The Apps

Honorable Mentions

Raytheon: This is a company that's actively developing iPhone apps for military field use; that they're making a Flight Control-esque iPhone game for us civvies is compelling, for sure. Alas, this app does not exist yet.

The Santa Game: Because it's Christmas, y'all! Almost! And also because navigating a disembodied Santa head out of these mazes is pretty fun.

Avatar: It's a massive third-person adventure game that is absolutely worth a look if James Cameron's new HYPERFILM piques your interest. But really, your $10 should be going toward an IMAX ticket this weekend—save this one for after the initial joy and or/headache has dissipated.

Lou Zoom: Lou Reed—yes, that Lou Reed—made an iPhone app for people with vision problems who have trouble seeing their contact list, or for people who really enjoy massive typography.

This Week's iPhone News On Giz

• Surprisingly, iPhone Takes Over the Weird Japanese Smartphone Market

• Inappropriate App Store Icons, Right Here

• Simpson Arcade iPhone Preview: Steeped in Authenticity

• FSJ's Anti-AT&T Manifesto Makes Me Raise My Fist in Solidarity

• AT&T Has Spent Less on Network Construction Every Quarter Since the iPhone's Launch

• Swedes Camping Outside Apple HQ Asking Steve Jobs to Approve Their App

• The iPhone as a Friend and Foe Tracking War Machine

• Control Your Mac With an iPhone, the Patent

• AT&T Dismisses Operation Chokehold as an "Irresponsible and Pointless Scheme"

• The StickyStrap Is the Weirdest iPhone Holder/Case/Stand I've Ever Seen

• Microsoft: Maybe We Should've Paid More Attention to That iPhone Thingamabob

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!

This Week's Apps

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Honorable Mentions

• Google Mobile: This update keeps the app from launching into Safari as much as it used to, and widens its voice capabilities. A minor but useful upgrade.

• My Name and Head Shoulders Knees & Toes: I suspect most of you don't reader these roundups to find ways to entertain your children. But if you do, My Name, which will teach your tot how to spell whatever is on his birth certificate, and Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes, which makes a simple touch game out of the children's song, will distract them long enough for you to gobble up enough Zoloft to keep the gears moving without anyone noticing.

• Wolfram Alpha: Once a comical $50, this mega calculator app is now a slightly less comical $20.

• Monkey Ball 2: Last week, I noted that this app seemed to have a widespread crashing problem, and therefore couldn't recommend it, despite the fact that it's a worthy—if not revolutionary—followup to one of the iPhone's best launch titles. The bug has been identified: If you have a jailbroken phone, avoid this one. If you don't, and you loved Monkey Ball numero uno, give it a shot.

• iClassic: Replaces your music interface with a faux-clickwheel. Jailbreak-only.

• Voltron: A name and a concept worth getting excited about, let down by mediocre execution.

• Aqua Forest 2: Same deal as above: A game with a pedigree and a soild concept, but on which the developers didn't quite follow through well enough.

This Week's iPhone News On Giz

• Mega-iPhone Dorks Who Idolise Rambo, Strap This On For Size

• Apple Countersues Nokia

• Analyst Claims iPhone Users Are Suffering From "Stockholm Syndrome"

• Apple Patent Shows Dock Made From 'Elastic Sponge-Like Substance' That Conforms To Shape of iPod/iPhone

• In Which a Telco Executive Makes Taking Sound Like Giving

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 Apps

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This Week's iPhone News On Giz

• An Exploded iPhone Is a Major Frat Party Buzzkill...Or Is It?

• Apple Sued For iPhone Patent Infringement, Again

• The New Mobile Twitter Site Is Actually, Um, Nice

• Droid Commercial Paints iPhone as "Digitally Clueless Beauty Pageant Queen"

• Wolfram Alpha Is Tired Of People Not Paying $50 Dollars For Their iPhone App

• New Mercedes iPhone App: Hands On

• iPhone Orchestra Hacks Touchscreen, GPS and Accelerometer to Create "Music"

• Just a Cheap iPhone/iPod Adapter USB Hub

• Mirror's Edge Coming to the iPhone In January

• iPhone Fitted With SLR Lens (It Was Bound to Happen)

• Top 5 Assclowns Laughing at the iPhone Back in 2007

• RedEye Makes Your iPhone a Universal Remote Control

• Stolen Belgian iPhones Traced to Russian Black Market

• Where Is My iPhone Videochat, Apple?

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!

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!

To view as a single page, click here

Voices: There are a few voice modulation apps on the shelves of the App Store, but none has captured Jesus' heart like Voices:

Retro tape recorder and microphone, cute icons, simple touch interface, and sharing via Twitter, Facebook, and email, so you can spook everyone with that infernal Reverse Voice effect. For $1, it's impossible to resist.

Zosh: Signing things over email: a thing that is dumb. Zosh: a thing that makes that process much easier.

Zosh is a $3 app that allows you to sign attached documents on your iPhone. Basically, you forward the emailed document to Zosh from the iPhone's mail app, then you open the Zosh app to sign it (plus you can add a date and stuff).

I especially like this one because it's not just a good way to sign documents on the iPhone, it's a good way to sign documents in general. I mean seriously, who wants to scan their signature, or jitter one out in MS paint? One catch: it only supports PDFs for now, so convert or die.

CatPaint: Negative space, as defined in the eminent McFairlyshire Encyclopedia of Artistic Principles (1904): An area, perimeter or measurable expanse that lacks cats. And one of the first thing they teach to you any good art school is to fill it up, with cats. Facts! Enter CatPaint:

Cats can be added to preexisting photos or cat-scarce shots from the iPhone's camera, and either saved to your camera roll or sent via email. Using it takes a while to get used to: Once you've selected a cat from the app's animal palette and set the slider for size, each tap on the photo instantly splashes a new cat at the point of contact, which can't be edited, save for a temperamental shake-to-delete function.

It is the best thing, this app. A dollar.

Knocking: Live Pic Sharing: Uses server-side galleries to let you view photos in sync with other people, which you can send or flip through by "knocking." Ideal scenario: You're talking to your friend over the phone, you want to show him a gallery of pictures, you tell him to jump onto Knocking, and suddenly you're in control of his viewing experience. It pretty much works like that. Free.

Blower: Real Air: Can you guess what this one does? Really, no? Then you're probably a good candidate for spending money on it. For what it's worth—something?—Blower explores the iPhone's absurd novelty potential in a completely new way. From the reviews, a perfect description: "It feels like an ant blowing on you."

Call of Duty: The control scheme isn't perfect, and the price ($10) is high, but it's tough to argue with a Nazi Zombie shoot 'em up with the Call of Duty name. Protip: switch to the tilt controls, because the overlaid joystick is not good. (They never are!)

Magellan: It's a late entrant into a crowded field, and without extensive testing it's hard to recommend plunking down for Magellan RoadMate's $80 introductory price. That said, for Magellan devotees, which probably exist somewhere, RoadMate is great news.

FunMail: MMSes are a bit of a conundrum. Like, it's great that you can send pictures and sounds and all, but phones—even the iPhone—aren't exactly the best tools for creating media, so you usually end up sending some pretty basic stuff: pictures of puppies, brief voice recordings, hot nudez, etc. FunMail takes whatever you type and converts it into an MMS-able image, generally with some kind of punny adornment. Call someone an ass, and there's a picture of a donkey. Say you want to get coffee, and your recipient gets your message overlaid on a picture of a mug. It's earnestly cheesy and a lot of the images look like clipart, but this isn't always a bad thing. FunMail works over MMS, email or Facebook, and it's free.

Fit or Fugly: Rounding out our cr-appier selections for the week, an app that purports to measure your beauty according to some kind of mathematical equation. It's not a good way to actually tell if someone is attractive, nor is it a particularly well-executed app. It is, however, a good excuse to tell your friends that their faces are asymmetrical, which evokes surprisingly intense responses. Try it! (The face thing, not necessarily the app.)

Google Earth 2.0: You can create and store your own customized maps in the desktop version of Google Maps, and save them to your account—this is great for keeping running routes, sharing driving directions and the like. You can view them in the new version of Google Earth for the iPhone now, which is useful, and also sort of hilarious, since you can't even access them in the official Google Maps app. Sound silly? Welcome to the iPhone, y'all!

Konami Apps: Whooooole bunch good stuff discounted to $1 for a few weeks, including: Field Prowlers, Frogger, Metal Gear Solid Touch, Silent Hill: The Escape, Silent Scope, Krazy Kart Racing, DanceDanceRevolution S, DanceDanceRevolution S+ -Power Pros Touch. Decent stuff to take a look at, with a few gems—especially MGS:T.

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!

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Point Inside: Fact: stepping foot in a suburban mall can drain your vitality in a matter of seconds. And though I don't think a deep disdain for the concept of indoor shopping complexes and what they've done to the very fabric of the American town was the driving inspiration behind Point Inside, they're definitely onto something: With hundreds of mall maps that look a lot like those big directory signs, this app gets you in and out of your local mall as quickly as possible, all for free. Could use a few hundred more maps—some of my old tweenage haunts weren't there—but if yours is listed, PI is great.

Agile Messenger: I've always been a little leery of Agile Messenger, since it's usually priced at around $10, up there with the likes of Beejive, and it's a little ugly—though the multi-account and push features are more than adequate. For a few weeks, though, it's just two dollars. And they've just added a new feature called "Walk and Type," which overlays your text over a live camera view, so you never have to take your eyes off you AIM conversations as you walk down the street. In theory. In practice, you will still die. Ranked for feature-bloat audacity, and shitty late night joke/newspaper cartoon potential.

Full Browser: As with every alternative browser in the App Store, Full Browser isn't really its own browser, since it's still using Mobile Safari's WebKit renderer. That said, FB's added features are worthwhile: the tabbing system, which is more traditional and desktop-like than Safari's, makes up for its rough looks with efficiency, in-app email makes life ever-so-slightly faster if you spend most of your time browsing, the favorite sites speed dial is a mite faster than using Safari's favorites, and inline text search is just, well, useful. A dollar.

WhatsApp: First, let's try this: WhatsApp is like BlackBerry Messenger for the iPhone. Cool, right? If that doesn't mean anything to you, it's like an instant messaging app, tied to your number—not a screen name or PIN or anything—that integrates with your contacts. If you have the app, your friend has the app, and you're both in each others' phonebooks, you're ready to go. Push notifications make this even more like BBM, in that you don't have to keep the app open. Free for now, so GO GO GO.

PicTranslator: Translates text from photos, from whatever language you want. I love it because it fits nicely with my vision of what smartphones should be doing for us in the next few years, and it seems to work pretty well most of the time. I don't love it because results are much, much better on the 3GS—you're basically limited to signage with the 3G and 2G, because they can't focus on small text—and because your $2 only gets you one language. Still though, extremely neat stuff, as long as you're aware of the limitations. And now you are, so!

PocketBlu/FoxPop: From Universal and Fox, respectively, these are the new Blu-ray companion apps. PocketBlu, available now but not really compatible with much yet, is like an enhanced remote control for compatible titles, making navigating various BD Live features a bit more intuitive. It'll also stream bonus content to your handset over Wi-Fi, which is pretty cool. FoxPop, which isn't quite out yet, does things a little differently: It's like a Popup Video feed that plays back trivia, photos, video, and other content to supplement the film. Bonus cool feature: it figures out where you are in the DVD or Blu-ray by listening to the soundtrack, and matching it to a timeline. Both should be coming soon to select releases.

Navigon Traffic: $90 for a navigation app is feeling more and more expensive by the day, and $20 for the new traffic function doesn't feel like a steal either. That said, there are no monthly fees after that initial charge, the traffic data is crowdsourced and rich, and Navigon is one of the best nav options out there. Worth your consideration, if not your dollars.

Priceline Negotiator: Priceline's main gimmick/selling point has always been its instant bid feature, and it's well-suited to the iPhone. Give it a location, make your hotel room bid, and you know if you've got it or not pretty much that second.

ARGH: I somehow missed this one in yesterday's augmented reality app roundup, so here goes. ARGH cheesily superimposes ghosts over your 3GS's camera view, as if there were actually there. Upon seeing ARGH, most of your friends will groan and tell you you've wasted your money. But! Your senile grandmother will be legitimately spooked, your pet dog will be mildly confused, and your little cousin will probably chuckle a little. Two dollars.

iVIP: This thing is basically I Am Rich, except it offers (some?) services, in the form of memberships to various clubs and societies. It sounds a bit like a scam (A Cineworld membership? Really?) and the concept is inherently deplorable, but in separating a special, horrible kind of rich person from their dollars, iVIP is doing the world a service. $1000, or $450 for the "Blue" version, which is blue.

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 Best

Chorus: Hey, Apple, when people start making apps just to help people find new apps, take it as a sign that your App Store interface could use a little help. Chorus crowdsources the effort to cut through the endless jungle of trash:

Chorus is a bit like Apple's native App Store app, except with drastically shifted emphasis: instead of giving category "Top" lists, which rank apps by overall download numbers, Chorus only pitches you apps that've been explicitly recommended by someone. These someones could include other friends who use Chorus, nearby Chorus users, or a stable of "App Mavens"-online reviewers and tech journalists, mostly.

Free.


ZenApps: An even better sign that the App Store could offer more in the way of search tools, filters and sorting options than a company making an app-finding app? Two companies making app-finding apps. ZenApps takes a more traditional approach than the social network-y Chorus, aggregating review buzz from a list of app sites into a tag cloud, or a simple list. Also free.


Million Tap Challenge: Speaking of maybe worthless crap apps, Million Tap Challenge is a simple app with a simple goal: to be tapped. A million times. This makes the cut because unlike 99.99% of the spammy crap in the App Store, Million Tap Challenge has a sense of the absurd. It knows how ridiculous it is, and for just the right kind of person, it's a brilliant timekiller.


Flying Without Fear: My pops was a pilot, and the thought of being suspended 32,000 feet in the air in a tiny aluminum tube still freaks me the hell out. Flying without fear takes a two-pronged approach to soothing panicked passengers, with relaxation exercises on one side, and more importantly, detailed explanations of each step in typical airline flight, and the terrifying sounds that accompany them. Minor complaint #1: $5 seems a little steep for a branded app—this one is slathered in Virgin Atlantic's colors and logo. Minor complaint #2: Sir Richard Branson, who provides a video intro, is scarier than the worst transatlantic turbulence I've ever sat through. IT'S THE BEARD, BEARDO.


Gokivo: It's getting hard to keep track of all the iPhone navigation apps' names, much less their price structures, so here's what you need to know: Gokivo, the decent-but-too-expensive navigation app, has become Gokivo, the decent and now-not-too-expensive navigation app. The price has dropped from $5/mo to $5 dollars 30 days or $40 for the year. It's not as dirt-cheap as products like MotionX Drive and CoPilot, but solid text-to-speech and live traffic make this a deal.


Black Friday(s): This one comes in two parts, actually! Both FatWallet and Dealnews have put together apps that'll aggregate the best last-minute Black Friday deals come (almost) Thanksgiving. Neither is getting very good reviews right now, mostly due to their lack of deals. Today November 6th, so this is mildly mind-boggling. Patience!


LexPrint: Hey, remember Lexmark? They made printers! And evidently, they still make printers! Also, they've put together one of the better iPhone photo printing apps I've seen. Instead of shipping with grossly limited compatibility like other printing apps (seriously, everyone's got one now, but they're all pretty picky about which printers they talk with) Lexmark bridged the wireless gap with a PC client called Listener, which accepts print requests in lieu of a wireless radio on the actual printer. Kind of brilliant, if you have a Lexmark.


Waveboard: Google Wave is still invite-only, so it's a little strange to see a dedicated app this early on. That said, a sizable group of people are already power-using the shit out of this service that I don't think I'll ever fully understand, so Waveboard, which is marginally better than the stock Wave web interface, might be worth the one dollar entry fee.


Eliminate: This one lands in the top ten for two reasons. One is obvious: This is a fun, smooth-running FPS with intuitive controls—rare!—and solid gameplay. The other is a little counterintuitive: To get the full Eliminate experience, you probably need to shell out for Energy Cells via in-app purchases. This is good precisely because it's terrible, and provides a perfect example to other devs of how not to use the new in-app purchase system. It's fun while the free lasts, though! A cautionary tale.


TowerMadness Zero: TowerMadness used to be a better-than-average tower defense game, rendered in 3D and priced at about $3. Then, there was a lightning strike. A developer was zapped in the skull, collapsed, and three hours later awoke, dazed. As he stood up and surveyed his charred surroundings, he froze as if he was having a stroke; his eyes, though, twinkled. He had an idea. When he finally spoke, everyone around him was stunned: "TOWERMADNESS SHALL BE FREE," he bellowed, "AND IT SHALL BE SUPPORTED BY ADS THAT ARE NOT VERY ANNOYING." Then he died, from the burns. Pointlessly dramatic fake scenario aside, this kind of thing should happen more often.

Honorable Mentions

Cry Translator: This one purports to tell you what your baby's various gurgles, yelps and screams mean. This sounds implausible! Also implausible: That it's somehow worth $30. Just jingle your keys, try to feed it, and smell for poop. Parenting, done.

Family Guy: Hey look, it's a game based on a popular-but-well-past-its-prime television series! It's a bit Nintendo-like, which is charming, and the free version is worth a few minutes of you time, provided you don't hate Family Guy.

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 Best

Nikon Learn and Explore: Tons of photos, shooting tips, a photography glossary and access to Nikon World magazine, all for free. Useful whether you carry a Nikon or not.

NBA League Pass Mobile: At first, you're like, "Whoa, 40 games a week, streamed live or from a 48-hour archive over 3G or Wi-Fi, with stats and news? That sounds awesome!" Then you're like "Wait, it costs $40? Don't I already spend a ton of money to watch these games on my TV?" Then you're like, "Hey, I don't even like basketball! What am I doing with my life? " Pricey, but essential for total ball junkies.

WordPress 2.0: Though this is an update to an old app, the differences are such that you've actually got to download the new version on its own—you won't be prompted. Anyway, you should, because it's got an all-new interface, a fresh comment system and a persistent restore feature, which means you won't lose any work if you get a call in the middle of working on a post. Free.

The Snow Report: Added Twitter feed, push notification and longer-term forecast features make this ski report app awesome; the fact that it's an ad platform for the North Face makes it free. (It's more than a fair trade.)

Settlers of Catan: A few months ago, Wired wrote an amazing story about a board game called "Settlers of Catan." To summarize: Best. Board. Game. Ever. Or something! In any case, it's now here for the iPhone, and the adaptation is surprisingly faithful. The look and animations are a little cheesy, an absence of cheese would have been more surprising, and almost disappointing. Fivebux.

Layar Layers: Not strictly an app, but is may as well be: Layar, the do-it-all augmented reality app, allows for user-generated layers to be added. This one, which tracks bailout spending and overlays projects on a real-time camera view, is the first genuinely cool add-on I've seen.

Exit Strategy: Remember that buzzy app that tells you where to get on and off your subway car way in order to ensure the quickest, most efficient exit from the station? Now they've got a license to use new MTA data, and they've added the exact locations of every subway stop entrance, so you know where you'll surface.

Disney: A full-service iPhone take on the Disney empire, this video, radio, photo and game app represents classic, whimsical Disney and bizarrely sexualized, subtly evangelical new Disney in equal measures. Free.

HMSMobile Swine Flu Center: Educates you about the dangers of the H1N1 virus and lets you a.) figure out if you have swine flu and b.) work yourself into a nervous wreck even if you don't. Two dollars.

Attack of the Zombie Bikini Babes from Outer Space: I'll let Matt explain this one:

Imagine a Zombies Ate My Neighbors kind of schlock, except you're in the boots of a redneck armed with dual slingshots, firing rocks and raccoons at undead chicks in bikinis who will claw your eyes out if they touch you.

Honorable Mentions

LaLa: Stream any song once for free, or steam it as much as you want for $0.10. It's brilliant, so why isn't it ranked? Because it's not out yet, and I have a creeping suspicion Apple might find a reason to freeze it out.

Asian Boobs: This is most assuredly not a good app. It does, however, serve as a touchstone in the sweeping narrative of how ridiculous the app approval process is, for which I am thankful.

Not For Tourists: There are just so many iPhone travel guides, it's hard to pick one over another. I'm not sure the NFT guides are the best—they could be, but it's tough to test—but they're reliably good. Shame they're $5 apiece.

Vooks: I'm not as down on the concept as Adam is—I think there's something to be said for taking ebooks beyond raw, static text. And while the catalog is seriously anemic right now but hey, if you see a title you like, go for it.

Alice In Chains: Yeah, forget iTunes LP: Alice in Chains' companion app for the newest album does the digital liner notes thing just fine, and hey! It works on your iPhone. A dollar.

Easy Wi-Fi: Find free Wi-Fi hotspots, and simplify the login procedure for paid ones! What a great idea! Thing is, it doesn't work that well yet—account signup is buggy, and hotspots are sparse—so it might be worth waiting until it does. Free.

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 Best

NASA: NASA's really stepped up their online presence in the last few years, giving armchair astronauts more media, stats and news than they could ever want. Nasa's iPhone app, matter-of-factly named "NASA app for iPhone," aggregates it all, including Twitter feeds, orbit trackers, images, video and mission updates. Free, unless you count income tax.

GameCenter: A Gamefly queue manager first and a free encyclopedia of games second, GameCenter taps into GameFly's massive database of titles to immediately spit out everything from release dates to platform availability to screenshots to reviews. It's a field guide for games, essentially—a type of tool which lends itself well to the iPhone.

Pet Semetary: A gored-up mobile take on Stephen King's eponymous book and film, Pet Sematary is proudly straightforward: You shoot zombies; the zombies are often cats. It's a slow-build game, with short stages that get progressively harder, and accordingly, it's great timekiller. A dollar.

Wolfram Alpha: For this week's obnoxiously contrarian pick, how about a calculator app that costs $50, and doesn't do a whole lot more than the web-based version, available for free through the iPhone's browser? Yes, perfect. I don't totally buy that whole "graphing calculators are $100, this app is just $50" reasoning, but the mathematical shortcut keyboard as well as a streamlined interface are pretty great. In other words, if (and only if) you can somehow expense something like this—ie, you work at CERN—totally do it.

ReelDirector: This is as close as you're going to get to iMovie on your iPhone (which is still not very close, at all). Video stitching alone, though, will be worth the ($8) price of entry for many people, at least until Apple builds it into their camera app.

Rock Band: Despite the obvious success of games like Tap Tap Revolution, the big rhythm game players have generally steered clear of the App Store. Until this week! Rock Band, late as it is, is pretty good, with caveats: the control scheme isn't ideal; the singing mode isn't actually a singing mode; and it could stand to include a few more than the base 20 songs. Which are licensed, popular songs, by the way—not lame mashups or no-name material like you see in some other rhythm apps. $10.

SongSift: It's easy to let your iPhone library get cluttered with odd singles, poorly-tagged strays, and one-off playlist refugees. The real solution is to sort your freakin' colllection, you slob, but until you do, SongSift lets you filter albums by length, so if you're setting out on a run, or want to set-and-leave your iPhone for a while, you'll be able to find large, contiguous chunks of music with a simple slider. A dollar.

NFB: Canada's National Film Board funds all kinds of interesting films, documentaries and miscellaneous video projects, which their new iPhone app offers up for free. It's hard to argue with that, so I won't.

Earthworm Jim: The iPhone-ified Earthworm Jim could be a little cheaper, and the controls could be a bit more refined. But really, it's hard to imagine a more authentic port for this game, especially to a platform without buttons.

Loopt Mix: Loopt doesn't just keep track of friends now, it finds new ones. With the "Mix" feature, you can send any nearby Loopt users a friend request. And from the looks of the promotional shots, you're supposed to parlay that request into an entirely different kind of request, which we'll talk about after the kids go to bed.

Honorable Mentions

The Colbert Report's The Word: To be fair, The Word is a highlight of every episode of the Colbert Report. It just seems like, you know, you've made this nice video app an all, so why not throw in rest of the otherwise free ColbertNation.com content as well? Oh well. A dollar.

SuicideGirls: A video choose-your-own-adventure story in which one of the possible ending is engaging in light petting with an angry, tattooed, seminude lady. Remember when Apple used to ban dictionary apps for swearing?

Gucci: A free promotional tool for a company I have a feeling our readers aren't all that in to, Gucci's iPhone app actually has some neat features, including a in-app DJ tool, local restaurant/bar/whatever recommendations, and, uh, some stuff about clothes, or bags, or something.

Other News

• Lala iPhone App And Its 10-Cent Songs Might Be Reality By Year End

• Nokia Suing Apple for 10-Patent iPhone Infringement

• Graphs and Charts Prove iPhone to Be the Most Successful Gadget Ever (Sort of)

• Ballmer: "The Internet Is Not Designed For The iPhone"

• Apple: "People Are Still Just Trying to Catch Up With the First 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 Best

Layar: Mark my words: in the next year or so, augmented reality apps will graduate from halfassed party tricks to something with actual utility. This is a daddy-step in the right direction:

Layar has grown up since we last saw it: now you can overlay all kinds of data, from geotagged Wikipedia entries to Flickr photos to local Tweets.

3GS only, but at least it's free.

SuperGlued: Lots of apps help you find good shows, but SuperGlued doesn't stop there. You can Tweet with other members of the crowd (Are tickets sold out at the door? Does the venue still smell like urine? Where are you? etc.), post live pictures of the show, and keep track of which events your friends are planning on going to. Free. —Full disclosure: The developer, Tom Plunkett, is Gawker Media's grand tech vizier

Proactive Sleep: Is there a such thing as a sleep coach? Let's assume there is! In a nutshell, that's what this app, designed with SCIENCE, aims to be. It's an alarm clock at its core, which wakes you up with music of your choice then challenges you to a game, or offers you a dream diary. It'll also track your sleep patterns and warn you when you've dipped below average. A little steep at five dollars, but it's fairly polished and written by a bon-a-fide sleep researcher.

Canon: Got a Canon PIXMA printer? Then there's no good reason to pass up Canon's iPhone app, which lets you print over Wi-Fi:

The polished interface lets you select paper sizes, find wireless printers, print borderless photos, and select photos from multiple albums stored on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Blastination: The game looks like an instant headache, and it takes a few minutes to get used to the chaos. The idea, though, is a winner: Your goal is to collect shapes with your bouncing avatar, which you pilot by bouncing off of barriers you've drawn in real time. A dollar.

Heart Rate Monitor: More of a conceptual win than a practical one (it's not even out yet), Heart Rate Monitor broadcasts you heart rate over your social network of choice. Its intended purpose is medical, but the tech could easily be used for fun, too. I mean hell, Nintendo thinks we want a heart rate monitor for gaming, so there must be something to the idea.

Bailout War$: Tower defense + populist rage + genuinely OK gameplay = a good timesuck. The graphics could be better, and the satire more subtle, but this is a one-dollar casual game we're talking about here.

CBS News: CBS's new app is an example of a dedicated news app done right. Video content is plentiful and streams over Wi-Fi and 3G, news content is organized well, and Twitter integration is more than just token. And it's free.

Viper: It needs to be mated to an expensive remote ignition system, and it doesn't save you a ton of time, but this one ranks purely for coolness. I mean, you can start your car with your iPhone. This is totally the dream, for people with modest, iPhone-centric dreams.

USA Today Autopilot: Better than most travel apps, because it's not solely meant to sell you stuff—it's a travel planner and itinerary at its core. It's been tied to the TripIt planner service, which keeps track of your flights, hotels, and travel miscellanea online. Free.

Honorable Mentions

Itsy Bitsy Spider: Duck Duck Moose makes spectacularly helpful apps for keeping children entertained, turning your iPhone into something between a spinning mobile, a picture book and a toy. Itsy Bitsy spider is a musical picturebook, basically, and parent reviewers swear by it.

Pang: You know that legendary Japanese arcade classic, Pang? Me neither! But if you do, this thing looks pretty good. 3bux.

Assassin FPS: At the very surface of the augmented reality app strata, you find apps that let you put crosshairs over your friends, and pretend to murder them. There are plenty of these, but Assassin is one of the better ones.

NPR News: Another update to an already priceless app, this brings live NPR streams—they do that sometimes, who knew?—to the app, as well as a few minor functional changes. Still free.

PhotoNotes: Assigns titles and notes to you photos. It's three dollars and doesn't do anything particularly amazing, but I can see this being invaluable to people with very specific picture-notating needs.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• The App Store Effect: Are iPhone Apps Headed for Oblivion?

• Twitter Lists Are Live, Meaning Soon You'll Be Able to Create Groups in Twitter Apps

• Lite iPhone Apps Are Dead: In-App Purchases Come to Free Apps

• Trillian iPhone App's Been Stuck in App Store Limbo for 60 Days

• Pepsi Issues "Apology" For Offensive iPhone Dating App

• Studio Raises Price of iPhone App to $40 to Shut Whiners Up

• Now This is How the iPhone Should Handle Multitasking

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 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!

AP Stylebook: Anyone who has to crank out copy on a regular basis is probably familiar with the AP' stylebook, but an iPhone app seems like an odd incarnation. It's more portable and convenient that the hard copy, sure, but there's an online version too, which makes more sense for most folks, since you don't do a whole lot of actual writing on an iPhone, and flicking an alt+tab to your browser is faster than thumbing through an iPhone search query. Still great for the occasional spot-check, though. $29, which you should probably try to expense.

Talk Assist: This super-simple, free text-to-speech app was designed to help people who have trouble talking. However, it will almost exclusively be used by people who can speak, for laffs.

Squareball: A minimalist, but amazingly polished game that's sort of like if Pong had levels, or if Breakout was a side-scroller. It's really, really hard—give the free version a try before taking the two dollar dive.

cAR Locator: One old gimmick—GPS as a way to find your car—combined with a new one—an augmented reality overlay, cAR Locator is more of a tech demo or party trick than anything else, but it's a pretty cool one. 2bux, 3GS only.

Scarab: The first iPhone literary magazine, Scarab still has a few kinks to work out. Most of all, you've got to purchase each issue in-app, but due to a quirk in Store policy, the app itself isn't free. If you feel like supporting an experiment like this, feel free; there's some neat stuff here, like the ability to listen to poems read aloud by their writers. One dollar.

Buzzd: An old BlackBerry classic, buzzd meters the amount of activity at local establishments, according to other buzzd users, and tells you where the most people are, and what they have to say about it. Think real-time Yelp, roughly. The app used to depend on other buzzd users for content; now it taps into Twitter with natural language recognition, which gives it way, way more content, and enough users, or at least unwitting contributors, to make it worthwhile even in a midsized city. Free.

FIFA 10: The only licensed soccer game in the App Store, this one's got actual teams, actual players, and at least a passing resemblance to the FIFA franchise console games everyone goes so apeshit over. Controls are predictably a bit awkward, but there's a lot of game here, especially for diehard soccer fans. $10.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• iPhone Gets Better Image Stabilization from Pro-Camera App

• Cyclopedia Augmented Reality iPhone App Drenches Your World In Wikipedia

• Apple Buys Their Very Own Maps Company (See Ya, Google Maps?)

• iFukkin iPhone App Maybe Is Not What It Seems

• Why iPhone TV Apps Are Doomed to Mediocrity

• iPhone App Developer Jacks Your Phone Number to Pitch You More Apps

• ALK CoPilot GPS Navigation App Gets iPhone Keyboard, Text-To-Speech, Other Improvements

• CNN's iPhone App Makes Other News Apps Look Lazy

• iPhone Accessories Can Now Trigger App Download Prompt

• Daniel Johnston's iPhone Game Is Predictably Bizarre, Bizarrely Fun

• Tweetie 2 for iPhone: Full Offline Powers, Filters and Push Notifications

• Ping is Like a Free SMS Client For iPhone and iPod Touch Users

• Tweet Reel iPhone App Sends 640 x 480 Video to Twitter

• Ramp Champ Mixes Skeeball With Flicking

• Data Shows What Everyone Knows: Gimmicky Apps Aren't Used Frequently

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!

12Mail: MMS has only been working on the iPhone for what, four hours? So, uh, here's an alternative! 12Mail sends short—12 second, to be exact—video messages to your Twitter or Facebook account instantly, and for free. And if you designate a recipient who also has 12Mail, they get a push notification for you message. In other words, it can behave exactly like an MMS, except without using any of your monthly allotment.

Cinq: You can access your entire Mac photo library with your iPhone over the air, sort of like with Simplify's nearly identical photo sharing app. A couple things: Cinq's take on the concept seems to work slightly more smoothly, and it costs one third as much, at a dollar.

Proloquo2go: It's a little outside our normal app beat, but hey! Covering this feels good, OK? Proloquo2go is a step beyond a text-to-speech app, with a massive library of symbols and photos to allow people who have trouble speaking to communicate more easily. Three reasons this matters: It has the potential to truly help people; it's getting rave reviews from folks who are familiar with similar tech; and even at $190, it costs less than similar dedicated devices, which can reach into the thousands. Neat stuff, to be sure. [via Technabob]

Pocket Sherpa: A wonderful concept that could do with some (read: a lot) of refinement, Pocket Sherpa combines all kinds of—mostly crowdsourced—travel data for virtually any destination in the world. It's an accompaniment to the Localyte site, which has accumulated thousands of local volunteers, many of whom will answer individual questions sent through the app, for free.

PilotFAR: As you probably know, and Wilson made abundantly clear, the FAA's rules about how you can use gadgets on planes are labyrinthine and frustrating. The $7 PilotFAR app might be overkill if all you want to do is harass an overzealous flight attendant with some FAA rule disputes, but then again, after reading everyone's comments on the matter, maybe not. Oh, and all you aviators out there: This clever little app covers way, way more than onboard gadgetry—it's a full reg book.

Dear Best Camera,
You have a stupid name, and the self-promoting captions you put on uploaded photos are annoying. But! Your filters are genuinely good, and the ability to properly layer effects turns out some fantastic imagery.

I wish you weren't three dollars.

Love Sincerely,
John xoxo

Hava Player: Sling act-alike Hava is matching their main competitor on another point—they've just released an iPhone client, which controls and streams from your DVR, through a Hava box, over Wi-Fi. Feature for feature it matches up well against Sling's offering, and it totally wins on price: It's $10 to Sling's $30.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• TomTom iPhone Car Kit Priced at $120, Available October

• Bravo Gustavo iPhone App: Conductor's Baton Hero?

• iPhone Navigation App Battlemodo, Part II: The Best Cheap GPS App

• FoodScanner iPhone App Knows Exactly How Disgusting Your Diet Is

• Pizza Hut Rewards Laziness by Giving 20% Off to iPhone App Orders

• TI Turns $30 Calculator Into $15 iPhone App, Swears People Still Pay for Real Deal

• Griffin's iTrip FM Transmitter: Hardware Controlled Through an iPhone App

• McSweeney's iPhone App Delivers Exclusive Content Weekly

• At Gizmodo Gallery '09: Ghostly Discovery Listening Station

• Apple Approved Almost 1400 iPhone Apps Last Friday...Fourteen Freaking Hundred

• Apple Finally Makes an Honest App Out of Snapture

• Trope, the New Brian Eno iPhone App, Is the True Followup to Bloom

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 Onion Microfiche Reader: It's from the Onion, so it's pretty much guaranteed not to be not funny, but! For all the neat microfilm-esque presentation, this thing doesn't actually have any articles—just a bunch of those jokes-in-a-headline that the Onion is so good at. Still entertaining though. A dollar.

Foursquare: Now you can see who else is checked in at a given venue, who the current mayor is, collect nearby Tweets, and enjoy better Google Maps integration in this extremely strange, strangely popular, highly addictive territorial app. Free.

Reqall: Evernote integration. That is all. Free.

Strands: The best free exercise app for the iPhone now lets you replay your GPS-recorded running path, signals you with audio cues during exercise, includes route elevation profiles and supports in-app playlists.

Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan: A fantasy wedding planner that is evidently really, really popular. Maybe because it's fun, or maybe because it's the easiest way to make your boyfriend super, super, super uncomfortable. Three dollars.

Alive 4-Ever: There are a surprising number of zombie survival apps in the App Store, I guess because they're easy to make or something? I don't know. I do know, however, that this top-down zombie slaughter is extremely fun, and only a dollar. I would pay multiple dollars, even. Like two!

Kodak Smilemaker: A charming app that adds comical smiles to your photos, or a meditation of the tragedies of birth deformities? I have no idea, but either way, its free. So.

NPR News: Sorry to keep bringing this app up, but it's great, and the biggest issue people had with the last version—the lack of fast-forwarding and pausing—is solved in this one. Still free.

Air: Brian Eno done made another app, y'all! The last one made amazing music based (partly) on user input; this one makes amazing music based (partly) on user input, except it sounds totally different. It's as mesmerizing as the last one, but feels fresh. 2bux.

Polyghost It took me a while to figure this one out, partly because I'd never really heard of "Vinyl art" toys before. Well, this is what they are, and like them or not, Polyghost is an aesthetically cool app. Here what you do: Using microtransactions, you buy little 3D characters which you can transpose onto photographs. The pricing's a little unfortunate—four dollars for the app, with new characters at at least a dollar apiece—but if you're a fan of artists like Tim Biskup and DEVILROBOTS, the rendering in this app does the work justice. So twee!

Howard Dean's Activism Book Thingeee: Whether or not you're a LI-BRULL, you've got to admire the concept behind this book-cum-activism app, which gets its users fired up with a message, i.e. Dean's writing, then puts tools at their fingertips to act on their feelings, like a location-aware "call your congressman" function. I think it might be a liiiiittle more effective if you didn't have to pay for it. Five dollars to CHANGE THE WORLD, or whatever.

This Week's iPhone App News on Giz

• Google: Apple's a Liar, Did Reject Google Voice iPhone App

• Navigon Wants an Extra $25 for Real-Time Traffic Data on the iPhone

• I Am Sting App Is Even Whinier Than I Am T-Pain

• Army of Darkness Invades the iPhone

• Wall Street Journal iPhone and BlackBerry App Free Lunch Is Over

• Penn and Teller iPhone App Is as Magical as It Is Doomed

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!

Tick Talk Robot: In the mornings of the future, humanoid, quasi-British, deep-voiced robots will lull you with a reading of the day's news, stroke your hair, and breathe fragrant, bacon-scented air across your cheek until you wake. Until then, there's Tick Talk Robot, which does pretty much the same thing, except without all the roboculinary eroticism. Two dollars.

AppButler: This isn't quite as cool as the press materials make it out to be, but it's still not a bad idea, considering how much easier it is to arrange apps with iTunes 9. As it stands now—as a web app—AppButler gives you a bunch of free icons to place on your springboard as dead links, which act as labels (News, Productivity, Music, whatever) for your apps, so you can make interesting homescreen layouts. A native version—whatever that would look like—is mired in the approval process as we speak.

Riddim Ribbon: A new concept rhythm game showed off at Apple's iPod event this week, Riddim Ribbon shoots your avatar/ball/blob/thing down a pathway, on which you have to hit lots and lots of targets. The more you hit, the more the song builds; the fewer, the sparser the instrumentation gets. This one comes out in October, unfortunately.

Fantasy Sports Stats Grabber: Aggregates cross-league stats in a Fantasy-league-friendly way, so you can keep closer track of how much money you've lost to your coworkers in this bizarre ritual of manhood that I'll never, ever understand. A buck.

Flickr: Better late than never, Yahoo. At least the app is good at what it does, which includes uploading and geotagging photos, and managing your account. Warning: It can be sluggish, especially when loading thumbs. That's nothing to get too worked up about though, seeing as this one's a freebie.

Navigon: Navigon was only a killer feature or two away from a clear victory in our iPhone nav app Battlemodo, and with the latest free update, it may have gotten one. Or two! Now it features a full, proper-noun-reading text-to-speech engine for giving you vocal directions, as well as inbuilt music controls, which replace the iPhone's limited default popup panel. Obvious, maybe, but still awesome.

Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor: You play a spider with an extremely overactive web gland, and hop around a bunch of levels, trapping bugs and solving mysteries. The demo video at the app's website makes a better case for playing this lovely little game than I can, but I will say this: Spider game, I love you. Three dollars.

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!

Outbreak: An app that aggregates disease outbreak information into either a list or a map overlay, giving you just enough information to be nervous, but not quite enough to really do anything about it. Most useful for hypochondriacs and/or residents of Sub-Saharan Africa. Free.

Watchmen 2.0: Back around when Watchmen came out in theaters, there was a little iPhone game called Watchmen: Justice is Coming . It was one of the first 3D MMOs for the iPhone, but felt a little underdeveloped. Version 2.0, coinciding with the DVD release, is free if you've already got the first one, and comes with eight new episodes, a pile of new characters, a 360-degree battle mode, and new rooftop settings.

Robocop, Fargo, and Rocky Soundboards: This doesn't even feel like part of an app roundup—it feels more like three beautiful gifts, from me to you. These are official soundboards, from eminently quotable movies, for free.

i.TV: A fantastic TV listings app now works as a TiVo remote, with support for more DVRs to come, and push notifications. Free.

NFL Mobile: Once this one fully activates (Sept 13th) you'll be able to watch Live NFL games on your iPhone. Awesome! Minor catch: you need to be a DirecTV subscriber with an expensive sports package to use it, even just for news updates and scores. App's free though!

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Loopt First iPhone App With Always-On Location, Even When It's Not Running

• Gizmodo's Essential iPhone Apps: Fall 2009

• I am T-Pain iPhone App Is Auto-Tuning Genius

• Top 10 Back to School iPhone Apps

• Apple Approves Line2, a Google Voice-esque Program For Toktumi

• Push Google Voice SMS and Twitter Messages to iPhone With Prowl, No Growl Required

• µTorrent iPhone App Rejected, Heads Over to Cydia

• Bustedhot iPhone Application Makes Me Lose Faith In America

• Why We Can't Have a Napster iPhone App (Or Android App, Or BlackBerry App...)

• Grand Theft Auto On the iPhone Will Be Wonderfully Old School

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 swell Labor Day, everybody.

People who don't really care about The Victuals, what's wrong with you? don't worry!: I've still trawled the App Store for non-food downloads this week, and there are plenty—just scroll waaay down. Everyone else? Commence feast...NOW.

Eating Out

Yelp: If by some bizarre circumstance or mental tic you can't download more than one restaurant finder/review app, you should probably make it Yelp. User reviews are plentiful and generally helpful, the database is huge, and its new augmented reality tricks are pure bliss. Free.

OpenTable: OpenTable does the review thing pretty well too, but this app is less about finding restaurants than it is finding a table at said restaurants. Granted, it can feel silly making an online reservation on a telephone, but there's a certain antisocial appeal in replacing a maître d' with a piece of software. Free.

UrbanSpoon: This one tries to do everything: It's city-specific, and it'll feed you reviews, menu and location info for all kinds of restaurants, and in some cases let you make a reservation. It's free too, and the food-finding tools (shake the app for a surprise, within your parameters) are kinda fun, I guess.

VegOut: It's hard to be a vegetarian (I hear), not just in terms of diet, but socially. Where do you go with friends? Where do you tale a date? VegOut spits out a list of nearby meat-free establishments, with reviews and contact information for each one. By its nature it's not going to be much help outside of a big city, but in a metropolis? Priceless. Well, ok, three dollars.

Michelin Guides: Available by region, these are premium restaurant guides, thank you very much. I'm a fan of crowd-sourced reviews, but Michelin reviews are historically reliable, and if you really need to find a three-starred meal to blow your month's pay on, now, this is your best bet.

Global Eater Food Dictionary: When you're eating above your weight, figuratively speaking, you'll run into some terms you've never seen before. Global Eater Food Dictionary will tell you exactly what kind of cow glands those sweetbreads are before you order them, and it's faster than Google, which'll minimize your chances of being outed as a food moron. The price of your snob cred: a buck.

Wine Enthusiasts Guide: Same as above, for the inscrutable world of wine. Five dollars, but that comes with the territory.

Eating In

Epicurious: A beautiful, wonderfully curated recipe and shopping list app that's been perfected with time. It will make you a better cook, period. Free.

BigOven: Another take on the recipe app, this time with more of an emphasis on personal recipes and crowd-sourced ideas. Backed by a fairly huge recipe database. Free.

Allrecipes: Another recipe app, closer to BigOven than Epicurious in concept. It's a bit better at spontaneous recipe ideas, with a slick dish discovery interface. Free.

Locavore: For more discerning and/or conscientious and/or guilty shoppers, Locavore figures out where you live, and spits out a list of local foods that are in season, as well as guides as to where to get them. It's tied to Epicurious for recipes, which is brilliant. Four dollars.

Non-Food

Because some other stuff happened this week, too:

TextExpander: A massive timesaver on Mac OS X, TextExpander gives you immediate shortcuts to your commonly-typed phrases, which is great if you write with a lot of complex jargon, code or HTML tags (hey, bloggers!). Since the kind of deep integration it'd need to behave like its desktop counterpart is impossible on the iPhone, it's more of a glorified clipboard in this incarnation. It does let you pull your shortcuts from your Mac, though, which is pretty helpful. 2bux.

US Open App: Hey, tennis nerds: Live streaming US Open radio coverage is pretty great on its own, while a predictable-but-useful set of news and photo tools will keep you as attuned to the goings-on New York as you could ever want to be. Free.

Girlfriend Keeper: Want to make sure you don't lose your significant other because an anniversary slipped your mind, or because you don't text them enough? Would you like to manage these issuew while simultaneously condescending to them with automated text messages and email? You can do that now, thanks to technology!. As far as joke apps go, you've got to give these guys credit for following through. A dollar. [via TheFrisky]

TUAW: Single-source news apps are by nature kind of dumb, but TUAW's new app deserves a special mention because a) their news is obsessively relevant to iPhone users and b) because it's a surprisingly polished app. Free.

Madden NFL 10: This one isn't technically out yet—it's due in a month or so—but we thought we'd give you a peek. There are other football games around, but this is a real Madden title, meaning it'll have team and player names licensed, and an outsize budget, which looks like it's manifested itself in some pretty amazing graphics. The control scheme is the obvious wildcard here, so we'll let you know how it works once we've had some hands-on time.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Nobody Wants to Be Judged Based on the Apps on Their Phone

• Augmented Reality Yelp Will Murder All Other iPhone Restaurant Apps, My Health

• Apple Actually Approves Awesome Streaming Service Spotify's iPhone App

• Panelfly iPhone Comicbook Reader Is Crying for the Apple Tablet

Your Childhood PC, Perfectly Simulated on the iPhone

• Sirius XM SkyDock Not-So-Magically Converts Your iPhone Into a Satellite Radio

• iHungry?

• How Your Favorite iPhone App Was Designed

• Chipotle iPhone App's Super Convenient Burritos Are Going to Make Us So, So Fat

• Being a Creepy Stalker? There's an App For That

• The Most Racist App Apple's Approved

• The Best iPhone Navigation App: TeleNav vs. Navigon vs. TomTom

• Qik iPhone Video Sharing App Now Allows For Video Uploads 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 and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.

NPR News: The unaffiliated Public Radio Player was great great great, but this is somehow better. It brings twice as many stations, adds written news content along with offline reading, on-demand NPR shows and a surprisingly navigable interface. Guiltily free, since you don't even have to sit through pledge drives.

Wikipedia: I just assumed this app already existed, but Wikipedia somehow didn't have an app until this week. Weird! It's sort of a website-wrapped-in-an-app snooze for now, though it's open source and Wikipedia would very much like you to help make it into something decent, that people might actually want. Free, and quite.

Fluent News (Update): A personal favorite news aggregator of mine, Fluent now supports Google News-style searches across sources and emailing from within the app. The search feature is more useful than it might sound, especially if you want to dig right into a news story right after hearing about it. Free.

WHOA: You know Telephone, the group game where you pass a complicated, whispered message around a circle of people until it turns into something about penises, usually? This is that, with writing and drawing, on the iPhone. Here's what you do: You write a word, the next person draws it, the next person writes what he thinks the drawing is, and so on. A dollar.

Aha: Crowd-sourced traffic, with a big-buttoned, simple interface intent on not causing you crash into other people. It'll let you see how traffic is on your preferred driving routes based on input from its users, who can literally yell at their iPhones to record short voice messages about how bad (or awesome, I guess) the roads are. It's only available in a few cities for the time being, but the concept is promising, as are the early reviews.

Discovery Channel: Better than your average dedicated station or publication app, though it follows the same concept: This is video, audio, photo and text content from the Discovery Channel, home of Mythbusters and LOTS OF SHARKS, in a nice little packaged news-style app. No full show episodes—gotta buy those in iTunes—but lots of decent clips and plenty of meat for DC nerds, if there is such a thing.

Simplify Photo: Simplify's other app lets you listen to your home music library from anywhere with a sort of zero-setup server app, and it's absolutely indispensable. This one does the same thing for photos, letting you access your entire home photo library wherever you are, without taking up much space on your iPhone's dinky drive. The experience is surprisingly seamless considering how much it depends on the iPhone's data connection, and the app is only a dollar.

This Week's App News On Giz

• You Can't Read the Good Part of Google's FCC Response

• Apple and AT&T Answer FCC About Google Voice Rejection: It's All Apple

• App Store Approval Process Slowly Getting Less Horrendous?

• iPhone's Sonar Ruler App Measures Distance Using Sound

• Native Twitter Location Data Means More Stalker Power With Every Tweet

• Blow Virtual Kisses with Happy Dangy Diggy

• i.TV iPhone App Grows a Remote Control Framework, TiVo Gives It a Whirl

• Apple Exec Phil Schiller Reaching Out to Rejected App Developers

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 and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.

Civilization Revolution: Real-time strategy doesn't really suit the iPhone—it can be a little frantic, and controls aren't perfect. So how about an iPhone adaptation of one of the greatest turn-based strategy games of all time? $10 is right at the acceptable ceiling for non-professional iPhone apps, but this is real, true-to-form Sid Meier stuff, right here.

Duke Nukem 3D: Oh, by the way, everyone who likes strategy games is a nerd, right guys? Because real men play DUKE NUKEM', with the boobs, and the cursing! This is a fairly direct port of the classic game, but with crappier—though not terrible, for the iPhone—controls, and sadly, no iPod Touch 1G compatibility. Three dollars for a reasonably long, surprisingly playable game.

eBay: eBay has updated their app to support two pretty awesome things: Push notifications, to tell you when you've been bidsniped, because that's pretty much all that shopping on eBay is about nowadays, and PayPal payment support, so you don't have to log onto a PC every time you want to seal a deal. Still free, OBO. (via)

reMail 2: iPhone mail search is fine. reMail iPhone mail search is actually good, if it works for you. Two things: there's no Exchange support (sorry suits!), and there's only support for one account at a time. But within that one IMAP or POP account, reMail archives all your message text as far back as you want, letting you search full text—not just subjects—without a network connection. The five dollar price is a little shameful, though.

Pastie: Lets you make a list of preset text snippets that you can quickly send as emails or texts, rather than having to type out a unique message. It's a timesaver if you're the kind of person who responds to everything instantly and succinctly, or if you just like having a large clipboard on your phone, but beware: it doesn't work on iPod Touches, at all. (via)

My Gay Agenda: Are you gay? Do you have a well-formed sense of irony? Would you like to spend three dollars to make everyone is totally aware of these two facts? Great! Though in all seriousness, this faux-pernicious calendar/to-do list is pretty funny, and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

This Week's App News on Giz:

• Qik Video Sharing Application Now Available for iPhone 3GS

• iPhone App Developer Uses Fake Tablet Video to Promote their Crappy Game

• The 10 Most Expensive iPhone Apps

• Apple's Phil Schiller Continues Quelling Faithful's App Store Unrest With Polite Letters

• Sex Offender Locator Back in the App Store For Some Reason

• CourseSmart Dumps 7,000+ Textbooks Into the iPhone App Store

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 and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.

Pac-Mac Remix: This is an official, sanctioned Pac-Man remake, and accordingly a pretty good one. Purists might be turned off by the 3D graphics, but the gameplay hasn't really changed; in fact, using finger flicks to change direction is a brilliant way to control Pac-Man. For $6, as is, this is good; for $2—even if that would mean losing the flashy production—it would kill.

Mujik: An instrument-slash-synthesizer made of books, flies, cardboard and whimsy. It takes about five minutes to figure out what the hell is going on with Mujik, but once you do, it's beautiful, and the musical possibilities are tremendous. This is as good as Brian Eno's Bloom, if not better—not least because it's free. (via TUAW)

Tightwire: A fat man on a tightrope wire, in 3D, who you keep alive by tilting your iPhone. The graphics are good, the impact animations forceful and satisfying, and difficulty level high enough to keep this simple concept entertaining for more than a few minutes. One dollar.

Waze: To be honest, crowd-sourced navigation sounds like a pretty terrible idea, but who am I to judge: Waze has been available in Israel for quite a while, and people swear by it there. In the US, its userbase is a little lean, and most the features don't yet work as well as they're supposed to—turn-by-turn navigation included. If more people join, I guess, the user-contributed information, like common speed traps, road quirks, and whatever else you can think of, should get much better. Cool, but couldn't Google just do this by enabling user layers in Maps? Free.

Call of Duty: World at War Companion: Ha ha, that icon got you all excited, didn't it? Sorry, this isn't a new Call of Duty game for the iPhone. Actually, no, not sorry, because for anyone who plays COD: WaW (nice acronym), the detailed stats-tracking and player communication features are pretty neat. Free.

iSimulate: Alright kids, step outside—this one's for the developers. iSimulate lets you display iPhone apps on your computer screen, mainly for the purposes of demo recording, which is tough in the SDK emulator on account of its awkward accelerometer and multitouch implementations. $8.

The Week's App News on Giz:

• Gross Virtual Girlfriend App Is One-Upped by its Gross Fox News Coverage

• Apple Yanks Sex Offender Locator From App Store to the Relief of Perverts Everywhere

• Giz Explains: How Push Works

• Apple's Phil Schiller Explains They Don't Actually Censor Dictionaries

• Now Apple's Blocking All Ebook App Store Submissions? Update: No

• The Stupidest App Store Incident Yet: Apple Censors a Dictionary

• Third Largest App Store Developer Gets Banned, For Sucking

• Windows Mobile Wants In On the iPhone App Action, Literally

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 and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a swell weekend everybody.