AppBox Lite

HURRY UP $4.99 APP IS FREE FOR LIMITED TIME!!! With the iPhone’s limitation on only allowing 144 applications to be installed at once, it’s definitely good to see 10 miscellaneous utilities here grouped into the one shell. (In case you were wondering about the name, ‘9-Toolbox’ only offers nine utilities on its main screen, with a tenth held over as a ‘bonus’!). And, using the iPhone’s native user interface elements cleverly, each of the elements here is actually quite well done.

What you see is very much what you get with 9-Toolbox – the opening screen/menu attractively presents the various utility functions on offer. What each does is mainly self-evident, but I’d like to highlight a few of my favourites. ‘Currency’ is, of course, a currency converter, but it gets brownie points by going online regularly to get updated rates for you. ‘Holidays’ calculates (or looks up?) the dates of the major national holidays for half a dozen major countries (e.g. ‘When is the Spring Bank Holiday in the UK?’) and should be a real time saver.

‘Date Calc’ and ‘Days Until’ are somewhat trivial, while ‘Loan’ and ‘Tip calc’ take the donkey work out of some macroscopic and microscopic financial transations. ‘Inclinometer’ is something of a gimmick, showing off the sensitivity of the iPhone or iPod Touch’s accelerometer rather than pretending to be a professional spirit level. ‘My Girl’s Day’ is rather more useful, at least to anyone in a relationship – while you might not want to talk about the subject in detail, knowing/estimating your wife or girlfriend’s monthly period dates can save embarassment all round and perhaps even prevent an unwanted (or help create a wanted) pregnancy!

The ‘Units’ utility is in the classic units conversion mould, although it’s slightly limited here to just ‘Area’, ‘Length’, ‘Pressure’, ‘Temperature’, ‘Volume’ and ‘Weight’, with the latter only knowing about USA weights and not the UK versions. Still, the interface is supremely clear and it’s trivial to adjust the from/to units and enter amounts where needed.

Tapping on the developer’s logo brings up some help and the aforementioned ‘Bonus app’, ‘Price Grab’. This does a good job of solving the classic supermarket dilemma: “Is it best to buy a pack of 8 for £28.99 or the five pack for £20.99?”. As the developer thinks of extra bonus apps, it would be better to reformat the main screen to allow 12 slots, I think, despite the rather limiting (in hindsight) name.

A fabulously useful utility collection with very few weak points. My recommendation?: grab this and wait for future updates – I like the way this developer works.