We all know the feeling. Hearing that great song on the radio that you’d give up your Mac to remember the artist and title. Or come across this great new song playing in someone’s car or in the mall that you’d give up your iPod to know the name of. Well, these days all you’d really need is your iPhone, a wifi connection and Listen.

TUAW’s Erica Sadun, lead purveyor of free crazysexycool apps and utilities for the iPhone has come up with with another winner.

Imagine you hear that mysterious song somewhere with wifi, and you happen to have your iPhone. Fire up Erica’s Listen, put your iPhone near the audio, wait a few seconds, and you get the artist, title and album the song came from, right on the multi-touch screen. Sounds too good to be true.

Listen samples five seconds of audio, then goes online to consult a database, matches the sample to the music and spits back the song info. Is that crazysexycool or what?

I used it in the office today, and people went oooh and ahhh. Granted, it doesn’t catch everything. It caught maybe three out of every five (it’s still a beta, after all), but sample a reasonably popular song and it’d get it every time. And it’s not really a new idea - there are cellphones with this sort of feature out already for a while now. But hey, who cares? This one’s sure to make it into the Doodler’s Top 10 Favorites for 2008.

The Listen beta is available for your iPhone via Installer beginning today.

The folk from ModMyiPhone are alerting iPhone users about a malicious install that might mess up your units.

Apparently if you have jmwiki.com in your list of sources in Installer, an app called “113 prep” that purports to be an update of Erica Sadun’s utilities and implies that it prepares your unit for the 1.1.3 firmware is actually malware. When installed, the app will just say “shoes”, and when you uninstall it it takes with it important files from the /bin directory, and breaks other working apps like utilities from Ms. Sadun, and apps like sendfile.

Please do not install 113 prep and remove the JMCO source jmwiki.com from Installer.

(Via MMi)

Another major and majorly egregious omission from the iPhone’s basic features is the ability to just copy your contacts off of your SIM and straight into the iPhone’s directory. Conversely, if you’ve added a lot of contacts to your iPhone and want to upload them onto your SIM, you’re basically SOL.

Folk with Macs who keep their Address Book updated have no problem, as are Windows users who are equally as conscientious about it on Microsoft Outlook. But the poor iPhone newbies who do neither have to impose on their Mac/Windows friends to copy and upload their contacts, lest they do it painstakingly one by one.

Well, the same people that gave you Camera Pro have just released iSIM, which does what you’ve been looking for (and like Camera Pro, hold back the best features to make a quick buck before Apple includes those functions in a firmware update). Works OK, save for the fact that it’s as slow as molasses accessing the SIM card’s contacts; you’d think the iPhone had frozen. (If you get impatient, just lean on the Home button for a few seconds and it’ll kick you out of the app.)

Like Camera Pro, it’s much easier to screencap iSIM’s Welcome Screen than explain what it does:

Now available via Installer.

With the constant trickle of TPAs (third party applications) for the iPhone and their quick and painless installs, you tend to try everything out - because it’s just as quick and painless to uninstall them. (And believe me, there have been a lot that don’t last ten seconds on mine; the ratio of crap to good stuff is heavily one-sided.) Whatever the case, updating Installer has become a daily routine, which I expect is the same for a lot of you guys.

At the moment I have four pages of apps on my iPhone (considering that the Apple-legal stuff takes up only over half a page, that’s a lot of TPAs). The number of pages grow and shrink as the weeks go by, and staying on the iPhone is survival of the fittest; the ones that stay are either really useful or fun, or are just really good conversation pieces. The common thread among most of them is, why didn’t Apple think of these? (The only one I haven’t yet come across, but was fully expecting to appear this year, was something that let me cut and paste text.)

It being year-end, people have a compulsion to make lists, and I’ve succumbed and made a listing of apps I’ve kept on my iPhone over the many weeks. Please take note that these are personal, subjective choices. I’m sure you have others you prefer, or some you feel are moronic. But hey, it’s my list. Why don’t you post some of yours in the comment box? Who knows, there might’ve been some we missed and should know about.

Anyway, here are some that have managed to stay on my screen this year:

weTool - There have been a few other apps that individually do all the small things that weTool does, but none all together, none as well, and none in a more professional looking package. You can delete specific items in the Call and SMS logs, you can forward texts (to multiple recipients!) and contacts, you can even save texts to Notes. You can even makes calls directly from it. One of the best parts is that it has a set of visually stunning page transitions you can select that Apple is only beginning to do (as the page curl transition seen in a screenshot of the 1.1.3 preview.) Nice one.

TuneWiki - This is for the karaoke lover in you. When connected online, it will search an online wiki database for the lyrics of the song currently being played in iPod mode and will show it to you line by line as the song plays, ostensibly so you can sing along. Of course you have to manually forward each line by tapping on the TuneWiki icon on the screen, but hey, it’s free. Who’s complaining?

[Read the rest of this entry »]

One of the most tepid, dishwater-weak and featureless of the built-in Apple apps for the iPhone is the barely functional Photos app. Even the cheapest digicam or cam phone has more features than that one.

Well, someone’s finally done something about it and made a somewhat-free and more capable photo app. It’s called Camera PRO for iPhone, and offers a few shoulda-been-in-the-box features for free (and some not so free).

Considering that it’s just a matter of time before Apple beefs up their own software in a future update, these entrepreneurs from Amsterdam are striking while the iron is hot and is charging for additional “Premium” features. Some are in numbered trial mode, and others yet to come (including a send-to-Flickr feature).

Rather than take time explaining the app to you (and because they say a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m still too sleepy to type much), I just screen-capped the welcome screen on my iPhone, because everything’s there anyway:

It works, too. Here’s a shot I took using the default no-choice settings:

And using the zoom feature of Camera PRO where I didn’t move the iPhone:

Focus seems to be a problem still, but hey, anything’s better than what we got now, right?

V. 1.04 now available via Installer.