Since I discovered my MacBook’s MagSafe connector had died, I’ve been computerless. Now granted, that’s only been three days, but for someone who lives on their machine it’s a pretty big deal. Thankfully though, I’ve survived admirably. How ? Thanks to my iPhone, that’s how !

Here are a selection of applications that have made my iPhone a relatively solid computer replacement for MOST things.

SimplyTweet

My current Twitter application of choice. I’m lucky enough to be a beta tester for SimplyTweet 2.0, and it’s very good indeed. Having been a Tweetie user for what feels like forever, it was going to take something special to drag me away, so well done SimplyTweet !
So what makes this Twitter application better than the others ? First up, we have push notifications for both @ mentions and Direct Messages. Yes there are other push Twitter apps, but this is the first fully featured client to support it.
When you load the app to read your pushed Tweets you’ll find an app with more options than you can shake a stick at. Want an address book of all your Twitter contacts to ame those #followfriday tweets easier? Done. Want a full conversation view to follow tweet replies easier ? That’s done too. With SimplyTweet installed I don’t miss Tweetie on my MacBook.

OmniFocus

There isn’t really that much to say about OmniFocus – it’s been the task management application of choice for many since the App Store launched last year.
The iPhone version of OmniGroup’s GTD app even has a couple of features its big brother doesn’t. The best has to be location aware contexts. Once set up, stabbing at the apprpriate button tells OmniFocus to find your current location and show task that have contexts close-by. The best bit ? Thanks to 3.0’s in-app Google Maps, OmniFocus can also show these tasks on a map, complete with pins. Brilliant !
The one downside I see right now is the lack of notifications. I’d like some sort of push solution where OmniFocus will pop-up a window reminding you of a start or due date being reached. OmniGroup say they are working on something long those lines, though I fear it won’t work quite as I hope.

NetNewsWire

If you’re anything like me, you have more than a few web sites you frequent looking for news, be it tech, current affairs or sport etc. If you’re a lot like me, you’ll have all these sites’ RSS feeds in your favourite RSS reader. NetNewsWire brings RSS to the iPhone with one killer feature: syncing.
My Mac client for RSS is also NetNewsWire, and I have both apps syncing through Newsgator, meaning if I mark a news article as read on the iPhone, it’s marked as read on the Mac too. Obviously this works both ways too.
Without NetNewsWire I’d find myself having to manually check web sites one by one, and that would get very old, very fast.

Evernote

Evernote’s nothing new, it’s been around a while now. The Evernote iPhone app recently had a pretty hefty update, and it’s awesome !
There are so many changes I’m not going to go through them all in detail here. What I will do though is ask you to watch a great video I found on Evernote’s blog. Well worth a watch.

In short, we now have:

• Advanced searching
• Better syncing
• Landscape view – all your notes in thumbnail form
• Instant grouping

So there you have it. That’s just a handful of the applications I use daily, and have made it possible for me to survive without a Mac without being completely out of touch and the world coming to an end. There are others I could have listed such as BeeJive IM, Facebook and Blogpress. Apple was right, there really IS an app for just about anything !

What about you? Could you live on your iPhone for a few days?