Firstly, Tiny Flashlight. One touch of the screen turns my phone into a very effective torch. It turns on the camera's LED flash, which is very bright. No more trying to find things you've dropped by the vague light of your phone screen! Hurrah! Obviously it does eat up the battery, but not as quickly as I was expecting.
Next up, First Aid by British Red Cross. Although I haven't used it very much yet, it's just so reassuring to know that I've always got a first aid guide with me. I don't have to worry anymore about forgetting to do something in a first aid situation. I can just look it up! It's clear, concise and practical and has helpful videos and FAQs. There's also a button at the top you can tap if you find yourself in an emergency situation, rather than having to look at menus while panicking. Though I would like to say that it's not a substitute for proper first aider training; it's just a back-up.
The next one is also a geeky first aid app. It's called Instant Heart Rate, and it's amazingly clever. You put your finger lightly over your phone's camera and hold it still. The phone can detect the tiny changes in light reaching the camera as the blood in your finger pulses through, and gives you your heart rate! Ain't technology marvellous? You do have to keep still though, so with casualties it might well be easier to take the pulse the old-fashioned way, but it's still pretty damn cool!
MusicGrid is a good one! It's basically a Tenori-on, designed to be an instrument that anyone can play. when you start it up it looks like a 16 x 10 grid of buttons. Vertically there are ten different notes, and the sixteen across is time. So when you touch the button in the bottom left-hand corner the lowest note plays. If you touch the lowest button second from the left it plays the lowest note again straight after it. If you then press the button third from the left and second from the bottom it plays the lowest note twice and then the next lowest note, and so on. You can use any combination of buttons you like. You can play rhythms, chords, scales, harmonies... Once the player has reached the end of the 16 seconds (or whatever the unit of time is) it loops back round and starts again. By changing the notes as it plays you can change the tune. It's a lot of fun.
Another music-related one now, Shazam. Start that up on your phone and it'll tell you what song is playing! Genius! No more having to ask your friends "What's this song again?" and trying to remember the answer so that you can download it when you get home, no more trying frantically to commit the lyrics to memory so that you can google it later; this little baby will tell you the song title and the artist (and then, obviously, try to sell it to you). It's not completely foolproof - if it can't hear the song well enough you won't get an answer, but I've used it successfully in some pretty crowded bars before. It's pretty good on obscure stuff too. If it's been recorded, Shazam seems to know about it. Hurrah!
And finally, My Bus Edinburgh. This app tells you when your bus is coming. Excellent! Very practical. Especially in a cold place like Scotland where you don't want to be hanging around at the bus stop for longer than necessary. You can save your most-used bus stops which makes it very quick to use. Though I will say that it's annoying that the app doesn't give you access to bus timetables for planning ahead.
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