First Place — JPS

Second Place — Jeff Forde

Third Place — Harm Veenstra

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with One Letter in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Xmas Decorations in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

To view the following gallery as a single page, click here

The Apps

This Weeks' iPhone News on Giz

• A Thanksgiving Message From the iPhone

• Opening Up a Sega Genesis Leads to a Genesis iPhone Dock, Naturally

• This Is How Multitasking Should Work On the iPhone

• iPhone and Android Are Taking Over the (Mobile) Internet

• New Apple Ads Get In on the AT&T vs. Verizon Slapfest

• The Dumb iPhone That Thinks It's a MacBook

• Three-iPhone Ocarina Much More Expensive Than No-iPhone Ocarina

• New Jailbroken iPhone Worm Wants Your Bank Details

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Black Friday Disasters in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

First Place—Jim Chitwood

Second Place—Andreas Kokkinos

Third Place—Sergio Hikawa

Now it's your turn. What sorts of ridiculous secrets do you wish Infinity Ward put in their latest blockbuster if only they didn't take themselves and their game so goddamned seriously? Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Modern Warfare Easter Eggs in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

First Place—Doc Brown
Second Place—Shaun Legacy
Third Place— Jon McGrath

Basics are fine—and we like what it does there—so our real gripe is that there's no adjustment for white balance, which is notoriously shitty on the G1. But hey, it's free in the Android Market right now. [Adobe]

Send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Bionic Upgrades in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

Create your visions of what powers our day-to-day devices, and send your best entries to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Inside Gadgets in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people and the unintentionally hilarious DIY props and sets that he required to make his painted fantasies of Americana come true.

The book is not about painting. Rockwell's oil-on-canvas work feels like an afterthought for Schick, who mostly documents Rockwell's photography and art direction. Throughout the book, you see a painting, then you see the photographs he took to make that painting. In most cases, many shots comprise the different elements, and are joined together only in paint. It's almost sad: Vivid interactions between people, remembered jointly in the country's collective consciousness, may never have taken place. Even people facing each other at point blank range were photographed separately, and might never have even met.

The photos are as memorable as the paintings: There's a little boy whose feet are propped up on thick books, a walking still-life; there's a naked lady who ended up a mermaid in a lobster trap; there are men and women in various states of frustration, concentration and bliss, whose facial expressions defined Rockwell's style. These were mostly not agency models, but friends and neighbors who were pleased to help out, but not always thrilled by the finished product.

Since Rockwell was one of the most commercially successful artists of all time, you can imagine the rights to all of his images (paintings and photos) are carefully managed. The publisher was kind enough to let us show you the book cover plus two additional pairings, below. I encourage you to buy the book ($26.40 at Amazon)—what you see here is just a quick lick of the spoon:

Going and Coming, 1947
You'll notice the book jacket shows a painting of a family embarking on a summer vacation—Granny, Spot and all—coupled with a photo of a similar scene with far less action. There's a kid sticking out of the car in both, but many family members are missing. This is because they were photographed separately, in Rockwell's studio, and painted in where needed. (You'll also notice that the photo on the jacket is reversed—the car was pointed in the other direction but I suppose that wouldn't have looked as cool.)

Circus, 1955
What I liked about this picture is that you get to see how ridiculous Rockwell's sets could often be. He needed real faces, but he could fill in the rest. Hence piling chairs up on top of an old desk to simulate bleachers at the circus. Good thing nobody fell off the back and sued ole Rocky for millions—that twine used to hold the little girl's chair in place doesn't look OSHA certified. If the geeky looking fellow in the front looks familiar, it's because Rockwell himself served as a model for his paintings all the time.

The Final Impossibility: Man's Tracks on the Moon, 1969
Yep, here's proof that the moon landing was faked. At least, Rockwell's commemorative portrait of it was. NASA loved his work, so they loaned him spacesuits and helmets whenever he wanted, and for this, he got permission to photograph his models moonwalking around an Apollo Lunar Lander, with a black tarp doubling for infinity and beyond. Remember, this is when Apollo was new and the Cold War was in full swing, so getting access to the latest NASA toys took clout.

Behind the Camera covers many aspects of Rockwell that I had not known about previously. He was an outspoken civil rights activist, and many of his paintings dealt with race relations. There is a painting of two murdered men, one black and one white, accompanied by an almost absurd photo of two very alive guys lying side by side, eyes closed, on a carpet. There's another painting of a little black girl being walked to school by US Marshals, and the many different closeup shots Rockwell required to paint the extreme detail of the tense, potent—and fabricated—moment.

I wish I could run a gallery of 100 shots from this book, because each page startled me in a different way. Meeting the real people behind the paintings, and learning that every painting was composed of masterfully planned photographs—always black and white, since the artist let his imagination add the color—I will no longer take Norman Rockwell for granted. In fact, I'm gonna kinda worship him from now on. [Amazon sales page; Little, Brown product page]

We have featured Star Wars-World War II photography and classic art medleys before, but I like the superhero theme (I know, there's some Star Wars too, like Darth Vader with Joseph Stalin. How fitting). Still, I don't get what the hell Batman is doing with Fidel Castro. Unless he's about to break his neck. Then I will understand, and applaud. [Melman and the Hippo via Format Mag]

Send your best examples of the eternal hipness of Windows 7 to me at contests@gizmodo.com with Cool Windows in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Send your work to me by next Tuesday morning, and I'll pick three top winners and show off the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Get to it!

The Best

Where the Wild Things Are: Promotional apps are normally garbage, and in a few areas, this is a little fluffy (though there's some neat media in here—it's fairly generous). But hey, the people marketing this movie know exactly whose heartstrings they're pulling at, and how to pull them. And the 3D monster toy is genuinely cool. Free.

iBlast Moki: A visually stunning physics-based platformer, with bombs. The levels are puzzles, but they don't feel like work at all. A very, very safe buy at a dollar.

Photoshop: This app bears almost no resemblance to the Photoshop we all know and steal love. That's fine though, because it's a serviceable photo-editing (on the iPhone, this means filters, cropping, and a few other tricks) app that is free, unlike virtually all of its competition.

Tweetie: Few people like Twitter as much as Matt, and Matt likes few things as much as Tweetie 2: The $3 app is described as

the most polished Twitter app yet, oozing slickness with every swipe. Yet, it's exploding with new features, and still really fast.

"Tweet tweet?" "Who's there?" "THE WORST JOKE YOU'VE EVER HEARD."

Weight Watchers: I've never thought about my diet too much, which means my life will be short, brutal and tasty. But I have seen people using WeightWatchers, and they seemed to sorta like it, and sometime get less fat! An iPhone app pretty much seems like the ideal tool for keeping a food journal, plus this one's free.

Pet Acoustics: Excuse me everyone, I've got an announcement: People write muzak for dogs. And cats. And horses! Then they put it in iPhone apps, so you can use it to soothe your stable of animals, uh, on the go? This makes me laugh, which makes me happy. (Though I have absolutely no idea if it works, because my Labrador only listens to gangsta rap.) Two dollars.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert: This one isn't out yet, but I defy you to name a game franchise that needs an iPhone title more than C&C. TouchArcade got an early hands-on, and they say it's fantastic—and surprisingly faithful to the original.

Rock Band: Another long-overdue addition to the store, Rock Band, the app, is kind of a jerk: While it was taking foreeever to show up, companies like Tapulous stepped in an made decent rhythm games to fill the void. Now that it's here, and it looks great—multiple instruments, a decent song list—it's going to poop on everyone else's party. It'll be here in a few weeks, price TBD.

MotionX Drive GPS: It's not brand-new, but it's too good a value not to mention here. $3 a month, or 25 per year is amazing for a turn-by-turn nav app, and Wilson enthusiastically deemed it to be fine:

I am not going to tell you this is the best turn-by-turn road navigation app in the world. The designers made some funny UI choices, there's no multi-destination or point-on-map routing, it doesn't have text-to-speech, and it only runs in portrait mode, taking up awkward space on my dashboard. Still, there's almost no reason not to get it.

Indeed.

iLickit: This app deserves more credit than I can give it for being the first designed for use with the human tongue. Ho ho, you wacky app developers, what's next!? Wait, ugh, don't tell me. Not in the store, yet.

Honorable mentions

• Explore the New York City Which Could've Been With the Phantom City iPhone App

• PewPewPew (With Your iPhone): Ahem:

pewpewpewpew, bangbangbang boomPEW, swishpewpewpewpew.

Also, augmented reality. A dollar.

• iSheriff: It's a lot like that PewPew AR app above, rebalanced: It's free, which is cool; and it's not quite as playful: it puts people in zoomable crosshairs, and has gore effects, which makes it a little creepy.

• Good Things Do Come in Threes with Tap Tap Revenge 3

• MapQuest Stumbles Back Into the App Store With Budget Turn-by-Turn

• FHM: DUDE MAG, in an app. Lots of near-nakedness here, with daily updated FHM non-boob content too. $2.

• Let's Draw Some Sheep: No, really, let's draw some sheep! Because that's just about all you can do with this moderately charming little app. $1.

Other App News on Giz

• ChilliX, who makes all kinds of neat, usually paid iPhone apps, is giving away their entire catalog for free this weekend.

• Flash Apps to Come to the iPhone, But Not to Safari

• The iPhone App Store Gold Rush May Be Running Low on Gold

• Apocalypse Nigh, AT&T Opens Network for VoIP Over 3G on iPhone

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

The tools are basic—you can crop, adjust exposure, saturation, and tint, among others, with some standard special effects like soft focus, colors and filters like "warm vintage" and pop—but using entirely swipe-based gestures as a virtual slider for how intensely or lightly the effect is applied is natural and easy. Here's a photo I made with it:
[iTunes, Thanks Weston!]

Click here to mail your sketches. Remember to save them as JPG files with your name in the filename before next Tuesday morning. The subject line should say "Dream Gadget Sketch."

I'm trembling with a mix of horror and anticipation. Good luck to all of us. We are going to need it.