iPhone apps are extremely useful in our day to day lives, great design and user interfaces enhances our experience and makes us want to use it more, thus solving  day to day problems become whole lots of fun while enhancing productivity. Here are 21 essential iPhone apps that are extremely useful, coupled with visually appealing interfaces. If you have any recommendations please feel free to leave a comment. Enjoy!

Groups

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

A highly potential iPhone native “Contacts” app replacement. With groups you can manage your contacts easily, organizing them using drag and drop. Your created groups will synchronize with iPhone’s Contact app. Email groups of people easily with this app, call or SMS anyone easily, all with a very sexy interface.

User Interface

Cha-Ching

[$2.99 (Introductory Price) | Website | iTunes]

Cha-Ching was originally a Mac app (current version 2.0 beta, free until 30 April 09) designed for personal finance management. The highly anticipated iPhone app was only recently released at the App Store. I’ve tried many similar apps of the same genre and this is the best looking one in my opinion.

User Interface

Analytics

[$5.99 | Website | iTunes]

Analytics lets you check your Google Analytics data and reports on the go. At times you might find this app even easier to analyze Google Analytics data than the web app.
User Interface

Ego

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Ego gives you one central location to check your Mint (number of visits), your total number of Twitter followers, Feedburner stats and Google Analytics stats on the go. Very convenient way to streamline the checking of your numbers, or your ego so to speak.
User Interface

Weightbot

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Weightbot is a weight tracking app designed to let you meet your weight losing goal. Set your goal weight, record your weight at any interval (one weight per day max), view your BMI, and see your progress on a beautiful graph.
User Interface

Tweetie

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

Tweetie is (in most people’s opinion) the best Twitter iPhone app available on the App Store. The most distinctive difference between Tweetie and the rest of the Twitter apps in the store is it’s extremely smooth scrolling. You can do most major functions like reply, direct message, retweet, Twitpic, Instapaper integration, search, save searches, trends or even look at tweets by nearby tweeple (using the GPS) etc.
User Interface

Tumblr

[Free | Website | iTunes]

If you use Tumblr, you’ll love this app as you’ll be able to update your Tumblr blog easily.  Most often than not I use this app to quickly snap pictures and upload it to my Tumblr.
User Interface

Byline

[$4.99 | Website | iTunes]

Byline is an RSS reader that synchronizes flawlessly with Google Reader. The best and most good looking Google Reader app I’ve found, the plus point of this app is that for every article you marked as favorite, the whole article will be downloaded into Byline so that you can read it offline, good feature if you want to read your favourite articles without having to wait for the article to be downloaded while on your daily commute.
User Interface

Tags

[$2.99 | Website | iTunes]

Tags is a Delicious app that syncs all your bookmarks from your Delicious account. I guess the reason why this app is named “Tags” is because of the unique way your bookmark tags are displayed (as seen from the screenshot). If you’re a Delicious user and there is only one app you can download, make it this one.
User Interface

Satisfaction Remote

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

This is an accompanying app for Get Satisfaction users who wants to check discussions on the go. Find companies, products or people, find and read support topics of your favourite apps. Reply or comment on a topic.
User Interface

iStat

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

iStat lets you remotely monitor your Mac’s CPU, memory, disks, temperatures, fans, uptime and load averages all from your iPhone. This app also lets you see your iPhone’s stats for memory, disk space, WiFi and Cell IP addresses, uptime & load averages, plus view and email your iPhone’s Unique ID and MAC address. Pinging and traceroute functions are also supported.
User Interface

CompareMe

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

This app lets you compare any 2 product’s prices by their quantity, volume, lengths etc. A simple example will be – 3 for $1.75 or 2 for $1.35, which is cheaper? CompareMe will tell you that in a split second. Good for price conscious shoppers, helps me heaps when doing grocery shopping!
User Interface

Tipulator

[$0.99 | Website | iTunes]

Having trouble doing mental calculations on the tips you need to pay on top of the total price of your dinner and how much each of your friends need to pay? Tipulator solves this problem, with a literally “sweet” looking interface.
User Interface

Measures

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Measures lets you convert units like currencies, temperatures, weight, distance etc. What I like about this app is not only the interface and the icon, there is an inline calculator built into the app for calculations while letting you view the converted value during the process. Great when shopping for multiple items at a foreign country.
User Inteface

GuitarToolkit

[$9.99 | Website | iTunes]

GuitarToolkit is packed with a slew of utilities to compliment your guitar playing experience. It includes the most notable guitar tuner (using the iPhone microphone) which proves to be extremely accurate, a metronome, a library of over 1500 chord variations which is highly recommended for beginners learning guitar.
User Inteface

Inquisitor

[Free | Website | iTunes]

The very popular Inquisitor browser plugin now comes to the iPhone. With the same sleek interface, Inquisitor lets you quickly search anything on the web. Keep in mind that the search engine used is a Yahoo search engine, if you’re a staunched Google user you might not be very fond of that. But if you’re a staunched designer, the sexy interface will make up for it.
User Inteface

Flickit

[Free | Website | iTunes]

At last, an iPhone app that lets you upload multiple photos to Flickr! Via a beautiful interface (and can’t believe it’s free!), you can snap a photo or choose your desired photo(s) from your photo library for upload.
User Interface

Night Stand

[$1.99 | Website | iTunes]

Night Stand displays a beautiful, vintage LCD clock on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It sports two variations: flip clock and vintage LCD display. There’s also an alarm clock built into this app.
User Interface

Faces

[$0.99 (Sale for a limited time) | Website | iTunes]

Faces is a visual quick dial application. Calling or SMSing a friend is just a click away upon launching the app, launch time is quite fast I would say. You can also sort contacts into groups so that you can find your desired person to call/SMS more easily. Yes you can find many quick dial apps on the store, but spotting one with a pleasing interface is hard. You can even customize the background by using a picture from your photo library.
User Interface

Classics

[$2.99 (Sale for a limited time) | Website| iTunes]

Classics has one of the best user interface for reading classic tales including Gulliver’s Travel, The Time Machine, Frankenstein, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illustrated), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, among many other books. Highly recommended for classic tales fans, even if you’re not you might just fall in love with it.
User Interface

Things

[$9.99 | Website | iTunes]

The very popular and extremely useful GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity app deserves a mention here. If you have not heard of Things, this app lets you handle your to-do lists systematically. Also check out the awesome Things Mac app.
User Interface

ConvertBot

[$0.99 | Website| iTunes]

For only 99 cents, you get an awe-inspiring unit converter that converts angles, area, currencies, length, mass, power, pressure, speed, temperature, time, volume etc. One thing to note is that only a couple of currencies are supported, do check if your country is supported at the App Store before buying.
User Interface

Outpost

[$12.99 | Website| iTunes]

I have always wanted to try Basecamp but haven’t found the reason to, but if you are one proud user, you’ll be able to appreciate this native iPhone app for Basecamp. Outpost brings the power of Basecamp to your iPhone or iPod Touch, with comprehensive support for messages, milestones, to-dos, and comments. Outpost is also the first app for Basecamp which offers full offline capabilities.
User Interface

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First of all, this might not make many fans of Things very happy, I’m referring to those who had already bought Things as their GTD application (including myself). If you don’t want to feel the tinge of regret, navigate away from this page, otherwise read on to discover this great app with me.

The Hit List is a to-do list application that works very much like Things except with a few more perks. If you’re a shortcut fan, loving the keyboard more than the mouse, you’re in luck.

The app comes with a slew of keyboard shortcuts you can use. Entering a new to-do item means hitting the “return” key. Set priority of the item by pressing 1 through 9. Spacebar to mark the task complete. Set context or tag by pressing “@” or “/” key. Hitting “T” to set an item as “Today”. These are only a few of them.

The Hit List offers almost everything you would expect from Things, and here’s more:

Drag and Drop Files

Essentially, dragging and dropping files into your items creates an alias to the original file, double clicking opens the file. You can also add notes along side it.

Time your tasks with a Timer

Never imagined this on a GTD application. Start timing your task by hitting “b” on your keyboard. A lovely counter timer will appear timing the time taken to complete your task.

Create Tabs

The Hit List lets you create and delete tabs based on your most important or frequently used list.

Create Sub Lists

Create sub lists by hitting “tab” after creating an item. The previous item before you hit tab will become the main item for the rest of the sub list. Marking the “main” list item as done will mark all the sub items as done although you can also mark as done the individual sub items.

Lovely Chime

This might not be a core feature, but marking an item as done sparks a lovely chime that makes you feel even better about getting a task done.

Sync with iCal

I love the ability to sync ALL my list respectively with ALL my iCal calendars! Something that you can’t expect from Things, maybe not yet? I think this feature is the most important to me.

Sync with iPhone

This feature is still in the works. Once the native iPhone app is done, The Hit List will certainly attract more GTD fans on top of its elegance, ease of use and functionality.

The Hit List is still in beta, there’s still some kinks to be sort out, for example when I create an item on the app, the item immediately syncs with my iCal, when I try to delete the item, it doesn’t let me unless I delete the item from iCal first.

Otherwise, a Things and Omnifocus killer?

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If you’ve been a fan of Things, a very awesome GTD application by Cultured Code, you must be anxiously waiting it to get out of beta. It’s 7 more days before you can finally get the very first 1.0 version, but hey, there’s a 1.0 release candidate to download immediately!

Things is a to-do list app for Mac, simple and elegant while not achieved at the expense of powerful features. I have been using Things since it’s beta and it’s one of the apps I can’t live without. With Things, you can look at all the stuff you need to accomplish today at “Today”, schedule your to-do lists and have them show up at “Today” when the time is up, group to-dos by Projects/Areas, tag your to-dos, include notes in your to-dos etc.

If you have an idea but not sure which category to put your to-do in, put it in the “Inbox” first and sort it later. There’s also a “Someday” box where all the task that you wish to accomplish some other day will appear.

Things 1.0 cost $49.99 to own, you can get 20% off if you enter this coupon code THINGSPRESALE20. Code is valid through January 15th, 2009. You can buy Things today even before it’s release, I know I’m sure gonna get one copy!

iPhone App ($9.99 from the app store)

Things also comes with an iPhone app (separate purchase from the app store @ $9.99), with all the functionality of the Things desktop app. You can sync both apps through WI-FI.

Syncing Things between 2 or more Macs

One thing Things is lacking is the ability to sync all your to-dos between 2 Macs, but this is still possible with a little bit of manual work. If you have more than 2 Macs, or would like to sync Things between your home and work computer, here’s some tutorials on how to get this done. Please note that these tutorials are not officially documented or supported by Cultured Code. But I have tried it and it works.

1. Sync via Mobile Me
2. Sync via DropBox
3. Sync via SVN (with Applescript)
4. Sync via WebDAV

Sync tutorial sources via ars technica

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Here’s 20 great iPhone apps you can use in a day from 8am to 12midnight. To make it more interesting, let’s create a character to use these nifty apps and call him Suberman!

Here goes (click on icon for direct iTunes link, click on link for developer’s website):

		Friday Morning
		08:00am: Alarm clock goes off on a beautiful Friday morning, Suberman wakes up, launches Tweetsville on his iPhone and tweet “Good Morning world”.
		08:30am: All washed up and off he went, to the nearby Starbucks to have some breakfast. Grabs a Grande Cafe Latte and some muffins. Records his breakfast spends on Money Trackin.
		08:38am: While having breakfast, he decides to update himself with some RSS feeds on NewsStand.
		08:45am: While reading RSS feeds, he heard a great song Starbucks is playing, but didn’t know the name of the song, Shazam came to the rescue.
		09:15am: Finishing up his last bits, he quickly catches up with his friends via Facebook and updated his status.
		09:20am: Also checked out his buddy’s Flickr via Exposure for last night’s crazy party!
		09:30am: Before getting too late for work, Suberman left Starbucks and checks his email on the way to work. Replies to an important thread using Wide Email for easy typing in landscape mode.
		10:30am: Upon reaching his workplace, he syncs his iMac with all his to-dos for the day which he compiled last night on Things.
		Lunch Time
		12:00pm: After a very productive half of the day, completing all his to-dos, he did lunch while checking out Digg on Scoop for some latest juicy articles.
		12:15pm: He discovered that his favourite gadget is available today! He converted the price to local currency with Measures. Not a bad price!
		01:00pm: Finished lunch, back at his workdesk, he eagerly launched Safari browser for the online gadget store. Entered his credit card number stored in his E-Wallet to buy the gadget he saw earlier. Shopping is done.
		Dinner Time
		06:00pm: Time to knock off! Headed straight to the famous Italian restaurant in town to meet her fiance for dinner. But she’s not there yet! Suberman settles down on his reserved table, logs on to MSN via Fring and saw her fiance online. “I’m finishing my blog post and will be there soon!”, she says.
		06:10pm: While waiting for her fiance, he started racing with Black Mamba on the very addictive Black Mamba Racer game to kill some time.
		06:30pm: Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he looks up and saw his fiance. They started by ordering steak and a bottle of red wine recommended by the restaurant. The wine is here, he took a sip and says wow! Great tasting wine! He takes a picture of the wine label with Evernote and stores it in the cloud.
		07:30pm: They continued having great conversations over dinner. While on a music topic, her fiance couldn’t remember the name of the frontman from this band she was gossiping about. Suberman launched Wikipanion to search for the band, and impressed her fiance with the name.
		08:30pm: What awesome dinner! Suberman calls for check. Paid the bill and not forgetting the tips calculated with Tipulator.
		After Dinner
		08:40pm: Grocery shopping for the week is next! Suberman checks off the grocery list on Grocery IQ in the supermart. The couple left happily after buying all the much needed items.
		10:00pm: With lots of groceries, the love birds finally reaches home, kicks back and enjoys music from their favourite station on Last.fm app with the iPhone docked onto the music player.
		10:15pm: Suberman heard his favourite tune, decided to play it on guitar to serenade his fiance. Took out his classic Fender acoustic guitar and starts tuning it with Guitar Toolkit before starting to play. What a romantic way to end a lovely Friday evening.
		Turning In
		11:30pm: It’s time to turn in after a long fulfilling day. Suberman reads a classic story book via Classics in bed.
		11:40pm: Saw a word he don’t understand and checks out the meaning with Wordbook. New word learnt!
		12:00pm: They fell asleep shortly after.
		12:01am: Good night.

Stay tuned as Suberman will return!

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As a sucker for productivity tools, I am always looking around, reading reviews and trying out new native and web applications to manage my day to day life – personal or work wise. You might already be using some that you love or deem useful, but I would like to share 4 tools I use everyday for my personal life and work.

Please pardon me if some of these applications doesn’t work on PC. Here goes:

1) MobileMe, by Apple

MobileMe is Mac & PC friendly! If you have several computers at home, eg. 1 desktop computer, 1 laptop to work on the go, 1 iPhone or iPod Touch, you definitely need your data to be synced across all devices, and nothing does it best like MobileMe. MobileMe not only syncs but pushes data from your calendar, contacts, emails, bookmarks and more to all your devices.

If you like push technology and if you’re running a small business run by 2 person for example, it’s not practical to pay a hefty price monthly for Microsoft Exchange or Blackberry in my opinion. MobileMe only costs US$99/year for Single User and US$149/year for Family Pack to enable you to have push email, calendar and contacts to your iPhone and your other machines.

You will also get a full suite of web applications allowing you to manage your emails, calendars, contacts, photos and files. The web app really looks and works like a desktop application which is really an awesome experience.

2) Money, by Jumsoft

Money lets you keep track of your earnings and expenses, invoices and bills. What I really like about this native application is that it really just gives me what I need without being bloated with extra features that I don’t need. Very easy to use, once installed it gets you up and running in no time.

This application lets me see my overall finance situation, income, my invoices (invoiced, uninvoiced, overdue), and expenses all at a glance. If you find creating invoices day to day a chore, you can also create invoices within this application, but unfortunately you can’t customize the look of your invoices like you want them to although you can select from a few pre-designed templates.

But that’s besides the point, the ultimate purpose using this application is such that I can make financial decisions very quickly, keeping track of invoices sent to clients and filing income taxes at the end of the year. There is also a sync feature to backup and revert your data to MobileMe, so that you can see exactly the same data on different computers.

Money costs US$39 to own the program.

3) Things, by Cultured Code

In order to reduce stress, you need all your tasks, big or small, immediate or future, to be recorded instead of having them hanging around your head. Things lets you do just that. It comes with a desktop and iPhone app available at the iTunes store. You can sync both apps with both platforms wirelessly. This to-do list application lets you create tasks which you can file under “Today” (tasks you need to complete today), “Scheduled (tasks you need to complete in the future)”, “Someday (tasks you might want to consider completing) and “Next (all the task you need to complete after Today’s task, including scheduled tasks). You can even create folders under “Projects” where you can list individual tasks under each of your projects, be it your clients projects, personal projects, or even shopping lists!

You have to try using it to get the flow going, it really does makes me more productive and stress relieved especially when I have a tad too many things to handle at once. Never underestimate the act of ticking off your tasks as “done” each time you complete them, it does makes me feel more accomplished of all the things I have at hand.

Things is now available as a free beta download for your desktop, it’s still undergoing development and once it’s done you’ll have to download the full program at a US$49. You can get US$10 discount if you sign up for their newsletter now. The iPhone app is available at the iTunes store at US$9.99.

4) Evernote

This free notes taking application, Evernote, stores all your notes in the “cloud” which means you can access your notes via a web interface, free desktop application or the iPhone available for free download via iTunes. Evernote is Mac & PC compatible. You can take regular text notes which you can format the text freely using the interface on any platform, take photo notes using either your iSight/Webcam/iPhone Camera, or voice notes using your iPhone’s built in microphone. Evernote also works on Windows Mobile devices.

Notes created or edited will be synced throughout all your devices which is a very important aspect. You can also create multiple so called “Notebooks” to sort your notes into different categories.

Evernote gives you 40MB of monthly upload allowance. You can pay US$5/Month or US$45/Year to go Premium and get 500MB of monthly upload allowance.

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