Macgasm

The OpenTable iPhone app is the perfect idea for the iPhone. You’re stuck in traffic and can’t get to a phone book to find a restaurant or your girlfriend asked you to reserve dinner at Chez Bernies and you forgot. No you can sneak away and turn it on and get the closest restaurants to you (thanks to GPS location), then choose a time, a party size and presto a reservation that is confirmed and ready for you. The iPhone was built for apps like this and OpenTable has built a great app to support it. The only catch is the restaurant must be using the OpenTable reservation software, so your favourite restaurant might not be on the list.

Another plus, if you book through OpenTable you get Dining Rewards Points (100pts per reservation) which when accumulated are good for dining vouchers (2000 points = $20 voucher) at affiliated OpenTable restaurants. So there are perks to using this app and service, in addition to convenience and fast reservations.

This app is a must have for travelers on the go, who are looking to explore the cuisine in a new city, makes finding location, menu, reviews and confirming reservations easy – all in one app.

Great features like reservation modification and canceling of a reservation are easy with Open Table iPhone app. If you are a concierge, assistant or similar and are used to booking reservations for your clients, Open Table offers Administration accounts (Dining Reward Points eligible) that will allow you to book for another party straight from your phone. Like you needed another reason to get an iPhone.

Available in select cities in the US, Canada and UK.

Available in iTunes

Image Credit: bzyla

Too busy to download and upload all your banking transactions? No time to login into your online bank, but want to check your balances? Then try the free Quicken Online Mobile iPhone app.

Before I get into the details, here are some reasons to get this app:

• Auto-refresh transactions/balances for checking & savings accounts and credit cards
• See up-to-date status of financial goals
• Track cash expenses on the go and throw away the receipt
• Categorize transactions which are not automatically categorized from your iPhone.
• Consolidate multiple accounts easily and get instant Cash flow stats.
• Trusted Quicken defacto standard in financial management software as opposed to Wesabe.com or Mint.com (relative newcomers)

Now the first thing to do is create a free sign in account online at Quicken Online. If you’re Canadian, for some reason there is a quirk that forces a US Zip Code, just put in the famous 90210 to get past this. Once in you can add your bank accounts and credit cards. Voila! Use the iPhone app to get a financial snapshot at any time, while your sipping a $5 Starbucks or waiting in line for the latest movie and wondering where all your money is going.

Goals, a great feature that allows you to set monthly goals for spending on gas, groceries, dining out, etc.  Since each transaction is automatically categorized to a list of pre-defined or custom categories, you get an instant goal status every time you open the app. Great for reducing costs on items or to see where your paycheque is going.

Useful Features not available through iPhone but through Online Web App:
On the online web app there is a Trends tab which outlines trends in spending or income in a graphical and transactional manner.  Another very useful feature is the idea of Alerts under Settings, which you can define to email or SMS you if you exceed a certain amount on a credit card or category of spending, very useful as your own fraud alert or to curb your spending ways.

Definitely an app to have in your top 10, did I mention it is free – Quicken Online Mobile

Image Credit: oceandesetoiles

Finally! Flickr has released their native iphone app. Took long enough, but it’s here and it’s good. Not only do the team at Yahoo know how to make good iPhone apps, they make them look good too. Pretty much all the functionality you would expect on the Flickr website is in the iPhone app. The only thing missing is multiple file upload, but that ain’t so bad.

So the first step is the authorization to allow the Flickr native app to use your Flickr login (Yahoo ID). This part is a bit wonky as it prompts you that it will open Safari and then you proceed to the crap-tastic login page. Don’t worry you should only have to do this once and forget about it. (Unless you have multiple flickr accounts, which would be problematic.)

Then you get into the real meat and potatoes of the app, and I can honestly say that I prefer using this to the actual Flickr site. It’s so easy to use and intuitive.

Highlights:

• browse/search/star/comment/email yours or other contact’s photos
• tag your photos
• set privacy levels
• upload photos from your iPhone

I guess you only need the Flickr site to do bulk uploads of non-iPhone photos, but once they are on your account you can browse them and brag to people about your cool Flickr sets or go wild with tagging in your spare mobile time.

A very cool touch to the app is when you start it up (after login is setup) it will slideshow your contacts photos in random order, with a “by friend” tag at the bottom.

Overall, Yahoo has done a great job on the first version of the Flickr iPhone app and looking forward to more enhancements in the future.

Can be had for a mere, $0.00 in iTunes.

Groceries (version 2.0.4) makes grocery shopping high-tech and easy, so you never have to forget the sugar. Out of the box Groceries has a predefined list of groceries with brand names organized by aisle names. Once you make a list, you can take it with you or email it to someone else to take care of the fun task of grocery shopping. (yay! blatant sarcasm) Tried and tested it myself and it works great at the grocery store, one hand thumb swiping while pushing the cart and maneuvering through the aisles made my grocery run fast and efficient. If you have kids, who have turned your brain into mush, this is the perfect answer as you don’t even have to think, just read and swipe as you pick up the items.  I’ve been approached a couple of times in the store by curious onlookers and frustrated soccer moms, trying to cross off their lists on the kiddy seat. All wondering how I can make a sometimes tedious, mundane and frequent task of grocery shopping go like clockwork.

In a nutshell:

• Multiple shopping lists (ie. Grocery, Home Depot, Sears, etc)
• Fast creation and easy no mess (or miss) strikethroughs
• Sexy UI, easy to read, well designed
• Configurable and customizable in terms of # of taps, aisle order, names, items, etc

Overall, this is the best grocery/shopping list application there is out there, fully worth the $4.99
Looking forward to new features, with talk of cloud integration and price tracking feature.

Check out Groceries in iTunes

Prowl (version 1.1.5) is an iPhone Growl client. For those who are familiar or not familiar, Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X for various applications to notify the user of events such as when a download is complete, a twitter direct message, network connections, etc.  Thanks to Zac West, a computer science student from Florida who helped give the world Adium.  Prowl itself is a simple application that keeps a list of the recent push notifications received. A new feature is the redirect rules, that allows you to redirect a push notification to open another iPhone app. A quiet hours option allows you to silence notifications, and just updated badge counters.

Since there is an API for Prowl, the possibilities are endless. Want to monitor your server? Want to be notified when a user makes comments on your site? It can all be done easily with the API, available in various languages. One great example is called Prey Fetcher, which allows you to get pushed @mentions and DMs from Twitter right to your phone. So you don’t have to be constantly checking twitter if your an addict like me. Another service is called GVMax, which allows SMS sent to your Google Voice account to be pushed directly to your iPhone with Prowl.

You can use this as a cheap man’s SMS if your carrier charges exorbitant rates (.15 cents per received) like mine, then this makes sense for people to get in touch with you. Just a create a simple HTML Text Area PHP page hooked up to your Prowl API key and send it to all your friends, they can get can get a hold of you easily and for free. (Contact me for the source code)

For $3 on the App Store, this is a steal.

Download now.