"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens."

--Isaac Bashevis Singer

I've been a vegetarian for over a decade now, and I'm very familiar with the predicament of being in a new city and not having the foggiest idea where to look for a restaurant which caters to my particular lifestyle choices. When I heard about VegOut, I was immediately hopeful that my iPhone would, once again, provide a solution to a real-life problem. I was not disappointed.

VegOut is powered by happycow.net, an community aggregator for reviews and locations of vegan, vegetarian and veg-friendly restaurants. VegOut provides location awareness, touch navigation and a great-looking front end for this very useful service. It provides ratings, contact info, maps and can filter by your specific vegan/vegetarian preferences. If you're going out with a group of omnivores, or trying to please a vegan in the group but still keep the rest of the carnivores well-fed, VegOut can help. In addition to "current location" search, it can also search any location you specify.

Reviews of a restaurant can be loaded from happycow.net in VegOut's internal browser, and you can easily jump from there to Mobile Safari to add your own reviews, email the page, etc.. I'm discovering new restaurants across the country, and all of my current favorite restaurants have shown up. My newest culinary crush (Soul Vegetarian East in Chicago) came up with a 5-star rating, and I found some reviews of dishes I can't wait to go back and try. VegOut is available in the App Store (iTunes link) for $4.99US.

Champ Bennett, author of VegOut, has announced a 24-hour sale for TUAW readers, dropping the price to $3.99US. You can follow @VegOutApp on Twitter for updates. I don't know how many TUAW readers have sworn off the meat for one reason or another, but this is one handy application for the traveling vegetarian.

The iPhone can certainly make life easier on a number of levels, and that has greatly increased with the advent of the App Store. There are thousands of selections for every taste, even bad taste. In 2007 Steve Jobs told us web based apps would do the trick, but he finally relented and we all benefited from the tremendous success and variety of the App Store.

So, without further ado, here are some little apps you may have missed that have made my i-life better.

• Backgrounds [App Store link] A nice little app that points you to large collections of wallpaper for your iPhone or iPod touch. You can select a category such as Movies or Nature, and browse away till you find something you like. When you are happy, download the image and it will show up in your camera roll. Do the usual tap, and select it as wallpaper and you are ready to go. The pictures are generally of very high quality, and are sourced from Flickr. The developers claim about 50,000 images are there for the downloading. The app is free, although some unobtrusive ads do show up on the margins of the images. There are a lot of other ways to find iPhone wallpaper, but this is quick, easy and free. I like it.
• Open Table [App Store link] Using your GPS (if your iPhone has one), or simply by giving your location, find the nearest restaurants that have, you guessed it, open tables. Then click on the time you want, and you have a reservation. It doesn't get any easier than that. It works in many U.S. cities, and in London, Toronto and Vancouver B.C. I gave it a go here in Southern Arizona, and found many restaurants with tables available You can set up an account at the Open Table website, but it is not required. Without an account you can select the restaurant, the time you want, and give your name, email, and phone number. Then click on 'confirm' and you are good to go. If you do sign up for a free account with Open Table, you can collect 'Dining Reward Points' when you book a meal at a member restaurant. Collect enough points and you can get some hefty discounts off your next dinner. Open Table also works on the iPod touch. Things that should be added are search by type of cuisine, and I think there should be a direct link to restaurant websites. Open Table is free.
  
• Distant Suns [App Store link] I love to star gaze, and here in Arizona we get about 300 clear nights a year. There are several nice star map programs for the iPhone, but I am very partial to Distant Suns written by Mike Smithwick. This program goes way back to a PC version in 1985, and there have been Mac ports for OS9 and now there is an OS X version. The iPhone/ iPod touch version is scaled down from the big computer versions, but has excellent graphics, location awareness, and does the math to tell you what is visible at the moment and what is not. It is an impressive way to explore the universe above you. Distant Suns is $5.99 and well worth it.