iPhone Life

1: Google Earth

It would look lame not to include Google Earth here, but the mini me is a pale shadow of its desktop/laptop self. Nowhere near as featured and darn slow to boot, it’s worth downloading because it’s free, fun, and singular. Just don’t expect the same “wow” experience you get on a big device.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:

• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see hilly terrain
• Show the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the position feature to fly to your current place
• Search for cities, places, and business around the world with Google Local Search

2: Motion-X GPS Lite

There are dozens of apps that use the iPhone’s GPS to record speed, distance, routes, waypoints, and all those other navigator geek metrics.  Why carry the load and risk the damage? But if you are going to do that, here’s your pick: MXGPS seems the most precise of all the trail apps and plots pace, too. You can set waypoints and find the way back to them. And there’s even a rudimentary map feature–it shows your track, but not terrain or streets.

• iPhone 3GS magnetic compass integration.
• Access and manage your iPod music directly from MotionX-GPS.
• MotionX-GPS is exclusively designed and optimized for your iPhone 3GS and 3G (the first generation iPhone and the first and second generation iPod touch do not have the essential GPS chipset to acquire a GPS signal).
• MotionX-GPS is the most important GPS solution for the iPhone. Over 2 million happy iPhone users have chosen MotionX-GPS. MotionX-GPS is for biking, running, hiking, walking, skiing, geocaching, and sailing.
• MotionX-GPS shows your position and track at all times on street, topo/terrain and satellite maps. You can go after your track back to where you started and email to multiple recipients with a single click your position, track, trip statistics (such as date, start time, elapsed time, distance traveled, average speed, etc.) and even a picture taken along the way.

3: Bicycle Gear Calculator

Designed by a cyclist, for cyclists, Bike Gears is the premier Bicycle Gear Calculator for the iPhone. Calculate Gear Ratios, Gear Inches, Development and Gain Ratios using your bike’s measurements. The app now has over 200 preset tire sizes and also lets you enter your own custom tire size for personalized measurements. I swap chairing on my single speeds about once every presidential election, but I still think this app is fantastic. Most cyclists don’t need or don’t care about the esoterica of gear ratios or gear inches, but if you’re a wrench, single speeder, or fixie fanatic, you’ll find it irreplaceable. The free sample fastly calculates ratios using chairing from 20-tooth to 61-tooth, sprockets from eight to 35, and cranks from 150 mm to 200 mm. Simple, efficient, and fast, it does one thing and does it well.

4: Absolute Fitness

At last check, there were 27 pages of health and fitness apps on the iTunes store, everything from the sounds of Hawaiian waterfalls to trackers for menstrual cycles. Most are superficial and somewhat hapless. If you’re gonna use the iPhone as an exercise aid, go all the way: Absolute Fitness pulls all your efforts under one roof and keeps track of calories consumed, calories burnt through exercise, weight, body fat proportion, BMI, and more. At 15 bucks, it’s not for dabblers–it’s a fully featured, powerful little life organizer. The database of foods is extensive and you can easily add custom items or whole meals. Online reviews have mentioned crashes, but I’ve never experienced any–the only glitch is that the amount I enter for a particular food sometimes resets itself to zero. Perhaps it was coded by an Italian mother wants me to eat more?

Features:

• An extensive food and exercise database (with the ability to add custom items).
  Nutritional information on macronutrients (calories, fat, etc.) and more than 30 different types of vitamins and minerals*.
• Automatic calculation of daily nutrient limits based on your profile and your dietary aim (with the skill to set custom limits).
• Dynamic daily nutritional snapshots that assist you see how much you have eaten and how much you can still eat.
• Customized food study.
• Graphical charts to track your weight, calories and others over different periods of time.
• Ability to create Custom “meals” (food items composed of many individual items – e.g. a salad).
• Tracking of Body Fat %, Blood Pressure, Hours of Sleep and Number of glasses of water.

5: Moon Atlas

Six bucks will weed out the casual from the lunatics, which is a disgrace cause this is one very sweet and detailed moon app. It represents the big chunk of cheese as a sphere, which is how you really see it (as opposed to flattened), and has 1,800 named features and the locations of 26 spacecraft. And while you perhaps won’t need to search for many spots by name, it does that, too, and has a wonderful Google Earthen flyby and you come in above it. Oh, and it also lets you view the dark side of the moon–cue Pink Floyd…now. Moon Atlas displays the phase and libration of the Moon from your chosen location and renders these on the globe. You can switch to a ‘Globe’ mode that allows you to spin the Moon around to see far side features. The feature database is searchable and can move the globe to a searched feature. The phase can be switched off and the far side is shown in a slightly darker shade of grey. Date, time and location can be changed. There is also a real-time mode that will update to the current time. The Moon globe can be shown with north or south at the top or inverted to suit special telescope views. Over 1800 named features are included as well as 26 spacecraft that reached the surface of the Moon.