The run up to the festive holiday is great news for the App Store – closing for submissions over Christmas means developers are working hard to ensure that their applications are approved and ready for purchase before Apple closes the doors. As a result, a torrent of applications have been surging in to the App Store over the past week, and to help you separate the good from the bad, here’s our list of must-have apps released over the past week.
The fascinating Guinness World Records book is now available as an interactive iPad application. Records come to life with full-screen video and full-color photography, and you can even attempt to beat exclusive world records on your device.
Friends is a new social networking application for the iPhone that lets you keep up with your friends, family, and colleagues from 4 social networks. With support for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, it’s easy to stay in touch without the need to open up different applications – it’s all here, in one place.
Screens is a VNC client for all of your iOS devices that makes accessing your computer from anywhere incredibly easy. It’s simple to set up and is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, through both Wi-Fi and 3G.
Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps – including Type It!, Puffin, and more – after the break!
Guinness World Records – ($4.99) iPad – Books
Experience the ups, downs, chills, and thrills of your favorite world record book in this interactive iPad app. Featuring exclusive record breaking challenges that give you the opportunity to be a record breaker; exclusive full-screen videos including interviews, record previews, and actual attempts; hot-spot images that reveal hidden facts & features; and lots more!
Friends – ($1.99) iPhone – Social Networking
Gather your friends from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn and conveniently keep in touch with them all in one place. Never miss a tweet, status update, or wall post; sync all of your friends with your address book, providing access to their profiles, photo albums and contact details; plus a whole lot more. Featuring the best Facebook experience that allows you to read, comment and ‘like’ posts on your news feed; browse through friends’ photo albums; make posts on their wall, and more. With support for all of the features you’d expect to find in a dedicated Twitter app, such as retweets, favorites, Instapaper support, and in-line attachments.
Screens – ($14.99) Universal – Utilities
Accessing your computer from anywhere has never been easier – Screens is the ultimate VNC client for your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. It’s user-friendly and simple to set up, and it’s compatible with Mac, Windows and Linux computers. Unlike other VNC clients, Screens doesn’t use a cursor – it’s 100% touch-based enabling you to click, drag, and scroll anywhere. Access to your computer is through a secure SSH tunnel so your connection is always safe & secure. Multi-touch support allows you to use all the gestures you’re already familiar with, and Screens will work anywhere through both Wi-Fi and 3G.
Type It! – ($0.99) Universal – Photography
Turn your photos in to beautiful typography art and create pictures that literally say a thousand words. Paint your pictures using fonts, rather than oil and water colors, and show off unique photos that are guaranteed to impress. Type It! features support for iPad & iPhone, numerous beautiful fonts, the ability to save and email photos to your friends, and a lot more coming soon.
Google Latitude – (Free) iPhone – Social Networking
If you’re not already familiar with Google Latitude, it’s a location-based social network from Google that allows you to pinpoint where your friends are right now and see each other on a map. Share your location continuously with whomever you choose and help friends and family stay in touch with you, even when you don’t have access to your device. Latitude will run in the background so you don’t even have to open the app, and the built-in privacy controls ensure your location is only shared with who you want, when you want.
Puffin – ($0.99) Universal – Productivity
Puffin is a ‘cloud accelerated’ web browser for your all of your iOS devices that provides you with the ability to render desktop versions of websites extremely fast on your mobile device. Run modern web applications with 100% compatibility, display Flash content, stream Flash videos, and even play Flash games (without sound) – the first application approved for the App Store to provide this feature.
