Unsung iPhone apps

As one of my friends finally upgraded to an iPhone recently, I’ve decided to list my favorite apps you may not know about.

Some iPhone apps are famous for their little tricks, like Shazam, and official apps for services like Facebook and Twitter are indispensable. For games, everyone should download Angry Birds, of course.

But here are four I really like that you might not yet have given a try:

Bing. Yes, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine; it’s a little worse than Google on the desktop, but I love its mobile app. It’s got plenty of features, like voice recognition and social network integration (huh?), but also does cool tricks like barcode scanning and the bird’s-eye-view Bing maps. Once upon a time (New Year’s Eve 2009) this helped me find a street that Google Maps had spelled incorrectly, and thereby deliver two female friends some personal effects they’d forgotten, though in retrospect this only contributed to a long-drawn out and disappointing series of events that ultimately…you know what, Bing is solid. Its location awareness actually makes it my favorite app for checking movie times, too.

Meebo. Meebo is my favorite instant messaging app, working with multiple accounts simultaneously. It works great with iOS 4. I don’t generally stay signed in on it, but it’s nice in a pinch.

Dictionary.com. Maybe this just marks me as a huge word nerd but one of my favorite programs on the Mac is Apple’s built-in Dictionary. This app downloads a dictionary for offline viewing, and does pronunciations over a network connection. I like it cause it’s quick compared to navigating through websites.

YouTube Mobile (m.youtube.com). Google’s mobile YouTube website is so much better than Apple’s YouTube app it’s embarrassing. It allows you to select and stream “HQ” versions of videos, even over a cellular connection. They load quickly and look great over 3G, so much so that it makes you wonder why Apple’s app downscales videos so intensely. Plus, with iOS 4, this site has a cool hidden feature of sorts. If you start playing a video in Safari, you can hit the home button to go back to your homescreen. Of course, the video playback stops. But, if you bring up the multitasking menu with a home button double-tap, you can swipe to the music controls and hit play next to the Safari icon to continue streaming YouTube audio. This is nice if, like me, you use YouTube to stream music and don’t actually care to watch the video. Plus you can turn the screen off and save battery.

(Side note: if you’re Mormon, the Gospel Library, Mormon Channel (stream general conference), and LDS Tools apps totally rock, too, though I keep Lee Falin’s Scriptures app around because it still outperforms the deeper Gospel Library. Nice to see the church update its website and make some great mobile apps; now they just need to crack the nut that is MLS.)

As for other apps, I recently downloaded Calvetica and think it’s cool. Its week view seems ideal for a Retina Display, but I’m still getting used to it. What other apps do you like?

New iPod Day

New iPod Day has come and (nearly) gone, and I must say, either it was disappointing or I’m getting too old for this. Has Apple lost its ability to amaze? I doubt it, but for the second year in a row, I’m down on the holiday lineup. Here’s the blow-by-blow:

iPod touch: There has never been a year when I wasn’t disappointed by the iPod touch, and 2010 is no exception. The first iPod touch, after months of anticipation following the announcement and release of the original iPhone, came with crippled software (no Notes, no Mail) and relatively small capacities (8 and 16 GB). The second-generation one was better, sure, and was barely revamped last year. This year, somehow, I fooled myself into thinking things would be different. The iPhone got a major redesign and some cool features; isn’t it time the touch did, too?

The iPod touch is sometimes called an iPhone without the phone, and I was hoping that all the upgrades to the iPhone 4 would trickle down into the touch. (I’m upgrade-eligible for the 4, but I’m not excited about re-upping with AT&T and their new $350 early-termination fees.) The upgrade I wanted most? The camera, for sure. The iPhone 4’s shooter is great for a phone camera, and soundly beats my 3GS, which is already capable of some good shots. So today when Apple announced a new iPod touch with that high-resolution screen, video calling, and high-definition video recording, I had one question: does it take pictures? During the keynote, though, I saw a shot of the camera app and sure enough, as it does on the current iPhones, it had a slider to switch from video to still mode.

Later this afternoon I went to the Apple website in search of more details, already knowing that the camera records in 720p, just like the iPhone 4. Does it get the same five-megapixel pictures? Not quite. According to Apple’s iPod touch tech specs, the iPod takes still pictures at 960 by 720 resolution. Let me do the math for you: that’s 0.7 megapixels. Not seven, point-seven. That sucks. I haven’t seen any samples from the camera yet, but I don’t doubt they’ll underwhelm.

I wonder how much the price difference is in camera parts between the touch and the 4; as it is, it’s cost them one touch sale so far.

iPod nano: The new nano is nuts, a tiny clip-on player with a 1.5” multi-touch screen. Peculiarly, the nano has lost the abilities to record and play video. I have a fourth-gen nano with a 2” screen and while it’s not ideal for movie-watching, I have caught some stuff on it while travelling and it’s not too bad. I liked having the option. Now it’s gone.

At first glance, the new nano appears to be the perfect exercise iPod, with its ability to clip anywhere and the adjustable screen orientation. But I don’t see the benefit of a touch screen over the ability to just hit “next” without looking at it.

When the iPhone came out, the touch interface was so obviously right for it: it gave you a huge (for the time) screen to use for videos and that computer-like web browser. When rivals copied it with products like the BlackBerry Storm, it was hilarious, because most of them didn’t have the same strengths as Apple’s platform and weren’t nearly as suited to the all-touch style. What does the nano get out of going that route?

The nano’s touch interface does allow a tiny player to have a relatively big screen. I guess that’s cool, I just would have rather had last year’s body (which, while bigger, was already impressively small) and a 32 GB capacity.

iPod shuffle: This one’s a huge win by today’s standards, with Apple giving up on the horrendous third-generation shuffle (a masterpiece of miniaturization that required headphone-cable controls) and returning almost exactly to the second-gen form factor: a small clip with a few buttons. Personally I still like the first-gen, with its built-in USB plug for easy syncing with any PC, but the new shuffle is tiny, looks durable, and at $49 for 2 gigs, might beat the nano as the exercise companion of choice. (Also, at that price, does the shuffle cost Apple more or less to make than its headphones do?)

iPod classic, or: I’m just glad they didn’t kill it. This year the iPod classic didn’t get a price cut or a storage upgrade, instead remaining at $249 for 160 gigabytes of stuff. I’ve always wanted a video iPod of this style since before they were called classics, but never quite pulled the trigger. I suspect I will continue to hold off, though it would be sweet to have all my music, pictures and videos on my person at all times.

So that’s it. If I was to buy one now, perhaps I’d get a touch, then feel, as I suspect most touch owners do, that Apple resented me for not buying an iPhone. (That’d be a weird feeling for me.) I think I’d use a shuffle and enjoy a classic. The nano? Eh. It doesn’t make sense to me. Why spend $149 for eight measly gigabytes when I could save fifty bucks and get a gorgeous fourth-gen banano?

iOS 4 impressions

Apple's iOS 4, the latest version of the company's iPhone and iPod touch operating system, is out, awesome, and, on the iPhone 3GS at least, the company's smoothest-running new operating system in years.

iOS (previously iPhone OS, and kinda/sorta OS X before that) updates should be met by users with equal parts anticipation and skepticism. iPhone OS 2.0 brought the now-legendary App Store, but was stupid buggy. That's not even mentioning what Gizmodo dubbed the iPocalypse, when the iTunes activation servers went down and my phone was useless for half a day. It took multiple updates to feel solid, but eventually the 2.family surpassed 1.1.4 on pure stability while adding sneaky-cool improvements like Google Street View. iPhone OS 3 added a ton of smaller, nice day-to-day features (copy-and-paste, MMS, more prevalent landscape keyboard) but brought with it lag on older devices. (Makes sense; the first two iPhones had half the RAM of the 3GS, though they became smoother in later iterations of version 3.)

iOS 4? Well, perhaps it's too early to say for sure, but it's very, very good. Some highlights:

• Runs like a dream. The 3GS has only half the RAM of the iPhone 4, reportedly; still, the phone is responsive and everything works just as well as you'd expect. Special attention was paid to transitions and animations and that makes the whole experience feel right.

• Home screen wallpaper. This is exactly the kind of Apple update that makes an Android user laugh in derision, but it's cool. Honestly, changing the wallpaper, icons and sounds was the coolest thing I ever did on my O.G. after jailbreaking it, which should tell you how lame jailbreaking is for the average bear. It's nice to have a little variety.

• Multitasking. Everyone calls this the must-have feature for 4.0; outside of Pandora, I didn't think I'd care. And I sort of don't, though I'm getting used to double-tapping the home button to switch between applications quickly. Pandora's great, plus it works with the lock-screen music controls, which were previously iPod-only. Those controls still bring up the back, play/pause, and skip buttons, which is kind of weird as you can't go back on a streaming Internet station (touching the button does nothing), but, quirks aside, it works great. Pandora's so smooth that I keep thinking it's the iPod app, so now I'm getting in the habit of bringing up the multitasking menu and swiping left-to-right across it to get to the music controls there, which also show which app is playing audio. The number of apps in the multitasking menu is insane. Right now I have 23 down there, and you scroll through them four at a time. It's not like I'm going to remember that I was doing something 18 apps ago and use that menu to switch to it.

• Super syncing. My 3GS syncs in a minute or two; on 3.1.3, if I went a few days, it would easily take more than twenty. That wasn't the case when the phone was new, so it could have been some sort of issue with my phone or computer, but regardless, I no longer dread adding a new song.

• SMS character count. You can turn on a counter now to see how close you are to 160 characters. I can't articulate a good reason but I really wanted this. I guess I just don't want to send my friends messages that spill into two (though one friend recently sent me a text that was a mind-blowing seven messages long).

• iBooks. I don't know if this should count, since it's technically a separate app. iBooks is cool; I haven't decided yet if I will ever use it beyond reading Winnie the Pooh someday. The built-in PDF viewing is useless for the few page-sized PDFs I put on it. But I really like the page-style reading. I've tried a few self-contained book apps before that require scrolling and, ever since I read this article, they're really annoying to use.

• Bluetooth keyboard support. I'm considering buying one of Apple's sweet Bluetooth keyboards to use for long e-mails. I'm not proud of what a huge nerd that makes me (and I'm fast enough on an iPhone keyboard that I'm told I resemble a 13-year-old), but there you go.

And here are a few other things that aren't quite highlights:

• Global inbox. This is a cool idea, seeing all your new e-mails in one place, though it makes permanently deleting my work e-mails (I get a lot that I delete quickly) kind of a pain.

• Spell check. Don't really care. The phone already corrects for typos really well; if you would have spelled a word correctly, but hit the wrong key, it'll usually get it right. That's a bigger problem for me than spelling. (You know that means there's some horribly misspelled word in here that I've missed.)

• Faces/Places in photos. I don't sync with a Mac, so I don't get to use the facial-recognition that comes with iPhoto and now syncs to iPhones and iPod touches. However, at the bottom of my list of albums there is now a big "Places" button that takes me to a Google map of the U.S. with little pins everywhere I've taken a picture. This is stupid, since my pictures are already kind of organized, and since it places three pictures I took on a drive from Boulder to Longmont in Missouri for some reason. I would rather be able to see one more album on the last line without scrolling. But I'll live.

The iPad, revisited

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?” —Steve Jobs

* * *

So said Jobs in a killer e-mail exchange with a Gawker blogger who wrote him to complain about…well, I’m not sure, exactly, but it seems the blogger was mostly upset with the the unusually harsh restrictions Apple puts on their iPhone OS platform, where they approve or disapprove every program in the App Store, and don’t support the common Web technology of Flash.

(Brief aside: Flash is lame, but the tech enables some cool stuff, like Hulu. It reminds me of the furor over Windows Vista’s built-in copy protection, which would constantly check your hardware for compliance when playing back certain kinds of copy-protected content. Well, that’s annoying, right? But now you can watch a Blu-Ray on Windows, while you can’t on OS X. Kinda the same deal. Not big enough for me to switch from an iPhone, especially since Hulu seems to want to block phones anyway, but Flash isn’t all bad.)

You should really read the exchange, because it’s hilarious how quickly the guy gets defensive about his, um, choices in entertainment. But Jobs’ quote (which I loved) about creating things struck me, because it helped me express why I was so disappointed by the iPad.

The iPad, to me, seems like a fantastic device for consuming content. Reading websites, watching videos, checking Facebook—the device was almost purpose-built for some of these functions. And it seems good for e-books, if you’re the kind of sucker who’s into them. But, particularly for someone who writes occasionally, the iPad seems horrific for content creation. I hate the typing experience, even though I love the touchscreen keyboard on the iPhone.

And in our universe there exist laptops, which are way better for some kinds of content creation with their built-in keyboards, and are only a little worse (and in some cases better) for most types of information and entertainment consumption.

But I’m rethinking for two reasons. The first was an article on Gizmodo by a writer who says he can replace his laptop with an iPad in part by typing with a Bluetooth keyboard. Fair enough. Maybe not ideal, but it’s at least an option. The second was Apple’s latest TV ad for the device, which allowed me to see the product as something with potential, rather than as a computer for morons.

It can do some cool things: like when the guy flips the iPad over to someone to show them what’s on the screen (much better than trying to huddle around a laptop), or my favorite, the sheet music application. If I were a musician, I’d kill for a device that would let me take all my sheet music everywhere. And then I guess they wouldn’t let me be a musician anymore.

So I am beginning to come around. On the other hand, it’s not like you can set your iPad on top of a stack of sheet music at night and have it learn it all by the time you wake up. So while the technology is slick, and the form factor has much more potential than I initially recognized, I still wouldn’t spend five hundred dollars for the thing as it is today. But I think I’ll no longer be shocked if the iPad becomes a huge success—if it hasn’t already.

Dear Boulder Republicans: Maybe everyone here is a Democrat because of how much you suck.

So I went to the Republican caucus tonight, which was a nice mixture of being both depressing and disappointing. First, I walked in slightly late, then stood at this table by the very front door of a local elemiddlery school, waiting to check in. Inside the room behind the table was an impressively-sizeable group of active voters. Finally it was my turn to be helped. I went up, and they couldn’t find my name in the list. Unless, the lady asked…are you here for the Republican caucus? Um, yes, yes, I am. That one’s way down there, she said, then pointed at something too far away for me to see.

I walked down the hall, then into a mostly-empty gymnasium, where my precinct (six of us in total) had already gotten started. The precinct next to me, the one we shared the table with? Well, none of them could be bothered to show up, so the saddest packet of all time laid there, waiting to be opened. I hope I never hear you complain about Obamacare, you lazy bastards. That was the depressing part.

The disappointment? Well, that was the whole rest of it. First we picked precinct officers and election judges and all that. I’m an alternate for some kind of delegation that they’d better not call me for. This was all very boring, but at least our ringleader kept things moving at a nice clip. Really, he did great in a pretty thankless job. But the resolutions…oh, the resolutions. I don’t know what manipulative hack penned them, but I’m very disappointed that I can’t find them online so you can see them in their full glory. So I’ll just give some examples. One was to make it part of our platform—my party’s platform in my county—to eliminate automatic salary increases for Congressmen, so that they’d have to vote themselves a new pay bump every time they want one. Sounds good to me. And it even had this awesome part in the intro, about how Congressmen currently get automatic pay bumps even when their actions harm the economy, a nice little crack I loved. Except then in the last line, they threw something in about how every Congressman should also be capped at 200% of the median income in the district they represent. What? Where did that come from? (And because, well, we’re Republicans, one guy immediately decided he was going to move to Manhattan and run for Congress.) We didn’t really like the idea of creating class distinctions in Congress.

Another fun one was about laws in Congress, and how so many of them are written by lobbyists, and how we should require them to read every bill aloud before voting on it. Yeah. That’s practical.

The one that really got me was about letting the Patriot Act expire, because, you know, it’s 2010 and all. OK by me. Except it went completely off the rails at the end, where the resolution said that IF some other law had to passed in its place, it HAD to be Senator Feingold’s JUSTICE Act, which gives the government powers to spy on suspected terrorists. Seriously, it used the word spy (and the word Feingold). Like any of us were going to vote for it at that point. But for some reason, we started to discuss it. After a minute, I asked, what is up with these resolutions? I got a laugh, but then I said, “Seriously, it’s like they wrote it this way just so they wouldn’t have to support getting rid of the Patriot Act,” which got me a bunch of blank stares. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that's the only thing that makes sense. Elefants, I’m on to you. Cut out the grandstanding crap and focus on some issues that actually matter, like fiscal responsibility (not that I support the balanced budget amendment we were also polled on). I mean this was a friggin’ caucus in a non-presidential election year, a gathering of only the most concerned citizens (& me), and we’re still playing word games with members of our own party and making the whole process feel as undemocratic as possible from the start. Give me some individual rights, some states’ rights, some money-saving ideas and some candidates who can actually prevail in a modern-media showdown. I want winners, not excuses. And then the party can get back on track and get back to making a difference in this country. That’s all I ask. Thank you, and good night.

The iPad is a fairly ridiculous object, isn’t it?

This next line is where I’m supposed to say something like, “but I want one anyway.” But I don’t. I mean, I’d take it if someone gave it to me (and my birthday is coming soon); I’m just not sure when I’d use it.

Surely an Apple device would be ideal for home use, right? Before it was announced I pictured using an Apple tablet kicked back in my recliner, websurfing aimlessly. However, a notebook or laptop would blow it out of the water for that purpose. For one, the tablet doesn’t appear to support Flash (in the demos today it put up the same missing plugin icon the iPhone does for Flash elements), so Hulu is out right away. How am I supposed to catch up on 24? YouTube is also out, kind of: the YouTube app on Apple’s other devices does not include every video on YouTube, though it usually has most videos I want to watch. A proper computer will have much broader support for formats and web content, in any event.

Also, you better stock up on bookmarks, because you won’t want to enter a bunch of addresses onscreen: the comfortable angles for web reading and typing don’t look like they’d be close to the same. I really don’t know how anyone would write anything of length on this without the keyboard dock, which just turns your iPad into what looks like a laptop, but with added inconvenience.

What else? Ah, the iPhone OS’s famed lack of multitasking. Usually when I sit down on a computer, I fire up Pidgin, the totally awesome multi-service instant messaging app that lets me talk to my Gmail and AOL friends. I probably won’t be doing that on the iPad, which seems to run just one app at a time. (There is the workaround of background notifications on the iPhone; you can stay signed in to an IM app, for example, and you’ll get pop-ups when someone writes you. Then you can jump home, go to the IM app, write them back, and get back to your Web browsing. That works in some cases, I suppose, but my friends don’t usually have just one thing to say every fifteen minutes. I also don’t know if the iPad even supports these notifications.) Of course, on a normal Mac or Windows laptop you could just put an IM window next to your browser of choice and go from there.

Let’s see, what else…how about media consumption, a huge strength of Apple’s? Well, you can listen to music on the iPad, but in a world of mp3 players I think you’d be mad to do so for more than a few minutes if that’s all you’re doing. As on a computer, though, I would play music in the background while I perused the Internet. The picture viewing looks awesome on this thing, and it’s an area where multitouch really shines. And for video? Yeah. This thing looks like the greatest device ever invented for watching a movie on a plane, even with its 4:3 aspect ratio. But then, iPods and computers handle these tasks pretty well, too, though with a little less razzle-dazzle.

Oh, and what about books? Well…yeah. Consumers: electronic books do almost nothing for you. You can’t loan ’em, you can’t borrow ’em, and is their relatively small digital file size, i.e. the ability to carry a ton at once, really all that helpful? Do you often find yourself wanting to carry even three books at once? It would be a pretty sweet deal for students if they could put all their textbooks on it, but that probably won’t happen for a while. Instead you can buy restricted-rights versions of some books and read them off a bright LCD screen on one specific device. But hey, at least Apple won’t delete stuff you bought the way Amazon did. (I really wish Apple had demoed their iBooks store today with a copy of 1984.) I’ll stick with paperbacks, thanks.

Speaking of students, this would be great for them, right? Well…not really. I’ve taken notes several times on an iPhone, and it’s not a bad experience for text. I feel like typing on an iPhone is a bit easier than typing on an iPad will be, though perhaps I should reserve judgment. Sometimes you do want to copy a picture or diagram; Apple’s Notes program makes no allowance for on-screen drawing, though other apps do. So if you don’t mind quitting out and drawing the picture, I guess you’re good. Of course, on an iPhone you can just take a photo of the diagram or whatever, but the iPad has no camera, so good luck finger-scrawling quickly. A convertible tablet with pen input seems like a much more useful device for digital note-taking, and paper notebooks still handle the job with ease.

But Apple surely brings a sense of class and taste to the table, don’t they, which normal PC manufacturers just can’t match? Indeed they do. The calendar and e-mail apps just look outstanding. Maps is pretty sweet, too. If I was a hotshot trying to look important I would only check my e-mail around the office on an iPad.

Many of the other minor annoyances with this device stem from Apple’s decision to build the software on the iPhone OS, rather than Mac OS X. The iPhone OS devices have been hugely successful, and the software offers an ease-of-use that even the Mac can’t match. Plus, it’ll run all those apps from the commercials. On the downside, the application icons look like they’re spread comically far apart on the home screens, the unlock slider just looks weird, and the lock screen is still just your wallpaper and a clock. Wouldn’t it be cooler if it was like a touch iGoogle, and you could see your e-mail and the weather and some headlines or whatever just by tapping the button to wake it up? Personally, I’m more excited for the possibilities of slates based on the multitouch-capable Windows 7, because they’ll be full-blown computers. HP already announced one that is kind of lame (no webcam), but I hope it’s only a matter of time. Since the iPad runs iPhone OS anyway, I think for the most part you’d be happier with an iPhone or cheaper iPod touch that does the same stuff in a pocketable size.

The final problem with this device, to me, is the price. Apple bragged that they got it down to $499 today, which indeed surprised me. But that’s for a 16-gig model with no 3G (hallelujah, I say: 3G is awesome but shouldn’t be required on a product like this). That’s 16 gigs of flash memory, meaning it’ll survive a fall a lot better than a netbook hard drive would…but I wonder if that screen would last if you dropped it very far anyway. And a netbook with an HDD is going to hold at least, what, ten times that much stuff? I can’t decide if sixteen gigs is enough or not, but with the device’s stellar photo and video capabilities, you have to be tempted to bump up to the 32-gig model at least, right?

Of course, at the $499-$829 range, you’re not just looking at netbooks, but a huge variety of laptops from many manufacturers. Many of those are also wicked stupid: 15-inch screens with crappy resolutions, etc., but there are some real gems out there. I haven’t seen anything that would convince me I’d want an iPad more than, say, an 11.6-inch Acer Timeline. The iPad looks futuristic and fun, but I plan to pass easily. Am I missing something?

Best of 2009

Now that 2009 has mercifully drawn to a close, it’s time for the first annual HPE Awards. I can’t say I’ll miss 2009 at all, but some pretty sweet stuff happened nonetheless.

Song of the Year: Unthought Known (Pearl Jam, Backspacer): As a Pearl Jam addict I happen to think all of their songs are about me or apply to my life in some way. This one took me a while to decipher, but once I listened to it enough it made the perfect anthem for my 2009. Plus it’s just awesome, and I love the way the music steps down right before my favorite lines:

See the path cut by the moon, for you to walk on

See the waves on distant shores, awaiting your arrival

Team of the Year: Denver Nuggets. Yeah, I know, they lost to the Lakers in the conference finals, but their playoff run was my favorite event in sports in years. Even the Broncos’ equivalent run after the 2005 season wasn’t nearly this much fun. They crushed the Hornets, smacked around the Mavs, and then gave the Lakers a brief-but-fun fight. Waving balloons at the free-throw shooters in the Western Conference Finals was about as cool as it gets, though the clutch touch of Chauncey Billups and the superstar emergence of Carmelo Anthony were just a little bit sweeter. This season the Nuggets are a killer 13-2 at home, tied for the best mark in the NBA.

Video Game of the Year: Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s true, Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3: Oh, Dreadfully Short in Total were awesome shooters with great online multiplayer in addition to fun main campaigns. But Batman! It’s just the baddest, most fun time I’ve had playing a superhero since 2004’s Spider-Man 2, and a terrific balance of feeling between superior skill and outnumbered vulnerability. My only wish is to play it more.

Movie of the Year: Sherlock Holmes. In middle school I took a class about mystery stories where we talked about Sherlock quite a bit, and for Christmas soon thereafter I got The Complete Sherlock Holmes, though I never read it. Plus it turns out Sherlock was the inspiration behind my favorite TV character, Dr. House. So I might have been destined to love this movie, but it’s a blast, with a great setting and cool action. I saw it in a packed house on Christmas night, sitting in the front row, which sucks at that particular theater, but I liked it a lot and will see it again soon for sure. And, oh yeah, I’m finally reading Sherlock now.

Although I think it’s like the nerdiest IP in history, before the last month or so this award would have gone hands-down to Star Trek, by the way, which was fun and the only good movie I saw for months. But recently I’ve seen The Blind Side and Invictus, which were also fantastic in their own ways.

Worst Movie of the Year: Transformers 2. Yeah, there were some cool fights, but even Megan Fox and that smoking Decepti-chick couldn’t save this script, plot, or poorly manufactured sense of tension.

Software of the Year: Windows 7. It’s stable, fast, works with everything, looks great, and puts XP and Vista to shame.

Non-Pearl Jam Album of the Year: The Resistance, Muse. This is just sick, and the start of my current favorite track, Guiding Light, simply can not be played loudly enough.

Suspiciously Good Customer Service of the Year: Apple. I took my iPod nano into the Apple Store down the street after a bunch of white specks (dust?) got behind the screen. The Genius told me he’d never seen that, and a few days later the store swapped me for a new one, which I wasn’t expecting. Sweet. Similarly, my iPhone 3GS became completely unresponsive (at a Windows 7 launch party, natch) and was replaced by someone who told me she almost never sees that happen. Only weird thing? My replacement Nano has the same white stuff under the screen now, and the guy who sat next to me while I was getting my phone swapped also had a completely dead iPhone. It’s always annoying when your gear has problems, but dealing with Apple is a million times better than trying to get an Xbox 360 fixed.

2009 was definitely a rebuilding year, but looking back it was pretty strong. If you think I missed anything, toss it in the comments.