Omaha Steaks Steak Time

Well this is cool. Omaha Steaks has created its own app for all the steak lovers out there. It’s free and comes with tons of features to help you cook steaks to perfection.

The recipe section of the app is full of every type of steak you can think of, complete with ingredients lists, instructions and pictures to help you out. One cool feature is that the app will automatically generate a shopping list based on the recipes chosen to take with you and check off as you buy ingredients. Additionally there’s a collection of how-to videos to help you out, connecting directly to Omaha Steaks if there are any questions. The coolest feature by far though is the steak timer. The steak timer automatically tells you when to add steaks to the grill to ensure that all of the steaks are done at the same time, regardless of the preferences of your guests. The app beeps at you each time a steak is supposed to be added to the grill and shows a progress bar of all of your steaks, letting you know when to flip and remove them as well.

If you’re a steak lover, check this out. It’s a free app that’s well designed and will definitely help all the home cooks, regardless of skill level.

-Tim

TapTrace

If you’re lucky, this app will be of no use to you at all. If you happen to lose your iPhone or have it stolen, however, you’ll be glad you have it. TapTrace allows you to send a message to your phone via its website, which will appear as a push notification. When the person who has your phone taps “View,” the app loads and immediately starts beaming its location back to Tap Trace’s servers. You can see the location of the phone on the website’s map and also see any messages from sent from the phone’s user.

If you don’t want to pay the full price for MobileMe but would still like to have a feature similar to Apple’s phone tracking, this is a cool app to check out.

-Isaac

Hidden Sky

Hidden Sky is a neat little augmented reality app that overlays satellite locations and paths onto the sky as seen through the iPhone camera. For those that don’t know, augmented reality is a relatively new genre of apps that superimpose app-generated images onto camera images to “augment” the reality of the user as seen through the iPhone. In this case, Hidden Sky lets the user “see” satellites as they move through space. Objects can be selected from a database of over 1000 satellites to either be displayed through augmented reality or plotted onto a 2-D map for easy path comparison. Additionally, the app can display a multitude of data about the selected object and iPhone just for fun.

If you don’t mind dropping the $2.99 to download the app, Hidden Sky will provide you with some nifty educational entertainment for those boring days outdoors.

-Tim