Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they're iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they're fair game.
So who's on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!
We have covered the iPhone and gaming from top to bottom here at TiPb. The iPhone still has a lot of catching up to do in terms of the quality of the games and you can also toss in the lack of physical controls as a huge negative. All that aside, for the most part we've felt that if Apple plays their cards correctly, they could be a major player in the handheld gaming wars alongside the likes of Nintendo and Sony.
Not sure when this went live, or how I missed seeing it the moment it did, but the snippet of video on Trism that Apple showed off in their iPhone 3.0 Sneak Peek Event is up in full on Apple's developer site, and it's brought along some friends. The full list includes:
We don't know. BGR originally posted that it had, but has updated with a comment from Sling PR saying they haven't heard from Apple one way or another yet.
It must be music day here at TiPb. Sonos, which we reviewed late last year, just let us know that they've updated their Sonos Controller App for the iPhone, adding a few nifty features which, when combined with iTunes music now being completely DRM-free, adds a whole heap of functionality to an already automagic system:
You're Smule and you've already released the innovative and acclaimed Ocarina app for the iPhone. What do you do for an encore? Why a Leaf Trombone, of course, a "massively multi-player musical game for the iPhone and iPod touch", now available for $0.99 via the iTunes App Store.
We've covered the Gym Technik WebApp before, but now they're back and fitter than ever. Our sibling site, CrackBerry.com has the long list of upgrades, or you can check out gymtechnik.com to sign up.
Now excuse us while we go do 100 sets of 3 min. burpee rounds. Yeah, that's how we roll... In our dreams...
Birdhouse is a hybrid app of sorts. It lets you take offline notes, store them as drafts, and email those drafts individualy or en masse for "backup". The differentiator here is that it's also a multi-user Twitter client that lets you publish said drafts to the internet's favorite 140 character micro-blogging platform. It also lets you visit your Twitter history to un-publish (i.e. trash) tweets if you later regret posting them. (Or if you just want to correct an error and repost, like I just did.)
It may replace Apple's built-in Notes app for hardcore Twitter users, but since it's exclusively a drafting and publishing app, it isn't intended to replace more full featured Twitter-clients like Twitterrific and Tweetie.
A clean, considered, dare I say crisp little application, it will no doubt elicit all manner of oohs and ahs from the Twitteratti, while those not fond of Twitter or uncomfortable being overly artsy about their tweets would do well to shake their heads and move on.
Personally, I'm enjoying it thus far. And more than I suspected I would.
Apple has gone out of their way to point out the cons of multi-tasking background applications -- a claimed 80% reduction in battery life while on standby with a single 3rd party IM client enabled. Push Notification, likewise, has been promoted by Apple as providing a single point of coordination for 3rd party alerts routed through servers on Apple's end.
But unlike the code-once, release-done model of background processing for a single app, Push Notification requires developers to create a server system on their end as well, one that's constantly and reliably available to send alerts to Apple, and scales to an iPhone and iPod touch user base already exceeding 30 million units.
