I bought a couple of applications for my phone today. I don’t know how I feel about that right now but okay…there’s some background. There is also a technerd/business piece coming up later in the week about vendor lock in but for now, it’s actually today’s experience in trying to buy applications for the phone. I’m not short of applications.

When I bought the iPhone in November, I really didn’t expect to do that much with it beyond a) use it to phone people b) use it to check my email c) use it to occasionally browse the internet in dial-up land and d) use it to send text messages.

In terms of the applications I bought for it when I got it, most of them were photography related because at heart, I am a photographer. I’ve used DSLR Remote once and Photoshop for the iPhone twice and that’s really it for the iPhone and the photography toys.

The glamour toys that come with the phone, the video and the camera, well I’ve not used the video camera at all – not yet anyway although I suspect it could have a use for some photography projects I have – and I’ve barely used the camera, despite its fantastic 3MP. Today I was looking for organiser software.

It’s not that I don’t like the Calendar application that comes with the phone, you understand. It’s just there’s this feature that Google Calendar has that allows you to load several calendars into a single view. I have a busy and complicated life. I’d like to be able to sort events in some respect that separates out my private life, my work life, my financial stuff and various and assorted items like that. Despite a lot of googling and hunting through the Apps store I couldn’t find anything that was exactly that.

You could argue that perhaps I could just you know, use Google Calendar via the Google App but I don’t want to. It may seem irrational, but I’d rather keep my calendar stuff local to me rather than stored on a server owned by someone that I’ve no really obvious financial stake in. Given that the primary reason that I was looking for a multi-calendar function involves organising some financial details and tracking direct debits and stuff, I’m particularly unwilling to farm that data out to anywhere else.

But I didn’t want it tainted by task or to-do lists. I get integrated task and todo lists with GroupWise nearly 10 years ago and they wrecked my head. The place I need to-do lists most is at work and I organise them via blogging software and a notepad. It works for me. Not only that, at least 2 of the applications that handled calendar filtering seemed to involve storing data on a remote server not owned by me so see what I had to say about Google Calendar for that.

So I gave up on the calendar front and found two separate applications to handle two of the items that I had an interest in tracking on my iPhone, namely a calendar driven financial manager which may or may not work out okay – I’ll start dealing with it over the next few days – and something called iP.

If you search the iPhone App store for calendars, a fair number of the first 25 or so are period related calendars. If you’re a guy, you’re either going to ignore this, go slightly pale or think, what a great idea. I’m interested to see how this one works in practical terms. It has to be better than the back of my personal journal which is what I’ve been using hitherto. You also find a bunch of calendars that enable you to predict when you can get pregnant. You won’t find one that does exactly what I need.

It’s frustrating when something like that happens; ultimately, a good response would be to see if I can write one myself, then you have to get it accepted and right now I haven’t time to sit down and work out how to write stuff in Cocoa, how I’m going to test it because I’m not jailbreaking the phone I have. All that’s for another evening.

Leaving aside the new calendar applications when I need to get working correctly, a couple of applications are standing out as being particularly useful or well designed,

1. Daft.ie’s location based property search is great. It picks up houses possibly in a wider radius than it claims but I’m not complaining because it’s giving me back the information that I have to go through a bit of picking a searching to pick out on their website. If you are house hunting, this is a treat.
2. Echofon is my client of choice for twitter.
3. Radio IO’s iPhone player is really nice.
4. MPORA’s client for accessing their site is pretty groovy also
5. I like Maps also but I think I need to look at it in more detail.