Archive for category Free iPhone Apps

DreamWalk Turns the iPhone Into a Mobile Treasure Hunter

DreamWalk (free, link) is a cool idea: win free prizes by traveling to locations on a map; when the iPhone’s GPS confirms you’re there, you get a coupon code for the item emailed to you. Prizes range from small like free Quizno subs to semi-big like 19″ LCDs TVs. Are the prizes real? It looks like it. Trevor Sheridan over at AppAdvice.com has a post about using the app to win one of the TVs in Los Angeles.

The problem with the app? Only a few cities have prizes. I live in Chicago, the third largest city in the US, and only 4 prizes were listed for the entire city. But apparently Los Angeles has dozens of prizes listed.

The reality: Chicago is almost prizeless

Cool in concept, DreamWalk needs more businesses to support it to truly be worth using. And it’s just one of a long list of GPS games and social networking apps that are popping up all over the place. But it’s worth checking out if your city has prizes.

DreamWalk is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Gibson Learn & Master Guitar App: Free Tuner & Metronome

The Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app (free, link) is a guitarist’s Swiss army knife. And it’s as free as a bird now. The app has 4 features that should come in hand to all guitarists, a tuner, a metronome, chord book, and lesson videos.

The chromatic tuner uses the iPhone’s microphone and can tune any instrument. It also has settings for alternate guitar tunings as well. The app can play tones so that you can tune by ear.

For the rhythmically challenged, the app comes with a metronome that beats out the time along with a lever for adjusting BPM (beats per minute). There are settings for multiple time signatures as well—the standard 4/4 as well as 2/3, 3/4, and none). The coolest feature is the ability to tap out your own tempo. Simply hit the Tap Tempo button several times at the speed you want, then app will compute the tempo after a few seconds.

Also featured is a basic chord book that shows you how to place your fingers to form chords as well as high-quality videos of various guitar lessons (Internet connection required).

Gibson Learn & Master Guitar is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Free iPhone AdSense App: SimpleSense

Checking an AdSense account using the iPhone’s browser is a huge hassle. Not only does it ask for your user name and password every time, visual errors often appear in rendering the website. And, the AdSense site tends to be slow to load in general. SimpleSense (free, link) to the rescue.

I love SimpleSense for two reasons. First, you only need enter your username and password the first time you use it—from then on, it logs you in automatically. Second, it strips down the Adsense site so it loads faster and presents your earnings in an efficient and easy-to-read manner.

The app’s feature set is pretty sparse (remember, it’s free). It shows 5 things: Earnings, Clicks, CTR, CPM, and Pageviews. And you can view those statistics for today, yesterday, week, month, and all time. That’s it.

But there is one more sweet feature. At the bottom right corner is a button that launches the regular AdSense site within the app. From there, you can take advantage of all the rest of AdSense’s features, like Advanced Reporting, etc.

There are many paid Adsense apps on the iPhone, but SimpleSense is the only free one I found. And it’s an excellent little app to boot. Even if you don’t like the stripped down stats it presents, it offers auto logging-in to AdSense, and the full website can be viewed within the app. Highly recommended.

SimpleSense is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Cars.com App Offers Efficient Car Shopping

The Cars.com (free, link) app brings the popular car-shopping website to the iPhone, allowing users to quickly browse through listings of new and used cars. A stripped-down version of the website, the app offers search for New, Used, or Certified Used cars and can display a specific dealer’s entire inventory. Thanks to the iPhone’s GPS, there’s no need to enter in the zip code to find the closest cars (but there’s the option to if you want to search outside the area).

The search feature lets you specify four car categories: Make, Model, Max Price, and Location. The app will bring up a list of cars that fit the criteria along with a picture. Tapping on an individual car will bring up more info like more pictures and dealer info, including a map showing the dealer’s location, more of the dealer’s inventory, or you can call the dealer right from the app.


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Fidelity Investments iPhone App Now Available

Those who maintain a stock portfolio with Fidelity brokerage should be glad to see the Fidelity Investments (free, link) app finally appear in the App Store. Besides account monitoring that allows you to see your second-by-second net worth, the app also allows users to buy and sell stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, and stock options. The app joins eTrade (link), and TD AmeriTrade (link) as apps that let you trade stocks using your iPhone anywhere. For example, you could invest in Microsoft while flushing the toilet.

The app also features real-time quotes (for logged in users), financial news, charts, and qoute lookup tools.

Fidelity Investments is a free download from the iTunes App Store.
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Send Photo Love Notes With Valentine Photo Free (Valentine’s Day Apps)

If you’re looking to send your baby snookums photo love notes this Valentine’s Day, Valentine Photo Free (iTunes link) is a simple app that makes adding hearts and other Valentine’s Day-themed graphics to your photos easy. And best of all, it’s free.

While not the smoothest interface we’ve seen in an app, it gets the job done. Simply drag the graphics into the photos. You can resize or rotate the graphics through button controls or pinching gestures (we recommended using the buttons as the pinch gestures don’t work too well here).

When you’re done, you can save the finished product to the iPhone’s photo album, email it, upload to Twitter, or upload to Facebook, all within the app.

Again, it’s a very basic app with a lot of limitations. For instance, it doesn’t support landscape photos, so you have to choose only sections of landscape photos to use. And you can’t add your own text—you have to use the graphics provided. But the graphics are not too bad.

Valentine’s Photo Free is a free download from the iTunes App Store.

Learn to Speak Haitian Creole With Free iPhone App

Aid workers headed to Haiti or interacting with refugees should check out Byki Haitian Creole (free, iTunes link), an excellent app that teaches you the regional Creole language. The app uses audio and flashcards and gives the English phrase (and audio) as well. The phrases are grouped together by subject including a “Medical Emergency” set.

Overall, the app is very slick with nice features like a Slow Sound mode that slows down the audio and an all-import search feature. It comes with over a 1000 words and a 100 phrases to learn, but you can download hundreds more within the app for free.

There has been a language barrier for many foreign aid workers in the area, although those who speak French can get by somewhat (Haitian Creole is derived from French). This app is useful for the traveler too, as the data sits locally on the iPhone once downloaded and is searchable.

Byki Haitian Creole is a free download from the App Store.

How to Confuse Your Cat With an iPhone

This app will remove whatever remaining trust your cat had in you.

Kitty! Annoy Your Cat (free, iTunes link).

“Free App A Day” Website Offers Exactly That

The Free App A Day website is from the same organization who brought us the Appvent Calendar in December, and their mission seems to be to fill your iPhone with free apps. Each day they announce a free iPhone app, but free for 24 hours only — you miss it and it’s back up to full cost.

Today’s app is Real Deer Hunting (free, iTunes link), which is currently rated 3 stars on iTunes. Other apps so far this month have included Low Grav Racer (3.5 stars) and Kryzer (3 stars).

If you feel you may lose track of this whole project, the website has a customizable email alerts, Twitter account, and an RSS feed. You can specify different app types and genres that you’re most interested in, and a you will be alerted when a matching app is featured.

An Official White House App Comes to the iPhone

The White House has announced The White House iPhone app (free, iTunes link). The app features news, info, and video of speeches from the Oval Office. The app will provide live video streams of important speeches, including Obama’s upcoming State of the Nation address scheduled for January 27th. In addition to the President’s speeches, there are webchats with administration officials, key speeches, press briefings, the White House blog, behind the scenes photos, and on-demand videos.

If you don’t have an iPhone, the White House is planning on rolling out a mobile version of their website soon. This will allow any internet accessible device to see a specially formated version of their site for easy mobile viewing.

Full press release:

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