Short Order Techout here there be geeks

 I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the belated birthday of the App Store than to review an App that will have you checking it every morning with fervor. That App is “AppMiner 2.0”. AppMiner is not only a gateway drug back into that .99 cent black hole, like any good catalyst of addiction, its absolutely free. This really is the only App on my iPhone I can safely claim everyone and their mother should own. Here is the rundown:

In short, AppMiner is an App Store crawler. The App has access to the entire contents of the store and splits the store up into the following very useful categories:

• New, which lists out all the new Apps in the App Store in order of newness or by their individual genres such as Games, Finance, Health & Fitness, etc.
• Sale, does the same as above but lists everything in the store that is on sale rather than new. This is excellent but dangerous to those dollar bills as it quickly provides access to every App that has been reduced in price in one place.
• Top Rated, here you can see all the top free, paid, and all time releases broken into genre or the true top 100 Apps listed in order, again by free, paid, or all time.
• Search, allows you to search the store by title or keyword.
• Watch, is the feature that sets AppMiner apart and transforms it from an App Store clone, to a stand alone App that you can’t live without. In all the aforementioned categories, the purpose is inevitably to browse or search for Apps. The key here is that when looking for Apps, AppMiner adds a button to each Apps page labeled “Watch”. This button, when touched, will pop up a menu that allows you to bookmark it or to watch it for a price drop. Say for instance I have been really interested in a particular App but it costs $9.99 and for some reason or another I am not that interested in it but would definitely pick it up if it were say, $4.99. I can find it with AppMiner, touch the watch button and tell it to alert me when it goes on sale, or specifically when it hits $4.99. The App now appears in my “Watch” tab which will then be flagged when the App goes on sale. One of the other really excellent features is the “Tell a Friend” button which is on every App I am watching so when said App goes on sale I can alert everyone I think would be interested in it.

In summary, AppMiner has quickly become every bit a part of my morning routine as Coffee, RSS, and TWiT live. I can quickly check to see if any of the Apps I am watching are on sale, and if so, grab them and let my friends know to check it out. The other benefit is that while reading my RSS or listening to my Podcasts, I can easily flag any Apps mentioned with AppMiner and double back to check them out later without forgetting about them. If anything else, its an organizer for all those Apps you hear about all the time, but quickly forget about. AppMiner is published by bitrino and is again, available for my favorite price of free. You can also follow @AppMiner on twitter.  Now click here and go get it.

While I keep up with dozens of tech feeds daily and certainly could regurgitate the latest information from those sources, I seriously doubt anyone is coming here for breaking news. I have tried it and will gladly leave the daily grind to the big boys for now. Being a new dot on the map, I prefer to use these early posts to define the Short Order Blog as a place for my own personal experiences. My goal is to review projects and products that I have had my hands on, and feel experienced enough with, to provide useful feedback and not waste anyones time. If I have succeeded, my readers will have found that feedback useful and well presented. This being said, I would like to submit my thoughts on the iPhone App “My Weather Mobile”.

 I have used this application since its launch as an $18.00 app and consider it a meteorologist in my pocket and a trusted source of weather information. The Application not only provides excellent trends and predictions, it uses the location services to provide this information whenever and where ever you need it. My wife was recently driving home from Florida and while in Mobile Alabama called me because the sky looked very dark and she was concerned that bad weather was about to close in on her. As it turns out I asked her to open My Weather Mobile and review the local information provided by the location services and she was able to see that the bad storms were actually going to pass her by. We have also used the precipitation trends during threats of icy conditions and found that by relying on the data present by the app we were able to have all of our errands and preparations made, and everyone off the road, prior to the deteriorating road conditions. If I haven’t properly conveyed the message yet, this App is used to its maximum potential in our household.

 This being said, here is a rundown of the features in My Weather Mobile:

The Radar:

 I find that the radar is very useful. You can quickly navigate to anywhere in the U.S. and see currently conditions from both Doppler and Satellite views. Access is fast on 3G and animation is smooth. This is by far the nicest weather map I have see in any of the various weather apps I have used. It initially appears as a thumbnail at the bottom of the screen but if you rotate the iphone into landscape mode it enters full screen as shown in the picture above.

  The Trending Screens:

Local conditions and forecasts (left) are shown for all of the areas you choose to follow as well as your location services location. The daily forecast at the bottom can be swiped with a finger to display each day of the week 

The Temperature & Sky Conditions screen will allow you to see current as well as forecasted temperatures based on time of day in a very easy to read graph.

 The 36 hour precipitation graph is in my opinion, the other very useful feature as it is accurate 95% of the time and you can often plan your day around its rain predictions.

 Finally is the wind speed graph which, I admit, is the feature I use the least. For the sake of being thorough I wanted to at least show it off. While I don’t use this particular feature I can think of dozens of reasons why it would be useful.

In conclusion I have to say that this is one of the most useful applications on my iPhone and I consider it every bit as much a core application as my calendar or e-mail. I will say that on a very negative note, the application does not provide advisory or warning information from the National Weather Service, and if they would add that single feature it would be the ultimate weather application. As it were, I also rely secondarily on the Weather Channel Mobile Website for information on warnings and advisories. In fact, this review was prompted at 3AM (as the time in these graphs show) last weekend when a storm of biblical strength rolled through Little Rock and I wasn’t able to see if we were under a tornado warning with My Weather Mobile. That one issue aside, for $4.99, I would pick this one up. Its stable with 3.0, easy to read, accurate, and for the most part as all the features I need to keep up with the weather, up to the minute.