App Sales Around the Holidays

In one of my early posts this year, I mentioned that you can often find iPhone and iPad apps on sale (sometimes for free) and I gave you some advice on to find them.  Although there are always apps on sale, they tend to increase in frequency around any given holiday.  Also, around the holidays, the big names like Electronic Arts and Gameloft tend to put a lot of games on sale, many for only for $0.99.  Check out AppShopper to find out what's on sale this Thanksgiving week.  While you are at it, download the AppShopper app to get notifications when apps you want go on sale.

Tip: Never buy an Electronic Arts or Gameloft app for full price if you can wait. Mark it as "Want It" in your AppShopper app and you'll get an email when it comes down in price.

Up to Date Fantasy Football Information on Your iPhone

If you play fantasy football with me, please stop and don't read the rest, because I'm giving away one of my secrets.  When you realize, like I did today, that Thursday night football for the season is already starting on the NFL Network, you know it's a narrower window during the week that you have to set your lineup.  This means that it's critical to be able to do that anywhere. That's one of the reasons I wrote Fantasy Football: What You Can Do on Your iPhone and Why.

However, to set your lineup on the go you need to be able to do some research on the go.  You need to know the latest about players and teams (especially roster changes and injuries) to decide who to start, who to sit, and who to pick up out of free agency.  So what's the best ways to get the information you need on the go, on your iPhone?

Don't Have Siri but Want to Talk to Your Older iPhone?

Most of us don't have an iPhone 4S but may look semi-covetously on those who are able to talk to Siri and get a response to almost any question.  We know we can talk to our phones with the iPhone voice control feature, telling it to call a phone number or play a playlist.  But those people with the new iPhones can search the web, find a restaurant, and even send an email. You can't do those things with the voice control feature.

This is where Vlingo comes in.  Vlingo is the Siri for the rest of us.  Although it's not built into iOS, like Siri, once you launch the app, it is super-easy to use.  You just press a button and speak, starting your sentence with certain keywords.  For example, you could say, "email Tim, subject testing vlingo" and it would create an email to Tim, whoever that is, with the subject "testing vlingo".  It will update Facebook and if you say something like "update Facebook I'm writing a blog post right now."  You can even send text messages (SMS) and update Twitter.

Reminders on iOS 5: A To-do Alternative?

Reminders on iOS 5 are pretty nice.  They sync along with your calendar to iCloud if you do that sort of thing.  (I sync my calendar to the "Google cloud" so I don't use iCloud for mail, calendar, or contacts.) The most compelling thing about Reminders though is that they can be location based, allowing you to set a reminder to alert you when you leave a location or arrive at a location. For example, you could set a reminder to "Buy milk" that alerts you when you leave work.