There's an app for that??????????

[blucher]

Confession app for iPhone approved by Catholic Church

Confession app: A Catholic bishop has given his imprimatur to an iPhone confession app that helps prepare penitents for their time in the booth.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0208/Confession-app-for-iPhone-approved-by-Catholic-Church

The app is called "Confession: A Roman Catholic App," and it received an official imprimatur ? basically a seal of approval ? from a bishop, a church bigwig. As the app's description stated, this "is the first known imprimatur to be given for an iPhone/iPad app."

The new app is designed to prepare one for the Rite of Penance, in which a person goes before a priest and confesses to sins in the hopes of a reprieve from damnation.

The 10 weirdest uses for a smartphone

10. Solving a Rubik?s Cube
The current generation of iPhones and Android phones have processors that are about 500 times faster than the computer onboard the Apollo Lunar Module (with the added benefit of not weighing 70 pounds). All this computing power can be used to tackle one of humanity's most vexing problems: the Rubik's Cube.

9. Creating fine art
Brushes, an app for the iPhone and iPad, is quickly becoming a favorite of artists, with more than a quarter million downloads.

The app was even used to draw a New Yorker cover in May 2009. The artist, Portuguese illustrator Jorge Colombo told the magazine that he really likes the Undo feature. ?It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast," he said, "it gets rid of all the hesitations.?

8. Avoiding the fuzz

If our reading of the US Constitution is correct, you're allowed to drive your car as fast as you want, wherever you want. Regrettably, many municipalities have not acknowledged this inalienable right, and they have found that infringing upon it can provide a steady stream of revenue.

Enter Trapster. This app, available on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry platforms, allows users to submit speed traps and share their locations with other members, of which there are over 10 million.

7. Performing live music on the subway

In October, the Brooklyn rock quartet Atomic Tom posted a video on YouTube of the band performing their song "Take Me Out" on the B train in New York City, using nothing but musical instrument apps on their iPhones.

The video got two million views in the first week, and the single rocketed its way on to iTunes top 100 chart.

6. Piloting an augmented-reality drone quadricopter

If you're like most people, you're probably wondering what to do with your drone quadricopter. Well, wonder no more: There's an app for that.

The Parrot AR.Drone (not a typo) is a remote control four-rotor helicopter outfitted with cameras and sensors that can be controlled with an iPhone, and iPod Touch, or an iPad. You fly it by tilting your device. You can also play air combat games against other quadricopters, with your iPhone providing augmented reality in the form of crosshairs and tracer bullets, providing hours of fun.

5. Monitoring earthquakes

Do you want to contribute to earthquake science but can't be bothered to get an advanced degree in geophysics? Now you can just let your smartphone do all the work.

Researchers at Berkeley have developed an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure the intensity of an earthquake. The app, called iShake, reports jostling to a central computer that will compare your phones movements to those of other nearby phones, creating a map that shows the strength and location of the quake.

4. Solving Sudoku puzzles

Ride on any subway train in America and, unless there's a live band performing on their iPhones, you'll see a whole lot of people hunched over their Sudoku puzzles. We won't pretend to know what these puzzles are actually for, but we assume that people send in their completed puzzles as part of a massive distributed computing project designed to end poverty. Only that could possibly explain the vast amounts of mental energy that people expend on it.

3. Annoying teenagers

With their incessant texting, hip-hop ring tones, and superior technological skills, it's pretty easy for teenagers to annoy you with their cell phones. Well now you can annoy them right back, with an iPhone app appropriately named "Annoy-a-Teen."

It turns out that, just around the time that people lose the inclination to roll their eyes when asked to take out the garbage, they also stop being able to hear tones at frequencies above 16 kHz or so. Using the Annoy-a-Teen app, you can set your phone to emit a tone that is silent to you, but supremely irritating to them.

2. Piloting a satellite

In an attempt to prove that you don't need a lot of money to make a functioning satellite, British researchers have developed one that has a smartphone as its brain. The STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator), which weighs just 8-pounds, is cheaper than your average family car. And yet, unlike the average family car, it goes into space.

According to the technology website TechNewsDaily, the satellite will be piloted by an Android smartphone, which has a software suite that "incorporates advanced guidance, navigation and control systems, as well as pulse plasma thrusters to propel it through space."

1. Blowing out a candle

We normally think of our phones as operating solely in a digital environment. If you want your phone to actually manipulate the physical world, the thinking goes, you need to link it to a machine with moving parts, say, a Lego Mindstorms kit or a remote control flying helicopter.

But then, every once in awhile, an app will come along that pierces the veil separating cyberspace from the rest of the world, leaving you slackjawed in ontological bewilderment. Blower, which turns your phones speaker into the world's worst personal fan, is just one of those apps.
Just watch.....

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2011/0201/The-10-weirdest-uses-for-a-smartphone/Blowing-out-a-candle