And that wasn’t all. In addition to being a great iPod and a vaguely OK phone (woefully crap reception in central London on O2), the iPhone is a mobile computer platform, which creates space for all those apps, some great, some useless and some so utterly pointless it’s a wonder anyone actually downloads them, let alone makes them. I’ve been thoroughly caning my iPhone for the last year, stuffing it with tons of apps many of which have lasted less than 24 hours. Now it’s time to sort them and find the ones worth keeping.

Best App

Jamie Oliver in his app

Fundamentally, I use my iPhone apps to take, manipulate and upload photos, Twitter, Tumblr and occasionally add to my WordPress blog, play games,organise and keep track of tasks, notes and stuff, do gym and sports routines, check social media, play around with music, play more games, get local information and, very occasionally do online shopping. So I’m kind of stunned that my best app for 2009 is all about cooking.

However, Jamie’s app, Jamie Oliver 20 Minute Meals,  puts pretty much all other info/instructional apps to shame – and here I’m talking about apps like the National Gallery’s Love Art and the Louvre’s, both of which are pretty decent. It looks like something that has actually been specifically designed for the iPhone and has had a load of thought put into it. It’s got a fair amount of good recipies (sure it could have more but that’s just quibbling), each of which has a ton of well presented info and is beautifully laid out with loads of photos. It’s got a shopping list area, which links seamlessly into the recipies as well as letting you add on your own items. But it also comes with a pile of excellent instructional videos that are pitched at exactly the right level for inept-but-enthusiastic cooks and will change the way you do your cooking. Personal favourite at the moment is the How To Cut Onions, but there’s basic advice about a whole load of things from chilies and buying fish to what you need in your kitchen and how to keep that chopping board in the same place. I’ve cooked more stuff from this app than I have from pretty much any of the other cooking books I’ve got, which is saying something. And it even tasted good.

Best Photo app

Along with being only an adequate phone (poor reception and the lack of a real button to let you hang up calls), the original iPhone has what can only be described as a shit pinhole camera. And it’s saying something for portability and the way it can link to sites like Flickr that I’ve totally ditched my 5Mb Ixus for this, but it’s also down to the way I can manipulate my photos prior to uploading them that makes all the difference. Now, I’ve used (and dumped) a load of image apps, but basically it boils down to two or three that I use all the time. For manipulating images I use Photogene (way better than the rather shit PS Mobile – hang your heads in shame Adobe), ColorSplash (for making those neat black and white with a little bit of colour images), Polarize (to make them look like polaroids) and TiltShift (to make those ‘lil people images). I have tried all those filter packages, but basically only CameraBag makes the grade and has any regular use. And for uploading I use Mobile Fotos (total connection to my Flickr content) and Pixelpipe (uploads to any/all my numerous social media sites). So it’s a tough choice pinpointing just one of them, but if I have to (and I have to) then my photo app for 2009 is Photogene as it’s the one I use first and always to correct the levels and colour of the original image.

Best Game app

This is a really tough one. Mainly because although I have spunked cash on way too  many games, I really don’t play them all that seriously, so most of those clever ports from Gameloft really don’t get the attention they possibly deserve and I’m not convinced that we’ve really seen a proper game done for the iPhone in the way that Jamie’s app or indeed Super Monkey Ball has been. Also gamewise, I’m more of a puzzle game type person than a swift-fingered action adventurer, so the bit in Assassin’s Creed where you have to carefully jump in a specific direction while double-tapping or something drives me into an uncontrolable frenzy of anger when I can’t do it and I tend to blank the game for a while afterwards to punish it. So based on a ‘how much do you actually play them’ test, my choice is down to Real Racing (way the best racing/driving game), Moonlight Majong and Sol Free Solitaire, with special mention to Sentinel 2, which the Boon really enjoy on a compulsive level. And, while it’s tempting to say none of them are really inspiring, I’d have to say that my best game app is Sol Free Solitaire. Hmmmmmmm.

Best Connection app

This is really what makes the whole mobile connection work. It’s not so much the provision of information that relates to where I am (step forward Time Out, FixMyStreet, Rightmove etc), but my ability to link what I’m doing to the digital world. And while apps that connect me to my cloud data are cool (iDisk, OmniFocus and Evernote), what really rocks is my ability to communicate instantly with the world. And this basically boils down to Twitter clients and other updating apps. Now I’ve tried a load of Twitter apps (Tweetie, Tweetdeck etc), but I’ve settled on Twitterific Pro as my client of choice. It’s simple, lets me do most of what I like and can track a variety of sources. The other updating apps let me link into my various social media spaces, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, WordPress and Tumblr. And while I have used the WordPress app to actually add new stuff to my blog, the ones I’ve really used on a regular basis are Tumblr (my site is essentially all about stupid stuff I’ve taken photos of), Pixelpipe (which lets me post photos to multiple sources) and Mobile Fotos (which is effectively my Flickr client). They’re all impressive and certainly increase my posting and interaction online, but my favourite has to be Mobile Fotos as it has completed that link between taking a photo (and manipulating it on my iPhone) and posting it directly to my Filckr account, and given me a level of instantaneous satisfaction that has meant my Ixus/Aperture combo now lies a distant second.

Best Music app

I have spent altogether too much cash on music apps, and I’m still not entirely convinced that the iPhone is a genuine music creation platform. Sure it packs way more potential than my first ever four-track (ahh the nostalgia of it), but it’s fucking tiny and fiddly and it’s hard to get stuff on and off it. They also suffer from the lack of any widely established space to share tunes and the built-in capacity to share them a la Flickr or Facebook – in fact I’m thinking that making music with the bloody thing is a right bad idea. But on we go… There are essentially 3 types of music making apps which have their own particular styles, some provide the music clips and make the process about messing with them and sequencing them (deadmau5′s app, iDrum and Looptastic), others find a super-complicated way of letting users add samples and rearrange them (Beatmaker), while the really extreme give you the world’s smallest piano to actually make music on (MusicStudio) albeit with a very limited number of different sounds. Now, they all work and some are great fun and I love iDrum Underworld, but it’s not really about making music, and while MusicStudio is, it’s bloody complicated and you need fingers as thin as matchsticks to really use it. So, based purely on the fact that I have actually used it to make some music at 4am one morning when I couldn’t sleep, my best music app is Beatmaker. To see whether it was actually worth it, check this out.

01 First Stab

Apps in 2010

So where are apps going to go? It’s clear that the keys to moving many apps forward are an understanding of location and the ability to share and possibly even collaborate on material with other users. And most apps are going to want to have some way of sharing with more than just Facebook and Twitter – if only to publicise the app. Apple needs to seriously upgrade the iPhone camera and the telcos are going to have to make 3G (and subsequent networks) actually work properly to enable us to really take advantage. And I’m probably going to have to upgrade my original iPhone.

The Roundhouse playing piana

We went off to see the David Byrne ‘Playing The Building’ installation at the Roundhouse during one of its ‘bring your own tambourine’ evenings, which had the potential for both awesome spectacle and truly painful knitted raffia music. The reality was a bit half and half. I felt a little let down by the installation. While it’s a great idea – a kind of artistic Einsteurzende Neubauten (go google them) without the full on destruction – I thought it veered too far in the direction of installation rather than an actual functional experience. You can see that the single piano-cadavered instrument sitting in the middle of the Roundhouse makes a fantastic image, stark, empty and a fusion of ancient and modern, but it would have been far more interesting to have more instruments controlling the sounds made by the building. Certainly more people would have been able to interact with it than were allowed for by the single piano and you’d have had a much more exciting, cacophonic experience.

It was, however, a genius idea to allow people to come in on certain evenings with their own instruments. Again, this could have been a recipe for disaster. Instead it was somehow incredibly touching and polite as bunches of people with guitars, tubas, those mouthy blow organ things that the guy in Gang of Four had, toy instruments and a variety of other wind and percussive things strolled around the space playing their own things, while trying not to overwhelm anyone else. And while it could have gone all Glastonbury porridge field, it somehow didn’t. Not my usual thing, but really good.

View from Arundel Castle

Meanwhile in my search for the perfect iPhone app, I’ve discovered two really sweet ones. The first is the carefully hidden tilt-shift filter in Photo FX (find it in Lens fx /depth of field). Tilt-shift being the effect that makes everything look like it’s a teeny weeny little model as exemplified by my favourite Monster Truck videos (see this post). While hardly perfect, it’s pretty good as you can see from these images. I would like to be able to alter the blur areas but that’s just being picky.

The other great app is iDrum Underworld. A bunch of Underworld tunes, including Cowgirl, Born Slippy and King of Snake, which you can mix up and use to create your own stuff. Really compelling and pretty addictive. As one review said, ‘This steals your life’.

I’ve also started to get back into running using my favourite social media site (or at least the one I’ve been most active on), Nike+. I’m using their now-working-pretty-well Coach facility, which has me doing very simple daily runs, although that will ramp up as the weeks progress. You can follow my attempts to get one leg in front of the other on Twitter.

Very, very blue. Roger Hiorns' Seizure.

Having managed to be nominated for a Turner Prize, or at least being responsible for having its creator Roger Hiorns nominated, it’s no surprise that the council who wanted to demolish this old council house block somehow haven’t quite got around to breaking it up. In fact you get the feeling that if they could only find a way to levy a charge on this it would cover the building of a few new decent homes.

Still, Hiorns’ Seizure, a copper sulphate encrusted house that’s well worth seeing, has been reopened (until October 18 2009). It does make you wonder what they’ve been doing with it since they closed it at the tail end of last year. Anyway, it’s great and you all should go and stand in line to get your feet into the now probably very scabby festival gumboots you have to wear to get inside. You won’t be disappointed (foot infections aside). More info on Shapeandcolour and here, oh and here too.

Frankly if Hiorns doesn’t win the Turner Prize, then the art people need their heads examined.

Squire Jules in his new headgear

Went out to see the medieval jousting at Arundel Castle, where the Boon were able to equip themselves in a style they could only previously have dreamed about – real swords, super-vicious gauntlets and some quality headgear such as this forward thinking child encasing unit – simply place the unit on child and watch them bimble about merrily for the next ten minutes heroically bumping into stuff left right and center. For double amusement equip child with a finely made longsword and back off quickly. We thought the Boon would be enthralled by the fine exhibition of olde worlde sword fighting and jousting, but it turns out they really raved over the castle, which was “A proper castle just like I wanted”. Best bit obviously being the Tower Guards’ outdoor toilet.

Meanwhile, the Lairds of Scunthorpe album has been developing at a pace over the summer. Currently there are 10 – 12 tracks being worked on, from material developed solely on the fantastic Beatmaker on the iPhone, to fully Logiced up songs with some neat beats. I want to get it to about double that before I start working out which ones to focus on.

As if this wasn’t enough I’ve been rewatching The Wire (like anything else is worth rewatching alright). Only this time I’ve added a new twist. I’m watching it in French with English subtitles. That way when I go over to France I’ll be able to talk in authentic Baltimore French, which I guess is a bit like McNulty’s genuine English. Spot On eh.

A small section of the huge mud wall painting at Tate Britain

Something else I’ll be spending more time with is Posterize. A great simple, free app that turns your iPhone pictures into pseudo-polaroids and lets you scribble any message you like on it, as long as it’s 14 characters or less. Simple and potentially stupid, it’s a bit like photo candy or popcorn or crack. Once you’ve done a bit you probably want to do some more. My latest were taken at the Richard Long exhibition at the Tate Britain, which is pretty bloody fantastic too. It’s one of the first exhibitions for ages where the catalogue is genuinely worth having. And you can see what the effect of Posterize is on this too. It just makes the colours look really enticing and I love the stupid writing. You can see more Posterize images in the Posterize group on Flickr and more of my ones on my Flickr pages.

Meanwhile, putting the iPhone and its apps aside for one moment, let me roundly condemn Van Cam for introducing me to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher comic. I’d been trying to avoid it for ages, mainly because I’d taken a somewhat irrational dislike to Dillon’s artwork (no accounting for taste), but I got suckerpunched into it when we were inadvertantly browsing through the racks at the Trafalgar Square Waterstones. Now I’ve read the first issue I’m bloody well crack happy on the book and only too aware that I’m going to have to blow hard earned cash money on the remaining 8 or 9 volumes. Bastard.

Finally, I’m loving the new Little Boots album.

Large copper sulphate crystal from Roger Hiorns Seizure installation

The Kids Who Do Art were obviously very, very clever. Having had the contents of last year’s Turner Prize substantially dissed, they decided to ensure that this year’s nominations at least produced some interesting, albeit highly exclusive, art, rather than tedious monologues of string and manikins.

This time instead of nominating some oververbal, cliche ridden artphags, the Turner Prize people have nominated personal favourite Roger Hiorns (along with three other lucky losers). Hiorns, who poured anything between 60,000 and 90,000 gallons/litres/bathtubs of copper sulphate into a council flat to ‘see what happened‘, is everything the Turner people need after the tedium and torpor of last year. Most essentially he gets noticed outside the patronisingly oblique little artworld that the Turner people inhabit. Seizure, the copper sulphate council house, is fantastically compelling and emphasises that the most extraordinary, most relevant art today is taking place outside the confines of the galleries and museums the Turner people live in. The demand for spectaculars, whether it be Seizure or the recent grafitti under Waterloo station, far outweighs that for most retrospective showpeice exhibitions. Admittedly, at least one of the other nominees, Richard Wright, is interesting, but for my money it’s Hiorns’ to lose. I particularly look forward to seeing the Little Artists’ lego version.

Meanwhile, I’ve been adding to my overbearing web presence. In particular I’ve been forced (forced you understand) to upgrade my Flickr account. You can see all my pics from the copper sulphate house, along with a whole load of other stuff, most of which has been taken by and manipulated within my iPhone. I can’t wait for Apple to put together a halfway decent camera lens for it in the next release.

I was super happy to find out that after what seemed like three or four lifetimes worth of waiting, Powers volume 12 is out. I had worried that, as with many comics, I might have got bored during the interval and it would be a hideous disappointment, but I needn’t have wasted the worry. Powers 12 is the best volume yet, finalising the Deena Pilgrim story arc along with a bunch of in-the-wings characters. Overall it feels as bittersweet as the final episode of The Wire series 3, it’s hugely satisfying, but I’ve no idea where they’re going to take the series now. Pilgrim sitting on a beach somewhere feels very reminiscent of McNulty swinging a baton as he’s returned to the beat. Still in Bendis we trust. Like David Simon, he seems to have his finger on the pubic bone of the police procedural and is capable of playing it about at will.

I also decided to try using iTunes’ music store to actually buy it (it was a slow day, I was bored, it was only about a fiver). As far as the store goes it’s not bad at all – downloaded fast, slipped easily onto my iPhone (so I can watch it on the train going ‘THIS IS SPARTA’ as commuters look at me in a combination of awe and repugnance) and so far it hasn’t worried too much about being migrated all over the place.

As far as the film goes, stylistically it’s great, way more effective than Sin City, and manages to combine a sort of comic super-reality with some kind of emotional connection, which again Sin City just never accomplished. And it has many good bits, not least The Wire’s Dominic West once again playing a deceitful womanising political whore and David Whenham once again playing a grovellingly obsequious sidekick. And it does have that sense of super-realism that started to come in vogue with The Matrix and colour timing and really great greenscreen work. It also works as a story.

But no matter how good it is, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator still shits on it. Visually way more expansive, better story, better plot, better acting, more emotionally engaging and it even has better lines. So while 300 gives us “Give them nothing, but take from them everything”, Gladiator gives us “What we do in life echoes in eternity”.

Still looking forward to Watchmen though.

Personally speaking, I’d make some sort of effort, but then I’m not O2, the spanish telephone company that has the lock on the iPhone in the UK. They thought of a very special way of making their customers’ iPhone upgrade memorable. First you send them a text message at 8 in the morning telling them you’re offering them a special deal. It’s so special it’s a web only deal.. You tell them that it’s extremely limited and demand is expected to be high. You tell them it’s first come, first served. You direct them to a part of your website that is 3 clicks away from where they get to sign up. And then.

Your server crashes at 8:02.

How bad is that? Well. It’s pretty bad. Admittedly it’s not bad in a ‘Hover, we practically blew the company on that free flights offer’ way, but it is bad. Bad in so many other ways. Bad in a ‘we had a chance to marry our brand (which no one gives a toss about) with Apple’s (one of the world’s best brands) and we decided we’d rather stab our customers in their eyes than take the opportunity’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘aren’t we supposed to be, like, a telecoms company?’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘shouldn’t we have some idea of extendable server systems’ kind of way. Bad in a ‘do you think anyone will trust us to set up ANY kind of internet sort of thing EVER again’ kind of way. And very, very bad in a ‘do you think they’ll notice’ kind of way. Hmm, let’s ponder that last one. Nope, I think they’ll definitely notice. But just in case they don’t, let’s redirect them to look at our iPhone tarrifs, I mean they’re all only going to be EXISTING IPHONE CUSTOMERS. They’re only currently paying for the service, so they’ll probably have AN IDEA of your bloody tarrifs.

So O2, the telecoms company that thinks it’s better to sponsor the millennium dome than actually provide a, get this, mobile telephone service, this is how badly you’ve blown it. You’ve managed to convince ALL the early iPhone adopters in the UK that you’re systemically unable to live up to the Apple brand. You’ve managed to convince us that you know NOTHING about technology, NOTHING about the internet and NOTHING about your customers – except that apparently it’s OK to treat them like scum. You’ve managed to convert an opportunity into a catastrophe in a way that can only be described as self-inflicted. You’ve demonstrated an incompetence of planning that is somehow also deeply, deeply strategic. This is long term brand-nuking stuff. This is a well known major supermarket selling poisoned food manufactured in sweat shops by slaves to children and exposed in a popular Sunday tabloid. This is incompetence, ignorance and technical illiteracy as core brand values. This is ‘Ratners sells crap’, but sent by text message, individually to each of your customers. This is getting really, really, really close and personal with them and then, giving them a full-on blowback of your festering halitosis.

Compare and contrast with the Nike +, a partnership with Apple that worked for both partners, where Nike win a Palme d’Or at Cannes, while Apple reinforce the iPod as the natural choice for runners. Here Apple must be really pleased to work with people who can’t even keep a server running. I mean Apple only sells billions of tunes via iTunes and here’s its specialist mobile partner and they can’t even keep a website up. For the morning. This makes Apple look like twats for selecting this bunch of amateurs for their partners. Worse, it makes Apple look like stupid twats. It makes Jobs look like an asshole. And you’ve got to think, How long is he going to tolerate that?