favorite apps and conversation

this morning, a few of us met for a and informal and delightful conversation about all kinds of cool stuff. here’s a quick review of what we discussed at this morning’s zombie/magpie incubator confab:

we talked a little about . . .

interest in gathering, sharing ideas, sparking, rejuvenating, technology, teaching, and getting together on a regular basis, about what exactly this gathering is or isn’t but everyone seemed comfortable with the murky mystery and not trying to hem it in or put a fence around it. (I liked stephen’s description – “sort of like a book club for other stuff.”)

we talked about Apple’s recent iBooks/iTunesU/texbooks announcement:

huffingtonpost article

techland article

about how favorite apps differed sometimes depending on the platform you’re talking about (some stuff that we’d definitely want on our phone, but not on iPad or vice versa)

while there was a lot of fave app discussion flying around, here are the one I was able to capture from the fray!

in the category of productivity and tools:

alarmed
robust and customizable alerts, alarms, pop-ups, snoozes, etc.

envelopes
old school meets new school, budgeting app using virtual envelopes for your funds

genius scan app for scanning docs on the go, email as jpg or odf

stitcher
on demand streaming of 5,000+ podcasts and radio shows instead of downloading

mocha telnet
use your iphone or ipad to access telnet servers and run terminal windows

evernote
remember everything (notes, photos, to-do-lists, voice notes, etc) synced across all your devices and searchable

dragon dictation
user-friendly (and very accurate!) voice recognition app instantly converts to text that you can output directly to social media networks or email

flava
clean and easy holding bin / virtual scrapbook for voice memos, text, photos, music, websites, etc.backup/sync with dropbox and evernote, one touch social media share

urbanspoon
slot machine meets concierge for restaurant suggestions, organized by price, neighborhood, type of food

aroundme
helps identify nearby banks, gas, hospitals, theaters, restaurants, markets, etc. with distance and maps

checkplease
for calculating the tip or splitting a bill between multiple people

and the cateogry of mental break/entertainment must haves:

words with friends

onion magic answer ball

FS5 hockey

tiny tower

tiny defense

today’s wordcloud:

Wordle: fave apps discussion

deleting photos from iPhone

If you’re like me (macfan, supercool, dork), you take a bunch of photos on your phone, import them into iPhoto (or whatever photo hoarding software you use), but think, “hmmm…i might want to show that photo to someone on my phone” so you don’t delete them. before you know it, you have gazillions of photos lurking on your phone. how do you get them off? you can delete them one by one on the phone (dumb). you might think, “oh, i bet in iPhoto i can mass delete!” but you’d be wrong. here’s how you can do it though (thanks to flobro in the apple support communities discussion board for this tip!):

connect your iPhone to your mac
open Image Capture application
select your phone from the options on the left pane
select whichever photos you want to delete from the roll displayed in the main pane
and click the delete button at the bottom [UNLESS YOU HAVEN’T IMPORTED THE PHOTOS YET! if so, do that first!]

now you’ve got more breathing room on your device and are ready to take your next gazillion photos!