As well as my work in the Web Development team at Dennis Publishing, I've started writing reviews of iPhone applications for their "Know Your Mobile" site.

So far I've reviewed Trails and AutoStitch.

More to follow soon.

A quick review roundup on some of the useful apps on my iPhone at the moment (hiding in 6 screenfulls now), and some of their "quirks"...

Twittelator Pro is currently my portable Twitter app of choice, mainly on the "it just works" principle - although it needs some work on failing gracefully when it can't send a tweet - it tends to forget about it instead of saving it for later. One particularly nice feature is its ability to track conversations in a single view, and the search looks impressive.

Spend, which I've mentioned previously, is an extremely useful budgeting app, which is proving extremely useful in both controlling my expenditure and feel confident in spending saved money on a holiday.

The Google Mobile App is currently at the stage where it promises much more than it delivers. Voice searching is slow and unreliable, and the "super-ajax" search hinting just isn't fast enough to be useful. Perhaps with some work it might provide useful voice dialing.

A trio of apps help me get around: Tube London City, London A-Z and MyRail Lite. The Tube app is useful both to provide a map and route plans, and also to give realtime tube status. MyRail Lite (I've not seen a "heavy" version) is an interface to realtime departure boards and service schedules for pretty much every station and surface train in the UK - frankly, a lot quicker to use than the public departure boards at Waterloo at the moment (as the direct access to platforms is currently closed and you have to go via the concourse, which tends to mean walking away from the platform you need to see the board).

But why the A-Z? Isn't Google maps enough? Well, one problem is that you need a network connection to use it; not great for planning ahead underground. And, as has been mentioned elsewhere, google maps have a nasty habit of being under-detailed and out of date. The A-Z is *the* map for London, and having it on hand is invaluable. The app's not perfect, but the joy of iPhone apps is that you tend to get free improvements.

Shazam wins for Cool Points - an extremely accurate (and free) music recognition app (so long as you don't get *too* obscure. I've already bought a couple of albums of music identified this way.

NeoReader is a 2Dcode / QRcode reader, but feels like a problem waiting for a solution. QRcodes aren't widely used yet, and the iPhone's camera doesn't read them very smoothly. That said, it does work.

Tiny Violin is just amusing - for those moment when you really do need to pull out, and play, the world's smallest violin.

Microsoft's first iPhone app, Seadragon Mobile, is extremely impressive; it's essentially an image viewer, but it's designed for vast images, even of gigapixel size - it's a similar technology to Google Earth, and indeed includes various images of the whole Earth, Moon and Mars, alongside access to the online Seadragon and Photosynth archives.

FileMagnet is one of a class of apps that lets you store files - particularly PDFs on the iPhone. This is great for storing things like full tube maps, and the study guides for my rapidly increasing selection of audiobook language guides.

That brings me to one irritation about the iPod app on the phone - getting to audiobooks, particularly multipart audible audiobooks, is clumsy:

Go to 'iPod'
Click 'Back' out of whatever's playing at moment
Click 'More'
Click 'Audiobooks'
Click 'Audible'
Look through a list of things called 'A History of Britain, Vo...'
Try and guess which one is Volume 3, Part 1
Realise the only way you can be sure is to start one of them, and turn the phone sideways to rotate to coverflow view which will give you the full title.

I mean, c'mon guys, you're supposed to be usability experts!

The iTunes store has a few issues that bug me, too, and they're just clumsy.

Trying to find the URI that links to an iPhone app in the store is absurdly difficult; you can either hack around the web or "send to a friend" to yourself. It almost seems that they don't want people to discuss or recommend apps. And the ratings system may as well be designed to draw in harsh reviews. The only time you're encouraged to rate an app is when you're deleting in - probably not the way to get representative reviews from people who actually like the app. For those reviews that are left, there's no way of telling when a review was left - how old it is or which version of the app it relates to - so, as the store gets older, more and more of the reviews are outdated, and the scores unrepresentative of the current version. This is both unfair on the developer, and unhelpful to the user.

I've learned a number of languages in my life, to various degrees of fluency and in various ways; English I learned natively from birth(ish); French I learned in a fairly traditional (albeit early-starting) scholastic fashion from ages 8-21, including various holidays and a year's study in Paris. German, I learned in lunchtime classes in a year, followed by some Uni study before living there for a year, and Spanish I learned, again fairly traditionally, from about ages 13-16.

I enjoy languages, have something of an aptitude for them, and don't particularly like holidaying in places where I don't speak the local tongue.

I've also tried to teach myself (bits of) three languages: Irish Gaelic, Italian and Japanese.

Irish because I love the sound of it (I'm a sucker for the accent) and used to be extremely interested in Irish and Celtic legend. I tried to teach myself this from a book-and-tape, listen-and-repeat combination; I failed, dismally. I couldn't even work out the pronunciation (Irish uses letters and letter combinations to represent different sounds than English does) and, to be honest, I had no real motivation or external use for it. Equally, these systems require specific time; you can't read and repeat on the tube.

Italian, because it's one of only a few countries in western europe where I couldn't converse easily. I hate having to expect other people to speak my language. Plus, my partner loves the country (I'm pretty fond of it too), and we both love the food. If you haven't eaten pizza, pasta and antipasti *in* Italy, you have no idea what you're missing. Motivation here: holidays, appetite, and a constant embarrassment every time I lapse into Spanish. The method: a more modern, primarily audio-based, listen-and-repeat learning set - the Berlitz Italian Premier set, in fact. It's pretty good, reasonably varied and quite effective. You can use some parts on the tube to some extent, but you still really have to spend time on it. (I'm not claiming that this is, in any way, surprising or unreasonable).

Most recently, Japanese, because I love japanese food and used to study Aikido; I wanted to get a bit further than "Raw rice, raw fish, rice wine, 1, 2, 3, yes, no, Sensei and *THUD*" (it's considered appropriate, when impacting the floor clumsily, to try and do so in the correct idiom). I initially got as far as the Aikido forms, formal requests, numbers 1-10, and about 12 types of food. The dojo taught us some of this, my appetite supplied most of the rest of the motivation. However, my partner has also suggested we might visit Tokyo sometime, and I'm under no illusion that my current capability will get me *anywhere*.

Now, I didn't want just another listen-and-repeat box set, because, one, I'm theoretically still trying to improve my Italian that way, and two, I really don't manage to make much time for it. So, when I spotted "Rapid Japanese" on audible.com, I figured it was worth a look. The fact it was on offer for a fiver helped, too.

It's described by the publisher as follows:

"Rapid Japanese: The Musical Brain Trainer, a genuine breakthrough and your easy and effective access to the Japanese language.

Earworms MBT is a revolutionary accelerated learning technique that takes the hard work out of learning. By listening to these specially composed melodies with their rhythmic repetitions of Japanese and English a few times, you pick up over 200 essential words and phrases that will not just be on the tip of your tongue, but will be burned deeply into your long-term memory in next to no time."

OK, I'll be honest. To me, as a lifelong language student, it sounded like some combination of snake oil and hypnopaedia, possibly with added hippyness. And it's quite possible that many people would still think after they've heard it. But I found it extremely engaging, fascinating, and actually quite fun. I have no idea whether it'll actually stick, although I find on second listening that I'm recalling quite a lot of vocab.

The system is best described as a native japanese speaker casually teaching a few words and phrases to a friend. The whole thing's set to music - running the gamut from chill-out jazz, via spanish guitar, to disco-wakka - and this will almost certainly drive some people off it. Repetition is intense, although the voicing is good enough that it sounds casual; the music probably helps with this- after all, we expect music to echo. Whether we expect it to drop off into an echobox periodically is another matter though.

Yet, I like it. As I've said, it's fun, it's casual and it's happy to be inventive and try something very new. It's also very effective at gaining and holding your attention, even on the tube - we're talking miss-your-stop and possibly even walk-under-a-bus, so be warned! It covers 200 or so words in 72 minutes, so it's not massively in-depth, but you can easily dip in and out of it, and repeat it as you like. Grammar is touched on very lightly, but it is there; this is not purely parrot-fashion learning, which is great for a purely audible course. I suspect that having some comprehension of the basic concepts of grammar help, but Japanese has a very different word order and formative structure from european languages, so it'll be new to most people anyway.

I think I'm learning from it; I'm certainly looking forward to the release of volume 2. But it's not without a few faults. The japanese speaker (who, mysteriously, isn't credited) tends to swallow vowels and isn't always perfectly clear. Now, this may well be accurate, but I've no way of knowing. The english speaker (who actually has a UK accent) is clearer - his pronunciation may actually not be so authentic, but it helps. Due to an unfamiliarity with Japanese pronunciation, it can be hard to figure out the words from the speech - although there is fortunately a pretty good downloadable booklet which helps with this.

In summary - it's good. It's a novel idea which could very easily have been badly executed, and from most descriptions sounds like it should have been, but it works, and works well. Earworms are to be congratulated on a highly innovative and well produced product.

I've downloaded the Italian version too - hopefully I'll be able to report back on that soon.

Webcowgirl, while trying to take notes for a review of Wayne McGregor's "Random Dance", noted, with mild frustration, that she "couldn't find the words". As such, I've been deputised to attempt to review a dance performance, something of a first for this journal.

Indeed I suspect it would have been impossible to find the words in this piece; it's defined purely by numbers. It is, I suspect, somewhat rare in having as its ideal audience mathematicians with an appreciation for beauty.

The piece was mathematical, energetic, powerful, captivating, and frequently humorous. Some of the jokes are of extreme subtlety and there are small riddles and references scattered throughout the piece, some so subtle that, in a suitably Heisenbergian twist, they would probably vanish if studied too closely.

The piece starts with an early zootrope-style movie of a running dog; one of the first technical experiments to scientifically study the mathematical properties of animal movement. It's a clever reference, and a gentle introduction into what's to be expected later on.

The stage is framed by what appear to be airfoil-shaped screens on crane-like mounts; these simple levers are used to great effect throughout the piece as projection screens for abstract mathematics, probablities, the human form and the flight of birds. When they rise later in the piece they cast a knowing glance at the Angel of the North, one of the most acclaimed (not to mention both vast and controversial) pieces of industrial art in the UK. The music is varied, powerful; intially baroque and thumping electronic later as it evolves. The lighting is stunning and beautifully designed.

Of course I've not yet mentioned the dancers, and this is intentional. They are a part, the focus, of the piece, but they are far from being its entirety. They are, it must be said, of extreme skill and incredible physique and imagination. They are dressed extremly simply in close white vests and black briefs which allows them to strip down (wordplay intended) to their raw and efficient forms. They dance mathematically; not rigidly, but with the full flexibility of numbers at play, of geometric curves and the algorithms that determine the flight of birds (the sudden on-screen metamorphosis of a string of differential equations into a flock of birds later in the piece is a humorous confirmation of this analysis).

There is, it has to be said, a robotic aspect to the dance, but it is not so much the sharp angular movement of a pre-programmed machine so much as the tenative, reversing movements of a learning intelligent system, reminiscent of cybernetic experiments in which robots teach themselves to walk (and here, perhaps, to dance). The smoothness of the movements increases through the piece to a point of particular monchromatic humour, but the mathmatical or engineer's eye will spot patterns in the energy and action of each small dance action or entanglement, and there's a temptation to try and work out the numeric rules which seem to lurk just below the surface.

These rules later take centre stage when classic geometric figures are projected onto the floor, becoming part of the performance; the dancers move within them, interact with them, are covered in them, following for example the sequence of the Golden Spiral. The effect of a dancer writhing within the squaring-the circle problem, shading lines flowing across his body, is frankly mesmerising. And there's a definite erotic tone in there too; McGregor (and the dancers) are clearly not shy of near-sexual interactions between male dancers, transferring incredible energies.

A few more words can round out this report; but they are hard to place in grammatical context. It is abstract, theoretical, organic, mesmering; certainly collosally demanding of the dancers, but ultimately it is a unique, intense and numeric experience.

1) If you want to transfer your number, ordering your PAC a week in advance would be a good idea. Apparently they last for 30 days anyway. Conversely, if you can't get the PAC before buying, you should be able to transfer your number up to 15 days after starting a new contract (I am told this but am not yet able to prove it).

2) You *can* pay cash for the iPhone, or at least they were allowing it last night.

3) You still have to go through a credit check for O2, which happens after you've bought the phone and while you're activating it via iTunes (for which you'll need address and bank info). What happens if you fail, I don't know.

4) The O2 data package is apparently *genuinely* unlimited, in that it does not have "fair use" limits. These were removed a couple of days before launch.

5) The bluetooth headset is not included. Apparently you can't use bluetooth keyboards with the phone either?

6) The audio jack socket is a standard 4-way (Left,Right, Microphone, Earth) 3.5 phono jack, but there's a thin collar / tube around the socket so you'll need an adaptor to use it with normal ear/headphones. There's an in-store choice of a 7quid Griffin adaptor that doesn't include a handsfree mic, or a 30-something quid one fron Shure that does. Or you can get isolating headphones with a built-in mic from v-moda, which seem decent. Oh, and the button on mic on this last apparently acts to pause music playback in *some* circumstances. There are volume control buttons on the phone itself.

7) Typing passwords (eg mail, WPA) into the device is a nuisance. The keyboard is tricky at first, has no caps-lock, and all passwords are typed in obscured, so you have to *really* concentrate.

8) Safari can crash (and it'll sync a crash report to your desktop to send to Apple), but is generally extremely stable and astoundingly usable.

9) The phone comes with a basic cloth-bag case; first thing I bought, besides the above mentioned headphones (my old isolator pair having fallen apart the day before) was a side-loading belt case and a screen guard. There are plenty of options for accessories at the Apple store.

10) EDGE data transfer really doesn't seem too bad, but then I'm used to an old GPRS? Treo.

11) I don't think you can use an iPhone as a datamodem for a laptop; I'm unlikely to need to try.

12) The email client is pretty good, and can read HTML emails and attached PDFs very smoothly. Mail on OSX however, with which it's supposed to sync, sucks compared to Thunderbird.

If you write PHP code, and want to make any pretence at security, read this book. Clear enough? This book's not cheap at something over £20 for 100 pages, but it's clear and readable. You won't find every potential security flaw in your PHP code in here, but the vast majority are covered and the techniques advised will cover most eventualities. Plus you can follow Chris Shiftett's blog at http://shiflett.org/ to keep up to date.

PHP is often criticised as an insecure language - in fact it's an easy and powerful language that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. In particular, because it's easy to pick up (and I'd recommend it as a first language) it's used by new programmers who aren't security aware. This book isn't ideal for the PHP newcomer - you'll need some understanding of the language, but with that you'll find the content of the book clearly laid out and easy to follow. Even if you're already aware of many security issues, this book will add a couple more and act as an invaluable checklist.

Update It's been pointed out to me, quite accurately, that this book is not a complete guide to securing PHP applications; however I feel that its small size means that developers have no excuse for not reading this, or a more complete, book; reading this should at least make you understand what it is that you need to learn about.