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Twittelator vs. Twinkle

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photo.jpg vs. photo.jpg

Disclaimer: I started using Twittelator first, and then moved onto the Twinkle bandwagon. While I think that Twittelator has more features, I find that Twinkle is simple enough for my everyday use.

Things I like about Twittelator:

  • panic button (even though I would rather call 911 in that case).
  • search function
  • can view EVERYONE’s tweets
  • can view favorites
  • can post exact location via google maps

Things I like about Twinkle:

  • Location awareness.
  • Easy stalking of people around me.
  • Better looking interface.

How to block a number on the iPhone

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Once in a while, I get an annoying scam phone call telling me that my car warranty is about to expire and blah blah blah. It always comes from the same number and every time I try to get through to a real person instead of a recording, it hangs up on me or just keeps playing a recording over and over again.

Since AT&T for some reason won’t block specific numbers on cell phones, it’s up to the phone itself to block the numbers. There’s no elegant way to do it on the iPhone without jailbreaking it, so what I did was this:

  1. Download a silence ring-tone from here.
  2. Load the ringtone onto my iPhone.
  3. List the number I want to block under a contact named “Blocked”.
  4. Assign the silent ringtone to the Blocked contact.
  5. Add any other numbers I want to block under that contact.

There’s a more detailed tutorial about it here. This method solves the problem of having the phone ring and picking it up, but it doesn’t help if your phone is set on vibrate as well. It also doesn’t help when you’re on one line and the blocked number comes up on the other line and you accidentally switch over.

Useful iPhone Apps

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I made a short list of iPhone apps that I’ve found to be useful. I’ll probably add more to it later, but my top three picks so far are:


Twittelator
I like Twittelator better than Twitter’s official app. It’s free, ad-less, and has features such as attaching pictures, location awareness, and even a emergency button that’ll send an emergency message with your location to all your twitter frieds. Why you wouldn’t dial 911 in that situation is beyond me though. A lot of people have been saying that it’s buggy, but I haven’t had that many problems with it. Once in a while, it can’t grab new tweets from twitter, but it hasn’t crashed on me yet. *crosses fingers*


The New York Times App
I don’t know what the official name for this app is, but it’s just the New York Times on your iPhone for free. It takes a few minutes to download all the content for the day, but after that, it’s easy to browse all of the articles. There’s also the option to browse articles by category and even adding your favorite categories to the bottom dock bar for quick access. I like to read this in portrait mode, but for those who think the text size is too small that way, rest assured that this works in landscape mode as well.


Google Reader
Maybe this is cheating since Google Reader is a webpage and not a stand-alone app, but it’s fantastic. Just browse to reader.google.com on your iPhone and you should get redirected to the mobile version of the site. List view is easy on the eyes, but it gets a bit laggy when there are a lot of pictures in a post. The only improvement I can see for it is to have some sort of floating menu-bar or dock so that I don’t need to scroll all the way down the page to ‘mark all posts as read’ or go on to the next 15 most recent posts.

With the exception of Google Reader, all these apps can be found on the iTunes store for free.