Apple is currently counting towards the billionth download from their iPhone app store. I know I’ve done my part. Ever since the update of the iPhone last summer, when the App Store opened, there have been an ever-increasing variety of cool and useful apps. Most of the ones I choose are free.

Currently we are restricted to nine pages of apps. At 16 per page, plus the four on the bottom bar, that means you can have a total of 148 apps on your iPhone at any one time. I don’t have that many, but I do have 102.

So, as a public service…um, okay, whatever…here are all 102 of my apps, why I have them, why I do or don’t use them, and anything else that might help you decide to add them to your phone or not.

I’ve organized my nine pages from most important to least important, mostly. And the four most critical apps are on my home row – the row at the bottom that appears on every page.

We start with the least important, on…

Page Nine
The apps on this page made it here for one very important reason – I don’t use them. It doesn’t mean they’re bad or useless…necessarily. But I don’t use them. Ever. So why are they here at all? Why haven’t I deleted them? Well…I MIGHT use them. Maybe. Sometime. Okay, I know I won’t, but I can’t bring myself to delete them.

There are some apps I have deleted. Some good ones, too. Probably the best one I’ve deleted is the Masters app. But the Masters is over, so I won’t need it. There were a couple NCAA Basketball Tournament apps I deleted, too.

As for these apps, the top row contains four Twitter apps that all have some great features and work quite well, though somewhat differently from each other. In fact, at one time I was using all four of them, in order to manage my different Twitter accounts (follow me at Twitter.com/TimMcDaniel.) Probably my favorite of the four was Twitterific. All four of them are free.

UReport is a free Fox News app, that allows you to submit news stories to Fox. Never used it.

SmileDialLite is a neat little free app that does one thing – it allows you to store the photo of one of your contacts with their contact information. Then, when you start the program, you see your contact’s photo full-screen, and when you tap the bottom half of the picture, it dials their phone number. If you tap the top half, it will send them a text. Of course, this has limited appeal, since you can only store one person. SmileDial Pro allows multiple people for $3.99. Nice gimmick, but I don’t need it.

Lightsaber is the official Star Wars app. Cool, but I don’t use it. (It’s free.)

Air Sharing is probably the most useful app I never use. It allows you to wirelessly move files from your computer to your iPhone and vice-versa. It works. It’s easy. Why don’t I use it? Um…I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I don’t usually need to. But it’s there in case I do.

I got Air Sharing for free, during an introductory offer. Now it costs $4.99 through the App Store.

You’ll notice that at the bottom of my screen, in my home row, are my four most critical apps, and they’re not the four that Apple pre-determined should be my four most critical apps.

Okay, three out of four are. The Phone, Safari, and iPod apps are far and away the most important things about the iPhone, because, well, it IS a phone, the internet is always important, and, as much as it’s a phone, it’s also an iPod.

The fourth app in my home row is one of the few apps I’ve paid for. It’s also the reason the other four Twitter apps ended up on the ninth page. Tweetie is $2.99, and it takes the place of the other apps mainly because it handles multiple accounts. I update my Twitter status – and also my Facebook status via Twitter – many times a day. I also have Twitter accounts for the church (Twitter.com/FaithAssembly), my BibleQuizPodcast (Twitter.com/BQPodcast), and a couple of others, so this has become an important app.

Next: The 8 on page 8.

If you don’t know, MacHeist is a promotion involving a number of Mac software developers who are offering there software at a greatly reduced price as part of the MacHeist 3 Bundle. This version of the Bundle includes a wide variety of utility and specialty applications. Some of them are very useful, such as photo editor Acorn and recording utility Wire Tap Studio. I was really excited about Kinemac, a professional 3D animation app, which regularly sells for $299.

At present there are nine applications with a total value of $601.80, available in the Bundle for only $39. That’s the price for all nine together, not the price for each one. That’s an incredible value, especially if you have a need for a few of these applications.

And the catch? Actually, I wouldn’t call it a catch – just a bonus. As I said, at present there are nine applications in the Bundle. When the Bundle was released (a few days ago) there were only eight. The catch is that when total sales of the Bundle reach a certain pre-determined point, they unlock more apps. Currently, we are waiting for the next unlock point, which is $400k. When sales hit that point, BoinxTV will be released.

That’s why I’m writing this post, because I really would like that program. It’s actually something I looked at for the church, but at $199, it was a little too much. But it looks great. So, if you have a Mac, and you like really good software at insanely cheap prices, go take a look.

The other thing about MacHeist is that 25% of every sale is donated to charity. You get to pick, from a list of 10 charities, where your donation will go.

Of course, if you’ve never heard of MacHeist, then you probably have never heard of the MacHeist controversy. In a nutshell, the people don’t like MacHeist think it’s unfair to the developers, that they are being robbed, and by purchasing the Bundle, consumers are being mean and dirty and cheap and favoring the big, bad marketer over the innocent, pure developer.

One blogger actually said, “Put it this way: would you rather pay $10 to Universal Music Group for a music album, or $15 directly to the band in question?”

This might not be obvious to you – as it wasn’t to me – but his answer is that we should spend more because the creator would get more.

Um…whatever.

So…I’m not going to link to that blogger, because he offered that piece of advice to me for free. Instead I’ll link to Apple, since his blog is hosted on their servers and they paid a lot of money for those servers so that he would have the ability to post idiotic, link-bait, gibberish like that. (And I’ll also link to John Gruber, where I got the link to the blogger’s blog.)

In the meantime, I’m going to download SousChef and see how Trudi likes it.

[Update: I should also mention that the applications in the Bundle aren't trial, demo, or previous versions of the software. They are full, up-to-date versions. In fact, SousChef is a new version as of the release of the Bundle, as are a couple of others.]

Version 2 actually looks kind of cool. What is it, you ask? It’s a web-enabled, anywhere, anytime, book-reader. It allows you to download books and magazines and other web content quickly. It will even read it to you.

UPDATE: 2/10/9…new links.

Back in December I purchased the MacHeist – a collection of software offered through MacZot that was only $49 for 10 applications. However, I didn’t download or install any of them. I was waiting for the new iMac to come out since I thought I would be buying one for the house and I would install these applications on it.

Of course, the iMac wasn’t upgraded in January like I thought it would, and when they finally were upgraded a few weeks ago, I didn’t have the money to buy one.

So this week I’ve been downloaded and installing these ten apps for my Powerbook and I wish I done it sooner. My favorite app has been NewsFire. It’s a great app for reading blogs and I could have mentioned it to my workshop class.

I guess I’m mentioning it now.

Contact info: Tim@FaithNFM.com

If you look on the right side of the main page of this blog, you will see my podcasts, as well as some of the podcasts I like. You will also find some other blogs that I read.

Good email
Gmail.com

Social networking
MySpace.com; FaceBook.com; Twitter.com; SecondLife.com; Jaiku.com
and I also mentioned YouTube and Flickr

Blogs I mentioned
Political – Instapundit
Mainstream Media – USA Today
Technology – Engadget
Christian – Evotional by Mark Batterson; God-Life-Stuff by Mark Lunsford

The Scrooge Blog
www.FaithNFM.com/Scrooge

Blogging sources
WordPress – and the WordPress software for your own site
Blogger
TypePad

Hosting providers
APlus.net
GoDaddy.com
DreamHost.com
Libsyn.com – free bandwidth

Podcast Aggregators (the software that lets you subscribe to a podcast)
Juice
Doppler
iTunes

It’s listed among the podcasts I like, but I would highly recommend Podcast411, both the website and the podcast. It is a great resource for you to begin or improve your podcast. I would also recommend a book by the Podcast411 creator, Rob Walch and co-author Mur Lafferty, entitled Tricks of the Podcasting Masters.

As I said at the beginning of the workshop, I’m a user, not an expert. I’d love to hear from you and what you are developing in the blogging/podcasting world for your ministry.

I am currently working on the links and notes from the session. I am also working on a video using the presentation slides that I will post here when it is ready. Thanks for your patience.

I am teaching workshops on blogging/podcasting (yes, some in the class are looking at this right now) and Bible Quiz.

The blogging/podcasting workshop will be in the Media Center at 1:40pm Friday and 11:45am Saturday. The Bible Quiz workshop and Teen Bible Quiz coaches meeting will be in Room FLC 110 on Saturday.

For the “Ministry on My iPod” class, here’s an example of using a YouTube video in your blog. (It’s an old video we posted several months ago.)

This is an example of a very niche podcast, and something I will be bringing up in my Blogging/Podcasting workshop at the Pen. Florida All Church Ministries Convention this weekend. My workshop is called “Ministry on My iPod” and the emphasis is on trying to get churches into the 21st century.

Fortunately, I have a list of good podcasts and blogs to point people to – without having them look at my pitiful offerings.

But I also have video podcasts that I subscribe to, and I wanted to get a video iPod, then they announced the iPhone. So I’ve been waiting.

Alas…some video podcasts do not work on the iPhone. Formatting issues.

However, I very much enjoy the ones I get to watch. Which brings me to the subject of this post. Even though the podcast I’m going to tell you about isn’t a video podcast at all, but simply a good audio podcast.

The Assemblies of God Theological Seminary has a couple of podcasts and I’ve been listening to the Chapel service podcast. Very inspirational. I especially liked the message by Earl Creps from October 2006. Check it out if you get the chance.