kevwright's Blog

In my day job as a Car dealership Sales Manager, I use the brilliant Parkers Guide App (as reviewed in PSC 21) to value customers cars, and present them with an "independant" version of the guides we use in the dealership.

This App from the Autotrader people is also useful to me at work, but I think a few of you may enjoy using it as well. It is fairly simple to use, you can either take a photo of a car number plate, or type the reg number in and the app goes off to the web and checks what that car is, and then presents you with a breakdown of the car. It works very well, but a couple of times the link to AT is down, and this renders the App useless until it returns.

Of course, the real reason for the App is to search Autotrader for cars to buy, and it works very well, in fact I would say since Autotrader messed up the website (looks like a 5 year old did it!), this may be a better way to search the site, ast least as long as the data dropouts do not become too common.

Kev

This is a very simple but, very useful App to allow you to search for, and setup recording for your Sky Plus (or HD) PVR.

In fact, I would go as far to say that I will use this to setup 90% of my recording for my HD box, as it allows you to browse and search for items much easier that a remote control. The only downside I can see at the moment is that it does not allow series linking.

You should also note that there is currently a limit of 10 record slots each day. All in all, a simple, free App that is a "no brainer" for any iPhone OS and Sky+/HD users.

Kev

 You do hear a few people who say they like the iPhone, but hate iTunes, and I have to admit when I was on Windows I was not too keen on it, but on the Macbook to be fair it is good. This App allows you to reduce your reliance on iTunes and allows you to search, subscribe and download podcasts directly to your iPhone without any involvement of iTunes.

Once you have paid your 59p, and installed the App, you can start to add your podcasts, I found most of mine no problem in the various categories, but our beloved PSC had to be loaded by inserting the URL manually, but that is not an issue as its a one time thing.

Once you subscribe to a feed, you always get the latest episode of the podcast downloaded, and there are settings to allow downloading over only wi-fi, and wi-fi and cellular. It also gives you choices over how many episodes to keep and delete etc. The other really nice thing is you can set Push alerts on a per feed basis, so you get a little popup and bleep when a new podcast episode arrives, and this is also able to be checked every 10 mins!, 45 mins or once a day.

Quite a new twist is in app purchases, and this App has them, it used to cost £1.59, but they just dropped it to 59p, and they give you 5 of the aforementioned alerts included. If you want to be notified of new episodes of more than 5 podcasts, you can buy 20 more at 59p per 10, quite a good idea I think.

The actual player interface is quite clean, and has a rather nice little skip feature, a quick press on the fast forward button moves it on 10 seconds, a double press goes 30 seconds, any further presses add another 30 seconds, and if this all sounds complicated, its not in practice. This feature is very handy for skipping some of Leo Laporte's rather rambling adverts for example. Oh, and it works in reverse also.

Another tasty little feature is the ability to backup all your podcasts to an opml file, which you simply email to yourself. In summary, I now use this App exclusively to manage and listen to all my many podcasts, and highly recommend it. Just two caveats, one is that as I understand it, this App can not play the podcasts via the 30pin dock, which could affect some car kits for example, but it works great through the 3.5mm jack.

It also does not run in the background, unless you are jailbroken and running Proswitcher, when it works very well.

Wow, this is a great app, tried a few on the iPhone, which of course does not have an FM Radio built in. This app is silly cheap, just £1.19 at the time of review. When you fire it up, you have several choices, and it asks you for permission to use Location data. The reason it needs this is it allows you to browse all the stations in your local area, a really handy feature if you travel around the UK.

Speaking of the UK, this is where this app is a huge win, compared to others, which are very clearly US biased. Here you have all the main and local UK stations, and my favourite station of all time, Solar Radio, a UK based Soul, R&B and bloody brilliant station, they hardly ever play a bum tune!

Sound pretty good for just over a quid, right? OK, how about the killer feature, it allows you to record from any stream your are listening to! This works like a charm, you are listening, and halfway through a song you think, "that is nice", no problem, hit record and it goes back to the start of the stream, and records the lot. Now to be fair, I can not say just how far it remembers, but it has always gone back a few mins for me, always enough to get the while song I am halfway through for sure.

This app also features a tie up with RadioTime.com, a website where you can listen, and search for stations, and add to your (free) account, and all your presets simply appear in the TuneIn app. This is a truly great application, and shows just why the iPhone (3GS!) is the handset of choice for music fans.

This is a follow up to my short Audio review of this app on the Phones Show Chat podcast.