Hasta La Gadget!

This week we’ve cast the net out a bit further to catch some gems from this month that may have escaped our attention, including a repackaged, excrement-producing pop-culture classic. And it’s no fart app.

Tamagotchi: ‘Round the World: But unfortunately, it’s just as inane. Gone is the dot-matrix Tamagotchi you may remember from 1996, and in its place, a not-particularly-cute generic cast of knockoff superflat characters. The game appears to be based around gardening and growing plants by doing a rain dance: I gave up after a few minutes. But it poops, which is always nice. $6 with free lite version.

PhotoKeys Photoshop Remote: If you keep your phone docked near your keyboard like I do and do some heavy ‘shopping, this looks pretty handy. It turns your iPhone into a customizable tool palette by talking to a mini server app on your desktop. Windows and Mac are both supported. It’s $4.

Epiphany Recorder: Innovating above the countless other voice recorders in the store, Epiphany starts recording a buffer the moment it’s launched, but it only saves the audio you tell it to pressing the “Remember that!” button, which automatically saves the previous few seconds or minutes of audio (you pick). It’s great for recording an interview by grabbing only the important parts, saving major time in transcription. Very cool, and it’s free.

FedEx: There are a handful of other package-tracking apps in the store, but FedEx’s new official app looks nice for its ability to tie into you FedEx.com account. You can monitor shipments you’ve scheduled online, as well as create new labels from your phone. Nice interface too, and it’s free.

CTU: Even though this app is a few years too late, the last remaining folks still enjoying Bauer Hour can now create the show’s trademark multi-splitscreen-with-digital-timer tableaux with their photos. As a clock app and a novelty, not bad. $2

This Week’s App News on Giz:
• Mac Plus Emulator now Available for Jailbroken iPhones

• Why Most Content Apps Suck (But Some Would Be Amazing)

• iTunes Concept Shows How iPhone App Management Should Have Worked From the Start

• Metal Gear Solid Touch For iPhone Trailer Has Me Worried

• Major Label Bands Decide App Store Is Cool, Want to Take Over Your iPhone

• 5-Row QWERTY Jailbreak App Fixes One of the iPhone Keyboard’s Most Annoying Flaws

• Dashboard Widgets For Jailbroken iPhones: Hot or Not?

• ‘That’s What She Said’ iPhone App Is the Opposite of Comedy

• Your iPhone Is now a Kitchen Thanks to Cooking Mama

• TV.com iPhone App Streams Free Full-Length CBS and Showtime Shows

• iMafia for iPhone Circumvents the App Store, Sells Other Apps In-Game…and Apple Willingly Approves

• Apple Purging App Store Of Every Last Emoticon Enabler

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 good weekend everybody.

Apple just today declared jailbreaking illegal. So, in outlaw style, it’s a good day to take a break from the App Store to peruse the naughty treasures available to jailbreakers via Cydia.

As you’re well aware by now, Apple’s official SDK limits apps from doing lots of things, like cut and paste, video capture, and dubiously legal things like NES emulation. All of the apps listed here do something Apple doesn’t approve of, and they can be found by searching Cydia, an installer that automatically appears on your iPhone once you’ve successfully complete jailbreaking your phone. We’re not going to run through that process here (Quickpwn and Pwnage Tool are your friends), but suffice it to say, Apple doesn’t condone the practice, and there are certain risks to messing up your iPhone when you jailbreak or install any unauthorized apps. Be forewarned. Here’s what we’ve safely tested:

WinterBoard – The essential change-my-appearance app for the iPhone since the days before the App Store, it’s been known by other seasons before (SummerBoard, for example), but it’s essentially the same: You download themes, and can use this app to apply them system-wide. It also gives you other appearance controls like “Dim Wallpaper” and “Solid Status Bar.”

BossPrefs – An insanely useful utility for making one-tap system adjustments like toggling 3G, EDGE, wi-fi or Bluetooth. You can turn your mail on and off fast too. I like the “Hide Icons” feature, where you can go in and take certain apps off of your home screens without taking them entirely off your iPhone.

Search – An amazing app for searching everything on your iPhone, including MAIL! It’s a lot like the Sherlock of old—type a search term, hit enter, and it starts digging through Contacts, SMS, Notes, Events, Safari Bookmarks and Safari History. Tap any search result, and you go straight to that app. (We also tried Searcher, which does all of the above but does not search mail).

Cycorder – The semi-answer to iPhone’s lack of video recording, Cycorder does motion JPEG recording (now with audio). It looks as good as you can expect with that camera. The only catch is, in order to pull video files off of the damn phone, you have to use SSH or something else that can access the file structure. Nobody said bootleg app use was a cakewalk.

Snapture – An example of a for-profit jailbreak app, Snapture gives you basic controls for free for 20 tries, but then asks for $8, and in return gives you access to albums and all sorts of stuff. It’s risky considering any jailbroken app may not work the next time you update your iPhone’s software, but in this case, it’s at least a well designed app, giving you lots of camera controls (timers, auto-rotation, color mode, an on-screen level) plus a shutter button that is the entire screen, so it’s easier to take pictures with one semi-steady hand.

xGPS – This GPS program made a name for itself the other day by saying that, by February 20, it would have turn-by-turn speech navigation. While you wait for that, you can check out the nominal version available now, which is mostly just Google Maps with some extra tools like GPS tracking.

Clippy – Copy and paste really do work on an iPhone, and it’s system-wide. However, there are limitations. Once you’ve installed this utility from Cydia, you get to it by going to the number keys on the pop-up keyboard. As you can see, it appears above the standard numbers. As you might guess from that, you can only copy or paste when you have access to the keyboard. So copying an address off of a website is not doable, even though you would be able to paste any address into maps once you had it. There are new features that just popped up which I haven’t explored yet—maybe you know about them.

NES.app – An NES emulator that keeps getting better. If you can handle the touch controls, it’ll handle most of your ROMs at near full speed. And this is certainly something you won’t find in the App Store at any time in the future.

There are a lot of multimedia apps, like TuneWiki, which gives you lyrics to your iTunes songs, Shuffle, which does Pandora-like smart shuffling of your library based on what you like and don’t like, and MxTube, which lets you save YouTube videos. While those are all nifty, they’re not as essential as the ones above. If you feel that we’ve missed something really truly essential, then by all means let us know. As usual, with so many iPhone apps out there, this is in no way a complete listing.

Oh, and as for that iPhone Modem icon in the image you may have noticed? It’s the only way you can tether your iPhone, and we’ll have even more on that in tomorrow’s Saturday How-To. Check it!

This Week’s App News On Giz:

• The 25 Best iPhone Apps For Outdoor Adventurers

• WhatTheFont For iPhone IDs Fonts From Text in Snapped Photos

• Turn-By-Turn Voice Navigation Comes to Jailbroken iPhones

• 31 Fart Apps In 90 Seconds

• ServersMan App Turns the iPhone Into an All-Out Web Server

For even more app coverage: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory and our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

We’ve seen plenty of remarkable kids — the world is just bursting with them — and Lim Ding Wen, a nine-year-old from Singapore is no exception. Like his father, Wen enjoys writing iPhone apps in his spare time. His application, called Doodle Kids, is a drawing application for children that he wrote for his two younger sisters, who enjoy drawing, and it’s already been downloaded over 4,000 times (we just checked in the App Store and it does indeed appear to be quite popular) since its release on February 1st. Wen, who is fluent in six programming languages and enjoys reading books about — you guessed it — computer programming, is already hard at work on his next app, a game called “Invader Wars.” We can’t wait to see that one!

Filed under: Cellphones

Nine-year old writes iPhone app, hates vegetables originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked for some iPhone apps that would never survive the approval process. Warning: some of these are NSFW, more are just in poor taste. Hey, I’m just the messenger!

First Place — Peter Telesco
Second Place — El Guapo
Third Place — Jesse Armstrong

When the App Store launched, there were a handful of Twitter apps for the iPhone. Now there’s ten zillion. We’ve read thousands of tweets on every Twitter app, so here are the best, and worst.

The Quicklist
• Best Overall: Tweetie
• Best Paid: Tweetie
• Best Free: Twitterfon
• Most Powerful: Twittelator Pro
• Best Tweet-Only: Tweeter
• Worst Twitter App Ever in the History of Twitter Ever: Tweetion
• Creepiest: Twittervision

GPSTwit
A tweet-only application (meaning you can’t read other people’s tweets, just post quickly) that distinguishes itself from the other minimalist one-way apps by adding GPS (with a link to your position on Google maps) and pictures to the equation.
Pros: It has as much versatility as you’d want to pack into a single-function Twitter app.
Cons: Not as beautifully simple as a single function app should be, and slow, which is fatal for an app that’s supposed to blindingly fast. Annoying ads.
Price: Free
Grade: D+

iTweets
iTweets is basic Twitter app that aims for simplicity, merging all of your incoming tweets into a single, color-coded timeline.
Pros: It has really pretty colors and a bemusing sense of single-mindedness.
Cons: It blends all of your incoming tweets—from people you follow, @replies and direct messages—into a single sticky stream of goop that’s unmanageable because of the way it’s laid out—no icons means it’s hard to tell who the tweet is coming from. And it’s a buck! Boo.
Price: $1
Grade: D+

LaTwit
LaTwit is a pretty standard Twitter app that gives you all of the core functions, with a few useful customizations for easier reading.
Pros: It lets you have tons of accounts and aggregate them into a single feed and gives you control over little things, like font sizes, and URL copy and pasting, that might make it endearing to you.
Cons: Kinda ugly. It’s buggy—goes catatonic often in the settings menu. It puts the public timeline front and center (when I check Twitter from my mobile on a tiny screen, I wanna see what my friends are up to, not the whole world). Missing deep features, like search. Not worth three bucks.
Price: $3
Grade: D

Nambu
Nambu is a hydra, pulling in your Twitter, FriendFeed and Ping.fm accounts so you can social network and read what your friends are up to until your eyes and fingers bleed.
Pros: The real selling point is that it combines three major microblogging-or-whatever-you-want-to-call-them services in one app. The reading UI is decent, clearly ripped from Twitterific, down to the color scheme. And uh, well, multiple social networking accounts in a single app!
Cons: It feels like beta software: One of the five main buttons is for feedback. Limited screen real estate shouldn’t be gobbled up by something like that. Despite ripping the UI from Twitterific, it’s a little messier, with tiny, unintelligible buttons up top and not quite the same fit and finish.
it’s not immediately apparent what some of the buttons do. Robert Scoble might love this for $2, but if you’re just looking for that one great Twitter client, this ain’t it.
Price: $2
Grade: C-

NatsuLion
Another generic Twitter app, it does all of the basic things you want in a Twitter application, but there’s nothing really special about it.
Pros: It has a separate section for unread tweets, which makes managing them easy. The lion is adorable!
Cons: Too much text crammed into each box (which need to be more cleanly differentiated themselves), which makes it hard to read. Blends direct messages and @replies into a single timeline, which might annoy some people. Skips out on features like search, and even picture uploading, which is typically taken for granted.
Price: Free
Grade: C-

Tweeter:
It’s a no-reading, just-tweeting one-trick pony.
Pros: It’s really fast for firing off tweets instantly.
Cons: It’s tweet-only.
Price: Free
Grade: C+

Tweetie
Tweetie is a powerful Twitter app with every feature you’d want, from multiple accounts to a landscape keyboard, packaged in a really well-designed UI that makes it a joy to use.
Pros: Feature-packed, with bonuses, even, like flashlight and fart apps—in a UI that’s never messy or scrambled by feature overload. It does the best job of squishing a full-featured app into a mobile one with a user experience comes that comes closest to what you’d imagine the perfect iPhone Twitter app would feel like. Totally worth $3.
Cons: It doesn’t cache tweets, meaning you lose your reading list as soon as you close the app. Some more theme choices would be nice—iChat bubble and “simple” doesn’t quite cut it. Not quite as superpowered as Twittelator Pro.
Price: $3
Grade: A

Tweetion
Tweetion wants to be a Twitter search app more than anything else, since that’s the first thing that pops up when you open it. It, uh, tries to do a lot of stuff too. Tries being the operative word.
Pros: It archives all of your tweets from ever ever ago. It’s like a trainwreck in your pocket that you can look at whenever you want for just $5.
Cons: Takes forever to load. Ugly interface that’s like a flashback to Geocities circa 1999. Animations are slow and choppy. Awkward button placement—one of them is dedicated solely to your profile picture, no joke—while most of the actual Twitter functions are buried in a more menu. Settings menu is a scrolling, choppy, confusing mess that awkwardly mixes buttons, text entries and the slot machine list UI. Couldn’t figure out the Facebook deal. It’s buggy and froze a lot too. Clearly, no one used this before they put it out. A genuine atrocity.
Price: $5
Grade: F-

Tweetsville
Tweetsville’s designers it seems weren’t quite sure what they wanted it to do, so it does a little bit of everything, but it’s not particularly great to use.
Pros: It has every major Twitter function, solid search capabilities and in tweets, makes it abundantly clear who it’s going to. That’s about it.Update: You can customize the main buttons along the bottom, which makes it a lot more usable than the default layout, since you can tailor it to what’s important to you.
Cons: It’s hard to immediately find core functions when you first open it up—a no-no on an app designed to be used on the go. By default, half the buttons on the bottom are dedicated to search and trend-tracking, while your @replies, which I think should be front and center, are buried under a “more” menu, until you change them around. (Which it isn’t immediately apparent you can do.) The UI is also inconsistent from function to function, and there’s just not a major reason to pay $4 for this when free or cheaper apps that are better.
Price: $4
Grade: D C+

Twinkle
Twinkle had a lot of fanfare early on for its cutesy speech bubbles and location features that let you see what people are tweeting around you, which it was the first to do.
Pros: One of best clients right after the App Store launch because it was one of the first with deep location features, it still has strengths there, like a landscape view map of real-time tweets. The stars and bubbles theme is… unique.
Cons: Its future development is questionable because of internal strife at developer studio Tapulous. It also requires a separate Tapulous account, which is really aggravating. In our view, Twitter apps shouldn’t need anything more than our Twitter username and pass so you can start using them instantly.
Grade: C

Twittelator
Twittelator’s free app gives you more functionality than most free Twitter apps in a pretty solid little package.
Pros: It’s one of the better free Twitter apps, retaining Twittelator Pro’s core functions—picture upload, search, GPS, friends list—though it doesn’t stack up to its pay-for-it-dammit bigger brother. Less prone to freeze-ups than Twittelator Pro.
Cons: You lose all of Twittelator Pro’s more powerful functions—not just themes, but multiple accounts, nearby tweets, in-tweet photo display, deeper profile diving and more—but you’re using the UI designed for the feature-packed version, with a kind of ugly skin, too. The emergency tweet button is weird, and in an awkward place (dead center).
Grade: B-

Twittelator Pro
The big daddy of Twitter apps, it has more features than any other app we tried and it’ll let you do just about anything—search, check nearby tweets and trends, create custom sub-groups of people you follow, multiple accounts and more
Pros: The most powerful Twitter client with lots of customization like multiple skins, and little touches like a friends list that makes it easy to @reply or direct message someone on the fly.
Cons: The listicle-style menu for all the features is a tad bland, though it gets the job done. When it’s trying to do something, it can be annoyingly unresponsive. The UI isn’t the cleanest, either (admittedly, because it’s trying to do so much) and some of the buttons are hard to hit. Pricey.
Price: $5
Grade: A-

Twitfire
Twitfire is another one-way application that just lets you send tweets, not read them.
Pros: Hrmmmm… It makes it easy to send messages to your friends—which the other one-way apps don’t do.
Cons: Another post-only app that wants to be essential, but is just confusing. Do I push the button before I type? After? What’s that button?
Price: Free
Grade: D+

Twitterfon
The most straightforward full-featured Twitter app, it has every major function you’d want—search, profile diving, picture uploads—presented in the simplest way in possible.
Pros: It’s incredibly lean and loads a zillion tweets way faster than any other Twitter app in a simple, easy to read layout. It caches them too, meaning you can flick it on to do a tweet dump before you hop in the subway. The best free all-round Twitter app.
Cons: Missing some power-user functions, like multiple accounts and themes (the baby blue does get on my nerves), and an option for a larger font size would be nice.
Price: Free
Grade: A-

Twitterific
Twitterific is designed around the reading experience more than anything, presenting all of your incoming tweets—from friends, @replies and direct messages—in a single stream with a fantastic UI.
Pros: It’s a great reading experience—it launches straight into the timeline and uses massive, readable-from-two-feet away fonts on top of a an essentialized user interface that’s single-hand-friendly. Caches tweets so you can read your backlog even without a signal, which is great if you catch up on Twitter in the subway (like me). The free version and $10 one are essentially exactly the same—the free one has ads and is just missing an extra theme.
Cons: It was clearly designed for reading more than doing, so it’s stripped of features like search, nearby users and more in-depth profile probing that makes it feel a bit shallower than other apps, especially if you pay $10 for the premium version, which is the most expensive standalone Twitter app in the App Store. Also, everything’s in a single timeline—your friends’ tweets, direct messages and @replies—so there’s no digging back for an older direct message or anything remotely tweet management.
Price: Free or $10
Grade: B-

Twittervision
Rather than check out what the people you’re following are up to, it bounces you around the world, following random, geo-located tweets in real time, or you can see who’s tweeting near you in creepy detail. All to give you a “sense of the global zeitgeist.”
Pros: It’s neat.
Cons: The amount of detail in local tweets, with a Google Map pin and all, is kinda creepy! You can’t read what the people you’re following are doing (granted, that’s not the point).
Price: Free
Grade: B-