trendpreneur

As a recent convert to the iPhone lifestyle, one of the first things I did was jump online and look for some funky applications to install. Having seen mentions of a myriad different apps that could do anything from recite Byron to wash the dishes, finally being able to install these wonders was similar to letting a child loose in a sweet shop.

Have you ever let a child loose in a sweet shop? So many unimaginable treats, the poor blighters don’t know where to begin. And it was the same for me and the App Store. Let’s take a look at how you can shrink the masses of possibility into a few easy starting points…

Five Easy Ways to Find the iPhone Apps You Want

Whether you know what you want or you’re simply trying to find something ‘cool’ via the wisdom of crowds, here’s a few ideas to get you started:

1. Browse the App Store.

This should be easy enough, really. The Store has categories you can drill down into, reviews from users and a homepage highlighting new, hot and favourite apps. Certainly a good place to start. However, once you start browsing the categories it becomes almost hopeless. With nothing but the application name to guide you, you end up in a forest of wasted clicks. That said, if you’re simply after either browsing everything, or some interesting apps to install to get started, you could do worse.

2. Word of Mouth.

If you’ve bought an iPhone recently, chances are that – like me – you know other people who own them. Hit them up for some app recommendations; poll your twitter followers, blog readers and FriendFeeders to truly harness the wisdom of crowds. Who knows – you might even start a mini war over which IM client is best.

3. Background Reading.

There are plenty of decent blogs and websites dedicated to Apple products, and particularly the iPhone, some of which you might not have been reading before you became a new owner. Here’s a couple to get started with: TUAW, Macworld, MacSlash, Gizmodo. Add ‘em to your feeds and before you know it, any hot new iPhone apps will come to you, rather than vice versa.

4. Best-Ofs.

Following on from the ‘push’ approach in #3, you can also go out there and look for blogger roundups of applications. A bit of Google-fu with phrases such as “top 10 iphone apps” (no, really) can get you a long way: check out posts like Lifehacker’s top 10 free apps, the Telegraph’s top 20 and Gizmodo’s marathon blog for starters.

5. Develop your Own.

Chances are that there will be some itch you really need to scratch when it comes to the iPhone. Whether you want to show off your WoW characters to friends in the pub, use Skype to save on call charges, or SSH into your servers, there’s probably an application that already does what you need. But if it’s not perfect, or if there simply isn’t anything that fits the bill, consider learning to write your own. Whether you simply choose to make an iPhone-friendly web interface to your own website, or a fully-fledged app running on the device itself, the tools are out there – make your world a slightly better place!

None of the above approaches are really perfect. It’s very hard to find “the best” apps, whether by blogosphere consensus or simply pure quality. There’s a lot of information about a lot of different apps out there, although obviously only a few people bother to give official feedback; pulling data from the numerous reviews out there would really help give a folksonomic style metric to judge what’s worth installing and what isn’t.