100 Best iPhone Apps of 2009

If you’re a new iPhone owner, or you just don’t scour the App Store every five minutes, you may have missed out on the thousands of apps available today. Luckly, Mac|Life released their 100 Greatest iPhone Apps of 2009 list, and it’s a great introductory list as well as great way to catch up on those apps you might have missed.

Most of the apps on this list are good deals, although there are a few deadbeats in there as well ($20 for Wolfram Alpha, when I can go to it on Safari for free?). For instance, I’m still waiting for the GPS apps to go down in price, personally. But according to the list, Peggle is only $2 right now, so I’d jump on that with a quickness.

One glaring omission is the last.fm app, which is one of the best ways to experience new music for free.

Now You’re Playing With Power

Geekologie found this Craigslist ad asking for someone to come over and give this guy a HJ while wearing a Power Glove (it’s so bad). I’m thinking that if you pop in Punch Out at the same time you could probably beat Mike Tyson in one round.

Notflix.

Here’s something that’s both interesting and annoying. Right now, Netflix.com is down, which affects not only the browsing of the site, but also the Xbox 360/PS3 playback. The only things available for me to watch are what I’ve already put in my Instant Watch queue, which I know now is just a lot of crap.

So now, I’m stuck here watching “Holly’s World” on E!. It is simply the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

Shadow Of The Colossus Mobiles From Salty And Sweet: I’ll Take 400

I honestly didn’t think it could get any better than the Left 4 Dead/Team Fortress mobiles made by the one and only SaltyandSweet over on Etsy. Apparently the lady at the laundro-mat was right because I’m a moron.

The two latest mobiles are gorgeous representations of  Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock. Both runs, along with the rest of her awesome catalog are available on her site. Maybe you thought the L4D mobiles were a little too… pants shitting…  to hang over your baby’s crib. If that’s the case then you should totally pick up on of the SoC ones, because rockets and farm animals are sooo last year.

Pictures: You Sneaky F—ing Russian

Via TMBO

Gadgetronic: Netgear XAVB101 Powerline Ethernet Adapter Kit

Great in theory, shitty in practice.

I bought the Netgear XAVB101 Powerline Ethernet Adapter Kit based on what someone had told me – that you connect one of the adapters to your router and plug it into the wall, and then plug the other one into the wall somewhere else in the house and then into your computer and BAM! you’ve got a 200mbps, secure LAN without any wires strewn across the house. Bet you didn’t know you could route the internet through your electrical system, huh? You can connect up to 16 adapters in one house, which means you could have super-fast gaming (it doesn’t require drivers, so it would work on the Xbox 360 and PS3) as well as internet downloads aplenty. The only thing stopping you would be your internet speed.

I picked this kit up because I thought it would be a great way to secure my iMac and keep the internet blazingly fast. On wireless, I was getting pretty good speeds, but not quite at what my ISP says I should be getting. After setting everything up, I tested the internet speed, and it was 1/3 the speed of my wireless LAN. I don’t know if it has to do with my house’s electrical wiring, but needless to say I was disappointed and took the thing back. Hopefully others will have better luck with it than me, but as it stands I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Tweet tweet!

So after two weeks of being unable to access my account (really Twitter, two weeks to reset a password? Really?), I’m finally back on Twitter!

So if anyone out there wants to know what banal thoughts run through my brain at any given moment, or just feel like saying hi, give me a shout.  My username is @blacktail9mm

Face-On: PS3 Facebook Integration

The latest 3.10 PS3 firmware brings a little surprise in the form of Facebook integration. Okay, probably not so surprising given the recent addition of Facebook, Twitter and last.fm on the 360. Once again it feels like Sony is playing catchup and coming out with half-baked goods that lack any real functionality all the while ignoring repeated requests to implement much needed changes to the PS3 software. As of right now, the Facebook integration posts news story on your wall whenever you buy something new from the PSN store (which seems like a thinly-veiled promotional ploy) and newly synced trophies (why am I still having to manually sync my profile?). No PSN friend-finder. No official PlayStation profile tab. Just more wall spam to greet you in the morning.

Dislike.

Getting an open NAT with Verizon FiOS and Xbox Live

I hope someday we’ll stop writing about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, but for now, it’s foremost on our minds. Matter of fact, we had an impromptu, partial-Threevue sesh just last night, fragging some mofos.

Of particular concern lately has been Tyler’s ability to connect to my Xbox 360; we weren’t able to play the Left 4 Dead 2 demo a couple weeks ago, and we can’t join a party of just the two of us. We’re thinking it has something to do with our NAT settings (mine is displayed as “moderate”).

I stumbled upon this forum which has the perfect solution to my configuration (Verizon FiOS and an Xbox 360 hooked up with one of those underpriced wireless adapter dongles). If you are having connectivity issues, this should work beautifully.

Netflix on the PS3 Lets Us Watch a Movie By Putting a Disc in the Tray…Wait, What?

So, I’m sure you’ve all read the deets about Netflix’s arrival at Playstation International Airport in the coming months, and have already picked your side: For, Against, or Indiff. Even though I’ve already been using this service on the 360 for a long time now, I think this is great, but I’m really not down with having to get this Netflix disc, and leaving it in the tray to watch something. It just seems like yet another thing that the PS3 is making unnecessarily difficult (e.g. downloading demos, talking to friends online, sending/receiving messages, and so on…), and I can’t imagine that it will be easier to manufacture thousands of these discs to send out, rather than just making an integrated app.

I’m sure that there are people in the know out there that will be able to explain and/or defend this disc business, but hey, I’m just Joe Everyday Consumer, and I just don’t get it.

Google Chrome Released on Mac

New buzz browser Google Chrome was released on the Mac yesterday, and instead of writing anything about it, I decided to try out the new screen recording capability of Quicktime 10 (which comes free with Snow Leopard). You can download Google Chrome for the Mac here.

Wrangling Google Reader: Gruml and Byline

RSS feeds are web feeds for frequently updated works (blogs) which can be consolidated into one program for easy access. They can then be viewed online (via readers like Google Reader), on a standalone program, and even on an iPhone. Basically, I use them to view lots of blogs without having to go to a million sites every day. I’ve been using RSS readers for years now – first with Apple Mail’s built-in RSS reader, and then NetNewsWire until this past week, when I buried the RSS apps of old and jumped into new territory.

Gruml:
It’s no secret that the best online RSS reader is Google Reader – their interface is smooth and easy to use. The only online reader that was almost comparable was NewsGator, which synced with standalone app NetNewsWire (which has a PC counterpart, FeedDemon, but I’ve never tried it) until they gave up and started syncing it with Google Reader. Problem is, NetNewsWire doesn’t work as well with Google Reader as it did with NewsGator. This made me start looking for a replacement program, and I settled upon Gruml.

Gruml (pictured above) syncs perfectly with Google Reader and has a few great features, too, like being able to send articles directly to your Twitter, complete with shortened URLs. It also shows your unread count in the menu bar (nice touch). It’s currently in beta so it’ll only get better in the future. Totally free.

Byline:
I’ve been using the NetNewsWire iPhone app since its initial release in August of ’08, but I’ve never been that happy with it. It’s slow, clunky, and it just had a new update that actually made it less user-friendly. This “upgrade” drove me to look for other RSS iPhone apps, and I am currently loving the $4 app Byline, which runs amazingly fast, and is customizable well beyond any RSS app I’ve used. It even caches your feeds for offline viewing, should you be stuck somewhere without a signal (subway, doctor’s office, etc).

So there you have it. For $4 I can wrangle all my nerdy Google Reader feeds in three different ways.

New Mobile Site: Yay or Nay?

Update: Looks like the “yeas” have it. It’s staying.

Those of you that are privileged enough to own a mobile phone that allows web surfing may have noticed that the most gracious host of threevue.com, WordPress, switched our site over to a condensed version without asking us. There aren’t any options for customizing it, so what you see is what we can offer. I actually like it, although you can no longer see all the fun stuff on the sidebar. You can always switch back to the regular version at the bottom of the page, if you’d like.

So we’re leaving the decision up to you whether or not we should have it at all. Rock the vote!

69 Free Mac Apps

Mac|Life has posted a list of 69 free Snow Leopard compatible apps for Macs. Here are 10 of my favorites, in alphabetical order:

1. Audacity: Edit and master just about any audio file. Need to make a snippet of audio quickly? This works just fine. The GUI looks like crap but it works really well.

2. Boxee: Control all the media on your mac easily with this clean interface. I use this on our TV-connected Mac Mini, and I can browse my media as well as Hulu and YouTube with my TV remote.

3. Cyberduck: A simple FTP app. I have been using this for years to upload files (and more recently, our podcasts) to the internets.

4. Dropbox: Lets you share files/folders with other users and other computers of your own over the internet with a Finder-integrated interface. The fastest and easiest way to share files with friends, once everyone has it set up.

5. Flip4Mac: Play WMV files with Quicktime.

6. Growl: Lets your apps push little notification boxes into the corner of your screen when something happens (a download completes, a new song plays on iTunes, etc).

7. Neo Office: An open-source MS Office app, runs a bit slow, but hey, it’s phuree.

8. NetNewsWire: The best RSS reader out there, syncs with Google Reader and its free (but buggy) iPhone app.

9. Quicksilver: This “Finder extender” lets you open, close and mess around with stuff without having to click anything. Once you get it down, it can really speed up your computer experience.

10. SeaShore: A simple image-editing tool. I use this to create all of our pretty post images.

What’s With The Raquetball Glasses?

Since we are on the subject of stupid people broadcasting themselves over the internets, here is one I recently stumbled upon. He calls himself Trent Gamer, but I call him the Chris Crocker of video games. I hope you hate him as much as I do. Enjoy!

If you are one of the 40,000 people that have already seen this, I’m sorry.