Where is Klaus?

Pocketpedia - DVDpedia for the iPhone

If you are using DVDpedia as the database for your Movie collection, searching info. for your favorite movie has become as simple as clicking on your iPhone.

To many of us this situation is quite familiar. You and your spouse or girlfriend are sitting in front of the Apple TV trying to figure out which one of your great 100+ movies to choose from the USB hard drive attached to the ATV (thank you ATVFlash for making this possible). The pressure is probably on you to suggest a title, but then who remembers the plot, the actors or the ratings behind all these movie titles.

Of course, there is always the option to fire up your Mac or PC, google "3:10 to Yuma IMDB" and wait for the browser to return all the info you need to make a decision. By the time you have looked up a few titles, the movie goers are getting antsy and your spouse helpfully suggests to watch cable instead.

Pocketpedia will avoid your embarrassment. All it takes to have your movie collection stored in DVDPedia (a $ 18 buy) on your Mac, an iPhone and the free app "Pocketpedia" which you can download from the iTunes App store. On first opening Pocketpedia while DVDpedia is open on your Mac, a sync button will appear. Depending on the size of your library, the download over the wifi connection will take about 5-10 minutes. Now you are all set to quickly check your movie data base on the fly. No more frustrated waiting in front of the ATV.

In addition, Pocketpedia allows you to search Amazon's website for additional info and greatly shortening your decision time at the store when you want to pick up a movie in the old-fashioned "DVD-style".

New "Google mobile app" for the iPhone

The new version just posted on the app store is probably the most stunning of any iPhone apps I have come across. It lets you "google" by voice (american accented english only), activate any of your google apps such as "Calendar", "Email", " News", "Translate" or any of the dozen or so free Google web apps. The productivity gains with voice activated searches are obviously significant.

See the introductory Youtube video here. If you have already installed the old Google Mobile app, discard it on your iPhone and go the app store and reload the new version. The automatic update does not yet seem to work.

Google's company motto "we do no evil" should be taken with a grain of salt, but with this mobile app they undoubtedly have hit a homerun. See for yourself.

Election night rally - the greening (blueing?) of America on Bloomberg

Hey, aren't we all sick and tired to see red ink, be it on America's political map or on the NYSE. Perfect timing to watch the American political landscape finally turn blue and the New York stock exchange bathe in green. And what could be better than using the free iPhone app as displayed above. It is head and shoulder above any other financial info app on the iTunes store for the iPhone. What else would you expect from Bloomberg?

Fstream - great little webradio player for iPhone & Mac

When working on your Mac you probably use iTunes to listen to your favorite radio station. How about on your iPhone? Well, get FStream (author Julien-Pierre Avérous) at the iTunes App Store and look no further. Actually, there is even a version for your Mac with much less overhead than iTunes.

FStream is a little webradio player which recognizes most popular audio formats (MP3, OGG/Vorbis, WMA, AAC, AAC+) and playlist formats. In both the Mac and iPhone (iPod Touch) versions it includes an extensive list of web radio stations. You can search for your favorite stations and double click to include them in the "Favorites" tab. That's all you need to do to get started. Of course, you can input the URL of other webstations not included in the list as well.

The Mac version includes a couple of nice features. It can be operated with the Apple Remote, it allows you to record the streamed music and there is an eye catchin fullscreen mode as well.

The iPhone version, in my brief experience, works only with wifi although according to the author 3G and Edge operation should be working as well. I have to test this further. Also, the app seems to be using quite a bit of juice, so keep the iPhone in the recharging dock whenever you can.