New Burner iPhone Apps

This summer there have been a quite a few applications that appear to be relevant and useful to burners who own an iPhone or an iPod Touch that I want to take a moment to share them with you. In my personal experience, my iPhone has impacted my life so positively, changed my life so completely and is the tool for which I connect with friends and family as well as is the medium in which I express and distribute my art that I feel it's worthwhile to take in-depth look at the current crop of apps available. Here goes:

BMTimer
The most recent app that just came out as of today is BMTimer by Brian Gowdrey. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and you call yourself a burner, then by all means this is the number one app to get. It's just a simple countdown timer that's very similar to the dinky one they've got on the home page of the official BM website. So when I say simple, I mean bare bones basic. All you have to do to get it work is just click the effigy (like I just did now) and voila! At the time of this post BMTimer tells me it's 61 days until the Man® burns. Perhaps I should really describe this app as "bare bones basic and boring" but hang on just a minute. While indeed it would be awesome sauce and score 5 strips of bacon if it had a stopwatch feature that counts down the actual minutes and seconds what I really, really like about this app is that -- in keeping with the 10 Principles and therefore the ethos of Burning Man -- it is a gift and so therefore it is free to download in the iTunes store. Go on and get yours today!

Burning Man 2008
Also available in the iTunes store is a paid app called "Burning Man 2008 - A Photo Essay by Matthew Freedman". First off, it's not really an app per se. It's really more accurate to describe it as a coffee table book like it says in its description in the iTunes store. It features 300 photos that Freedman took himself in 2008 and includes three essays he wrote. It's worth mentioning that this app/coffee table book's forward is written by Burning Man's power behind the Hat, namely Marian "Maid Marian" Goodell who is the director of Business and Communications for the Black Rock City LLC, the company that produces the Burning Man festival. That is to say this app is endorsed and carries the BORG's seal of approval. Be that as it may some will find this an opportunity to drink more KoolAid while others may see this as corporate propoganda. However you choose to see it, remember to take responsibility for that which you choose to take into your conciousness and manifest in your reality, hippie.

Taking a moment to compare 'Burning Man 2008' with 'BMCountdown' it's clear that way more effort has been put into the former than the latter. It comes loaded with more information and contains some very lovely imagery of Burning Man. But I don't think it's really fair to compare the two based on these merits alone. I mean first of all 'Burning Man 2008' sells for $3.99 so I have to be honest and say while it's a nice little coffee table book on my iPhone, I wouldn't pay money for it. Instead I would and do enjoy literally thousands of more photos by hundreds of other photographers by simply having downloaded Flickr's free app and running a search for "Burning Man". By doing it this way, I get to see more photos from all the years of the event and not just last year's alone. And I can do it for the low, low price of free.

Kindle for Iphone
I'm on a roll with free apps and this may be due to part to the fact that I'm a starving artist that's currently unemployed so needless to say, money is tight for me (and for many other burners like me) in these economic times. With that, I'm going to suggest that if you want more of a text based book about Burning Man as opposed to pretty pictures then download the Kindle for iPhone app (this is the "free" part) and pay $7.99 (this is the "gotcha" part) for the digital version of the book "This is Burning Man" by Brian Doherty. This book is by far the most comprehensive writing about Burning Man that details the history and evolution of the event from its beginnings in 1986 up until 2004. The pros of getting the digital copy of this book is that it ain't heavy and it all fits nicely in the palm of your hand. The cons are that Doherty can't actually autograph this one like he's done for my paperback edition but oh well. If you don't want to shell out $7.99 for your own digital copy, you can borrow it from your local library for free. It's still a great book and you should read it regardless of what you paid for it or its method of delivery be it pixels or paper.

Halfway between the price point of $3.99 and "free" comes another burner useful app called TentFinder that costs $1.99. TentFinder purports to be the "ultimate music festival companion". I do not personally own this app so to review it would be unfair. But I will say that it aims to help you find your tent when lost at a music festival by apparently using GPS and a compass to guide you home. One review of TentFinder that I read on a blog said: "Great idea, bought this for global gathering and tested it out. Works well." However in another review in the iTunes store the user had just the opposite experience, giving it a rating of one star and wrote a not-so-glowing (but I think very informative) review. You be the judge and check it out for yourself. But I'd love to hear what you think so send me an email privately or post a public comment on this blog post and let me know.

That's it for this summer's crop of iPhone apps. I'm looking forward to more wonderful, useful and elegant applications as this technological platform unfolds as a tool of expression and innovation for other burner developers, programmers, and new media artists. It will also be very interesting to see how the apps as featured in this post develop and evolve in upcoming versions and revisions. Finally, for what's it's worth, I'd like to remind you that both the audio and video podcasts of BURNcast are available for free in iTunes. It's my gift to you. So fuck your day! :)