Dear Alice and Ryan,
Congratulations on your new fondleslabs, and welcome to the 90% of humanity that now spend all their time staring at their phones. Since I am also too busy staring at my phone to talk to you, I thought that you might appreciate a list of the things I am usually staring at, so you can stare at them too.
I’ve left out obvious things you probably already found on your own, like Facebook and Google mail, and linked to the free versions of everything, though some of these I’ve already paid for the pro one, so I can’t be too sure they will work the same.
Hope this is useful,
Your loving brother.
 Instapaper
Read-stuff-later app
You put a bookmark in your browser and when you see something you want to read later, you click it. When you decide to read it, it shows you a reformated page for easy reading. Â It even works with blog posts in Feedly.
Feedly
RSS Reader
So I know when you’ve posted to your blog.
Moon+
Ebook reader
I like this because you can have the pages scroll for you, the text to speech is decent and you can set it up to access ebook library online (your brothers, for instance).
Tune in
Radio player
I use this instead of the radio now. Naturally, this is better over wifi. My favourite channels are New York’s classical radio station and soulfood radio, out of Germany
DogCatcher Radio
Podcast retriever
This is great for podcasts, like Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. You can set it up to capture stuff in the middle of the night on your wifi and then listen whenever. Most of the podcasts I listen to are about javascript and computers, but I’ve also been listening to the director of the London Museum’s History of the World in a 100 Objects, and the antique phonograph radio show. You search for the shows in the app.
Subsonic radio
Internet streaming player
This allows you to stream music from online music collection running the subsonic PC program (like your brother’s). Like Tune In Radio, this is less useful without loads of bandwidth. However, you can cue up a whole load of songs while on wifi, and it will save them to your phone so you can listen to them later in ‘offline’ mode. It’s how I get most of my music to my phone. Works with video too.
Our Groceries
Grocery list
This is what we use for our grocery lists. But, don’t get too attached – I’ve made a better list sharing app, that I’ll be releasing soon. Well, sooner or later 🙂
Meetup.com
Meetup app
Come to think of it, I just subscribe to my meetup accounts ‘potential meetups’ calendar, and ‘actually going to’ calendar in google, and use that.
Screen Filter
Screen darkener for night time browsing
Does what it says. You can turn it off from the menu status thingie that scrolls down from the top of the screen.
Ultimate Stopwatch
A stopwatch.
It’s a stopwatch. I wouldn’t exactly call it ultimate, but it gets the job done.
Google Voice
Phone service
This allows you to control phone calls and make free texts. You will need to change your number though. I think I told you about it before.
Where’s my droid
Phone finder
Finds your phone with a text message, even if the ringer is off.
Gstring Tuner
Tuner
It’s a guitar tuner. I thought Ryan might find this useful.
All my love,
Tameem.