Carbonite Online Backup

I have been keeping up with Leo Laporte since the TechTV days. Now that he has his own internet network, I have been watching his shows on the TWiT Network. He advertises this great backup service called Carbonite. This services is a fast and secure way to back up your files. You are able to backup any amount of data that you want. The best thing about backing up with Carbonite is that you get a great deal and all of your files are sent to “the cloud” on an SSL Secure connection, which is tested by McAfee. This service is $54.95 a year, but if you use the coupon code LEO, you can get 2 months free. It is well worth the money.

AppBox Pro

The other day, I finally hit the 100 apps marker on my iPhone. I have a bunch of different apps including a Battery Life app, System Info, Unit Converters, etc. Well, why download all of those apps when you can get those and a bunch more all in one! AppBox Pro is an app for $0.99 in the App Store. Basically, it is a suite of all kinds of apps. As you can see in the picture below, they have all kinds of different apps. I am not going to explain each one, but I will go over a few. Battery Life shows you how much talking time and idle time you have available. The Days Until allows you to make a countdown to a specific event. pCalendar is….. well, if your a female, then you will know what it is. Finally, System Info tells you information about your phone such has how much RAM is being used at the time. I really hope you can get this app and enjoy it because it is really cool and very useful.

Ocarina

If you like music in general, whether it be playing music or just listening, then you will most likely enjoy this app. Ocarina is an app where basically all you do is play music. As you can see in the picture below, there are 4 glowing dots, which are like the keys on a trumpet, and depending on what key combination you put in, the sound comes out differently. All you do to make a sound come out is blow into the microphone on the bottom right of the iPhone. If you just google “Ocarina iPhone App Music” and you will most likely find some sheet music to play songs on the Ocarina app. If I am not mistaken, this is based off of some kind of instrument in the Legend of Zelda series of video games. This app is available in the App Store for $0.99.

Snow Leopard

2 weeks ago today, the latest release of Mac OS X, 10.6 (Snow Leopard), was released. I was one of the many “Apple fanatics” who went out and bought it the day it came out. Since I have installed Snow Leopard, I have absolutely loved it. I have noticed a bunch of minor bug fixes and a major performance boost. The one noticeable thing is the speed of everything. One of my personal favorite updates would be that Finder has been re-written in Cocoa and it is really great. The new Quicktime X is really nice, but in my opinion, it has slimmed down a little too much. It has a really nice interface, but they need to bring back some of the features they had in Quicktime 7. Also, for Quicktime Pro users, it is a little disappointing that there is no support for that now. The new 64 Bit support has really taken advantage of the graphics card and everything is looking amazing. The few little things that I found wrong with Snow Leopard is that some of my USB devices don’t work when I initially boot up. Another thing, that is not really Snow Leopard’s fault is that 2 applications I use, Grabup and Carbonite Backup, do not yet support Snow Leopard. I really am enjoying Snow Leopard and I rate it a 5/5. I do not, however, say that you have to rush and get it as soon as possible if you haven’t got it already. It can wait for a little while.

Camera Genius

All iPhones have a built in Camera and app to use it, but there are some features the default app doesn’t have. However there is an app called Camera Genius that has some great features the default Camera app does not have. It is available for 99 cents in the App Store. One of the main features is the ability to zoom in and out on an object. There is also a feature where whenever you say something or make a sound, it takes the picture. Another useful features, especially for me, is “Anti-Shake”. This feature snaps the photo when everything is still. When you try to take a picture of yourself, you usually can’t find the button to snap the photo. However, the “Big Button” feature makes it so that the whole screen is the button. A few more features is the “Guides” which puts grids on the screen so you can get something just right in the picture. The last feature is a Timer where you can set the time of when you want the picture to shoot. This is a great app to have, and I recommend it to all big users of the Camera on the iPhone.

BNO News

Anyone who loves to be up to date with the latest news from around the world, then you have most likely have heard of BNO News (Breaking News). Well, there is an app for the iPhone called BNO News and it is available in the App Store for $1.99. Basically it is just the news feed of BNO News Latest Updates. One of my favorite features is that it comes with Push Notifications. You can also set a few little settings such as pushing out Low Priority and High Priority updates instead of just high priorities. You can also disable push notifications from a certain time of the day or night until a later time. So for any of you who want the fastest news updates, dig up $1.99 and go buy the BNO News app from the App Store right now unless you already have it.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the biggest social networks on the internet right now, other than MySpace, and it inhabits millions of users. For those of us who have an iPhone, the official Facebook app is available in the App Store for free. It has a really nice UI and good features. You can view News Feeds, as you can on Facebooks home page while your logged in, and a few other items. You can view a slimmed down version of you and your friends profiles as well. You would think if it was slimmed down, it would look ugly, but it actually looks pretty good. A few more features include viewing messages in your inbox and using Facebooks chat feature. As you can see in the picture below there are a few more features like events, notes, etc. I highly encourage an iPhone user with a Facebook account get this app. If you already have it and haven’t updated to Facebook 3.0, I highly encourage it because it has many more features than the previous version(s).

Pingle

There are many people that use ping.fm to update their status on networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Well, for those of us that have an iPhone, we are probably looking for an app that supports the ping.fm API. Look no further because Pingle is the app for you. This app allows you to update your status from your iPhone. You can also attach a photo either from your Photo Library for from your Camera at that certain point in time. You can also use your current location to show people where you are at via Google Maps. There is also an option to show the recent history of your updates not only you have done from your iPhone but also through the service alone. The app is available in the App Store for a low price of $1.99 and I really hope you get it.

FlickIt

If you, like most people, use Flickr as a photo sharing service and you have an iPhone, this app is for you. FlickIt is a free iPhone app that allows you to upload pictures from either taking a picture at that moment in time or from your Photo Album on the phone. There really is not a lot to this app because it is so simple. There are some preferences where you can set your account, the size you want to upload the picture as, and even set default metadata. Then all you have to do to upload is get the picture, fill in the information such as Title, Description, Set and Public, Private or Friend view. However, if you have already set some of those options in the Default metadata preference, then you don’t have to again unless you want to change it. I highly suggest this to anyone who is looking for a Flickr uploading app for the iPhone.

BeejiveIM

If you are like me and you have multiple IM accounts, you would like to have a client that can handle all of them at once. I have done reviews on multiple great IM clients in the past, but BeejiveIM is an awesome app you can get for the iPhone. This app is $9.99 in the app store but is definitely worth the money, if not more. It has some really great features and can support IM accounts such as AIM, MSN, GTalk, Jabber, and a few more. The UI of the app is fantastic and the chat windows kind of remind me of an iChat window. You have the ability to send pictures either from your album on your iPhone or by taking a picture with the iPhone at that selected time. The app supports both normal and landscape typing, which is a big help for me. You can set the wallpaper for your chat windows, just like in iChat. Your buddy list looks just as it would in iChat and you can also set some contacts as favorites and they will show up in the “Favorites” section of the app. Another kind of useful feature is that you can either sign in to all of your accounts at once, or just be on a select few that you use the most. The only thing it is missing, in my opinion, is MobileMe support like iChat has. I really hope you get the chance to use it because it is definitely one of the best apps in my opinion.