Learn to speak French, find out everything you need to know about medicine, and find out the weather in your home town. Here are some iPhone applications that mix functionality with hidden features.
Educational applications have become a central part of the
iTunes' App Store, but they really range between a number of different sub categories. Some of them are encyclopedic in nature,
offer up preparations for certain gate keeping tests, or act as
dictionaries. Foreign Language
assistants have always remained near the top of the Education section, which
shows exactly how important it is for people to escape the trappings of single
language culture. FREE French Tutor has
been one of the most popular of these, probably because FREE attracts people
more than anything else. FREE French
Tutor itself is structured around a quiz format to help teach you different
French elements. These are divided up
into Home and Family, Town and Country, Opposites, Basic Phrases, and
Questions. Each of these is supposed to
address a different area of the French language, and within each quiz you have
the ability to select different quiz types such as Multiple Choice or Write
In. Most of the questions in the FREE
French Tutor tests are pretty easy, but they do their job relatively well. You can save the scores you get from different
quizzes so you know what you are up against next time as you try to
improve. Over all FREE French Tutor is
incredibly limited and includes banner ads in some limited locations. FREE French Tutor is really just the Light Edition
of the more complete 24/7 Tutor series for French at the iTunes' App
Store. Here you can get more specific
and complete tutors for French, as well as other languages like German, Spanish,
and Italian. FREE French Tutor ends up
feeling a little like an advertisement for the other 24/7 Tutors iPhone
applications, and if you do not already know some to work with you will be lost
in general.
The inclusion of medical based iPhone applications may be
one of the great developments on the iPhone.
For many doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals it has
been standard practice to keep mobile devices with them for quick
reference. Here they may have quick
symptom references, drug catalogues, and other software to assist when in
serious work. This is all part of really
bringing technology to assist in proper and adequate healthcare. Web MD has been part of the major bridges
between the world of professional reference tools and the general public, and
Medscape has been a very useful wing of this.
Before downloading the Medscape free iPhone application you must go to
the website and create an account. Once
you do this you will log in to it using the Medscape free iPhone application
and finish the installation process.
This seems like quite a bit of work, but it is worth it for such a
complete service on your iPhone. You can
choose to download the Medscape Clinical Reference articles right to your
iPhone or just access it online using the application. It is usually best to just access it online,
but if you want to use it in a professional setting you may just want to go
with the full download version once you have it installed. Once in the full version of Medscape from
WebMD you will find an easy to use interface that will help you get to the
3200+ articles that they have in the database.
Right from the opening Reference tab you can choose to search for the
information you want or browse sub categories with Drugs, OTCs & Herbals,
Diseases & Conditions, and Clinical Procedures. You can also use the Interaction Checker right
from there, which is incredibly important for those in the healthcare
field. The News tab is nice to get
updates from health news and the CME department does a comparable function. The Medscape free iPhone applications is one
of the best iPhone applications that has been released of one of the best web
services that is available. There are
more complete medical software packages that people could use, but Medscape is
accessible and easy to reference right from your iPhone.
Weather applications have gotten their own section at the
iTunes' App Store, which seems a little specific. The reason for this is that when the internet
became indispensible and began shifting consumers' media consumption from Push
to Pull, weather was one of the first areas to be affected. No one wanted to sit around and wait for the
weather update when they could simply go in and find exactly what they were looking
for from a web service. AccuWeather is
one of the most popular Weather free iPhone applications, right under the
mammoth Weather Channel. AccuWeather actually
works incredibly simply in that you get a base search box where you search for
a specific area. You also have the
ability to use the location services to zero in on your exact location. The search function of AccuWeather is a
little difficult to deal with so you have to be pretty accurate when entering a
location name. Once you actually zero in
on your location in AccuWeather you will find pretty detailed information. You start in the basic Weather tab that will
allow you to look at the weather predictions in various distances of time. You also then get to switch into Radar
imagery of the area and look at any risks that are there because of the
weather. The Video section is kind of
nice if you appreciate traditional weather coverage, but it is not likely the
first place you will go to check weather coverage. Over all this is an above average free weather
iPhone application, but it still could be improved in certain areas. There are other pay iPhone applications that give specific functions from the AccuWeather.com base, but the basic AccuWeather application is the only free version from this service.
