Instapaper

Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet will change (for the better) how you consume content online. The iOS app is exactly what you need to read the content you’ve saved and nothing more. It’s beautifully minimal.

IMDb

Just wow. The developers of this little gem have almost ensured I’ll never visit their website again.

Amazon

I was hooked the first time I made some significant purchases while traveling 80+ mph down I-80. Massive value.

Kayak

This app has tons of use cases, but the flight tracker alone makes it worth its weight in gold. Realtime updates on the status of your flights? Yes, please!

Strategery

An addictive game akin to risk.

iSSH

Best of breed SSH application. Perfect when you’re in a pinch.

Reeder (iPad)

Seriously gorgeous interface for your Google Reader feeds. I literally wait until I’m around my iPad to check my RSS now. It’s that good.

iOctocat

The best way to keep up with open-source activity on GitHub.

Dropbox

I’m sure you already know about Dropbox. Unsurprisingly, their iOS app is great too.

USA Today (iPad)

Even old people would ditch their paper versions of the USA Today if they had this application on hand. Sometimes I check up on the news just to use it.

NPR (iPad)

Peruse and listen to tons of NPR content. So good.

Twitterific (iPad)

Despite the constant Twitter API Errors, this is one of the best feeling Twitter clients I’ve ever used. It takes advantage of the iPad’s form factor in every way.

Google Earth (iPad)

This app is nothing short of amazing. It literally puts the world in your hands as you tap, pinch, and spin the world around with ease. This is future stuff, and we are fortunate to be able to use such technologies.

Sorry for no direct links, but I was too lazy to fetch all the iTunes URLs for the apps. Just run a search in the App Store and you’ll find them with no problem.

Do you have any iOS apps that you absolutely love? Please let me know as I’m always on the lookout for great software.

1) Download and Install Paros

Grab the download from the Paros site. Your install process will differ depending on your O/S, but they’ve provided some install instructions here. Everybody will need the Java Runtime Environment 1.4 or above.

2) Configure Paros

Once installed, launch Paros and find the configuration options (on OS X they are under Tools -> Options). Paros is configured by default to listen on localhost only, but we are going to route our iPhone’s traffic through Paros, so we need to set it to listen on the IP address of the interface connected to the same LAN as the iPhone.

My LAN’s network is 1.1.1.0/16, so I’ll configure the Local Proxy address accordingly:

That should be the only setting that we need to fuss with. Paros is all set and listening on port 8080, let’s configure the iPhone to route its traffic through our proxy!

3) Configure iPhone

On the iPhone, open the “Settings” app and navigate to the Wi-Fi page. Once there, edit the settings for the wireless network you are currently connected to (this needs to be the same network where your proxy is running). To do this, click the little blue arrow on the right side of the screen.

Now, scroll all the way to the bottom of the settings page and change the “HTTP Proxy” setting to manual. Enter the IP address and port number of your Paros Proxy.

All set! Now all web traffic to and from the iPhone is routed through Paros. Let’s go see what we can see.

4) Using Paros

The main section of Paros is the “Request/Response/Trap.” As the iPhone talks through Paros to Internet sites, it will display the iPhone’s request and the server’s response. The “trap” functionality allows you to stop either the request or the response and view/modify it before sending it along to the recipient. Trapping is very cool, and why Paros is used for security auditing, but for our purposes we just want to see what is going on, so I won’t explain it any further.

For now, let’s see what happens when we fire up my iPhone’s “App Store” app:

In the bottom section of the screen is the history viewer. There we can see that my iPhone made 4 requests to different servers ( 3 GETs and 1 POST):

Highlighting the first GET in the history list shows its details. The iPhone’s HTTP request header looked like this:

One noteworthy tidbit is that the iPhone is sending a custom header (X-Apple-Connection-Type) which tells the server that it is connected to WiFi. Next, let’s take a look at the server’s response:

Notice that in the response we see both the headers that the server returned AND the response data itself, in this case an xml plist file.

Sniffing traffic like this can help you understand how different iPhone apps work behind the scenes or it can help debug interaction for an app that you’re writing. Hope this helps you get started!