Great Free Bible Reader - Plus price drop on NIV

The One Tree Bible Reader is one of the better Bible readers in the app store. It is free and comes with a couple of free public domain Bibles. It is extremely fast at verse look ups assisted by the fact that the bibles aer stored on the device. It also has a rather nice search facility. The interface is clean and straightforward with a short learning period.

Of course - as with most bibles you have to pay for version that are still under copyright. This is understandable since it costs a lot of money to pay for first class translators to provide an accurate and up-to-date translation. One of the more expensive translations has been the NIV, so much so that some of the most popular computer based bible programs have omitted it from time to time.

The good news is that the price of the NIV has just dropped and is now AU$15, still quite expensive but less than half of the original release price which is has maintained until May the 8th. The last price drop today has made it much better value for money.


My Rating: 5 stars

Has Apple Created a Mill Stone?

Apps such as this does make one despair. What is the point of an app that merely converts between temperatures? I have an excellent universal conversion app. It is easy to use, comprehensive, customisable - in fact it is the perfect conversion app, and it is free. The developer of the iTempConverter says that as he add more "presets" he will make it a paid app. So! who cares when there are much better free apps.

Of course the issue is that with so much rubbish how do you find these gems. I subscribe to a number of blogs and glean them for the best of that which interests me but what of your average punter. With so many useless crudapps, so many duplicates such as individual apps for sports teams or single relative speed-dials, and single use apps such as this temp converter the App Store is maybe 95% useless, maybe even higher.

I can see where Apple has gone wrong. They wanted to tie down the application development for the device to reduce instability and to control its use for a number of reasons. The problem is that it is so easy for your average hack programmer to develop some single function app that every man and his dog can get some piece of rubbish into the App Store. Great model but so open to abuse.

I am hoping that these people get so discouraged when no one is interested in yet another narrow single use, useless app that they give up and go back to kiddie scripting viruses. From the evidence I doubt that this will happen.

Ivory - A Nice Little Jahjongg

One of my favourite games is Mahjongg solitare and I have been on the lookout for a lice little version for the iPhone. This appears to answer the call. This app just appeared in the App Store and it looks quite nice. There are both the free and paid versions. The free version appears to be full featued but the paid version provides more layouts and sets and the satisfaction of supporting a good developer.

I have not yet had a change to play more than a few moves so I am not going to rate it yet but it does look like a winner at first glance. Apart from the obvious point and select and landscape only it has a rather nice zoom and pan which shows the tiles more clearly. If this turns out to be as good as it appears then I will certainly be shelling out the readies for the full version.

Rating: Not yet rated
Pros: Good tile graphics, zoom and pan
Cons: I will let you know if I find any
Price: Free/AU$2.49

Oceanus - free

There have been a plethora of new web browsers since Apple allowed users to submit their own Web Browser apps a few months ago.

Oceanus quite good but I have not yet had a chance to try it out. The developer has listed it as free as an introductry offer.

If you do try it out let me know what you think.

Update: It looks great and has some nice features such as full screen but after trying a few sites I have found it rather buggy. I will wait for an upgrade or two to allow them time to fix the bugs before delivering my final verdict. But at the moment it is not worth installing.

Update 2: Vikas Singla has announced a bug fix release has been submitted to Apple. This mentions all of the issues I had with this. If this indeed fixes all of the bugs I found then this could be a little beauty. Watch this space.