One of the main uses of an iPhone is to load completely useless apps that you can use to annoy your friends. As a service to the nerd techie community, I have reviewed all available most some of the free (or at least cheap) apps available for the iPhone platform and selected the top six useless but fun apps.
Here they are:
FreqCounter (Author: Tang Peng Lab, Cost: Free) A clever little app that displays the time domain waveform of the phone’s microphone audio, displays the sound level and calculates the frequency of the waveform. This is my favorite of the list.
Sound Check Tone Generator (Author: Joe Voelker, Cost: Free) A simple app that generates audio tones (just sine waves).
Tone Generator Pro (Author: Performance Audio, Cost: $0.99) This is a tone generator that can create sine waves, square waves, triangle waves and sawtooth waveforms. Also does white and pink noise and frequency sweeps.
Nerd Noise (Author: Brian Shumate, Cost: $1.99) This app produces some really important, but of course, useless sounds: computer modem tones, Morse code, RTTY, MFSK, telephone busy signal, dial tone, etc. This is a MUST HAVE for the true techie.
Piano Free (Author: Better Day Wireless, Cost: Free) One of those piano keyboard apps.
Cowbell (Author: CTS MobileSoft, Cost: Free) Makes a cowbell sound. Because you always need “more cowbell”!
Just to be clear, some of these apps might actually be useful. Or maybe not. Your mileage may vary.
– 73, Bob K0NR
Added 6 May 2011:
At no extra charge, I decided to add a 7th app:
SpectraSound (Author: Francois Guilleme, Cost: $1.99) This app shows the time domain waveform from the microphone plus the FFT spectrum of the signal. This is a fun way to look at the frequency content of an audio signal.
Now, I am more nerdier.
Randy
K7AGE
Major thanks for the blog article. Really Cool.