. And so I can you know, transfer papers or articles or ideas for podcasts or stuff like that and use that on my iPod in that way. And it's wireless, which is also very cool. Cool. Yeah, And there are other productivity software things we can touch their their tons and tons of ASO has an application on their yah, every note has an application. I'm using every note right now though I'm using it on my laptop, not on an iPhone, but I I should. Uh, I just want to throw this out. We're going to talk about some silly stuff but just as a bridge if you wish. Um. And I'm not really going to get into a whole lot of stuff, but games. One of the cool things about the games in general on the iPhone and iPod is the fact that they take advantage of the accelerometer, which is uh, the thing that allows the iPhone to switch views from barzon landscape to portrait or you know, the the we remote to sense what you're doing and use your remote as a putter or a lightsaber or whatever. Um, so you can. They have a lot of driving games like pole Position or chromag Rally another long time Mac favorite um and you basically steer your car by tilting the iPod or iPhone. Very cool stuff, just the fact that they've taken advantage of that stuff. And there are big name games on here to like a Star Wars, The Force Unleashed, um, Spore the sport Origins I think it is, which is the basic sort of a paired down version of Spore. And you're going, you know, these are not simple Tetris clones. No, it's it's kind of turned the iPhone into a legitimate portable gaming stuff. Yeah, it really is. It's it's a little stunning actually I wasn't expecting that when I when it. Anyway, so can we get into the Google Yay? Okay, so my first my first entry into the goofy is the virtual Zippo application, and it's here's the sad thing. It's not even the most highly ranked virtual lighter application on iTunes. There are other higher ranked virtual lighters. And all it does is display an image of a lighter which you can then flick open and light. And it's just it's just a picture of a lighter. I mean, it's for those people who want to go to a concert, but at the concert then you has a really strict fire code, I guess. So when the free bird comes up, you can just light up your iPhone and hold it up in the air and just be a huge dork. Well, you know, if you want to go that route, we can talk about I beer, which is which is two? Is the virtual lighter application free or does it actually cost something? Because ibeer is um beer and that's true actually, but not nearly is satisfying, although I guess it depends on what kind of beer it is. Um I beer is basically shows you a beer on your iPod. And this is another application that takes advantage of the accelerometer because as you tilt it, you know, to quote unquote drink it, um, it goes away and it tilts, and you know the liquid tilt. There's also I milk. By the way, there's I milk. So that sounds like a condition if you're right, If I don't, I don't recommend googling that. But but no, no, wait, um, the the developers of I beer Um, which is I think hot tricks, actually have a twelve point five million dollar lawsuit pending against Cores who came out with a version called I Pint Wow and uh they sued him and they removed the application from the store. So okay, well I got another one for okay, Hello Cal, Hello Cal. It's a picture of a cow and when you touch it, it says move. I'm gonna have to download that. Congratulations. Yes, I'm sure they'll give you hours of entertainment. Not many people know that polette has the same sort of entertainment threshold as your average two year old. Um, you know, since I have had a two year old, would like to say that my two year old has a more sophisticated said. Now she's five and has a much more sophisticated. Well, I mean that that goes back to a free Verse, who makes some of my favorite Mac games. And I have purchased Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab for the iPhone or iPod um and they have sim Stapler and Jared Stapler go ahead, go ahead, and Stapler is one of my favorite Mac applications ever. Actually both of them are. Sim Stapler is a picture of a stapler and if you touch it at Staples and it keeps a count's just calling Milton's and Jared Butcher of song he sings this. I can't remember now, it's been so long, Argentina. Yeah, it's something like that. I've seen this one. I didn't write it, and it you know it, only you have to hear it to believe it. Okay, Well, how about the game Hold On? You heard this one't? Oh my goodness. So here's the game. There's a button on the that appears on your your screen and it says hold. And the way you play is you put your thumb on it and you hold the button. And the way you win is that you hold it for longer than you held it previously. It just tracks how long you hold the button down. So you know, like going for three days. That's that's the extent of that game. You heard it here, folks. Uh. Also cow toss cows. Yeah, as another there's there's like a fascination with cows on the iPhone, but it's a picture of a cow. We have the cows, the virtual lighter, and the beer. This is going in a very Yeah. When they get to cow tipping, then they'll be speaking my language. But no cow toss you do you There's a little picture of a cow on there, and you can drag the cow down and when you let go, it flings the cow into the air. The end. Um. You know most of the applications for the iPhone or do you have some? I have one more? Okay, this one, this one just drives me nuts. Okay. Psychic move. Okay, So what psychic move does is that has a picture of a being on it and you are supposed to put your iPhone or iPod down on on a table, stare at the coin and try to make it move using your psychic powers. And then, um, I haven't actually used this, so I don't know if the coin ever moves. I mean, I think a clever thing to do is to program it in so that at random intervals it does move, thus convincing you that you do indeed have psychic powers. It says that one of the claims on the application is that it will improve your psychic ability to the point where you can improve your gas mileage car out of your iPhone, but of your car. All right, yeah, just let's throw that one in there. All right, Well, but we'll wrap this up without how what we talk about a little bit about some of the applications that did not make it into the app store or made it in, and then we're subsequently kicked out. Well, I was gonna segue into that by pointing out that most applications on for the on the app Store are either free or they cost very little. Um. A lot of them are some of them, uh, A couple of them omni focuses one. Uh, there are a couple others. Dictionaries or those are you think you might think, well that's kind of pricey. Well, there are others that are, you know, simply testing out the limits of what they can they can do. And this one was actually pulled. It was called I Am Rich. Oh yes, it cost nine dollars. It was iPhone bling. Yes, it was. It didn't really do anything, showed a picture of a jewel on your screen, which supposedly would be an advertisement to everyone around you that you were both rich and gullible. Yes, apparently, And I think a couple of people bought it. Yeah, there was at least one case where someone bought it and then recanted, saying that I'm not sure if it was a he or she. I want to say he, uh, I thought I didn't realize thought it was all a joke and didn't realize it was for real until he or she was a charge. And um, I think that was pretty much the beginning of the end for that app. Yeah, because I think Apple said, you know what, I can foresee a lot more of these sort of cases popping up where people are morbidly curious and then regret it instantaneously. Talk about buyer's remorse. Yeah, no kidding, Um, but they are. Most of the there's actually a website. It was very elegant. Most there's actually a website called the iPhone Application Graveyard, which is very interesting because I had been aware that there were a couple apps that that Apple had pulled from the store. Um. Most of them were things like Tris, which is a Tetris clone. Uh, and Tetris was copyright violation Tetris. The makers of Tetris, you know, asked him to remove it, which he did, um uh. But there are others, um. The big one was Podcaster Podcaster and Maile Wrangler, both of which were basically doing they they apples had they interfered with the functionality or you know, when they were deplicate of existing applications. And the Podcaster one, the interesting thing here was that it actually did something that the iPhone can't really do on its own. It not only lets you listen to podcasts, it lets you download them directly over the WiFi network onto your iPhone, which is something that that Apple it doesn't duplicate a function because Apple doesn't let you do that. True, well, I mean you can't you can't buy music or applications direct and have them, you know, downloaded directly, but not podcasts, right. So this was this was one of those issues where I mean, it's still there's still a lot of people on the blog is sphere talking about this because it's it's one of those that's showing that there may be some trouble in paradise. But other other applications were pulled for what what appeared to be more obvious reasons. One of them was called slasher. It basically had a hand holding a knife, and when you use the accelerometer and make the slashing motion, it screamed yeah uh is. Also there was also a pull my finger, oh yes, which is you know, well, yes, it would make it flatulent sound if you were to pull the virtual finger and it was pulled a rejected. Rather, it wasn't pulled, It didn't make it into make it. It was rejected because Apple said it had limited utility. I guess it just didn't have that massive amount of utility that virtual Zippo has. That's that I'm just saying. Actually, if you go to the developer's website, not that I have, you can find the there. There are several different fart noises that they were using in the the app, so basically when you touched the finger, they would make a different Yeah. I think that's expanded utility. Yeah, well you know, well you got that and you got hello cow. Yeah. Yeah. Consistency is all we ask there. Then there's the the extra expanded utility of the jailbroken iPhone um stuff like there's actually a MAIME emulator multi Arcade Machine emulator for iPhone for jailbroken iPhones. I'm pretty sure Apple would probably consider that a copyright issue and would probably never let it on the store. And there's a there's a whole host of problems that come once you jail break your phone. I mean, there's some good things that you can do with it, but it makes things like updates much more difficult, especially if you don't want your phone bricked. Um And, and there's also that the wonderful story about how Apple has a kill switch feature where theoretically what they might be able to do is uh to put an app on a list that says, uh, this app is malware and needs to be eradicated, and then through an update they can tell all the different iPods and iPhones connected to their system delete this application. And even if it was something that you had to pay for, it could go by by now. Whether or not they'll use it as another matter, but that's got some people kind of worried about what the future of the app app store and apps in general on the iPhone. It's really gonna be Yeah, yeah, that's true. Um One, last one I was going to mention is uh something called net share by Nell river Um. It was pulled from the app store because it violated a T and T S terms of service. Allowed you to turn your iPhone into a hermodum, essentially so you can plug it in I guess, and use it as a modem for the computer and not so much with the okay, right, well, we talked the heck out of this time. Oh my goodness, I think that we might have broken a record on this one. And the sad thing is there are thousands that we didn't even mention. Right. Well, well we'll have to We'll have to save that for another podcast or six. Yeah, I can't wait till we get into the Android ones. I hope we'd like to read more about the iPhone. We have How the iPhone Works, which is live right now on how stuff works dot com. That's right, and we'll talk to you again soon, good bye. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there, everyone, Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poulette. I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and sitting next to me, as always is senior writer Jonathan Stricklandhi, HOWI everyone? Uh uh? Today we want to talk about some applications and these are very very very tiny applicate well, most of them are very tiny applications, just a few pixels wide by a few pixels high, right exactly. Um. In this case, we're talking about the iPhone UM. And a few months ago we probably wouldn't be talking about that, so uh, you know, we really wouldn't have had much to talk about because it was limited. But the with the birth of the iPhone three G, the next generation iPhone, they opened it up to everyone to create their own applications. Right. And when we say opened it up to everyone, there's some limitations there, but we'll get into that later. That's true. That's let's let's focus on the positive before we jump right into the negative. Well, the nifty thing about iPhone and in my case, the iPod touches the ability to use other applications. You're not just using it to make phone calls or shoot pictures who are listening to your music. Um. These third party applications can be anything. Um, there's a whole list of them. You have e books, you have productivity software, games, more games, still more games, completely useless, but still fairly entertaining. Distractions Yep, yep. For the iPhone, which has a GPS system, you can actually figure out where you are and get get maps, which is very useful. Um, calendar software, stock you know, keep up with your stocks. But let's let's let's let's talk about some specifics here. I mean, okay, we've got a lot of categories here. Go ahead, pick one of your apps to talk about. We can do a little back and forth and if that doesn't work and we'll we'll take it all right. Um. Well, Uh, one of the major categories we've got that both Jonathan and I agree is a very cool thing is music. Yes, definitely, And um, you know both of us use streaming internet radio. UM, and I know that Jonathan wanted it to talk about these, but one of my favorites, you asked, um, Pandora. Yes, yeah, and both of us use that on our computers and I use it on my iPod Touch too. So if you're wondering what Pandora is, first of all, you need to get online and check it out. Absolutely, it is a really interesting especially you need to check it out before it goes away. Um. But it's a really interesting service. The idea here is that it's part of the Musical Genome project. And what the people behind Pandora have done is they have analyzed music. They take a music track, they listen to it, they analyze it, and when I say analyze, they write down essentially every single kind of aspect they can think of that describes that, um, that piece of music. It's kind of like tagging a photo, right, you know, you're tagging this piece of music, so that you're describing it in different ways, like what you know, what time is it recorded in, what kind of musical instruments are there? Is it a male vocalist, a female vocalist, is instrumental? What genre does it fit in? And what you would do is go to this service and put in a song or a music group that you like, and then the service looks for other musicians other songs that are similar to what your your your kind of your seed, the thing that you've planted to say, Like, for instance, I have a I have a I want to be Sedated radio station. So it's off of the Ramote song I want to be sedated. So there's a lot of yeah, well I also want to be sedated, but there's a So what it does is it looks for other songs that are similar to that in some way, and it it can it can go pretty far. Like you can get some music that comes back that you're like, how the heck did this ever get linked to it? And it will tell you. So the iPhone application it does the same thing and allows you to access this great service and you get an internet radio station that you can shape. You can tell it if you like a song, you can tell if you don't like a song, and it won't play that song again. UM, And it builds a radio station based on your likes and dislikes, and so it's it's pretty darn nifty. I think that's true. UM. Speaking of tags, last dot fm, which is a competitor of Pandora's UM. They do things a little differently, but they also offer their own free Both Pandora and last dot Fm are free UM radio apps, and you can go buy a tag or buy an artist and listen to streaming music online. Um. Another one is a O L Radio. Uh. Those are those don't give you as much control, but you do have access to a O L's radio lists, and it's another free app. It actually, even though I've never been a big A L fan, a L Radio the little app is actually pretty nice. Um. And another pretty cool one is a Stitcher, which is also available online. You know, you don't have to have an iPod or iPhone to use it. Um. But it's sort of a talk radio version of this. It actually sort of stitches together streams of different material, Like you might get a news feed and you get something from Fox News and then CNN and then NPR, and they'll be all put together in one stream, and they're different genres in there, which is kind of nice feed not necessarily interested in the in the musical aspect in it, But there are plenty other music programs. I got two more that I'd like to talk about kind of figured. One is Shazam. This is actually a request I got a request from from a fan who wanted to hear a little bit about Shazam. So Shazam is this, uh, this app that allows you to identify a song just by holding your iPhone up to um speakers where the song's coming out of it. I'll analyze the song and tell you what the title is. So if you've ever been, you know, walking by a store, or you're in the car and the radios on and there's this great song playing, but you have no idea who does it or what it's called, this will identify it for you. And it even gives you a link so that you can purchase the song through iTunes, so that when you get home songs waiting for you, you can just sink it right up and there you go. You've got it on your iPhone now, which is that's pretty cool. And the other one is medomi Now Medomie. You don't even need to have a stereo system playing the song. It identifies the song based upon your humming or singing that song. So I thought I would test this out. You can actually test it out online, you know, regular computer, as long as you have a microphone. Right, as long as you have a microphone, you can visit the website Medomi's website and test it out. So I did. So here are the test results. The first title is what I sang. The second title is what it identified. So it started out pretty well because the first thing I sang was Weird Science by Oingo Boingo, and it came back as weird Science. It's like, okay, that's cool. So then I tried to Istanbul not Constantinople made popular by They Might Be Giants. That also came back positive. It's like two for two. But then things went a little south. I tried to land down Under. It came back as I Want to Hold your Hand, which you know, I like that song, but it's not the same one. And then I tried rocket Man and that came back is Runaround Sue, and then the Kicker I did Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, and I came back as the girl from hippan Ema. Yeah, so not flawless or my singing or the application. Not sure. Actually no, I know my singing is not flawless, but well you know it, uh and maybe because the only song you know is the Girl from Eponema, it could be. But Don't Fear the Reaper and the girl from Hippanema, Westly. Okay, you needed more cowbell? I obviously I had a fever and the only prescription UM. Moving on, Yes, I was going to talk about social networking, which is a very very popular category. Facebook is one of the you know, free downloads that's very popular. You could see a list of the downloads available for the iPhone on the iTunes store, whether or not you have them, just if you're curious to see what kinds of stuff, because there are literally thousands of these things on here. That's true. Facebook is very popular free when they the original version of it, I tried with my iPod and I wasn't crazy about it. The newer version is uh, it's pretty nice. It gives you access to the Facebook applications um. But there are other things that uh take advantage of the iPhones unique abilities, like looped um, which is again another application that's online on your computer, but it uses GPS, so it's a combination GPS enabled I guess um social networking service. So you could say, well, hey, I'm in downtown, I'm near this bar, you know, and your friends might meet you there, or somebody might say, you know, hey, are you so and so and say no, I'm not. How did you find me? How did you know where I am? Exactly? Um. But a very unique application for the social networking capabilities of the iPhone is something that one of the presidential campaigns is doing this year. There is an application called Obama for America and whether or not you're a fan and we'll vote for him. There someone created an application. It allows you to make calls based on the people in your address book. It stinks with the iPhone address book and you can go ahead and dial people in there, so you can make calls for the campaign. If you're a supporter, Um, you can find events in your area. Uh, latest campaign news, things that speeches that he has made. You know, where is he now? That that kind of thing. And I have the feeling, um, that you're going to see more and more candidates taking advantage of this in the future, you know, especially considering organizations like Twitter and and you know, Pounds and some of the others are being used as campaign tools just by the the average person. You know, people are posting things and hey, um, you know the candidates have their own Twitter accounts, but uh, you know, I think you might see specialized applications like the one that Obama's campaign has come up with this year. It's kind of a different way to use these things because it is so specifically geared toward, you know, an event. Yeah, it's it's interesting that that politics is kind of catching onto this whole viral marketing thing that things like the movies and and and advertising has been on. They've been on to this for a few years and actually like a decade now and politics is just now catching up and um, and yeah, the iPhone is becoming a tool for that kind of thing. And and you were talking about social networks, we should also mention there are other ones that you can access through the iPhone, including LinkedIn or or Twitter. There are many Twitter just like there's just like on your desktop, there's there's dozens of Twitter applications. Tumbler. Yeah, there's a couple of Tumbler applications. And of course if you have if there's a brand new site that that you haven't yet found an application for in the iPhone, well, first of all, rest assure that will be one eventually. And second of all, it has a version of Safari on it, which is Jonathan's favorite web browser. But you can you can visit the web and that's a built in application too, So um, that's that's pretty cool. You can, you know, you don't have to wait for the application or if you're prefer like I used it the New York Times application for a while to check out the news, but I actually like the mobile web page that they use, so I I got rid of the application and just go to the New York Times. I've seen that in several reviews actually, where where in there are cases where the application really just kind of replicates your experience of going to the website, which seems kind of silly when you've got the browser built into the device in the first place. But we'll probably see less of that as time goes on, as people begin to really grasp the best way to leverage the iPhone and not just try and make a you know, replace something that it can already do. Um. And there are some neat apps that that turned the iPhone into something other than what it already is, you know, beyond just a phone. Um. Yeah, yeah, I've got a couple I'd like to talk about. Okay, Well, there there's you mentioned e books, there is there's applications to turn your iPhone essentially into an e book reader like books for example. That's an application that lets you do that. But there are others as well. But beyond that, there's a there's an application called remote which turns your iPhone into a remote control for iTunes and for Apple TV. So if you have an Apple TV, you can use your iPhone to actually control the your Apple Apple TV remotely. Um. Then you have things like there's a graphic calculator application that lets you plot functions if you uh so choose. Yeah, they're all kinds of educational things like flash cards and language you know, language tools holp you learn new languages to those are the same sort of category. Uh, there's a Mandel brought let's you plot Mandelbrot sets. That's a little Jonathan Coulton shout out there for any Joco fans. But yeah, you know you can actually get that that application and see what Joco was singing about. It's it's pretty cool. Actually, Um, there are tons of these. Uh, did you have any other useful ones you wanted to talk about before you jump into the silly ones? Actually, yes, there I have a couple. Um. One of those is uh sort of a favorite of mine. Um, been a fan since the max switch to S ten of the Omnigroup. They used to make applications for the next operating system and migrated and one that they have UM for the iPhone is called omni Focus. It's actually for the Mac too, but UM, the omni Focus is a productivity application. UM. But it is you know, it helps you organize yourself and keep yourself straightened out, which I need a lot of help with. UM. Yeah, UM, you know, just because I was gonna not come to the podcast session today, you know, he's just anyway. UM, But omni Focus is a really really cool one. UM. There are lots and lots more of them out there. I just happened to be an omni fan. UM and this other one, and this was probably the first of what I expect will be many. UM. When I switched to the iPod Touch, I was kind of bummed out because you know, when I plugged in my old style hard disk iPod, I was able to use it as a hard drive. So if I had, um, I'm in grad school right now, if I had a paper that I needed to be working on and I wanted to take a look at it at lunchtime, UM, at work, I could, you know, plug my my iPod into the computer and take a look at it. Well, you know with this one, I couldn't. And I was going, why did you know? How come Apple took that away? Well they did. But there are other applications that are bridging the gap. And Avatron makes one called air Sharing UM and you can use it use air sharing to upload and download files wirelessly, uh to your iPod or iPhone. And it's really useful because you can, you know, for example, uh, some I've got some free e books that I downloaded, and you can you know, move them over and look at the PDFs without having to get the third party application. And so I can you know, transfer papers or articles or ideas for podcasts or stuff like that and use that on my iPod in that way. And it's wireless, which is also very cool. Cool. Yeah, And there are other productivity software things we can touch their their tons and tons of ASO has an application on their yah, every note has an application. I'm using every note right now though I'm using it on my laptop, not on an iPhone, but I I should. Uh, I just want to throw this out. We're going to talk about some silly stuff but just as a bridge if you wish. Um. And I'm not really going to get into a whole lot of stuff, but games. One of the cool things about the games in general on the iPhone and iPod is the fact that they take advantage of the accelerometer, which is uh, the thing that allows the iPhone to switch views from barzon landscape to portrait or you know, the the we remote to sense what you're doing and use your remote as a putter or a lightsaber or whatever. Um, so you can. They have a lot of driving games like pole Position or chromag Rally another long time Mac favorite um and you basically steer your car by tilting the iPod or iPhone. Very cool stuff, just the fact that they've taken advantage of that stuff. And there are big name games on here to like a Star Wars, The Force Unleashed, um, Spore the sport Origins I think it is, which is the basic sort of a paired down version of Spore. And you're going, you know, these are not simple Tetris clones. No, it's it's kind of turned the iPhone into a legitimate portable gaming stuff. Yeah, it really is. It's it's a little stunning actually I wasn't expecting that when I when it. Anyway, so can we get into the Google Yay? Okay, so my first my first entry into the goofy is the virtual Zippo application, and it's here's the sad thing. It's not even the most highly ranked virtual lighter application on iTunes. There are other higher ranked virtual lighters. And all it does is display an image of a lighter which you can then flick open and light. And it's just it's just a picture of a lighter. I mean, it's for those people who want to go to a concert, but at the concert then you has a really strict fire code, I guess. So when the free bird comes up, you can just light up your iPhone and hold it up in the air and just be a huge dork. Well, you know, if you want to go that route, we can talk about I beer, which is which is two? Is the virtual lighter application free or does it actually cost something? Because ibeer is um beer and that's true actually, but not nearly is satisfying, although I guess it depends on what kind of beer it is. Um I beer is basically shows you a beer on your iPod. And this is another application that takes advantage of the accelerometer because as you tilt it, you know, to quote unquote drink it, um, it goes away and it tilts, and you know the liquid tilt. There's also I milk. By the way, there's I milk. So that sounds like a condition if you're right, If I don't, I don't recommend googling that. But but no, no, wait, um, the the developers of I beer Um, which is I think hot tricks, actually have a twelve point five million dollar lawsuit pending against Cores who came out with a version called I Pint Wow and uh they sued him and they removed the application from the store. So okay, well I got another one for okay, Hello Cal, Hello Cal. It's a picture of a cow and when you touch it, it says move. I'm gonna have to download that. Congratulations. Yes, I'm sure they'll give you hours of entertainment. Not many people know that polette has the same sort of entertainment threshold as your average two year old. Um, you know, since I have had a two year old, would like to say that my two year old has a more sophisticated said. Now she's five and has a much more sophisticated. Well, I mean that that goes back to a free Verse, who makes some of my favorite Mac games. And I have purchased Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab for the iPhone or iPod um and they have sim Stapler and Jared Stapler go ahead, go ahead, and Stapler is one of my favorite Mac applications ever. Actually both of them are. Sim Stapler is a picture of a stapler and if you touch it at Staples and it keeps a count's just calling Milton's and Jared Butcher of song he sings this. I can't remember now, it's been so long, Argentina. Yeah, it's something like that. I've seen this one. I didn't write it, and it you know it, only you have to hear it to believe it. Okay, Well, how about the game Hold On? You heard this one't? Oh my goodness. So here's the game. There's a button on the that appears on your your screen and it says hold. And the way you play is you put your thumb on it and you hold the button. And the way you win is that you hold it for longer than you held it previously. It just tracks how long you hold the button down. So you know, like going for three days. That's that's the extent of that game. You heard it here, folks. Uh. Also cow toss cows. Yeah, as another there's there's like a fascination with cows on the iPhone, but it's a picture of a cow. We have the cows, the virtual lighter, and the beer. This is going in a very Yeah. When they get to cow tipping, then they'll be speaking my language. But no cow toss you do you There's a little picture of a cow on there, and you can drag the cow down and when you let go, it flings the cow into the air. The end. Um. You know most of the applications for the iPhone or do you have some? I have one more? Okay, this one, this one just drives me nuts. Okay. Psychic move. Okay, So what psychic move does is that has a picture of a being on it and you are supposed to put your iPhone or iPod down on on a table, stare at the coin and try to make it move using your psychic powers. And then, um, I haven't actually used this, so I don't know if the coin ever moves. I mean, I think a clever thing to do is to program it in so that at random intervals it does move, thus convincing you that you do indeed have psychic powers. It says that one of the claims on the application is that it will improve your psychic ability to the point where you can improve your gas mileage car out of your iPhone, but of your car. All right, yeah, just let's throw that one in there. All right, Well, but we'll wrap this up without how what we talk about a little bit about some of the applications that did not make it into the app store or made it in, and then we're subsequently kicked out. Well, I was gonna segue into that by pointing out that most applications on for the on the app Store are either free or they cost very little. Um. A lot of them are some of them, uh, A couple of them omni focuses one. Uh, there are a couple others. Dictionaries or those are you think you might think, well that's kind of pricey. Well, there are others that are, you know, simply testing out the limits of what they can they can do. And this one was actually pulled. It was called I Am Rich. Oh yes, it cost nine dollars. It was iPhone bling. Yes, it was. It didn't really do anything, showed a picture of a jewel on your screen, which supposedly would be an advertisement to everyone around you that you were both rich and gullible. Yes, apparently, And I think a couple of people bought it. Yeah, there was at least one case where someone bought it and then recanted, saying that I'm not sure if it was a he or she. I want to say he, uh, I thought I didn't realize thought it was all a joke and didn't realize it was for real until he or she was a charge. And um, I think that was pretty much the beginning of the end for that app. Yeah, because I think Apple said, you know what, I can foresee a lot more of these sort of cases popping up where people are morbidly curious and then regret it instantaneously. Talk about buyer's remorse. Yeah, no kidding, Um, but they are. Most of the there's actually a website. It was very elegant. Most there's actually a website called the iPhone Application Graveyard, which is very interesting because I had been aware that there were a couple apps that that Apple had pulled from the store. Um. Most of them were things like Tris, which is a Tetris clone. Uh, and Tetris was copyright violation Tetris. The makers of Tetris, you know, asked him to remove it, which he did, um uh. But there are others, um. The big one was Podcaster Podcaster and Maile Wrangler, both of which were basically doing they they apples had they interfered with the functionality or you know, when they were deplicate of existing applications. And the Podcaster one, the interesting thing here was that it actually did something that the iPhone can't really do on its own. It not only lets you listen to podcasts, it lets you download them directly over the WiFi network onto your iPhone, which is something that that Apple it doesn't duplicate a function because Apple doesn't let you do that. True, well, I mean you can't you can't buy music or applications direct and have them, you know, downloaded directly, but not podcasts, right. So this was this was one of those issues where I mean, it's still there's still a lot of people on the blog is sphere talking about this because it's it's one of those that's showing that there may be some trouble in paradise. But other other applications were pulled for what what appeared to be more obvious reasons. One of them was called slasher. It basically had a hand holding a knife, and when you use the accelerometer and make the slashing motion, it screamed yeah uh is. Also there was also a pull my finger, oh yes, which is you know, well, yes, it would make it flatulent sound if you were to pull the virtual finger and it was pulled a rejected. Rather, it wasn't pulled, It didn't make it into make it. It was rejected because Apple said it had limited utility. I guess it just didn't have that massive amount of utility that virtual Zippo has. That's that I'm just saying. Actually, if you go to the developer's website, not that I have, you can find the there. There are several different fart noises that they were using in the the app, so basically when you touched the finger, they would make a different Yeah. I think that's expanded utility. Yeah, well you know, well you got that and you got hello cow. Yeah. Yeah. Consistency is all we ask there. Then there's the the extra expanded utility of the jailbroken iPhone um stuff like there's actually a MAIME emulator multi Arcade Machine emulator for iPhone for jailbroken iPhones. I'm pretty sure Apple would probably consider that a copyright issue and would probably never let it on the store. And there's a there's a whole host of problems that come once you jail break your phone. I mean, there's some good things that you can do with it, but it makes things like updates much more difficult, especially if you don't want your phone bricked. Um And, and there's also that the wonderful story about how Apple has a kill switch feature where theoretically what they might be able to do is uh to put an app on a list that says, uh, this app is malware and needs to be eradicated, and then through an update they can tell all the different iPods and iPhones connected to their system delete this application. And even if it was something that you had to pay for, it could go by by now. Whether or not they'll use it as another matter, but that's got some people kind of worried about what the future of the app app store and apps in general on the iPhone. It's really gonna be Yeah, yeah, that's true. Um One, last one I was going to mention is uh something called net share by Nell river Um. It was pulled from the app store because it violated a T and T S terms of service. Allowed you to turn your iPhone into a hermodum, essentially so you can plug it in I guess, and use it as a modem for the computer and not so much with the okay, right, well, we talked the heck out of this time. Oh my goodness, I think that we might have broken a record on this one. And the sad thing is there are thousands that we didn't even mention. Right. Well, well we'll have to We'll have to save that for another podcast or six. Yeah, I can't wait till we get into the Android ones. I hope we'd like to read more about the iPhone. We have How the iPhone Works, which is live right now on how stuff works dot com. That's right, and we'll talk to you again soon, good bye. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you