So last night I ate dinner at Dewey’s (for the second night in a row!) with some friends I don’t know very well….well, Suzanne and Karen were there, and I know them, but they were further down the table. The friends at my end of the table all have iPhones, and two people jumped immediately into comparing apps. They had downloaded apps like crazy—apps that count calories of meals ordered from restaurants, apps that read bar codes at Kroger, etc. If one person had an app the other person didn’t yet have, the other person downloaded it right away, and vice versa.
I, of course, have only a few apps on my iPhone…I use only two or three of them regularly. As a matter of fact, sometimes I download an app because it seems to me I might use it. Then, I find that I don’t use it. So, I eventually remove it from my phone. I don’t like my iPhone cluttered up with things I don’t use. For every app those two loaded last night, I was compelled to remove one.
Here are my apps:
- Facebook (I am so irritated by FB lately that I only check this when I’m bored out of my mind);
- Scrabble (I still use this one);
- Lexulous (a Scrabble variant. I haven’t used it in a long time, but it cost $5, so I haven’t removed it yet)
- WordPress (I use this when I want to blog from my iPhone. Which usually occurs only when I don’t have anything else going on);
- Wooo! Button (my nephew Grayson downloaded this one, and kids love it, so I leave it on there for Heidi and Cathy’s kids)
- Fart for Free (again, this was loaded by Grayson, and it makes me a kid magnet. It’s hilarious to watch them play with this one)
- NPR News (I use this only when I travel. I travel once in a blue moon. It helps me locate local NPR stations on the radio, or I can listen to the news or other programs on my iPhone. Which I never do)
- Flixter (I don’t use the paper to figure out which movies are playing where or when or to give me a synopsis. I love this one and use it every week).
- Just Light (that’s it. It’s just a light. Again, I use it when I’m in a dark and unfamiliar place and need to find something. Yeah, like that happens a lot. Maybe I should get rid of this one. Nah. All it is is white)
- The Weather Channel (yeah, I check the weather quite a bit. Not obsessively, but occasionally. You can check weather anywhere, but I don’t really care about the weather most places)
- MyWireless (This gives me an accounting of my iPhone bill every day. I used to check this to makes sure I wasn’t going over any limits…but I never come anywhere near my limits, so now I don’t check it at all)
- Shazam (I hold this up to a recorded piece of music and learn the song title, the artist, the record label, etc. Never use it, but it’s so amazing that I keep it)
- iTunes (I can’t remember if this came preloaded or not. I seldom download music or videos or podcasts anymore, but I did download Steve Martin’s “The Crow”…an album of banjo and vocal duets. I heard Vince Gill and Dolly Partin sing “Pretty Flowers” with Martin’s banjo and loved it loved it loved it. So I got it)
- Three different blogs
- I just this second deleted the “Google” app. You can speak into an iPhone using this app and ask it a question and Google will look it up. I don’t think I’ve ever used it for real. When I fiddled with it at first, it never understood me correctly. Screw it. It’s gone.
Not Alice 