A few of my favorite iPhone apps

I’ve had my iPhone for a few months now, and gone through the brain replacement that’s sometimes necessary to use Apple products, so I think it’s time to talk about some of my favorite iPhone applications.

At the top right now is AirShare from Avatron. It’s a simple app that starts up on the iPhone and sets up an active WebDAV enabled HTTP server. With some tools under windows, mac, or linux, you can mount that DAV as a filesystem, and voila, you have your own portable wireless data repository.

Admittedly, what I really do is play a lot of games on the phone. So, here’s a quicky list of some of my favorites:

• Dr. Awesome!
  This game plays much like the old arcade game ‘Qix’, but has a wonderful comic bent to it. Presentation and gameplay are excellent, music track is enjoyable, and the steadily increasing difficulty isn’t too hard to deal with, though I agree with some commenters that after a certain point, it’s nigh on impossible to win the levels.
• Tap Defense
  In the ‘Tower Defense’ model, this game fleshes out the premise with a mildly interesting storyline (Demons are escaping from hell, you’re trying to keep them from getting into Heaven). It took me about 4 weeks to complete the game on all three levels (easy, medium, and hard). And on the Hard level, I had to go to the net to get some hints. Each full game can take 30 minutes to an hour to complete.
• Jewel Quest 2
  This is an oldie but a goodie. It’s been around for ages from I-Play in various forms, but the iPhone version is a good clean port of it. Very long storylines, steadily increasing difficulty. Took about 3 weeks to complete the game end to end.
• Galcon
  Galcon is a realtime strategy game for the iPhone that’s faster paced than most RTS games, but still keeps the tactics element alive. It borrows many ideas from some old skool strategy games I played in college. The higher levels are hard to win, though you can play network play against other ‘live’ players anywhere on the net.

The potential for the iPhone to be a powerful gaming platform I feel is only just being realized. More and more high resolution excellent games are coming out, and the phone handles them with great aplomb. I’m looking forward to finding more.