After jumping into the handheld computer market too early with a Palm Zire back in 2000, I gave the iPhone a few years to mature before hopping onto that bandwagon. Now that I have arrived, it is time to get equipped with all of those essential applications. For “science” (and personal entertainment), the most useful apps have been:
- Dropbox (Free) - Both a pdf storage and viewing solution. It is also incredibly useful for synching active projects between home and work desktops.
- Molecules (Free) - A trouble free 3D viewer for pdb files.
- Atom in a Box ($9.99) - I can’t afford this, but the graphics look beautiful. Rotating g and f functions could easily pass a long train trip.
- Foursquare (Free) - Social network with GPS could be viewed as the death of privacy, or a gateway to stalking. I tend to be more optimistic, it tells you what fun places are close by (useful at conferences at least?). Maybe Foursquare will disappear with the advent of Facebook places.
- Waterfall (Free) - Tetris combined with the ice obsession of the UCL Chemistry Department.
- SSH Terminal ($0.99) - Perfect for that covert Sunday afternoon combination of “qstat” and “qsub” - it stores username and passwords, so you can connect to any machine with a single click.
- Mobile RSS (Free) - A nice interface to google reader, to pass the time with new publications in real time.
- Graphing Calculator ($1.99) - The interface is beautiful. It provides a fully functioning scientific calculator and the ability to graph multiple functions - very nice for playing with molecular mechanics forcefields while on the move.
(The title quote from an Author Profile in Angewandte Chemie is in nice contrast to the classic “Art is I; science is we” by Claude Bernard).</em>