The Italian priest who launched prayer app iBreviary has now slashed the price from $0.99 to gratis.

Given the popularity of the app, Don Paolo Padrini decided to give the current version away for free. (Profits from the app previously went to refurbishing a parish shelter.)

Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and an  Ambrosian Rite version (for mobile Milanese), this virtual breviary, or book of hours, gives the morning prayer, evening prayer and night prayer or complines for the day. It is the first app of its kind to obtain approval from the Vatican.

As a paid app, it was in the top 100 of its category (reference) beating out similar mobile prayer helpers like iPieta and iMissal.

What’s next? Don Padrini tells us his developers are hard at work on an iPad version they hope will be ready to launch when the new device hits stores in March.

The iPhone 3GS is like a Formula One car: fast, sleek and a thrill to drive. And then, every hour or so, it has to hit the pits to refuel (only, unlike refueling an F1 car, it takes hours, not seconds). Now, imagine if every F1 car had button on the steering wheel that the driver could punch, and a fuel cell would drop from some kind of team drone-copter and refuel the car while it was rocketing around the track. Pretty cool, right? Well, that’s what using the TruePower iV Pro is like.

The iTunes store is pulling off and putting on sexy apps faster than you can stuff a dollar bill in a g-string.
Case in point: the Hooter’s girls are back in bikinis to “clean” your iPhone screen. Hooters Calendar Screen Wash was quietly reinstated Feb. 24 and is now back on sale. The $0.99 app is for a +17 audience, though it doesn’t seem to be any more prurient or wholesome than some of the babes-in-bikini apps that were yanked over sexual content. Another five Hooters-related apps, from several different app makers, also appear to have been reinstated.

No one seems more surprised than the creators, On the Go Girls, who remarked on the company blog:
“Wow! Surprising! We are shocked!  Our Hooters Calendar Sexy Screen Wash was restored to the App Store last night 2am PST.”

No-name bikini apps still seem to be AWOL from the iTunes store, which makes me wonder whether it’s more a question of brand-name franchises like Playboy and Sports Illustrated flaunting their stuff than one of women complaining about them.

Apple’s policy on what constitutes content too risqué for the iTunes store vacillates more than one of those iBoob apps.

Case in point:  developer Jon Atherton says he received a letter that Apple pulled his wildly popular Wobble iBoobs app because Apple “decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store” following customer complaints.

Now we’re really confused. Many of the apps that wiggled, jiggled or writhed past Apple censors in our last iSmut app story have been pulled (Bikini Ispector, Peek-a-Babe, Crazy Eights with Hooters Girls). But if they’ve put a firm hand on iJiggles, there’s plenty of exposed flesh still available on iTunes.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Bebot, Buster Red, What’s On Reading, Amazon Mobile and Numeric Paranoia.

‘Tis the season to get and give presents, and with prices through the floor, many will have gotten new digital cameras this year. If you’re one of the lucky ones who received a nice shiny new SLR camera, here are 10 tips that will help you become the next Ansel Adams.

With just days before Christmas, we highlight three Mac deals for the harried, last-minute holiday shopper. If you have an iPod on your list, but you don’t want to cross that mystical $100 barrier, Apple still has 8GB iPod nanos for just $99. Not often does shipping make it into the headlines, but as retailers pull out all the stops to attract online sales, Apple still has free next-day delivery. But hurry – 1pm EST Wednesday is the deadline. Last on our top trio seems perfect for all those iPhone owners out there: 80 percent off select cases for the Apple handset. (We also have a 50% off deal for iPod touch owners.)

Along the way, we have deals on a skin for the Nike+ iPod running sensor, the latest batch of App Store price drops and more software for your iPhone or iPod touch. For details on these and many more bargains, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the break.

Emulators themselves are on fairly well-established legal ground, but the ROM files required to play all of your favorite classic video games are far sketchier. Technically, if you rip a copy of a game yourself as a backup, you’re in the clear… but since few have the technical acumen or equipment to do so, they usually resort to downloading the ROMs from warez sites.

That’s primarily the reason why Apple has traditionally kept its App Store so closed off to emulators. So expect Nescaline, an NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod Touch, to be pulled as soon as Apple gets wind of it.

On sale for $6.99, Nescaline has a full feature list, including multitouch, light gun and save state support. It ships with five homebrew NES games, which is certainly legal. Unfortunately, its cardinal sin — at least in the eyes of Apple — is allowing users to input a URL where they can download additional ROMs. That means it’s as easy to put a warezed copy of Castlevania III on your iPhone as it is to cut-and-paste a Google search.

Expect Nescaline to be pulled quick, and if it comes back to the App Store at all, for the download feature to be neutered. Unfortunately, for right now, if you want to play emulators on your iPhone, legally owned games or not, jailbreaking is still your best bet.

Update: That didn’t take long. It’s been removed from the App Store.

Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon.  Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!

I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video you need as much storage space as you can afford. You need a badass computer with big fat hard drives that scream.

You think you might wanna Hot Rod your Mac Pro?  This easy, step-by-step guide will show you how.

The King of Pop Michael Jackson’s posthumous album, This is It, launched yesterday on iTunes and almost immediately went to the no. 2 spot and 10 spots on the list of  hot-selling albums.

As of this writing, it was second only to the soundtrack to The Twilight Saga, the New Moon.

The widely-anticipated album almost didn’t make it to iTunes.

Jackson’s last effort contains only one new song, the title track, and Jackson’s estate did not want to sell the album, as per Apple’s policy, on a track by track basis.

Fans who shell out $13.99 for the whole enchilada also get four demos and a poem with the 15 tracks including “They Don’t Care About Us” and “Billie Jean.”

The uneasy compromise: the new single only comes with the complete album.

As commenter yippiyyip noted: “The lone fault is that the title song is not being sold separately. Buy the album for the song? No thanks.”

Would you shell out for an entire album to get just one track?