Top 11 iPhone Web Apps

Since the phrase Web 2.0 became widespread on the Internet, things as a whole started veiling themselves as Applications “More Powerful Than That Grahping App You Have” despite the fact that the web version had no columns. Apple decided to take this way too seriously and decided to make it the base of the iPhone’s 3rd party extension. Nonetheless there are some good apps amongst the pile of drivel and cluster of AJAX atrocities.

1. Fandango (iPhone.fandango.com)

Despite having a native Dashboard Widget developed to do the arduous task of aggregating movie times just so you can enjoy having a social life and pay far out the wallet for food items worth less than the amount you get making tips down at the local coffee shop, Apple conveniently forgot to toss us a frigging bone and grant us the same sense of superiority instilled by being able to check movie listings forgoing a trek to the theater itself.  While I was crushed that such an app as virtually nonexistetant for the iPhone’s launch, Fandango quickly came to the rescue and has granted me the ability to make myself look all the more cooler when I spontaneously suggest a movie and what time we should see it. Besides mimicking more than a dozen Widgets and Apps that do the same thing, Fandango for the iPhone really stands out like a shitty Michael Bay failure for the sole fact that you can buy tickets directly from your iPhone using your existing Fandango account in addition to feeding through directions to Google Maps in one of the most seemless integration schemes between a Web App and an OS ever.

2. Meebo (meebo.com)

Sadly, a native IM client remains absent from the iPhone but if unlimited texting isn’t enough to completely obliterate the skin of your thumbs into a fine powder, the awesome and web based IM client, Meebo will fill the void of your Sidekick loving self. Meebo supports Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo! and AOL (.Mac too for the whole 5 subscribers that exist).

3. Tomatometer (bigbucketblog.com/webtomatometer)

The general populace of movie goers tend to describe any movie that has explosions, breasts, epic fight sequences or any combination as “amazazing!!” despite the lack of any significant ploy or character development. If you range in that other group who doesn’t turn into an insta-fanboy when they leave their seats and actually value a good movie stuck in the dearth of deceny flicks then you’ll value  reviews that rate harder than Ebert and Roper. Rotten Tomatoes, one of the largest movie review sites has an unnoficial app which pulls ratings for the movies of your choice and shows the good, bad and ugly in a clean interface. Quick summaries of each review are shown to further aid your decision of a movie.

4. iMDB (iphonemdb.com/m)

For the movie fanatic in all of us IMDB has been our shrine of trivia and reference to useless movie novelties. But being able to boast about how many good movies Harrison Ford starred in has been limited down to the confined space of your computer lest you dare bring a laptop into a movie theater or you just happen to be a pirate. Now with the iPhone you can extend your falsely gained trivia knowledge while maintaining the atmosphere of a pretentious dick during the movie. Never will you have to worry about the awkward stares that follow when you ask “Hey, was that the dude from Lost?”  fuck it, we’ll IMDB it! For those actually
interested in the little bits missed during a movie “http://iphonemdb.com/m is the iPhone optimized iMDB search page.

5. Zagat (zagat.mobi)

Google Maps is great for finding places, hunting down enemies of a foreign regime or to just flat out pretend to be James Bond despite his love fest for Sony Ericcson phones. The rest of us that actually use Google Maps for not trying to see how far down the zoom will go into the cleavage of certain beachgoers, some useful features are missing. Sure the search function will bring up an awesome view of several dozen roof tops but when I search for fine Asian cusine, Panda Express is not an acceptable answer. That’s where Zagat’s guide for the iPhone pops up, shakes your hand and tells Google Maps to go fuck itself for imitating a food directory.
Zagat specializes in maintaining an expansive database that will ensure your social life will never be dull. Restaurants, night clubs, hotels and shopping locations are searchble by area and aren’t redundant or useless like Google’s search function which is a major plus.

6. Facebook (iPhone.facebook.com)

First it was joked that once you joined Facebook there was no leaving then it became a stark reality and soon you accepted the fact and Facebook controlled your life in impractical ways like that obssessive in-law who is berating you for forgetting what’s his face’s baby shower. Rather than stab the ever reaching tentacles of the all knowing Facebook you can embrace assimilation with a wholehearted grin through its iPhone web App. All the simplicity in drowning you out with the useless activities of your “friends” is still present so you’ll never miss a beat with susie’s horrible dating tactics which you fortunately are not a part of but when you are, tell the whole world through your status update conveniently located everywhere. In a purely human driven action not influenced by the almighty Facebook you can leave comments on their walls and pictures without the excess muck of 3rd party Apps borking up the interface.

7. Digg (digg.com/iPhone)

I’ve long considered Digg one of the biggest time wasters on the Internet so much so that it could get you fired at the workplace. But fuck accounting, you just want to see a picture of a kitten playing Crysis on a Mac with a cute caption. For all you Digg fanboys out there, your potential eroticism, er, love of Digg can be extended from the mere confines of your house and lame cubicle at work to the dangerous outback known as society. The iPhone watered down and optimized version of Digg allows for compulsive voting but flaming and trolling abilities are absent so you can set aside the fears of how your fire retardant vest will come across the opposite sex IRL. But devoid of user interaction you’re not, the top 5 rated comments are shown giving you a taste of rehased Internet memes and links to mirrors.

8. Newsgator (m.newsgator.com)

Web Apps that aggregate your news have existed in one contorted form or another since someone had the brilliant idea of using a machine to deliver updates instead of the other way around. Customized home pages, email and text message updates although useful, ok not really, don’t hold up to superiority of RSS and while a plethora of readers exist the only one available for the iPhone is some half-assed hunk of code that only translates the feed into something readable and stops right there. Despite being integrated with Apple’s .Mac service you’d think a developer would come out and upgrade the damn thing to support Feeds being synced from the iPhone to Safari and vice verse but too bad Apple, Newsgator got their first. You may have heard of NetNewsWire, one of the many Feed Readers available for the Mac and now it’s available for the iPhone in it’s sweet, sweet mobile form that syncs feeds and read counts to and from your computer.

9. Pocket Tweets (pockettweets.com)

Twitter is one of the most addicting web sites on the Internet when it comes to downright wasting vast portions of your life describing your life to other people, ironic I suppose and to further the widely embraced productivity killer that is Twitter, you can let the world know of the most inane aspects of your life through a web based twitter client. Sure you can text message your updates but that’s only a one way conversation, that cuts out a whole layer of excess. Pockettweets makes it easy to obsess over your friends and the rest of the Twitter-verse.

10. Zinio (zinio.com/reader)

Everyone remembers the day when magazines were the main source of news for people but its changed in recent years since instead of waiting 3 weeks for a benchmark on the newest iMac I can hit Engadget (If I am a good boy they might even have some sexy unboxing pictures for me to oogle at for hours on end). If your passion for the plastic pages of old news distribution never died, you can extend the nostalgia or the legimiate want of reading to the iPhone. Zinio Reader, the popular magazine reader and distributor for the Mac is now available as a web app for the iPhone with 20 subscriptions available (for free but with ads) including the usual bores as Reader’s Digest to the awesome collection of new gadgets and science geekery of Popular Mechanics, PC World and too many versions of Macworld magazine. Unfortunately you’ll need a fat pipe to grab all the unpixelated, finger pinching and zooming action of each hi-res page which in short means no EDGE.

11. Mac Tracker (mactracker.dreamhosters.ca)

Wikipedia is probably bookmarked on your iPhone and rightfully so, it nearly contains every ounce of human knowledge but one thing it won’t tell you is the code name of that beige box lookalike Mac in your closet or how big of a Hard Drive you can stick in that PowerMac to convert it into another useless server. Mactracker is one of the most expansive Mac info databases gauranteed to give the most dedicated of fanboys an instant hard on, bargain collectors some reference on their Mac of prey and modders an idea on just what they’re messing with. It’s descriptive enough to allow you to pinpoint an exact model knowing only a little bit about a Mac’s configuration. Forget it, just brush up on your Mac history and learn up on the Performa for the fun of it.