Love to use your iPhone to listen to music, pick a restaurant or even find out which golf club you should use at Augusta National’s 18th Hole?  Of course you do, and so do I…Well, if by ‘Augusta National’ you mean ‘Greenlake Pitch and Putt’ then you and I are kindred spirits; making leisure activities that much easier is what the iPhone was made for.  But keeping our kids and loved ones safe?  C’mon, the iPhone can’t possibly do that, can it?  Well now, thanks to ThinAir Wireless, it can.  Enter the Offender Locator iPhone App.

Available in the iPhone App Store for the last two months, the Offender Locator offers peace of mind to parents and relatives alike.  It comes in both a free and paid version, both of which allow the user to type in their address and view a map of their neighborhood with red pin-pricks where registered sex offenders live.  The difference between the free and paid versions seems to be minimal, though the free version has limits on the amount of times a day that you can access it as well as a more limited database to pull registries from.  If you are truly interested in peace of mind and not just looking to freak out your friends who recently became homeowners (no one wants to see a map of their new home surrounded by more red pins than if they were at a Maoist rally) then I would suggest springing for the paid version.

The app is limited by the information that is available in each state’s sex offender database. This means that if you live in Seattle like I do the information available to you could be years out of date - do I really need to mention how long it has taken us to get Light Rail?  Anyways, it costs $0.99 - I’m sure you would rather spring for this app and sleep a little better at night rather than use that money to buy a pack of Sun Chips and end up with French Onion breath, right?