iCatholicism

Well, I recently purchased my first Apple product, the iPhone 3G, and I was pretty sure I’d like it. But I really like it. I still can’t stand iTunes. I had avoided downloading and using iTunes for any music purposes before getting the phone — for politico-cultural reasons as well as general annoyance — but now with the phone, using iTunes is a must. I can’t understand how the phone itself can be so elegant and iTunes so clunky.

Anyway, when searching for “apps” to download and try, I tried searching for “Catholic” and didn’t get very much. What I did get was mostly pretty bizarre. I’m not sure why one would want to pray the rosary on the iPhone or why one would need an encyclopedia of the popes in one’s pocket at all times. The best Catholic app I’ve seen — and really, the only one useful to me — is Catholic Calendar from Universalis, a free complete liturgical calendar that lets you access today’s, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s Hours, daily readings, and more. (The paid version allows access to the Hours in their entirety.)

Still, most of the apps designed for Catholics are embarrassingly bad. Many of them, though, do look like they’d be popular among the Catholic blogosphere crowd, especially the Heresy Detector app. Interestingly, on the page for the Catholic Calendar app, if you look under the “Customers Also Bought” section you’ll see an app called “iRepublican.” Figures.

Other general apps I’ve found helpful are the Facebook, WordPress, and RssRunner apps. For general music listening, Pandora and Last.fm are great. For songwriters, there are a lot of simple recording apps that are helpful for getting ideas down quick, including the mindblowing 16-track MultiTrack app. For news, the apps for NPR, the New York Times, Democracy Now!, and The Weather Channel are quite good.

For Vox Nova’s iPhone users, have you found any interesting apps for Catholics? 1) What are some of the best? 2) What are some of the worst/most bizarre? 3) What about just generally good apps, not just “Catholic-y” ones?