My favorite weird little apps

As the year wraps up, I wanted to jot down some quick reviews of the lesser known apps that I've come to rely on in my daily life. I looked at my phone's apps and listed things that are very good at doing one thing well. In no particular order, here they are:

Social apps

These are Mastodon apps I use almost daily, and since Mastodon is unique in how it is set up and run, it promotes a bunch of people developing little apps that focus on one thing for the network.

Phanpy

This is clearly the best mastodon client there is and one of the only web-based apps that surpasses what you can do even in a dedicated iOS app. I often wonder why other social app makers don't just buy Phanpy off the single developer creating it and incorporate the cool unique features into their own apps. If you use Mastodon, this is definitely worth creating a shortcut to their web app on your phone.

Tusks

Searching is basically non-existent in Mastodon land, so this is a great for personal use. It is pitched as a way to manage your draft posts but it also lets you search everything you've ever said on Mastodon using your own archives, which comes in handy when you've posted thousands of things over the past few years. About once a week I launch this to see what I already said about a topic in the past or if I remembered to post about it at all.

Croissant

This is pretty much the only way to cross-post to multiple non-twitter networks, and it does it well. Hopefully they add a desktop and web app soon because when I want to use this with a real keyboard, I end up using the MacOS/iOS mirroring features to run it as an iPhone app on my desktop.

Honestly I still don't know why I ever post to Threads, and usually I only break out Croissant for big jokes or things I want to promote to all three networks I'm on, but it's good at that.

Entertainment apps

These all help me when I'm having fun or enjoying going out.

Callsheet

So much better than IMDB for so many reasons. I love the fun bits like how it shows the age of every actor when they shot the movie or show. I pay for this and it's fast as heck, way quicker than using IMDB to figure out who was that guy in that thing and if he was the same guy in the other thing? IMDB used to constantly barrage me with sign-in and ad pop-ups to the point I hated using it, while Callsheet never gets in your way.

Callsheet is also unexpectedly fun when you figure out Carrie Fisher was only 23 in the Blues Brothers even though they dressed her up as middle-aged, or that Ray Charles was still in his 40s during the filming!

LunaSea

It would take me far too long to explain what this app does, but the gist of it is that it wires up all the weird little guys I use when searching usenet for files, and it controls my Synology home file server from anywhere and it's basically black magic at what it does. From anywhere on earth, I can search for a movie or TV show and have it downloading to my Plex server within 30 seconds, and it's absolutely killer at that.

Morty

This is the app I didn't know I needed until I found it randomly last month. I'm not super big into doing escape rooms, but for the rare times I do them, I have a lot of fun.

Someone made an incredible app with detailed reviews, ratings, and ways to connect to every escape room in the US. I had no idea there were so many small business escape rooms near me and with Morty, I can reserve a spot from my phone and bring a bunch of friends and family and know ahead of time that we're going to have a pretty good time based on the existing reviews. It's a game changer, and one I would happily pay for if I could (I think their business model is charging escape room owners instead).

Utilities

This is the grab bag category of things that help me stay safe and keep the lights on.

Tailscale

I've already written tons about this app, but it's the glue that holds my entire online world together. Just amazing that it's free for single-person use, I load it onto everything so that apps (like LunaSea) can all talk to every device and server I control, and all from my phone. It lets me do amazing things like talk to any device on my home network from anywhere on earth, even the things I can't run Tailscale on.

Weather On The Way

I happily pay for this app because it's killer on long road trips, letting you know exactly what the temp and weather are like at various points on your journey, including every mountain pass that might have some dodgy weather. This app has come in clutch so many times on long road trips that it's worth paying $20/year for it.

Current Altitude

Maybe it's the natural urge as a Dad to always want to know exactly what elevation and GPS coordinates that I'm currently at, but when I travel I launch this every few hours. Along with Weather On The Way, it really helps to know how high of a mountain pass you're headed up, especially when weather apps inform you of what the snowfall levels are at.

ICECO

This year I bought a cute little electric fridge for my jeep to keep beverages and lunch cold while out on trips or shopping, and to my surprise its own bluetooth app to set its temp and monitor the performance comes with a CarPlay app, so you can control the fridge entirely from your driver's seat. Totally unexpected but really nice to see and worth mentioning that they went the extra mile for this.

Bambu Handy

Now that I'm a 3D printer guy, I run this app daily to cue up all my 3D prints, and seek out new things to print.

It's clearly got the look of an app made for a Chinese market that had English slapped on it, so the click targets are tiny and the text is too small and it ignores your font settings, but it's pretty powerful to be out and about, think about a problem in front of you, and be able to look up a solution on this app, get it printing right away, and even pull up the 3D printer's webcam to see how it's doing.