iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

I love books. The problem is I forget which books I have. Consequently, on too many occasions, I’ve bought the same book more than once. But not any more!

Now, I have xLibris by Option-X (v 1.2.1) installed on my iPhone. xLibris is a full-featured book database that sorts my books by title or author. I can easily search my book database while at the bookstore, and no more duplicates!

Frankly, I've never been able to understand how anyone could create a game. It seems impossibly complex, conceptualizing a game, making it fun, doing the programming, and most mind-boggling — creating the huge amount of artwork that many of the better games entail. If you have also been intrigued by this, you might enjoy Ryan Mitchell's Game Dev Blog.

The New Yorker is known for cartoons and great covers -- some of which are saved for years. The cover for the next issue was created like none other before: it was painted on an iPhone. Artist Jorge Colombo drew the street scene, with an iconic hot dog vendor as his focal point, while standing at a street corner, swiping his iPhone's screen.

Now here's an app that's fun for your kids, and it will improve their math skills! It's called PopMath Basic Math (Popsoft, v. 1.4). Kids love popping bubbles and that's exactly what they do in this app. They pop bubbles and learn math at the same time!

It’s truly amazing how many games and accessories come out each week for the iPhone and iPod touch, making it tough to keep up on which are hot and which are duds (and there are plenty of both). Functional and Fun are two words that come to mind with the following, check them out!

I love this application. From what I've read, Kindle for iPhone isn't the best ebook reader. But it certainly suits my needs. What I like best is the ease of putting books on my iPhone and the opportunity to download samples. I'm currently reading The Well Dressed Ape. It's the perfect book for reading on the iPhone because it has lots of fascinating bite-sized bits of information.

Eat Will Grow was one of those "hey, it's temporarily free so let's grab it" type downloads. As it turns out, I'm glad I did. The premise is simply to last as long as you can before colliding with what I would describe as a mine. Along the way you'll collect rings for points, but the rings will cause you to grow over time (it's sort of like the old snake game except you grow bigger around rather than longer). You can also collect a power up that will temporarily either speed up or slow down the flow of the game.