software - page 45

In the hustle bustle of modern urban life, especially during holiday seasons fraught with travel delays, white-knuckle driving on treacherous roads, crowded shopping districts (though maybe not so much that, this year) and kids on vacation underfoot, a little bit of peace and tranquility can seem like the greatest of gifts.

Now you can give such a gift to yourself, a friend or loved one, with Freeverse’s Tranquility app for iPhone and iPod touch.

For just $1.99, drift off to sleep or catch a few peaceful moments during a stressful day. With a beautiful visual interface and new audio tweaks in the recently updated version 1.3 (requires iPhone 2.2 firmware), you can choose from a full 60 minute relaxation and meditation track, or from other themes such as Flowing Water, Ocean Waves, Desert Wind, Gentle Rain or Thunderstorms, even Pink Noise – an enhanced form of white noise.

Tranquility is the other side of Freeverse, the award-winning app developer responsible for Moto Chaser, Burning Monkey Casino and Big Bang Sudoku, among many others. Available now in the AppStore.

The iPhone app formerly known as Exposure has just been updated to version 1.5 and now has a new name: Darkslide.

Developer Fraser Speirs explains what it’s all about on his blog. For the uninitiated, the app is an iPhone-friendly environment for your Flickr account. It lets you keep track of your photos, your contacts’ photos, and check what images have been taken near your current location (which comes in extremely handy when you’re at a tourist attraction and you want to try and shoot something a bit different).

The big new feature in Exposure – sorry – Darkside 1.5 is, in Fraser’s own words, “Upload, upload, upload”. So, it does uploads now.

(I’ve not been able to test it yet, because my App Store is refusing to acknowledge that Exposure has been updated to anything other than Exposure. I expect it’ll all update itself in a few hours.)

Dimensions is a virtual toolbox offering a bakers’ dozen of functional tools animated with gorgeous 3D graphics that turn your Apple mobile device into something far more useful than any other cameraphone/musicplayer/gamestation-computer could hope to be.

Among the things you can do are:

*     Use the caliper to measure to a precision of 0.156mm or 0.006 of an inch.
*     A flexible tape measure lets you measure interior furniture, fabric and more up to 2.5 meters or 8        feet.
*     Another tape measure handles interior and exterior distances up to 5 meters or 16 feet.
*     A third measuring tool uses the iPhone’s camera to measure distances up to 25 meters, or 82 feet.
*     Distances over 80 feet, up to a mile, can be calculated with the measuring wheel.
*     The podometer uses GPS location services to measure thousands of miles or kilometers.

All calculations can be rendered in metric or Imperial scales. Dimensions was 2008’s best selling app in AppStores France and Italy, the #2 seller in Japan, Belgium and Switzerland, according to advertising placed by its developer, pocketDEMO.

And here we are in the US spending all our money on Sim City and Pull My Finger – it’s no wonder we’re a laughingstock in Europe.

$2 at the AppStore. C’mon, people – get to work!

There are many fine and useful offerings coming out of the Freeverse development shop and I recommend a visit to the website, but I want to talk right now about a couple of their iPhone/iPod Touch games – Flick Fishing, which you can see in the video above, and Flick Bowling.

When I got into this gig, I didn’t intend on becoming an iPhone game addict, but I’m beginning to understand why some people chase the mobile handset dragon.

Ancient wisdom in fishing circles holds that the worst day fishing beats the best day working. Well, Flick Fishing is an app that will give you a mighty realistic taste of a day on the water during that smoke, or coffee, or lunch break on a day when you’re stuck at work.

Choose from 6 locations, 9 types of bait and tackle, a dozen tournaments and dozens of unique species of fish, for a far more satisfying virtual fishing experience than you’d think 99¢ might buy. You can even use Network and Hotseat play to compete against your friends and show off your trophy catches by email with the “Brag” feature.

If you’d rather kill some time with a virtual indoor experience, you could do a lot worse then Flick Bowling. There are a couple of other bowling games on the AppStore, but Freeverse’s 99¢ program knocks ’em down in the first frame.

Excellent 3D animation and realistic bowling alley sounds, along with great music – and customizable bowling balls in the latest version – make Flick Bowling an oddly relaxing way to feel good about doing nothing in particular. You can choose from varying levels of difficulty and bowl solo, against your friends or against a built-in opponent. Between frames you can switch over to iBeer and come back to pick up where you left off.

‘Tis the season for Holiday parties and overindulgences of many kinds, not the least of which can sadly include having too much to drink. It’s fitting then, that December is National Drunk Driving Awareness Month and we wondered how our iPhone might help us avoid the embarrassment and possible tragedy of too much drinking and driving.

Cheers! is a handy app from Addison Hardy that will help you estimate your blood alcohol content (BAC) over time, as long as you remember to add each drink you consume into the program. It factors in weight, gender and the time of each drink to help you make a reasoned estimate of your BAC after you’ve had last call and are ready to head for home. An excellent feature of this $3 program is that it will use your physical location to help you call a taxi if you’ve had too much to drink and drive.

A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is Drink Timer, from Simpsonics. With Drink Timer you enter your drinks and a calendar wheel tells you when you’re estimated to have zero alcohol in your system from the time you stop drinking. So if you’re out on a Friday night and being good about entering your drinks into Drink Timer, and you look down to see that calendar reading, say, Monday, you may want to throttle back a bit and have a nice warm cup of tea when it comes time for the next round. No Taxi services with Drink Timer.

r-u-drunk? is a game you can use to approximate the embarrassment and shame you’d face if a cop pulled you over driving in that condition. With 5 tests, including a balance test and a straight line test that make use of the iPhone’s accelerometer, it also has an alphabet typing test, a hand-eye coordination test and a simulated breathalyzer. Given the hit and miss nature of typing on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, you might want to start out with that one and if you can pass it, have another glass of champagne. The developers at MobilityWare market this $3 app as a companion to drinking games and it falls under the AppStore’s 17+ rating category.

Last but not least is iMeter, a 99¢ app that could actually help you save lives with its big graphic “meter” you can use to show your drunk friend that he is in fact talking too loud and that his BAC is at danger levels. Simply announce what you’re going to measure and when the meter loads on the iPhone’s screen, you control the “level” the meter will read out using a slider similar to the one used to unlock the phone. Comes complete with funny sounds and pop-out animation for maximum meter readings.

Please remember that drinking and driving is not a laughing matter and it is never fun to play games when real lives could be at stake. The Holiday Season is a time to celebrate with friends and family and to enjoy the spirit of giving and togetherness that make being part of a “cult” special. Drink responsibly and remember that Taxi feature if you use Cheers!

It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 12seconds.tv have created a 99¢ app for the iPhone that lets you take 3 photos (either on the fly or choose from your camera roll), record 12 seconds of audio, which it ties into a multimedia masterpiece “video slideshow” you can then share with your friends and an unsuspecting world.

Slideshows are automatically uploaded to servers at 12seconds.tv, where users have an account from which they can manage their body of work. Every video has its own page (sort of like Flickr) and any video can be emailed, downloaded or embedded.

One of the 12seconds dev team told us, “we tried hard to keep the app simple and straightforward and fun.” From all appearances, they have succeeded. The slideshows make effective use of the “Ken Burns effect” that will be familiar to anyone who’s made a slideshow in iPhoto, and the recording quality of the iPhone’s microphone is surprisingly good.

Another consideration behind limiting the final output to twelve seconds was that “twelve seconds is about the ideal amount of time for most user-generated content,” according to David Speiser, who consulted with Lipman on development of the app. “The goal is to keep the barrier for consumption really low – no matter how badly a video might suck, you know you’ll never waste more than twelve seconds of your life watching it.”

At long last, there’s a desktop app for UK Mac users to download digital copies of BBC TV shows.

The launch of the Mac beta comes many months after its Windows rival. It also comes with a self-congratulatory news story at news.bbc.

And it’s also a bit of a mess.

Lots of people, myself included, have spent long hapless hours this evening, trying to find any way to download the app in the first place. I hunted high and low and found nothing. I signed up as a Labs user. I clicked randomly on some stuff. Hmmm. Finally a friend sent me this link, which took me to a Download option.

It’s an Adobe Air app, so installation is fairly straightforward from that point. Even so, with the app installed, I still can’t find a single show available as a download. And that’s after trying in three different browsers. Hence the disappointingly empty screenshot above.

But hey, let’s not moan. It’s great to have the app at all, and UK Mac users will be delighted to have it around. Thank you lovely Auntie Nerds!

Recent weeks have seen renewed discussion about the security vulnerabilities of Macs and the OS X operating system, though, as usual, it is primarily PC interests who say, “your day of reckoning is gonna come” and Mac interests who say, “Apple computers are the safest computers under the sun.”

Meanwhile, Apple released a security update on Tuesday that quashed 21 security bugs, news of which was taken by those on both sides of the debate as evidence their argument is right.

What better time, then, for Norton/Symantec to release Internet Security 4 for Mac and Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection, designed for those running Boot Camp or other Windows virtualization software on the Mac. Both products integrate all-new firewall and antivirus protection with tools to help protect against the increasing instance of identity theft.

I spent some time this week going over the UI and program features with Symantec’s Mac Product Manager, Mike Romo, and I was impressed with the granularity built in to the software’s control features and pleased to see Symantec has paid attention to creating a UI that says the designers have seen and used Macs themselves.

While automatically blocking attempted exploits using different protocols, Norton Internet Security for Mac’s firewall now also offers application control, which allows users to manage the applications that are connecting to the Internet, protecting Macs from spyware. New location awareness controls let users specify different connection settings for different networks to which a computer may be connected. The software is also integrated with Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System, an evolving database of known bad actors. Firewall rules are automatically updated at least once a day to protect against the latest attacking IP addresses.

This is powerful software that should appeal to rabidly security-conscious Mac users – especially the growing cadre of multiple-user businesses, schools and enterprise customers who have adopted the OS X platform – who will be happy with its degree of configurability as well as the extensive live monitoring and event logging it makes possible. Those who want to “set it and forget it” can also feel secure from phishing, malware or hacking threats they believe are lurking out there for the Mac.

Available now for the US from the Symantec online store and through various retail outlets, Norton Internet Security 4 for Mac is US$79.99, which includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates. The suggested retail price for Norton Internet Security for Mac Dual Protection is US$89.99, which also includes a one-year subscription to Symantec protection updates.

You yourself might not be an actual superhero, but with Earthcomber, a free GPS-leveraging search/mapping/social networking app for iPhone and iPod Touch, you can have “superhuman awareness,” according to developer Jim Brady.

Preloaded with a comprehensive database of restaurants, movie listings, events, historical sites, local information and more, the app lets users tag their interests – for example, Greek cuisine, historic buildings, hot chai tea, or free WiFi access. They can also add their own items, and invite friends so they can find them as well.

Earthcomber then scans an area for any matches, using the iPhone’s GPS. Any place that has anything of interest is announced by an optional chime.

Earthcomber is different, according to Brady, because it utilizes multiple technologies so the user doesn’t have to jump from one application to the next to accomplish related tasks. “That’s the whole point,” Brady said. “We don’t have to turn off our eyes to start up our ears, and we sure don’t have to fill out a search box for our brains to work. Earthcomber uses mobile technology as a powerful extension of our natural abilities, so that we can be constantly aware of what’s right around us.”

Earthcomber won Nokia’s 2008 Mobile Rules! competition for “Best Infotainment” application. The company provides USA service today and plans international coverage with a coming update.

Retina-X released the unsubtly named Mobile Spy software for iPhone on Wednesday, a product the company says “will reveal the truth for any company or family using Apple smartphones.”

Mobile Spy operates in stealth mode, invisible to the iPhone user, but permits parents or employers who install it to silently monitor incoming and outgoing text messages (SMS) and call information of children or employees – even if activity logs are erased. The software starts when the phone is booted up, records all call and SMS activity and uploads the data in real time to Retina-X servers, which may be accessed from anywhere on the Internet.

The company says it is working on adding spy awareness to email activity in a future release.

Because the software runs in the background, sending and receiving data across the network while other software is in use, Mobile Spy violates Apple’s iPhone SDK, so you won’t find it on the app store, but it is available on the Retina-X website.

Priced at $100 annually, $70 semi-annually or $50 quarterly, it is compatible with iPhone 3G only.

This holiday season you may want to beware of parents, bosses and spouses bearing iPhone gifts.

Over at Crave, Matt Hickey has published a little list of the technological things he wants to see fixed by ol’ Father Christmas.

And first among them, top of his list, is…

… wait for it …

Apple released the 10.5.6 update to Leopard on Monday with a feature that makes it impossible to jailbreak and/or unlock an iPhone or iPod Touch using PwnageTool or QuickPwn, according to a report at iPhoneAlley.

Blogger Erica Sadun explains in more detail that engineers at Apple propagated to all 10.5.6 loaded Mac systems USB kexts (kernel extensions) that prevent a Mac from recognizing an iPhone or iPod in Device Firmware Update mode, a high level communication protocol used for firmware restores among other things.

The battle between Cupertino and a dedicated band of Apple users who believe the company’s mobile platform should be opened for general use and development outside the limitations of the AppStore has been going on since the original iPhone was unlocked weeks after its initial release in June 2007. Subsequent updates to the mobile firmware have ben decoded within days of their release.

Many, though not all users who jailbreak/unlock their iPhones do so to enable them to operate on cellular telephone networks other than AT&T, the exclusive authorized service provider in the US. Others see the advantage of an unlocked phone that can run software developed for it that has not otherwise been approved by Apple for sale and distribution in the iTunes AppStore.

Sadun confirmed with sources inside Apple that the current roadblock to unlocking efforts was deliberate and both she and iPhoneAlley suggested those wanting to operate jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches ought to wait to install the 10.5.6 update on their Macs until developers working to maintain the open mobile platform have devised a workaround.

One possible avenue around the DFU mode restriction has been suggested by Phone developer Steven Troughton-Smith, who told Sadun the problem relates to devices plugged directly to Macs. He relates that DFU mode can be used with a unit connected via a hub and can be pwned as normal, even with the 10.5.6 update.

Rogue Amoeba Software added to its lineup of innovative audio software titles Monday with the release of Radioshift Touch, software that lets users listen to internet radio anywhere on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Powered by RadioTime, an internet radio catalog with thousands of stations from around the world in its database, Radioshift allows users to browse by genre, search by keyword and view listings for thousands of specific radio programs as well.

The app leverages iPhone firmware’s GPS capabilities to serve up local stations based on the user’s location and uses a feature called “SmartStream” to point to the most bandwidth-friendly stations, depending on the connection. Users can access Internet radio via, WiFi, EDGE or 3G.

Radioshift Touch is available at the iTunes AppStore for $9.99.

Given the host of free and low cost music programs available on the AppStore, including the ever-popular Pandora, and ClearChannel’s iHeartRadio, it will be interesting to track the success of Radioshift, with its relatively expensive price tag. Paul Kafasis, lead developer at Rogue Amoeba, has a sterling reputation for developing useful, high quality audio software for the Mac, so we invite Cult readers who try Radioshift to let us know what you think.

First: Try My Nose!! No, really! Try it!

“Just select a nose you like, hold it next to you current nose and surprise your friends!”

Or – now here’s a radical thought – just stick with the nose you were born with! Maybe it suits you just fine! Maybe – oh never mind. Next!

The Blagoblogs are a-buzz this evening with word that Microsoft, though it definitely has no ZunePhone to show at next month’s CES (I know, I’m just as heart-broken as you are), will almost certainly launch some sort of software ‘n’ services platform for Windows Mobile called Zune Mobile. According to ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley, who is as interested in Zune Mobile as it is possible for a non-Microsoft employee to be, the platform may include “music purchase, playing, sharing and subscribing — and maybe even a little something special for podcasters/podcast listeners, too.”

Or, in other words, Microsoft may, if it plays its cards right, bring the technical media functionality of the iPhone to the legendarily poor interfaces of a thousand mediocre Windows Mobile phones, many of which have enough on-board storage for two or even three albums worth of music. Rather than attempting to a build a ground-up 21st century mobile platform, Microsoft is attempting to bolt on features that meet current user expectations, and then leave it up to dozens of hardware makers to see if the experience actually holds together. If true, this is a pretty sad bit of competitive response out of Redmond. At best, it’s a duplicate of a famous Apple failure — iTunes for the Motorola ROKR.

In that unfortunate experience, Apple brought iTunes support to a third-party phone, and then ran screaming as it realized the only way to ensure its name would only appear on a great phone would be to build the software and the hardware from the ground-up on its own. The iPhone resulted. Zune was Microsoft’s first attempt to follow such a strategy, to poor results thus far (in large part because Apple’s ecosystem was much stronger). Now, it would appear, Microsoft is relying on its standard software-only approach to respond to the iPhone juggernaut.

That’s pretty sad. As an enormous Apple fan, I would like nothing better than a credible challenge to the iPhone’s dominance — it means an even better iPhone than I can imagine in two years’ time. But if this is the best the Distinguished Competition has to offer, all we have to rely on is the vision of Steve Jobs. Good thing he can see for miles and miles, eh?

Via ZDNet

Microsoft finally got around to testing Apple’s AppStore waters this weekend with the release of Seadragon, a free project of Micrsoft’s LiveLabs that lets you see giga-pixel images on your iPhone using a nifty zooming algorithm to get super-close on a map or photo, with just a few pinches or taps of your finger.

The app comes pre-loaded with images and lets you view yours or others’ Photosynth images, or content from any RSS feed.

The embed above shows of the experience in a fashion similar to the one you’ll find on the iPhone or iPod Touch, according to a report at TechCrunch.

Via 148Apps

Seems like the big news over the past few days at the AppStore tends mostly to the questionably mature, if not downright asinine.

First, the re-emergence of Pull My Finger, an ingenious application that produces the sound of flatulence, generated over 200 stories in the Apple web-osphere yesterday. After initially rejecting the app as something with no discernible utility, Apple has reportedly sorted out how to handle this particular genre of application, according to Pull My Finger’s developer.

Then there there was the implication of either uncertainty or perhaps some discrimination with respect to apps intended for “mature audiences,” with developers of apps rated 17+ finding they cannot – as of this writing – issue promotional codes that other app developers were recently given to enable easier review and testing. Apple has described the restriction as a “minor glitch” that should be resolved shortly, according to a report at iLounge.

Finally, also on Saturday, the application Poo Price made its debut. Poo Price counts time while you’re doing your business on the toilet at work and tells you how much money you made during that time “working” based on your salary. What price good humor, eh?

The interesting thing about Poo Price, though, is that it may be an example of an app that works in the background, in violation of the SDK’s prohibition on such functionality, according to a piece at Venture Beat.

Amid recent concern that Apple may have given Google preferential treatment in approving the search giant’s voice search application for sale in the AppStore, and discussion over SDK restrictions that appear to be keeping Flash off the iPhone in any meaningful way, concern over how Poo Price keeps its timer going even when the user switches out of it while, say, checking email in the restroom, may not be the most pressing thing on many people’s agenda.

As MG Siegler writes for Venture Beat, Poo Price “is probably just another crude app in the new, racy App Store.”

Soooo, this 3D interface that everyone’s been going crazy about; allow me to add a brief comment:

Arrrrrrrrgghghggghghhhhh.

The developers at Mokugift, the kind-hearted people behind the iPhone/iPod Touch app A Real Tree, may not be the greatest app developers, but they are good at math.

For every one of the 99¢ apps purchased on Apple’s iTunes AppStore, one of Mokugift’s 12 internationally recognized tree planting partners will plant, yes, a real tree in places fighting deforestation such as Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines, and Haiti. These countries are in tropical regions where tree planting is the most beneficial in the fight against global warming.

To be sure, the app is not going to wow the average game-addled, accelerometer-addicted iPhone user. When the app is launched an animated tree grows out of the ground into full bloom. Ta-daa! Tap once and watch a little bird circle around and land. But Mokugift’s Hans Chung understands that Apple has sold more than 13 million iPhones. “If every iPhone owner planted one tree,” he says, “the environmental impact would be equivalent to taking 500,000 cars off the road.”

Chung’s A Real Tree project works with organizations that provide materials and education to local communities to plant trees in an ecologically-beneficial manner. Local communities learn how to plant trees while avoiding toxic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. The trees they plant produce nutritious fruits and crops that they can live off and make a living on.

It seems like an effort worth contributing 99¢ to, doesn’t it? “People spent $8,000 dollars on that frivolous “I Am Rich” app, Chung said, “That inspired us. We knew we needed to develop something meaningful.” If that’s not enough to turn you over, Chung promised more small ‘Easter egg’ surprises will be added to the tree and the little bird with future updates.

Via iPhoneSavior

In the wake of developer Craig Hockenberry’s “Dear Steve” letter complaining about feeling forced to drift in a sea of 99¢ “ringtone apps,” and the inevitable charges of petulant whining that some accused him of in response, developers at Appcubby have published detailed financial records showing, down to the dollar, what goes into keeping food on the table for an iPhone app developer.

Among the things Hockenberry mentioned in his developers’ wish list to Steve were: ways to accurately track who exactly is downloading apps (and which ads/links they clicked on to get to the store), and the ability to offer free demo version of apps that expire after a given time, prompting people to buy the full app. Appcubby’s records would appear to support the view that Hockenberry was not just crying in his beer, and their post supports his call for free demos and more ad-tracking capabilities as two things that would greatly help the situation.

Via Gizmodo

Gizmodo has the scoop on the launch of Pastebud, a third-party workaround for basic copy/paste on the iPhone using a couple of clever bookmarks and a webapp.

I say basic, because it is dependent on the bookmarks and so will only work with Safari, or with webapps that run within it.

I think the most interesting thing about Gizmodo’s scoop is the comment by Bandit underneath:

“No gadget in 2008 should require someone to create a workaround like this, let alone a gadget from a company as prominent as Apple. Apple should be embarrassed.”

You said it, Bandit. You said it.

Tune Up, already a popular iTunes plug-in for Windows, makes its OS X debut on Thursday, promising to automagically bring order to your hopelessly unorganized iTunes Library and bestow upon you missing cover art, concert information, music videos and news about your favorite artists, all without your ever having to leave iTunes.

Nicely presented to a snappy backing track in the video above, Tune Up will first analyze your library, presenting you with information on all the megabytes of music you have labeled Track 1, Track 2 and so on, all the Unknown Artists, Unknown Albums and missing information keeping your database from being fit to be housed in the Library of Congress.

Once you’ve been shamed to learn how sloppy you’ve been about importing music onto your Mac, Tune Up gives you the chance to clean up your mess and the automagical stuff really starts to happen. Using a secret forensics algorithm, the program takes an “audio fingerprint” of each mislabeled track and compares it to the 90 million song Gracenotes® Global Media Database and automatically fills in the missing information.

“All of us here are entrenched in music. We’re cranking tunes all day,” says CEO and founder of Tune Up Media, Gabriel Adiv. “We’re also the type of people who want all of our cover-art, don’t like missing concerts and spend hours online looking for YouTube videos, news, and merch from our favorite artists.”

Once your library has been cleaned and all your cover art rendered, Tune Up knowingly displays upcoming local concerts for every artist in your collection, and fetches YouTube videos, Google news and Wikipedia bios related to any playing track. The best part of this feature is that it’s built in – no filling out extra forms or compiling lists of favorite artists or albums from scratch.

For a limited time, a full-featured version of Tune Up is available with 500 “cleans” and 50 cover art “finds” for free. “Tune Up Gold” provides unlimited cleans and cover art finds for a one-time fee of $19.95 or an annual subscription of $11.95. The OS X version launching Thursday requires Leopard, but the company plans a release supporting Tiger soon, as well as support for Windows Media Player and AOL’s WinAmp later in 2009.

Promo App Codes, a  web forum, tradingpost and clearinghouse for iPhone app developers and the people who love them, launched this week and seems to already be generating considerable interest on both sides of the aisle.

For developers, the site is an oppportunity to promote their work and share Apple’s recently authorized promotional codes, a device for getting early-release and review copies of AppStore approved apps quickly into the hands of up to 50 app testers/reviewers. For reviewers/bloggers/app-nuts, the site provides an easy way to learn about new apps and to establish relationships directly with developers while giving them the valuable feedback to optimize and improve their applications.

Amanuel Tewolde, a developer and founder of Promo App Codes, told Cult of Mac, “When I first heard that Apple will give me 50 promo codes for my apps in the store, I didn’t know who to give them out to.” The site was conceived as he began to consider that “user testing is expensive, and these codes provide a cheap alternative, not to mention help with some positive buzz.”

Potential reviewers and developers alike register for a free account on the clean, simply designed site, with developers having the opportunity to post app information and screenshots in blog-fashion. Registered users have the opportunity to post comments on each “post” about an application.

Users/reviewers/bloggers create profiles and add apps to a “wish list,” entries which show up to developers as interest in their apps, and developers then contact users with free promotional codes. The site maintains a rating system for each app and hosts a forum where all interested parties can communicate with one another. At this writing the site has registered 685 accounts in the two days it’s been open for business.

“We still have lots to learn and do but things look very exciting and the timing seems right,” says Tewolde. “It is christmas season, could there be a better time to start a site where people get free apps?”

At a talk in San Francisco tonight, I encountered a very cool (relatively) new OS X app called MemoryMiner. Basically, it takes all of your photos, your address book, and Google Maps to create interesting, shareable stories with friends and family. The most important piece of the app is its ability to quickly tag a portion of an image, much as Facebook and Flickr do, then associate those pieces of data back to your wider social network — over the course of time. It’s explicitly designed to allow you to tag a person at different points in their lifetime, so you can track and associate your family’s history over the course of centuries, if you have the documents to support it.

It’s currently in version 1.85 (available for a 15-day trial or $45), and creator John Fox tells me version 2.0 is well on its way, as is a social tool to track your personal geographic history compared to others. Having played around with the app for a few hours now, I will say that the program is really great at tagging and adding in new people to my MemoryMiner people file. In a few minutes, I had clips of pictures and names with all the people I wanted to. Unfortunately, for those whose birth dates I didn’t know (most of them), I had no ability to track their photos over their lifetimes. But it largely works as advertised.

Unfortunately, it has some pretty basic, pretty show-stopping limitations for the time-being. I couldn’t get it to import my iPhoto 08 Library, so that’s a huge portion of my memories that aren’t included right now. Even more troublingly, the program lacks the basic functionality to rotate photos so they’re in the correct orientation. Or, if it’s there, I just couldn’t locate it, which would almost be worse

Still, it’s a program with considerable potential. I could even imagine the company setting up a service to scan, upload, and tag archival photos so they can be associated and studied by users at home. I can just see the genealogy lovers getting way into this. Maybe in version 2.0.

The proliferation of cheap applications on the AppStore is stifling innovation and holding Apple’s mobile touch platform back from realizing its true potential, according to developer Craig Hockenberry.

In a post Tuesday at his furbo.org blog, Hockenberry published an open letter to Steve Jobs, saying, “I’m not going to give you suggestions on what to do” about developers (himself included) working on 99¢ titles that have a limited lifespan and broad appeal instead of on “the cooler (and more complex) ideas that could see the utility of the platform taken to another level.”

He goes on to describe the economics of paying development team members the going rate of $150-200 per hour, the realities of having to make up the bulk of development costs during the short period of time an app is likely to be featured among the tens of thousands soon to be available on the AppStore, and concludes “there’s too much risk…in developing something that takes 6 or even 9 man months…with a break even at 215K or 322K units.”

Under the prevailing conditions, where 99¢ “ringtone apps” dominate the landscape, Hockenberry says “going for simple and cheap instead of complex and expensive” is the fiscally responsible choice for developers to make.

In the end, he says “We’re not afraid of competition. In fact, we welcome it as a way to improve our products and business. [But] we’re hoping for a way to rise above the competition when we do our job well, not just when we have the lowest price.”

It’s hard to quibble with Hockenberry’s assessments from a developer’s economic risk perspective, especially in the midst of a contracting economy such as the one at present. It’s also unlikely the iPhone’s “killer app” will end up being one that goes to market at 99¢.

From the perspective of consumers, though, from that of users of new technology that is itself in the midst of early stage development, of users who in many cases make purchase decisions sight-unseen or on the basis of 2 minute YouTubed product demos – simple and cheap seems just about right.