GuitarToolKit posts

Every time I walk through Warehouse Stationery (New Zealand's equivalent to Office Depot) or Dick Smith's Electronics (pretty much Best Buy), I'm struck by how probably half the products in each store are pretty much useless to me since I've got an iPhone.

Thanks to the apps that come pre-packaged with the iPhone and the more than 100,000 third-party offerings now available in the iTunes Store, the iPhone has gained functionality that might have seemed hard to fathom under three years ago when Steve Jobs first announced the device.

"A widescreen iPod with touch controls... a revolutionary mobile phone... a breakthrough internet communications device... these are not three separate devices. This is one device." So Steve Jobs told us all back at Macworld Expo 2007. But since then, the iPhone has grown to be much more than just those three concepts.

What follows is a sort of anti-buyer's guide, a list of products and devices that you may never need or even want to buy again (or receive as a gift) if you have an iPhone. Some of these are certainly open for debate, but more than a few of them are products that, for all intents and purposes, are completely unnecessary if you have an iPhone. (Items in bold also apply to the iPod touch).

I've built a recording studio on my iPhone ... kind of. It doesn't output production-quality mixes -- or anything close -- but it makes a great scratchpad for recording and developing musical ideas. It didn't take any special effort, just a few apps which I've found really handy, especially when working with acoustic instruments.

Tuning up

First, I've been using GuitarToolkit ($9.99US in the App Store) for tuning, general metronome needs and finding chord phrasings. There are dozens of apps available with similar features, and I haven't tried enough of them to fairly judge merits (if you know of an outstanding app, let's hear about it in the comments!). I grabbed GuitarToolkit when it was a little narrower of a field, and it's been a sturdy, steadily-improving app which has never given me reason to look around.

Read on for the rest of the "mobile studio" ...