Oink, a new app from Kevin Rose's app development lab Milk, is now available for download in the App Store. Oink is a social recommendation and ranking app that takes a Foursquare-like check-in approach, letting users rate and rank the different items -- instead of places -- that they like.

The main idea is for users to recommend and rate products from different businesses so they can share with friends and spread the word about the things they enjoy. It seems like a really great idea, as long as enough of your friends are using the service, and gives a fresh approach to finding and enjoying items with like-minded people.

Oink is an easy way to rate and rank the things around you. Instead of just rating places, you rate the items inside. You could easily find the most popular items on a menu and see if a friend has tried anything there. Then if there's something you like, it’s just a single press to rate it and share it with friends.

What you can do with Oink:

• Rate items around you and share with your followers
• See all the cool stuff your friends and other users are Oinking
• Find the best things in town (e.g. Best "Pizza" in Denver)
• Find the items at a place (e.g., Best roller coasters at Six Flags)
• Build "cred" in your areas of interest
• Share your Oink activity on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare

Oink is available on the iPhone and iPod touch for free.

App Store Link

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A few interesting patent applications from Apple have recently surfaced, showing they have some bold ideas surrounding Find My iPhone, social-matching, and a way to lock the camera so we can't make bootleg concert recordings and plaster them on YouTube (?!).

Reminder: Apple, like any big company, routinely patents just about anything and everything they dream up, and there's no way to know when, or if, they'll use any them in actual, shipping products. Still, it's interesting to see what they're working on deep inside the secret Cupertino labs...

Follow on after the break for the roundup!

Find My iPhone

First off, Apple has applied for a patent describing a much more control-oriented Find My iPhone feature with additional security and deeper system integration. Find My iPhone currently lets users remotely lock their iPhone, wipe their data, locate the iPhone on a map or send a personalized message to the device.

This is all nice, but Apple may decide to up the ante and provide much deeper control for the corporate and enterprise environment and better assistance for recovering a lost iPhone.

• Selective data scrambling and wiping lets users define whether to scramble certain data or to wipe specific data instead of clearing the entire device. Users can avoid wiping all data by scrambling emails, contacts etc making the data unusable, or selectively wiping only sensitive data while keeping other data intact.
• Unauthorized user detection is a method of detecting when someone other than yourself has tried to access your iPhone after a certain number of incorrect passcodes have been entered. Once the threshold has been met, the iPhone puts itself into a higher security mode with surveillance options for transmitting audio and video from the front-facing camera, thus giving the owner a higher probability of recovering the lost iPhone.
• Limited functionality allows for locking down an iPhone by turning off certain features, letting an unauthorized user perform tasks with limited capability and functions. The owner can the device to disable cellular data, phone, SMS and other capabilities as to not incur charges on their monthly phone bill. It also offers a function to disable VPN capabilities for better protection of corporate data if the device is lost or stolen.

Making friends just got easier

A second new patent application reveals that Apple has some ambitious ideas to make the process of finding friends with similar interests a lot easier. Tapping into location data, interests, books and other data stored on the iPhone will help match you up with other iPhone users with similar interests.

Social networks are a well known phenomenon, and various electronic systems to support social networking are known. Growing a social network can mean that a person needs to discover like-minded or compatible people who have similar interests or experiences to him or her. Identifying like-minded people, however, often requires a substantial amount of and time and effort because identifying new persons with common interests for friendships is difficult. For example, when two strangers meet, it may take a long and awkward conversation to discover their common interests or experiences.

Common interests and experiences of two or more users located close to each other can be identified from content, including automatically created usage data of the mobile devices. Usage data of a mobile device can be created based on activities performed on the mobile device (e.g., songs downloaded), a trajectory of the mobile device (e.g., places traveled), or other public data available from the mobile device (e.g., pictures shared).

All of this would be opt-in to help avoid privacy concerns, but the location-based services are quite interesting to say the least. As an example, if you tend to visit a specific coffee shop in your town, your iPhone could match you up with another iPhone user who also frequents that location. The idea is to make it easier to discover like-minded people and help spark up friendships that wouldn't otherwise be as easy to start.

Recording at concerts is a no-no

Lastly, Apple plans to build a system that will determine when users are trying to record or stream live video at concerts and events, and subsequently turn off camera functionality on the device. It works by using infrared sensors that can tell when people in the crowd are recording and sends a signal to the device to disable the camera. Users would still be able to send and receive text messages, calls, data etc.

That... seem a little "Big Brother" to anyone else?

[Patently Apple, MacRumors, The Sun, thanks Steven!]

RockMelt has released a free iPhone version of its popular desktop app, a social-network, orientated web browser, that integrates with your Facebook/Twitter accounts, to share sites with your friends/followers as you surf, or you can update your social network statuses directly from the app. RockMelt for iPhone, brings all of these to the iPhone.

Since RockMelt uses your Facebook login, the iPhone App offers real-time syncing for your bookmarks, RSS feeds or social networks, between your iPhone and other computer. As well as offering their new "View Later" feature, which allows you bookmark specific items, like sites or tweets which you can read on your computer.

Unfortunately, there is no iPad app, as of yet.

Are you a RockMelt user? Will the iPhone app be replacing your current iPhone browser? Check out screenshots and a video after the break.

[FREE - iTunes Link]

Every week a few of us from team TiPb 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, iPad, or iPod touch related, they’re fair game.

To see what we picked this week, and to tell us your pick, follow on after the break!

Alli's pick: BiteSMS (Jailbreak)

Deserving of a truly in-depth app review, I'm going with Cydia's BiteSMS since I consistently list it as one of my three reasons for jailbreaking. BiteSMS replaces the messaging app, with tons of options (which is why it deserves more attention) including individual contact sms tones.

As you can see from the screenie, it gives you contact pics with the message list as well as on incoming message. Of course, the option I like best about BiteSMS is that it pops up on top of whatever you're doing, so that you don't have to exit a game or an email to respond to a text. And if you go back to your game or email (or whatever else you happen to be doing) and remember something you need to text, you can invoke BiteSMS without exiting the app.

You can trial BiteSMS for about 10 days. When the trial is up you'll be bombarded with adverts, or you can shell out $8.99 and buy it from Cydia. Well worth the cost if you are a textaholic!

Ally's pick: Display Recorder (Jailbreak)

Display Recorder is a wonderful jailbreak utility that allows you to record what is currently being displayed on your iPhone. It's great for bloggers or techies who want to post up tutorials or reviews. It can also be used to show someone how to do something. Another neat feature is connecting it to a web server. There is actually a live mode that will show on a computer screen what you are doing on your phone in real time. This is excellent for demonstration purposes as well.

The only downside to the app is that it doesn't currently have an option to record audio. I've been using the voice memos tool as a convenient way around this for now. It would be nice to see it in an update.

Display Recorder is available via Cydia for $4.99. You can also find out more about it on the Display Recorder website

Andrew's pick: NotifyMe 2

NotifyMe 2 is a great ToDo notification app that utilizes both cloud notifications as well as iOS 4 local notifications. You can input any type of notification you want, categorize (custom categories included) the notification and set a time & date. The customization level of each notification is very well thought out, and includes 9 different notification tones to choose from.

The great thing about this app is that it comes with a desktop web-based client as well (free), which allows you to set up or review any cloud notification on-the-fly if you're at a Mac or PC. NotifyMeCloud will sync any notifications made on the desktop to your iPhone or iPad app.

Speaking of the iPad, NotifyMe2 Control Center for iPad extends the functionality of the iPhone app even more! Or, you can use it as a standalone ToDo app with local and cloud notifications included.

NotifyMe 2 for iPhone is available in the App Store for $5.99, with its iPad counterpart selling for $9.99. Although these prices may seem a little high, the payoff is well worth it given the polish and functionality of this great app. Go grab it now!

[$5.99, iPhone - iTunes link]

[$9.99, iPad - iTunes link]

Brian's pick: Boxcar

Boxcar is the perfect app if you want push notifications for apps such as FaceBook, Twitter and E-Mails. As soon as you get a notification in FaceBook you will be made aware of it via a push notification from Boxcar. If you are a Twitter user, anytime someone mentions you or sends you a DM you will get a push notification informing you of the new message waiting for you. If you are using e-mail that doesn't have push you can use Boxcar to alert you right away of any new messages awaiting in your inbox. This is the perfect app to keep you informed instantly of whats happening in your online life. Best of all the app is free and they have pushed over 100,000,000 push notifications.

[Free - iTunes Link]

Farbod's pick: iFile

iFile is a file manager running under user root. It is available on Cydia ($4.99) for Jailbroken devices such as iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.

It allows fast navigation through the iPhone file system. You can directly view and run files of various types, e.g. various movie files, sound, text, HTML, Microsoft Office files (doc, xml, etc.), PDFs, and various compressed formats. Files can be sent as email attachments. Text files and property lists can be edited. Folders and files can be bookmarked. ZIP packing and compressed file unpacking are also supported. In addition, files can be uploaded and downloaded from iFile's built-in web server.

George's pick: iTorch 4

iTorch 4 turns your iPhone 4’s LED-flash into a standard flash light. When you launch the app, the light turns on and to turn it off there is a single on-screen button. Thats it! Its an extremely simple, yet incredibly useful app. There is an option to shake your iPhone 4 to activate/deactivate as well. The best part about this app is: its FREE! (Warning: constant use of the flash will drain your battery).

[Free - iTunes link]

Georgia's pick: Bomberman

Ever since the Nintendo 64 I have loved Bomberman. Though I have to agree with most people that the controls are not extremely easy to use, it is still quite a fun game.

You are able to run around and bomb the ground in search of more power ups. If you have played and loved the Nintendo 64 version than this game is for you.

It is also enabled with Openfeint.

[$0.99 - iTunes Link]

Leanna's pick: Social for the iPad

Now that it has been confirmed that Facebook will not be making a Facebook app, you may be interested in a 3rd part option. One of my favorites is Social for the iPad. It has the same traditional Facebook look (without the ads) as well as the ability to chat and upload photos. The only thing I've found that Social doesn't allow, is tagging friends in a status update. But if you desire to send private messages, create groups, events, and pages, or check-in at Starbucks, you can do it all with Social. If Facebook on Safari leaves you desiring more, check out Social.

[$1.99 - iTunes link]

Rene's pick: 2010 MacBook Air

It's got to be the new 11-inch Macbook Air. We received one here at TiPb HQ just this week and we'll be putting it through it's paces and seeing just how well it stacks up against our hometown champ, the 9.7-inch iPad. At $999 the MacBook Air is twice the price (baseline models) for half the battery life and it's multitouch trackpad is just not the same as a full multitouch screen, but it has a full hardware keyboard and can run Mac OS X software.

Unlike the original Air it also has a high-density, higher resolution screen and 2 USB ports (and the 13-inch model even has an SD card reader). I used a second generation Air for most of 2009 and was extremely happy with it -- except the battery life and lack of ports. It's still the anti-netbook, with an okay CPU, good GPU, and amazing build quality, but that's just exactly what some people want in their ultra-portable.

Standard configurations come with slower CPU and 2GB of RAM but you can build-to-order with speed bumps and 4GB. And since there's no HD or SSD, only NAND Flash right on the board, it flies. The performance is much better than you'd expect and you often forget just how "small" a computer you're using.

If you want a Mac instead of an iPad and you're not going to be doing pro-level video or similar work, check out the 13-inch MacBook Air. If you don't mind sacrificing size for portability, check out the 11-inch. They're the sexist laptops in the world today and very likely a precursor of where Apple's entire laptop line is headed.

Your pick?

You’re part of the team as well, so jump into the comments and let us know your pick of the week!

Gowalla for iPhone is a social app from some fine folks in Austin, TX that allows you to check-in to locations, see where your friends are checking-in, collect items and complete trips. For those of you not familiar with the whole "check-in" craze, the idea is you travel around town, land at a "spot" such as the movie theater, gas station or restaurant, and then tap the Check-in button. When you do this a couple things happen:

You can...

• Post to Twitter and Facebook
• Add a photo
• Add a quick post
• Leave an item

There are some great social aspects to Gowalla, but let's first talk about items. After installing Gowalla on the iPhone, you receive three items. You can keep and cheris these items in a vault, never to be used, or you can swap for other items at Spots when you check in. You are also randomly given items when you check into locations. I found myself without an item for a few weeks, but fear not, I received two items randomly twice in a day! Other then exchanging an item at a Spot, you can leave an item at that location if now one has. This will give you "founder" status.

What I particularly love about Gowalla compared to it's competition, is that it is not focused on mayorships or point leaderboards. I tend to think I go a out a fair amount and explore the city with my family, but there are some people that go out even more than I do and I will never catch up to them in points. Gowalla's main attraction for me is the item collection feature.

For those adventurous types, there are trips. Trips are not built into the iPhone but are on the website. When you follow these trips, you earn a special badge. For example, I will be visiting Chicago and I am going to try to complete the Chicago trip.

To find friends to share with, Gowalla gives you some tools to can scan your address book, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail, and you can always find by name.

All of this is rendered with beautiful icons and graphics that really allows you to enjoy the experience of the application. The only major detractor for me is that the application is still a little slow, but boy is it pretty...

Gowalla is available now in the App Store for free [Free- iTunes Link]

Pros

• Wonderful artistry
• Check-in
• Trips
• View leaderboard
• Directions
• Save items to your vault

Cons

• Cannot edit Spots on the iPhone
• Slow loading

From the Forums is a great way to see what all of the current hot topics are on the TiPb forums. Today we would like to go over some of the popular sub-forums for those of you who may not be familiar with our forum setup. Becoming a member is fast and free, so if you have not already already done so, head on over and register now.

• iPhone Social & Off Topic: If you are new to the forums and would like to introduce yourself or maybe you want to discuss something that's not iPhone related, this is your place.
• iPhone Help: This is the place to go to post general questions you may have or view countless of other threads that already may contain the answer you are seeking.
• iPhone Apps and Games: This particular forum is a must if you are interested in anything App Store related. Whether you are a developer or a user, be sure to check it out.
• iPhone Jailbreak and Unlock: The title of this one says it all. If you are looking to jailbreak or unlock your device and are unsure of how to go about it, look no further than this forum.
• All iPhone Accessories: You guessed right, all iPhone related accessories should be discussed here.

See you on the forums!

When TiPb posted on Mplayit, being a huge iPhone and Facebook fan, I decided to take a closer look and here's what I found -- Mplayit takes browsing and buying iPhone apps to a whole new level. Mplayit is an application on facebook, or a website on your iPhone, that allows you to find apps, read a description, rating and an iTunes link to download them. Sound familiar? There's more, Mplayit not only does these things well, but also gives you YouTube videos of apps and ways to share the app. In facebook you can share on your wall or send a message. There are also links to share via Twitter or email. On the iPhone, you can share via the mail app.

Apps can also be added to Mplayit's "collections" feature. Simply click the add to my collection link on your favorite app. Mplayit will also "learn" over time what apps to recommend to you based on what you add to your collection. You can search for apps by typing the name in the search box, or you can choose to look at apps based on category.

I am very excited about this new way to browse apps for your iPhone. The added value of video and wide array of sharing options along with collections make this one compelling alternative to the iTunes app store.

Have friends that don't have an iPhone? That's ok, word on the street says that Mplayit will be launching soon on BlackBerry and Android platforms. Check out the screenshots below for examples of the desktop app and iPhone webpage. You can read more about Mplayit on their corporate site, or on Twitter.

BusinessWeek has an article up on Apple and Google considering app-sharing tools and -- hold on, let's deconstruct:

People like apps. "Tell a friend" buttons or, you know, actually physically showing someone a great app is difficult and far too real-world-contract requiring. However, Apple has iPhone 3.0 on the way, and with it -- someone thinks they could enable something that might somehow enable and incentivize app sharing. And Google is considering enabling the same type of "recommendations". Maybe.

Okay. Rewind.

Apps make a lot of money. Apps could make more money if not just the store or developers were selling them, but if users could push them to (at?) each other as well. Sound familiar? To the 5 of you reading who once owned Zunes, it probably does. Welcome to the Social. Just please don't use the term "squirt".

The theory is this. I love me some Peggle. I use a variation on iPhone 3.0's P2P (peer-to-peer) connection technology to "share" Peggle with Leanna and Chris, who will then gobble it up, have tons of fun, and curse me for their loss of sleep time, likely in that order.

It's not a crazy idea, even if Microsoft was already on to it years ago. iPhone 3.0 will already let you invite friends to join in multiplayer games. That could, theoretically, be extended to offer purchases for the game if they don't already have it. Likewise, the BT-range limit could be extended to WiFi network or even cell provider (Oh, hi, AT&T infrastructure!)

To further promote the recommendations/sharing, Apple could -- again theoretically -- offer referral fees if/when the recommended/shared app is eventually converted into a sale. (Of course, the App Store, even under 3.0, doesn't offer demos, so that would likely need to change first).

It's an interesting idea at re-intermediating software sales. Microsoft is already "squirting" among Zune users, which makes sense given their very different, subscription-focused model. But the question is, with Apple being Apple, is it something they would do? Is it something they should?

And don't be squirting no fart apps in our general directions! (Sorry, had to be said!)

[Thanks to the Reptile for the tip!]