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Lukas Mathis
Lukas Mathis is a software engineer and user interface designer for a swiss software company creating workflow management software. He writes about design, technology and more on his blog, ignore the code.
April 1, 2011
I really wish I could turn off the unread count badge on Apple’s Mail app. What is it good for?Absolutely nothing! Conversely, I wish Calvetica could display the current date in its icon. I have a tendency to forget the date, so I need a calendar that shows the date in my iPhone’s Dock. But I also want a calendar app with a good weekly view. So I use both Apple’s calendar app, as well as Calvetica.
Apple’s weather app is mostly useless to me. I hardly ever want to know weather predictions for the next days. Instead, what I want to know is, say, whether it’ll stop raining if I wait another twenty minutes. So I use iWeather.ch, because it has precipitation radar maps for Switzerland.
I’m not a huge Twitter user, and I’m not really ecstatic about any of the iPhone Twitter apps. I like Weet best right now, but I’m not sure how long it’ll stay on my first screen.
I use Kinetic to keep track of my running. It has an interesting UI that is different from a typical iPhone app, but works really well.
I don’t use task lists to manage tasks. I do, however, use TaskPaper to keep track of what groceries I have to buy.
Instapaper. There’s really nothing to say here. Look, if you don’t have Instapaper on the first page of your iPhone, we can’t even be friends. It’s a requirement.
A while back, I was unable to synchronize my iPhone with my Mac for a while, so I started looking for a good podcast client. I think I bought all of them. Some crash all the time. Others look horrible. I ended up settling on Casts. It has a funky UI, but it works. Using a podcast client is so much more convenient than going through iTunes that I stuck with it even after I was able to synchronize again.
If you live in Switzerland, you need SBB Mobile. It’s a timetable for trains, busses and trams. It also tells you if there’s a problem with your connection, and if you need to, you can buy tickets from within the app. It looks a bit like somebody ported a DOS application to the iPhone, but it gets the job done.
For a long time, I’ve used iCab on the Mac, simply because it had a ton of useful features. As other browsers started adopting these features, I eventually switched away from it. But now I’m in the same situation on the iPhone. iCabMobile does a ton of useful things. But some of its user interface decisions could have been made differently.
