*Monkeys with bones not included

I wake up in the morning to my iPhone alarm, usually hitting the snooze button about three times. Oozing out of bed, I grab my iPhone and head upstairs to sit with Lisa for a little bit before work.  I’ll usually open up Reeder to check the morning news.  Couch time is also a good time to check email and maybe G+ (Lisa in the meantime is checking Facebook on her iPhone).  Then sometime before I hop in the car I’ll crack open Instacast and check if there are any new podcast updates.  On the road to work I’ll listen to one of my podcasts, the audio edition of the Economist, or one of my many audio books on the Audible app.  At work my iPhone keeps me informed if I have upcoming meetings, email, or important site monitoring alerts.  During the day I get text messages from my wife, I take turns of the Carcassonne game I play with friends, and trade instant messages over Google Talk using BeejiveIM.

I have other activities that my iPhone gets used for irregularly, but listed above are things that I do almost every day.

From Chuck and Beans at shoeboxblog dot com

Once upon a time people didn’t have Google, and so there were many things that they did not know.  Pieces of trivia would simply go unknown for days or weeks until a proper dictionary, almanac, encyclopedia or other reference material could be found, often at a local library.  These days my intelligence is directly proportional to the signal on my smartphone.  I can answer most arcane trivia questions in less than a minute, provided I have a 3G signal.

There is really no doubt about it, my iPhone enables me in many different ways, most of which are quite enjoyable.

But I could live without it.

It is a very convenient device because it travels around with me so easy it’s accessible at a moments notice, but I don’t need that.  I wound’t be happy getting along with out many of the things it does: audio books, music, internet searches, etc, but I can do all of that stuff on my computers.  I have computers an internet at home, I have them at work.  Audio books and music can be carried on any number of other devices or formats.

I would miss it, but the iPhone does not in fact fill any unique purpose in my life.

My iPhone Homescreen

I’ve been a dropbox user for quite a while now.  I signed up for an account the first day that I heard about it and I signed up for a paid account the moment that paid accounts became available.  Safe to say I use it and love it.  I found another great iPhone app yesterday that uses it, and I looked at my homescreen and realized that quite a few of my apps have dropbox integration these days, and that’s awesome. QuickShot – Easy way to take pictures and immediately upload them to dropbox.  It can also upload multiple photos at a time from the camera roll. PlainText – primarily a note taker, it just very simply handles plain text files and keeps them sync’d. Dropbox – Access to any of my files. Trunk Notes – A great markdown notebook.  Lately I’ve been keeping notes about the various games I’m in, in here, but I think it could be used for much more. DropList – This was the app I just picked up.  It’s a pretty simple to-do application (of which I’ve tried many).  This one is pretty unique in that it just keeps a very basic plain text file in dropbox, and puts a pretty face on it on the iPhone. Atomic Web (not shown) – A web browser that allows me to download files and upload them directly to dropbox. GoodReader for the iPad – not shown on the screenshot, because that’s my iPhone.  GoodReader is a great tool for  managing read-only documents.  PDFs, word documents, etc.  It’s a great way to keep gaming books and documents with me.

To start, I’m very happy with my recent iPhone 4 upgrade.  The iPhone 4 is so much faster than my old 3G, and the battery life is much improved.  Facetime is a really cool feature, but until it stops being WiFi only, it will not be something that get’s a ton of use.  The biggest difference is the screen quality.  The new high density display is really something else and I notice it every time I use it.  All-in-all a worthwhile upgrade.

I was very happy to discover that Audible has released an iPhone application.  This made me happy because I was quite jealous of their android app which as been in beta for a while now.  I downloaded it yesterday and started playing around with it when I ran into some issues.  First off Audible appears to be having a problem with their download service, so I cannot currently download any of my books.  This is something of a bummer as quite a few people are having their first experience with audible through this app (coming from the App Store).  I’m sure Audible will resolve the issue, but they’ve probably lost a bunch of business because of it.  So I can’t use it yet to download books, oh well, we’ll get around to that when it’s fixed.  The other annoyance that I have is that I cannot access Audible’s website/store from the app.  This is the same issue the Kindle has, and it’s not their fault, it’s Apples.   Apple takes a cut of everything sold through apps on the iPhone, so Amazon can’t sell books (audio or text) from their iPhone apps.  Bah.  I would like to be able to browse their selection and purchase audio books without having to go to their website.

And last, but most definitely not least, Valve software release an updated port of a game called Alien Swarm this week.  I think it was around 2005 when a company called Black Cat games put out a UT2k4 mod called Alien Swarm.  We played a bunch of Unreal Tournament back then, and I don’t recall where I found this, but it was pretty intriguing so I picked it up.  It was an absolute blast.  I remember playing an awful lot of it and I’m not really sure why we stopped, although I remember getting to some absolutely death dealing areas and having trouble getting past.  So it may have been that we hit a wall.  The game has 4 classes, so you get to pick your play style.  The original game was top down, the new version is also top down, but at a slight angle so the view is nicer.  It’s 4 player co-op and it’s a total blast to shoot through.  Valve went ahead and set the price point at zero, ensuring that anyone who has ever played a Valve game would pick this up and get addicted.  I can only assume that this is the the first taste and that we’re going to have to pay for the second one.  That’s fine by me, I would have paid for this one.  I got to kick around with Matt last night for a while, and I’m really looking forward to having 4 players to stomp on these maps with.

Side note: the updated wordpress app means that I can once again post from my iPad!

While I’m griping I’ll add that the iPhone should also:

• Support syncing over wifi (e.g. I come home, get on my wireless network and sync up to my mac mini
• Support subscribing to podcasts within the iTunes app on the iPhone
• background support for audio applications (or the ability to queue files up withing the ipod application even if the file is stored in an exteral app like spotify or audiobooks or dropbox
• Approve the dropbox application goddamnit (does it really take 4 weeks of dead silence to approve and app?)