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iCali | The Blog of Cali Lewis

The Blog of Cali Lewis

I Am Rich Walk Through VideoAugust 10

The I Am Rich iPhone and iPod Touch application caused quite a stir last week. It was an application that was very clear about one thing: it did nothing and cost $999.99. What did you get for your money? A black screen with a red ruby in the middle, plus a “secret mantra” intended to inspire you.

Eight people bought it before it was taken out of the App Store. Eight people. That’s $8,000 minus Apple’s cut. Brilliant move, Armin Heinrich!

Neil Pomerleau, one of the eight customers, shot a video walk through of the application. Take a look:

UPDATE: Some people bought the application by mistake. The developer says their money will be returned.

GrandDialer: App ReviewAugust 8

Name: GrandDialer
Price: Free
Category: Utilities
Website: GGT Enterprises
Recommended: Yes

Woohoo! I’m excited about this iPhone application. It won’t be applicable to everyone, but I have to point it out for those will want it.

A little bit of explanation is needed. GrandCentral is a service that I’ve been using for almost two years. You choose a phone number with the area code of your choice. You then assign your home number, work and cell to your GrandCentral number. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, it can ring to all your numbers so you can pick up where ever is most convenient for you. It also solves an issue when you change your phone number. If everyone has your GC number, you don’t have to go through the process of telling everyone. Just change the number on the back end, and no one knows any difference.

Unfortunately, when Google bought GrandCentral last year, they locked the service into beta and stopped allo

Tipulator: App ReviewAugust 5

Name: Tipulator
Price: $0.99
Category: Finance
Website: TapTapTap.com
Recommended: Yes

I used to use my phone’s calculator every time Neal and I would go out to eat to calculate the tip. Eventually, I decided I didn’t want to rely on help and figured out easy ways to do the calculations in my head. That’s why I haven’t downloaded any tip calculator apps to date. When I was asked to review Tipulator, I didn’t expect more than basic functionality, and I was happily surprised.

You enter the price of the check using the scroll wheel, then choose your tip percentage. This is where the options get good. On one column, you can choose between No Tip (although I’m not sure why you’d need an app for that!) and 30%. On the other column, you choose how you want your tip to be calculated. Do you want it to be exactly 15%? Do you prefer to give a round tip, like $10 instead of $9.86? Or maybe you prefer to have a rounded total so your total bill is $50 instead of $49.74.

The other option you have is for splitting the bill. Tell Tipulator how many people you have, and it immediately gives you the breakdown.

This tip calculator is a full function

Ad HocAugust 4

We all know the great thing about creating software is that there is no hardware involved. You, as a developer, create something. There’s an initial cost, but you don’t have to spend money every time someone buys your product. Bill Gates realized the brilliance and simplicity of it, and ever since, the world of software development has followed a certain path.

The developer creates, tests, releases, and gives out free copies to people who can review it and hopefully if the review is good, they sell more copies. It also allows people like me to review applications and provide our audiences with good information, without going broke.

When the App Store first launched, the only way to have someone review a developer’s app was to give a reviewer iTunes gift certificates. This costs the developer money, and didn’t follow the normal procedure everyone was used to.

Apple has provided developers with a distribution method known as Ad Hoc, but it’s come to my attention that a lot of iPhone App developers aren’t aware of it. Developers can distribute up to 100 copies of their application for reviewers. Jason D. O’Grady from ZDNet gives instructions on how to go about the procedure:

The procedure works like this: a developer will request your iPhone’s unique identifier. The Identifier is 40-character string that can be found in

App Review: JottAugust 4

Name: Jott
Price: Free
Category: Productivity
Recommended: Not for me, but you may like it

I love Jott as a Speech to Text service. I’ve talked about it a couple times on GeekBrief.TV and I use it in my life often. Jott is a way to send reminders to yourself. Set up an account, call the Jott phone number, leave a message reminding yourself to buy a banana at the grocery store, and you’ll get an email reminder with the message written out in text form. It’s not perfect. No speech to text service is yet, but even when it gets a word wrong, most people recognize it enough to remember what they needed to do.

For me, Jott for the iPhone doesn’t add any useful functionality. Instead of getting emails with my reminder, I have to look at the Jott Notepad to see what I need to do. The brilliance of Jott has always been that you don’t have to go through any extra steps to be reminded. If I’m going to forget to do something, I assure you I’m going to forget to check my J