Unless you have voice recognition and Bluetooth in your car, dialing any cellphone can be dangerous to your health. It's truly frightening to see great numbers of commuters fooling around with their phones while trying to drive. Driving is tough enough these days without the distractions; without any tactile feedback on the iPhone, it's especially challenging to operate while in motion.

All the more reason for us to take a look at TapTapDial [App Store link]. This $0.99US app makes it easy to dial without looking at your phone and it provides voice, audio, and on screen confirmations, but don't look at that screen!

Describing how to use the app is a lot more difficult than just using it. You can add favorites from your phone book, and the app assigns them a number. If you want to call someone who is in position 3, you tap 3 times. The app will respond audibly with the initials of the person you are calling as a double check. It also will say if the favorite is a home, office, or cell number.

If your list is really long, you can tap on the right side of the screen to go through your list in increments of ten, so if you wanted to call person 31, you would tap 3 times on the right, and once on the left. If you make a mistake, simple swipes left, right, up, or down will move you around your list and provide other navigation functions inside the app. Once you have the person you want, a swipe up or down initiates the call.

You can even dial numbers that aren't in your address book, by tapping on the lower half of the screen. 6 taps dials 6, 3 taps dials 3, and soon. I think this feature is better for the vision impaired. Keeping track of all those taps while driving is probably not a good idea.

This is a clever and needed app that is, as I said, much easier to use than to explain. Some people will get quite addicted to it, and it will certainly result in safer roads and highways. I'd just make sure you have the app up and running before you get in the car, otherwise you'll be doing something dangerous just to get it up and running.

I don't really have any suggestions for the app, other than I think the GUI is not very attractive or contemporary to my eyes. Of course, if you're using the app correctly, you're not looking at it anyway.

Here are some screen shots of TapTapDial in action:

There is no shortage of iPhone dialers. Most work by voice, some by tapping a picture of your contact. Now we get Sensi Dial, [App Store link] an iPhone program that uses gestures to dial your contacts. Gestures? Yep. The idea is with gestures you don't have to look at your phone to reach a contact. Gestures can be taps on the screen or swipes, or a combination of both. You open Sensi Dial, and add the contacts from your address book that you want to assign gestures to. Then save them, and tap the dial button. Use the gesture you assigned to a particular contact, and it gets dialed. You can program in a pause so you have time to bail out of a mistake. If the program isn't sure which contact you mean, it will display multiple contacts and let you tap on the right one.

It's an interesting idea, and the program selling point is that you don't have to look at your screen, which is nice for driving. The reality is that you may have to look at the screen to pick the correct contact if there are multiples, and at least take a glance to see if your phone is calling the right person. As you feel more secure with the program, you may not have to look as much.

I gave Sensi Dial a try, and it pretty much worked as advertised. The tricky part is remembering the gestures you assigned to a person. I wouldn't think you would want a big list of contacts assigned to this app, or you may be swiping when you mean to tap or the other way around. On the screen shot you can see that the third number on the list is composed of two taps, two swipes, and a tap. You can either remember that combination, or just make 2 taps and see all the contacts that start that way. To clear the contacts and start over you shake your phone.

Reviews of the program from users are generally enthusiastic, although the developer is offering a free copy to buyers who write a review for the app store. That might be putting the old thumb on the scale a bit.

Sensi Dial is certainly an alternative way to make a call. It's $1.99US at the App Store. Think about if this kind of method works for you, and be sure to investigate the other dialers available. I think there are at least ten, most using voice. If gestures seems the way to go for your particular use, tap and swipe away.

Ah, Woz would be proud. MacMerc's Brian Burnham has written a tutorial detailing how you can turn your iPod into a phone dialer (is iPod phreaking far away? I think not). It works because analog phones use a series of tones to decipher what numbers you are inputting, so you simply play those same tones through some speakers, via your iPod, and BAM! The iPod dials for you.

[via Make]