My Favorite iPhone Apps...Some Of Them At Least

On the anniversary of Steve Jobs' death (technically yesterday, but since I'm still awake, I consider it today), I think it is appropriate to give my commentary on some of my favorite iPhone applications. Here are 10 apps I consider supremely cool and/useful.

• MLB.com At Bat

• As a mega baseball fan, I absolutely LOVE this app! It gives live audio feed and live boxscore for every single game, even during the post-season. It has all the baseball news, standings and highlight videos. There are complete roster breakdowns for every team and you can purchase game tickets directly from the app. And if you pay monthly for MLB.TV, you can watch all the games through your iPhone, which is especially nice with 4G LTE.  It costs $15 at the beginning of the season, but right now, it's FREE for the post-season. 
• Calendar 

• Yes, I'm sure everyone has their own calendar app that's "better" than Apple's stock calendar, but I really like this one. It's simple, well designed and works with Siri. List view is great when you only want to see your upcoming appointments. Day view is used to plan out your entire day.  The 'month' view is my standard because with the bigger screen of the iPhone 5, I can easily tap any day and see almost all of my plans. Holding the phone in landscape mode allows me to see five days worth of calendar events. And now, my Facebook calendar is also synced to my regular calendar. AND Siri works really well with this application. 
• Messages 

• The awesomeness of this app is solely due to iMessages. It's a great example of how Apple destroys competing companies.  No cell phone provider likes that I can send unlimited texts to anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Macbook.  And my response is....."All cell phone companies charge too much already, so just shut up."  It's also really convenient that I can send regular text messages and attach photos and videos without doing anything different.   
• Mail 

• Again, plenty of people say they have other apps for their email. I say "hogwash," Apple Mail is great! I have different mailboxes for each of my email accounts and I can see them together or separately.  There's great integration with other apps for attaching photos and documents.  The interface is simple and smooth and there is customization for spam folders.  Stop looking elsewhere for the perfect mail client, it's been here all along.
• Twitter 

• I don't understand all the hype about Tweetbox. I'm not paying $2.99 for something that can only be marginally better than the FREE Twitter app. I can easily view tweets of people I follow, click links to articles through the tweets, compose my own tweets, find new people to follow and update my profile. What can Tweetbox do? Let me view tweets while I compose one. Yeah, that's worth 3 bucks (sarcastic). The only issue with this app are the ads built on some of the articles linked to tweets.  Sometimes, the banners or videos really get in the way, but it only affects certain website, so I'm giving Twitter a pass on this.
• Facebook 

• Especially with the integration of iOS 6, the Facebook app is better than ever (and it wasn't 'great' in the past).  Status updates, uploading photos and sending messages are all easy and fast. I can quickly view my own timeline or the general news feed and 'like' what all my Facebook friends are posting.  I really like the notifications when close friends post something or tag me in their pictures. Definitely use this app everyday.
• Action Movie FX

• Alright, enough with the useful apps. How about some fun apps...some REALLY fun apps! Enter 'Action Movie FX.' I picked this up literally yesterday after hearing about it from watching 'Conan' on TBS (very funny....that's not my opinion, that's the slogan for TBS). Here are some examples of its awesomeness. 

• Now that's cool. You just record whatever you want to blow up or smash after you pick a method of destruction and the app does the rest. There are other you can buy for $1 for each pair. I might break down and get a couple of extras.  And J.J. Abrams, the director of of the new Star Trek movie, created this! Even better. (It wasn't Michael Bay? That's shocking)
• Stop Motion Studio Pro HD 

• This is quickly becoming one of my favorite apps. It costs $1 and there are really cool addition features that can be unlocked for $1 each. The on;y two really worth the extra cash are the remote camera and the paint additions. The general idea of the app itself is to create stop motion movies like Wallace and Gromit (if you're like 100 years old) or, more modern focusing, Robot Chicken.  I am working on a super epic action movie with Lego pieces and action figures. Stay tuned for updates on my production. Here's a quick sample I threw together. 

• What's great about this app is how easy and fun it becomes to create your own movie. Yes, it's time consuming, but a little patience goes a long way with this app.  To speed things up, you can set a timer to take pictures every 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 seconds. You can also see each picture in a long procession line and scroll through them to make sure the figures are moving appropriately. The remote camera allows my iPad to see what my iPhone is seeing, which is useful for different camera angles and for feeling like a super spy James Bond awesome man. You can also mute out any sound in the scene and then add any music from your library or record your own sounds. With the extra feature for painting, you can add paint effects directly onto the scene and with each new frame, you cane what you previously drew to make the progression of drawings that much easier.  The finished movies can then be sent to YouTube directly, to your camera roll for more editing on iMoive, or emailed to that special someone (I already have Valentine's Day ideas). 
• There's also functionality for creating a green screen effect, but so far I haven't got it to work properly. I think I need a better green background then a towel, but in general, I don't think this feature is very useful as it stands today. 

I'll definitely have more apps to talk about in the near future such as Pages, iAnnotate and some of my favorite games (mostly for the iPad actually).  For now, take my advice and make sure you get and/or use the apps I listed.  You won't be sorry!