My most favorite iPhone application lately is called "Daylight." You should download it. It's free. And, in this latitude, this time of year, it's a beacon of springtime in the palm of your hand.

Like as I write this, my phone tells me that I have just over ten hours of daylight, not including a little over an hour of twilight for dusk and dawn. If I punch in a date a month from now, I see it will be light here for more than 12 hours. How comforting is that?

For those of you who don't have an iPhone and the app-obsession that comes with it, let the rest of this tech-addicted column serve as a cautionary tale. Those of you who have one will probably understand why "Daylight" made me curious about other apps for Alaska iPhones. I did a search and then scrolled through about 30 or so possibilities that came up.

Right away I liked one called "Salmon Size," which lets anglers determine fish weight, even without an Internet connection. You just plug in length and width. There was also a Sarah Palin photo slide-show. And an Alaska Aces fan cowbell.

"AK Political Contributions" searches federal campaign contributions. I decide to give it a test drive, so downloaded it for 99 cents and typed in names for a half hour or so. I was able to see my parents' campaign contributions from the '90s. And that before the Palin nomination in 2007, then-Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell sent a check to Mitt Romney. In general, most of the info seemed out-of-date or incomplete. I'd recommend saving your cents.

Next, I went through a number of crude mapping apps, including a very simple one from the runner's mecca Skinny Raven, that points out local running trails. There were also a handful of weather-related apps. "US Radars" lets you watch a picture of the weather over Anchorage. There's a National Weather Service app that offers detailed local forecasts.

The rest of the offerings were a grab bag. You can listen to local police and fire radio chatter ("Scanner911"). You can get earthquake and avalanche facts. You prepare for a driving test at the DMV. "Alaska SpeedDate" promises to help you find love. And, you can download several mysteries by local author Dana Stabenow and a couple versions of Jack London's "Call of the Wild."

I was curious about a free app called " LiveAurora" that is supposed to deliver live shots of Alaska northern lights to your phone. When I downloaded, I discovered it was written in poorly-translated English phrases. I couldn't figure out how to make it work and kept getting an error message: "Prease purchase a license as follows:" The rest was in Japanese.

And that was about it. Kind of slim for a town where it seems every other person is staring at their iPhone. I sent out a note to readers looking for their ideas. A number wrote in that they'd like to be able to upload pictures of urban wildlife and plot them on a map. I got a suggestion for Dutch Harbor police blotter app. People also wanted apps that track fish runs, give snow conditions, and auto-start cars. A few suggested an app that would track the amount of your PFD every day and maybe also remind you to apply. Someone wanted a game that involved throwing tourists in with polar bears at the Alaska Zoo. Someone else wanted an app that tracked legislators' movements in Juneau and reported who was buying their lunches.

I called Aaron Morse, one of the state's few iPhone application developers. If you have an iPhone, you might have downloaded his small company's popular iPhone games "Tap Defense" and "Trenches." He's in the process of developing several Alaska-based applications but couldn't give too many specifics, he said. Some were map-related made for tourists. Others were related to conservation and Alaska Native organizations.

I passed along some reader suggestions. A company is launching an app that allows people to post wildlife pictures to a map, he said. It should be available soon. I pitched him the PFD app idea. He laughed. It was all a question of whether people would pay enough to download to cover the cost of developing the app, he explained. Alaska is kind of a niche market.

After we hung up, I kept thinking of more Alaska app ideas. A star mapper. A forest-fire tracker. A bird-sound identifier. A tide book. A coffee-cart locator with ratings. If only I knew how to write code.

Snow fell outside my window. I checked "Daylight" again, scrolling through the months, watching the light blue portion of a pie chart that represents daytime hours slowly swallow up the darkness until it almost disappeared.