The App Store is oozing with sleaze; sex-themed apps are everywhere. But here’s the thing: these “porn” apps are always terrible. Here are some of the worst, and how to fix this, the most important problem in the world.

First, here are a few of the worst, collected by Intern Kyle and myself. It’s a list of disappointment, of broken promises, and most importantly, of no nudity.

Of course, you can pick up your iPhone right now and go to a porn site. It’s a smartphone. It has the internet. Some sites even have iPhone-optimized video streaming and navigation, because apparently, just like on every other device that’s been connected to the internet, people use their smartphone for porn. This is an inevitability.

And Apple has a ratings system in the App Store. It has a 17+ rating, for apps with violent, crude or sexual content—or app that have a browser function, which could be used to access objectionable content. Most of the apps above are 17+, which means that if parents so choose, they can block their iPhone-having children from even being able to download them. It follows that they could do the same for 18+ apps, so why haven’t they?

I can understand Apple not wanting to get into the porn business, which, by taking 30% of developers’ revenue, I guess they would sort of be doing. But the current setup just doesn’t make any sense. You can buy an app with a built-in browser, which can access the most horrible smut on the web, and get a 17+ rating. But if you link said app to one of those sites, and disable general browsing, suddenly it’s verboten. Again, I can understand how we ended up here, but the results, as you’ve seen, are depressing.

It’s fair to say that most people just assume there are porn apps, when there really aren’t. But there are hundreds of apps that look like porn apps, cost money, and that are, effectively, bait-and-switch scams. Apple can fix this in two ways: they can open the floodgates and just let people have their real porn apps, which would effectively kill these in-between semi-porn apps, or they can revise how the App Store works: by instituting a 24-hour open return policy for paid apps, like the Android Market has, people would simply return these worthless apps, and developers, now unable to trick people into giving them boner money, would stop making them. They would tumble down the rankings and into oblivion.

Anyway, no matter what Apple does, people will continue to look at photos of naked humans on their iPhones. It may make the company squirm, but there’s no reason to pretend it’s not happening, and to let scammers screw up the App Store more than they already have. So do something, Apple! The fate of the world depends on it, a little!

The iPhone is the most popular cellphone in the country, and with good reason. Despite occasionally awful choices by Apple, it still has the most—and best—applications around. Here are the most popular free iPhone apps (and posts) of 2009.

As with our most popular Windows downloads and Mac downloads of 2009, this collection of applications is based solely on the popularity of the associated post here on Lifehacker. We always prefer free applications that offer a little productivity boosting, so this is by no means a complete look at the most popular apps of the 80 billion in the App Store.

First, the downloads…

GV Mobile Makes Google Voice the Default for Your iPhone

In April, an industrious iPhone developer released GV Mobile to the iTunes App Store. It was followed by other Google Voice apps, and then Apple went brain dead and removed every Google Voice application from the App Store (along with rejecting Google’s official Voice app). Annoying, to be sure, but users still willing to jailbreak can still get GV Mobile for free on Cydia.

Stanza Turns Your iPhone into a Kindle, Kindle App Counters

At the beginning of the year, the beautiful Stanza (iTunes link) iPhone app came along and wowed us with how good ebook reading on the iPhone could be. Then, when Kindle for iPhone (iTunes link) was released a few months later, it gave iPhone users a pretty good reason not to buy a Kindle. In the end, Amazon liked Stanza so much they ended up buying it, so that’s probably the app we’d choose.

RunKeeper is Like Nike+ for Your iPhone—Only Better

RunKeeper (available in free and pro versions) uses your iPhone’s GPS to do some seriously cool tracking for your running, walking, or biking routine. Apple was extremely slow in bringing Nike+ to the iPhone (once they did, it only supported 3GS), and even then it doesn’t take advantage of the fact that the iPhone has a built in GPS and excellent mapping capabilities. RunKeeper is an excellent alternative to people who don’t want to pay for the Nike+ dongle, want advanced GPS and mapping capabilities, or don’t have an iPhone 3GS. Still, if we could marry these two apps, we happily would.

Email ‘n Walk Lets You Multitask Without Getting Hit By a Car

We get it. You are seriously busy, and you don’t have time to make sure you don’t walk into traffic while you’re composing that email. Email n’ Walk overlays an email composition window on top of the view from your iPhone’s camera, so you can type out an email and watch where you’re going. It was free when we first covered it; now it’ll set you back a buck.

Dropbox Comes to the iPhone and iPod touch

Dropbox is far and away our favorite file syncing tool, so we were thrilled this September when Dropbox for iPhone (iTunes link) finally made its way to the iPhone. Users can access any of their synced files, view files supported by the iPhone (including documents, photos, music, and video), upload photos and video to Dropbox, and save files for offline viewing. Handy.

CardStar Creates Scanner-Friendly Bonus Cards on iPhones

Lifehacker readers hate a bulging wallet, which is presumably why CardStar (iTunes link) resonated. The free app replaces keychain tags and wallet-cluttering bonus/discount/rewards/”shopper’s club” cards with scanner-friendly barcodes that live on your iPhone. Users report mixed results in the App Store, but if it does the trick in place of your rewards card, it could be worth the download.

Skype for iPhone Brings Reliable VoIP to Your Pocket

Skype is far and away the most popular VoIP service, so it’s understandable that people were pretty excited when it finally made its official plunge onto the iPhone with Skype for iPhone (iTunes link).

Dragon Dictation Does Voice-to-Text Transcription on Your iPhone

You spend plenty of time typing at the computer all day, so we forgive you if you’re not eager to continue pecking away at the software keyboard on your iPhone. Dragon Dictation (iTunes link) does voice-to-text transcription you can copy to your clipboard and use anywhere.

Epicurious App Puts an Entire Cookbook in the Palm of Your Hand

Epicurious for iPhone (iTunes link) puts access to over 25,000 recipes from the likes of Gourmet and Bon Appetit at your fingertips. When you find something you like (I seriously love this app and would strongly recommend the simple-yet-delicious Mario Batali Basic Tomato Sauce), you can add it to your favorites, generate a shopping list, and get cooking. The entirety of The Gourmet Cookbook is inside this killer kitchen supplement.

Put Google Calendar and Notes on Your iPhone Wallpaper

By default, the iPhone lock screen shows you the time, date, and possibly a pretty picture. With gCalWall Lite, your home screen also displays your upcoming Google calendar appointments. Handy.

And now, the popular iPhone-specific posts/how-tos:

Set Up “Push” Alerts for Anything from Your Computer to Your Phone

When push notifications finally rolled out to iPhone 3.0 this year, lots of applications started using them—but not everything we wanted. In this guide, we demonstrate how to use Growl (for Mac and Windows) in conjunction with Prowl (iTunes link), a $3 iPhone app, to set up push notifications for virtually anything. Our guide focused on Gmail push (which wasn’t available at the time, and still isn’t available with message previews), but anything that sends an alert with Growl can also work with Prowl, so your options are only limited by your creativity.

Enable Tethering on Your iPhone 3G or 3GS Running 3.1.2

It’s been a feature of the iPhone forever now, but AT&T is still dragging its feet on iPhone tethering—that is, allowing users to enjoy their iPhone’s data connection on their laptops. We’ve shown you how to enable tethering on your iPhone 3G or 3GS running 3.1.2 (the latest iPhone OS), and before that we helped you pull it off with the 3.0 OS. You may not want to tempt the AT&T billing gods with flagrant use of this one (wild fees may apply if AT&T decides they do), but it’s a godsend in a pinch.

Got a favorite iPhone app we covered (or didn’t) in 2009 that you love? Let’s hear more about it in the comments.

It still seems strange, on the face of it. iTunes is the ginormousest force in digital music, beaming out billions of bits a day. Apple paid $80 million (maybe) for Lala, a streaming site you’ve never heard of. Why?

First, let’s look at what Lala is. (Or was.) It’s three things, really: A CD trading site (its original emphasis), a streaming site, where you can “upload” your own music and stream it anywhere (your collection is matched with what Lala’s got, and anything they don’t have is actually uploaded); and a streaming site that’ll let you stream a song once for free, or pay 10 cents to stream it an unlimited number of times. In other words, It’s a music service that’s all about streaming and the cloud, both for the music you already own, and for finding and playing new music.

That obviously looks a lot different from iTunes—you pay for things, you download them, you have a library of stuff. It’s kind of a dated, restrictive model, really. Only being able to listen to the small slice of music that’s banked on my hard drive, it feels cramped and very 2004. Zune feels like a generation ahead with Zune Pass, which essentially expands my library ad infinitum, with full access to most of the service’s 6 million songs (plus I get to keep 10 a month, so the pass just about pays for itself). iTunes needs to refresh itself.

Okay, so Lala obviously fits into that need. But what’s Apple going to do with it specifically? Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill Lala and assimilate its features into iTunes? Keep Lala running? Well, there’s actually some pretty good case studies when it comes to Apple buying up smaller companies, historically, especially when it comes to iPod and iTunes.

iTunes actually began life as an acquisition. In 2000, Apple was looking to buy MP3 software and wound up purchasing a little program called SoundJam MP, along with its lead developer, Jeff Robbin—it was re-engineered into what you now know as iTunes, and Robbin is now the VP for consumer applications at Apple. Cover Flow, which is now slathered on top of basically every app Apple makes, was originally an independent program developed by Steel Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, though not the company. The iPod itself was mostly developed by a company called PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the company (which was later picked up by Nvidia).

Finally, and most recently, Apple bought PA Semi, an entire chip company, likely so Apple can design its own chips for iPhones and iPods (we haven’t seen the fruits of this venture yet, though we likely will soon). So, there’s a couple different models here: Buy the tech, buy the brains behind it; buy the tech; buy the company, the tech and the brains. In each instance, though, the thing purchased became wholly an Apple thing, fully assimilated, as if its past life had never existed.

Looking at Lala, it’s likely true, as the NYT says, that Apple is “buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services,” as Apple did with iTunes so many years ago. But that’s not all Apple was after, not if they paid $80 million (or whatever) to outbid at least two other competitors, as some reports say. It seems clear, looking at the history of Apple’s iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its features are going to be integrated into iTunes in a very fundamental way.

After all, one of the central conceits of Lala—streaming your own music library anywhere—is something Apple’s been looking at for a while, and it doesn’t alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that’s so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved.

And that’s most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You’ll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we’d buy music from iTunes, and if history’s any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes’ new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It’d be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano.

True, we won’t know precisely what Apple’s going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we’ve got some rough ideas.

The relationship between cellphones and music has almost always been a quirky one, producing bouts of the surreal punctuated by an occasional flourish of the sublime. Latest to join the melodic fray are Georg Essl from the University of Michigan and his “mobile phone ensemble.” Each of the participating students has designed a noise-making app for his or her iPhone, which is used in conjunction with the built-in accelerometer and touchscreen to make (hopefully beautiful) music. Though we may consider this a gimmick for now, Professor Essl is most enthusiastic about the future prospects of utilizing smartphones to make music with legitimate aspirations. The debut performance of this newfangled orchestra is on December 9, or you can check out a preview in the video after the break.

[Thanks, Ry]

Continue reading iPhone orchestra at the vanguard of smartphone music-making push

iPhone orchestra at the vanguard of smartphone music-making push originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each month, the best new iPhone apps—and some older ones—are considered for admission into Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps Directory. Who will join? Who will live? Who will die?

For the full directory of Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps, click here.

The Month’s Best

As gathered from our weekly roundups.

If you hate hate hate galleries, click here for a single post.

Essential App Directory Inductees

This month was BOUNTIFUL, as we welcome seven (7!) new apps to the fold. Here are your new inductees:

• I Am T-Pain: This app was fun when it first came out, but now that you can sing over your iPod library, it’s priceless.

• Waze: Because it’s getting to be good enough to depend on (in a few areas), because it’s free, and because their video-gamey plan to make the app better is totally charming.

• Voices: Because when your iPhone isn’t acting as a tool, it’s a toy. And everyone loves some good voice modulation.

• Snapture: Because full 3GS support, which Snapture recently added, was the only thing holding this app back from replacing the iPhone’s camera completely.

• ShopSavvy: Because any iPhone decent a good, free barcode scanning app.

• Chorus: Because finding new apps is hard, y’all.

• Jailbreak: Kirikae: Because without a solid task switcher like Kirikae, fantastic jailbreak app Backgrounder is kind of useless. With it, your iPhone is a full-fledged multitasking smartphone, finally. (Don’t get defensive!)

And Farewell To…

Our current directory members are all safe this time around. But next month, expect hell. (Maybe!)

What counts as an essential iPhone app changes all the time, and so should our guide: If we’ve missed anything huge, or you’ve got a much better suggestion for a particular type of app, let us know, or say so in the comments. We’ll be updating this thing pretty frequently, and a million Gizmodo readers can do a better job at sorting through the app mess than a single Gizmodo editor. Enjoy!