App Store - page 101

Did you promise yourself that 2011 would be the year that you would quit smoking? Are you having trouble sticking to your new year’s resolution? Well maybe there’s an iOS app that will make it a little easier for you. Here’s our list of the best iOS apps that may help you succeed in your quest to quit this year.

The apps we’ve selected will help you find the motivation you need to stamp out those nicotine cravings. Quickly calculate how much money you spend on cigarettes each week and see how much you could save as a non-smoker; create personalized plans that are tailored to help you quit in a way that suits you; and even estimate how much of your life you might be saving by saying no to cigarettes. If that’s not enough motivation, we don’t know what is!

Check them out after the break and get help to kick the habit in 2011.

This week’s must-have iOS apps features Bills – On Your Table HD – a fantastic finance application that helps you manage your money on your iOS device. Bills makes it simple to store and track various types of outgoing payments with specific due dates. The application has been available on the iPhone for some time, but now it’s available in HD for the iPad.

iDarkroom is the latest top photography application for personalizing your snaps. With a wide variety of effects and frames to choose from, it’s easy to make your photos that little bit more priceless.

“The internet, rethought, reinvented, and handcrafted for the iPad,” with Browser+ HD – a feature-packed web browser that claims to be the slickest way to browse the internet on the planet.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps, including Timeli and OMGuitar, after the break!

This week’s must-have iOS games features a motocross game that turns a fan-favorite genre on its head and delivers a side-scrolling racer that claims to be like no other game you’ll find in the App Store. Discover what players of the desktop version of Mad Skills Motocross have enjoyed for years.

Sheeple Chase is a loveable little racing game in which your aim is to guide a cute little sheep to victory against his farmyard friends. Enjoy a multi-colored visual feast as you race through the various worlds in a bid to obtain all of the winners cups, while picking up as many juicy apples as you can on the way.

Fans of run-as-far-as-you-can games will love Run Like Hell, the frantically-paced platform game that will have you running, jumping, sliding, climbing and crawling your way to safety as you try to outrun the spear-throwing tribesman.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS games, including Road Blaster and The Blocks Cometh after the break!

In just a little over 200 million downloads, the App Store will serve up its ten billionth app , and to celebrate the occasion, Apple’s going to give the lucky S.O.B. who downloads the 10 billionth app a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Well, technically, Apple’s only saying that the person who downloads the ten billionth app has a chance of winning a $10,000 gift card. Note the verbiage (emphasis ours):

As of today, nearly 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves. So we want to say thanks. Download the 10 billionth app, and you could win a US $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. Just visit the App Store, and download what could be your best app yet.

The explanation for Apple’s wishy-washiness are pesky American laws that require companies to give an equal chance to no-commitment entries, which is why Apple has provided an entry form that you can fill out up to twenty five times a day. These entries count as make-believe app downloads; if one of these cheapskate entries triggers the ten billionth download, they’ll walk away with $10,000, just as if it were a real download.

Either way, this is super cool. A $10,000 iTunes gift card is probably large enough that even the most addicted app fiend will never have to spend another real-world dime in the App Store again.

What does Capcom’s new App Store game MaXplosion and the Twisted Pixel Xbox Live Arcade game ‘Splosion Man have in common? Everything, much to Twisted Pixel’s dismay.

With excellent timing for citation in Microsoft’s lawsuit against Apple over the latter’s App Store trademark, the American Dialect Society has just declared the word “app” their word of the year.

Beating out words like “junk” (?), “WikiLeaks”, “trend” and “nom” (thank God), app was voted the belle of the Dialect Society ball by over 69 linguists. It was a close race, though, with the Dialect Society’s executive secretary saying that while there was nothing “clearly dominant” this year, “there’s no question ‘app’ is a very powerful word.”

A few other Apple-related words also made the American Dialect Society’s list, including “fat-finger” to mean mistyping on a touchscreen and the “-pad” suffix in reference to tablet computers.

Writing about mobile for a living, it can be hard to keep the names of all of the competing App Stores straight. Apple has the App Store, Google has the Android Marketplace, HP has the Palm App Catalog and Microsoft has the most unwieldy name yet in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Microsoft seems to be as embarrassed by their app market’s name as we are, because they’re now trying to take Apple to court over Cupertino’s 2008 trademark on the the “App Store,” arguing that the term is too generic to be exclusively used by Apple.

The Mac App Store had a pretty big first day, racking up over a million downloads, but that’s more than just a big number for Apple… even successful software companies with proven distribution strategies are being wowed by the sort of numbers they’re seeing.

Take the chart above courtesy of Evernote, the popular virtual notebook and productivity suite. Note what happens to the Mac numbers come the Mac App Store launch day. Holy bejeebus.

Let’s flash back a few months to October, when an iOS developer called Applidium ported the indispensable VLC video player to the App Store as a free download. It was a great day for iOS device owners who wanted a more robust way of watching videos across many different codecs, but one of the lead contributors to the VLC project, Rémi Denis-Courmont, decided to get pissy about it. Why? Because VLC was released under a GPL license, and he felt that Apple wrapping a port of VLC in App Store DRM ran counter to that license.

Well, score a victory for VideoLAN, I guess. Denis-Courmont has successfully had VLC pulled from the App Store in response to a claim that the app violated VideoLAN’s licensing agreement.

I had originally experimented with the Mac App Store on my desktop computer installing a number of free and paid for applications. Now, I’ve finally gotten around to trying to install the same applications onto my MacBook Air just to see if I could, but I already know that I can. The licensing model of the Mac App Store allows it.

Unfortunately tonight the Mac App Store isn’t working and according to AppleCare there are two suggested ways to work around this that you need to try when the Mac App Store gives you an ambiguous error message: @@errorNum@@.

Now that the festive period is out of the way and we begin to settle in to the new year, Apple has returned to reviewing App Store submissions and games and apps are starting to trickle in again. Here’s our pick of the best iOS apps to enter the App Store over the past week.

8mm Vintage Camera is a great new video application that shoots old-fashioned 8mm movies in real-time. It was recently reviewed by the Cult’s own David Martin, who was very impressed with the app’s effects and awarded it 4 out of 5 stars.

Trimensional is a ground-breaking photography app and the world’s first 3D scanner for the iPhone. It cleverly uses both the screen and the front-facing camera on your device, detecting patterns of light reflected off your face to create a true 3D model. The results are extraordinary and you can check out some screenshots after the break.

If you’ve made any New Year’s resolutions for 2011, Zendre for your iPhone is the app you need to keep track of your goals and achievements. Reward yourself progress points every time you do something towards meeting your resolution, and get the motivation you need to keep your resolutions going.

Find out more about the applications above and check out the rest of this week’s must-have iOS apps, including Awesome Files HD and Symphony Pro, after the break!

Now that the festive period is out of the way and we begin to settle in to the new year, Apple has returned to reviewing App Store submissions and games and apps are starting to trickle in again. Here’s our pick of the best iOS games to enter the App Store over the past week.

Grimm is the first I’ve discovered, and probably the first you’ll play, in which your aim is to navigate a lost baby’s carriage and successfully deliver the child home to its mother. This side-scrolling adventure is set in a dark and stylized world and delivers something a little different that iOS gamers are sure to love.

Block Rogue claims to be the biggest mobile puzzle adventure ever made, and the game in which each solution brings you one step closer to the truth. Problem-solvers will love the hundreds of mind-bending puzzles and dark mysteries that Block Rogue has to offer.

The latest highly addictive iPhone game features a big, colorful elephant named Clumsy Bob, who’s about to set off on an adventure around the world. Bounce Bob across the vibrant cartoon environments as far as you can for your highest score, then challenge your friends to beat it.

Find out more about the games above and check out the rest of this week’s must-haves, including Ascendancy and Flying Hamster, after the break!

The Mac App Store has been live for less than a day, but already pirates have figured out how to circumvent its DRM to install and run unauthorized paid apps. It’s not Apple’s fault, though: instead, it looks like developers just haven’t been paying attention to Apple’s own app validation advice.

The father of a five year old boy born with a rare genetic disorder that delays the development of speech has designed a new iPad app that aims to help the speechless communicate.

A new lawsuit filed Monday against Apple and a number of app developers including Pandora, The Weather Channel, Dictionary.com and — uh — Pimple Popper Lite is alleging collusion to create secret profiles of iPhone users, including location, and pass that data onto advertisers without users’ consent.

For the iPhone user who has everything except his arms, meet the NoseDial, a new app that makes your contacts larger so that you can dial them using simply your face’s bulging proboscis. You don’t have to be a double amputee to use it, though: it’s also good if you’re trying to call someone with gloves you don’t want to take off.

Our favorite gadget vivisectionists over at iFixIt have just released a new iPad app that aims to be a free, easily-referenced glossary for their healthy library of open source self-repair manuals for every gadget under the sun: from the first generation iPod to the new, nigh-un-self-serviceable MacBook Air.

When you try to open a file that your Mac doesn’t already have a default app registered to, it doesn’t know what to do, so it either asks you to choose the application you want to use, or it will — if you so desire it — unceremoniously dump you back to Finder.

That’s actually not a very elegant way to handle unrecognized file extensions. Windows has a better system, for goodness’ sake: it will automatically search the web for applications that can open the file.

Luckily, with the arrival of the Mac App Store in January as well as the release of Mac OS X 10.6.6, that’s all slated to change. As it turns out, Apple has very cleverly deigned to integrate the App Store into the prompt you get when OS X doesn’t know what to do with a file: you can now search the Mac App Store for one that’ll work to open it. Keen!

You might not be able to watch a Blu-Ray DVD on your Mac, but Pioneer’s just unveiled a new line of 3D Blu-Ray players which not only feature DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD surround as well as 1080p video upscaling… but come with a new app called iControlAV that will allow you to control your new Pioneer player from the comfort of your iDevice. If you want one, it’ll cost you somewhere between $299 and $499.

We haven’t played it yet, but we look forward to, because Papa Sangre for iOS devices has one of the most intriguing central conceits of any app we’ve seen to date: it’s a video game with no video.

The one guy at Apple who programs their fantastic iOS Remote.app seems to have been busy before Christmas break: a new update was pushed live yesterday, adding AirPlay control on the AppleTV to the app’s already great list of features.

The new Remote.app is now at version 2.1 and, as usual, is available on the App Store as a free download. You can now use it to control iTunes on your Mac to stream videos directly to your new AppleTV, as well as play rented Movies and TV shows on your Mac without ever getting up from a supine position.

Internet Radio support is also new, and there are a slew of new stability and performance improvements as well, as well as some bug fixes for issues connecting to an iTunes library or Apple TV.

Grab the new Remote.app here

Square Enix just released a iOS port of one classic JRPG from the SNES era, Secret of Mana, and now it appears that they’re teasing another: Joystiq just sussed out a cryptic new teaser site for what appears to be a smartphone compatible (and hopefully iOS specific) port of Chrono Trigger, their famous 16-bit time travel RPG first released way back in 1995.

Chrono Trigger is still one of my favorite games. The site says “Spring 2011.” Oh please, oh please, oh please.

You probably know of Instagram, the hipster app du jour which allows you to easily apply a number of attractive, quasi-Polaroid-esque filters that spruce up your iPhone or iPod Touch pictures to give them a more artistic and sometimes twee look.

But you probably know more than of Instagram. You probably use it. After all, they just racked up one million users.

According to Instragram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Instagram started with just 80 users, and their ultimate “audacious goal” was just to let people share media in open community. The growth they’ve seen is phenomal, though: since mid-October, they’ve lured in over a million souls.

“We’ve just been amazed at the growth of the service,” Mr. Systrom said in a phone interview. “My partner and I had a bet the first day about how many downloads we would get and I was off by an order magnitude.”

How big is Instagram? Users are now collectively uploading three photos per second, to contribute to a library of almost ten million photos.

I may sound dismissive, but I’m not: Instagram undeniably allows users to take more interesting looking photos than the iPhone’s built-in sensor can natively produce. I guess I just wish that the iPhone and iPod Touch’s camera hardware was capable of taking interesting images without needing a filter app. It can’t, but that’s not Apple’s failure: it’s a limitation on the technology of digital sensors. Here’s hoping that changes.

If you’re as addicted to Chair and Epic’s Infinity Blade, as I am, today’s a banner day: an update to the elegiac swordfight action game has just dropped, and it adds a slew of new content.

Behold! An iPhone fit for a Brobdingnagian! This is the world’s biggest iPhone, located in the heart of London’s famous St. Pancras International Train Station. But while it is impressively enormous, a Bunyan-sized handset for the on-the-go colossus, it’s something of a cheat: it’s made up of 56 interconnected iPads.