The Free App Pack

     Do you need apps that will help you daily and don’t cost a cent? Well you have come to the right place. Here are eight apps that are completely free and make life a lot easier. The apps include: Shazam, Pandora, WikiTap, Dictionary.com, Evernote, Score Center, Flixster, and Twitterrific. I highly recommend downloading all eight apps as each one is salutary and used with ease.

Shazam
     Shazam allows you to have music played into your microphone and identifies the song, artist, and album. This app is a must if you don’t have a paid radio service, such as Sirius Radio. Once a song is identified you can preview and buy it on iTunes, view on YouTube, tweet the song, send a postcard, view where you discovered the song, read a biography on the artist, read a discography of the artist, view the lyrics, save the album work, and attach your own picture to replace the album cover, all via the app. I should note that not all of these options will be available for every song you tag.

Pandora
     Pandora is almost like a radio, but with no advertising between songs, and free! The only advertisements are on the screen, which are small and close-able. When you create a station, you enter a song and/or artist that acts like a seed to find related songs. You can add more seeds if you wish to get more songs you like. It’s so simple yet incredible how this works. I always get songs that I enjoy and I even learn new songs. Pandora is a great way to listen to music you like and to find new songs. Pandora recently had to limit all users to a 40-hour limit a month to avoid lawsuits, but I have yet to surpass the limit. Overall Pandora is a great way to listen to music.

WikiTap

     WikiTap is a portable Wikipedia. Type something in the search, such as lacrosse, and it opens the Wikipedia page on lacrosse. Of course you could use Safari, but this is much faster and no need to type in wikipedia.org. There are three tabs at the top, Cached, Wiki, and Contents. Cached shows you very large excerpts (almost full size) without the pictures. Wiki displays the actual Wiki page (with pictures and links and all). There is also a link at the top to open the page in Safari. Last, Contents is the table of contents of the page. Pretty self-explanatory. Shows a list of all the sections, tap one, and takes you to the section under the Cached tab. There are also videos stickied to the bottom of your screen that are about the subject you searched. To recap all that has been said, WikiTap is a shortcut to Wikipedia, which is formatted to fit your screen. Even though Wikipedia has a lot of useful information, the man who made Wikipedia said that Wikipedia should not be used as a reference for school assignments.

Dictionary.com
     Dictionary.com decided to release an app called Dictionary. I have been calling it Dictionary.com just to keep it distinctive from other dictionaries. Dictionary is extremely useful. There is a dictionary and thesaurus inside of the app. Search a word and quickly switch between the definition and related words. Also, there is a Recent tab, which allows you to view your searches is newest to oldest order, and there is a Word of the Day tab, which doesn’t have much to describe. Dictionary is a very simple yet convenient app.

Evernote
     Evernote, recently reviewed here, is pretty much a notepad. But what makes this app stand out is that it syncs with your phone, computer, and there is even a Firefox extension. You can take text, picture, and voice notes. These notes are synced with your account. The desktop version lets you view and edit your notes, the iPhone/iPod Touch version lets you view an edit notes, and the Firefox extension allows you to take notes on a website. This takes note taking to the next level.

ESPN Score Center
     Score Center lets you create tabs of your favorite pro and college sports. The tabs shows you all of the recent, current, and upcoming games/scores. It even lets you put your favorite team at the top to quickly see how they are doing. Other then when the server is overloaded and the app won’t connect (which doesn’t happen that often), Score Center is a very easy way to keep track of scores when you are on-the-go.

Flixster
     Ever wonder what movies are in theaters, or ever want to watch that preview again because you missed part of it? Your adversaties are solved! Well, your movie problems, maybe not your other ones.With Flixster, you can save a list of movies you wish to see, watch previews, order movies via NetFlix, and much more.

Twitterrific
     There are many twitter apps out there, and some other free ones, but Twitterrific is a great way to use Twitter on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Twitterrific allows you to sign into multiple Twitter accounts, and has an option when tweeting to compress text and/or URL’s, which is great! Twitterrific is a great Twitter app, especially the compressing text part. 

Movies & Netflix & Twitter oh my!

MyMovieList is a nice little app on the iPhone/iPod Touch that lets you manage what movies you have watched, who your favorite actors and directors are, share your list on Twitter, and even order movies from Netflix.

When you first open the app it defaults you to the Search tab. The interface of this tab is pretty straight forward. Search by actor/actress, director, movie name, year the movie was released, or the genre. When I first went to “Search by name” I was astonished at how many movies can be in such a small application. It lists, what I am guessing, thousands of movies. Luckily there is the alphabet scrolling thingy on the left, and a search field at the top. Under the “Favorites” tab, it shows all of the actors, actresses, and directors you have marked. “iWatched” shows all of the movies you have marked. When you tap one of the movies you have searched, it shows when the movie was released, how long it is, the director, and all of the actors. This feature is pretty nice if you are in a conversation with someone and you are trying to remember the actor or director of a movie. Or if you are just plain curious, that works too. Last, under the “Share” tab, you can share your list with your Twitter followers.

The interface that MyMovieList has is very plain and simple, which I believe is all this app needs. Not too much and not too little.The repository this app contains is incredible. There are so many movies listed, including new movies, such as Jennifer’s Body. This application is a great movie reference. If I were to choose the price for this price, I would choose either free (and place an adsomewhere) or 99 cents.


Overall Rating: 8/10
Great