Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t listen to the pasty dude with the Arsenal shirt who lives downstairs—FIFA 10 isn’t the only good thing to land in the App Store this week. Not even close.

AP Stylebook: Anyone who has to crank out copy on a regular basis is probably familiar with the AP’ stylebook, but an iPhone app seems like an odd incarnation. It’s more portable and convenient that the hard copy, sure, but there’s an online version too, which makes more sense for most folks, since you don’t do a whole lot of actual writing on an iPhone, and flicking an alt+tab to your browser is faster than thumbing through an iPhone search query. Still great for the occasional spot-check, though. $29, which you should probably try to expense.

Talk Assist: This super-simple, free text-to-speech app was designed to help people who have trouble talking. However, it will almost exclusively be used by people who can speak, for laffs.

Squareball: A minimalist, but amazingly polished game that’s sort of like if Pong had levels, or if Breakout was a side-scroller. It’s really, really hard—give the free version a try before taking the two dollar dive.

cAR Locator: One old gimmick—GPS as a way to find your car—combined with a new one—an augmented reality overlay, cAR Locator is more of a tech demo or party trick than anything else, but it’s a pretty cool one. 2bux, 3GS only.

Scarab: The first iPhone literary magazine, Scarab still has a few kinks to work out. Most of all, you’ve got to purchase each issue in-app, but due to a quirk in Store policy, the app itself isn’t free. If you feel like supporting an experiment like this, feel free; there’s some neat stuff here, like the ability to listen to poems read aloud by their writers. One dollar.

Buzzd: An old BlackBerry classic, buzzd meters the amount of activity at local establishments, according to other buzzd users, and tells you where the most people are, and what they have to say about it. Think real-time Yelp, roughly. The app used to depend on other buzzd users for content; now it taps into Twitter with natural language recognition, which gives it way, way more content, and enough users, or at least unwitting contributors, to make it worthwhile even in a midsized city. Free.

FIFA 10: The only licensed soccer game in the App Store, this one’s got actual teams, actual players, and at least a passing resemblance to the FIFA franchise console games everyone goes so apeshit over. Controls are predictably a bit awkward, but there’s a lot of game here, especially for diehard soccer fans. $10.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• iPhone Gets Better Image Stabilization from Pro-Camera App

• Cyclopedia Augmented Reality iPhone App Drenches Your World In Wikipedia

• Apple Buys Their Very Own Maps Company (See Ya, Google Maps?)

• iFukkin iPhone App Maybe Is Not What It Seems

• Why iPhone TV Apps Are Doomed to Mediocrity

• iPhone App Developer Jacks Your Phone Number to Pitch You More Apps

• ALK CoPilot GPS Navigation App Gets iPhone Keyboard, Text-To-Speech, Other Improvements

• CNN’s iPhone App Makes Other News Apps Look Lazy

• iPhone Accessories Can Now Trigger App Download Prompt

• Daniel Johnston’s iPhone Game Is Predictably Bizarre, Bizarrely Fun

• Tweetie 2 for iPhone: Full Offline Powers, Filters and Push Notifications

• Ping is Like a Free SMS Client For iPhone and iPod Touch Users

• Tweet Reel iPhone App Sends 640 x 480 Video to Twitter

• Ramp Champ Mixes Skeeball With Flicking

• Data Shows What Everyone Knows: Gimmicky Apps Aren’t Used Frequently

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. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Still, with this? Well, luckily there’s plenty of other stuff to tide us over until the Google Voice fiasco resolves itself. Like zombies! And weddings, and exercise, and soundscapes, and urban art, and political activism, and jokes, and, and, and…

The Onion Microfiche Reader: It’s from the Onion, so it’s pretty much guaranteed not to be not funny, but! For all the neat microfilm-esque presentation, this thing doesn’t actually have any articles—just a bunch of those jokes-in-a-headline that the Onion is so good at. Still entertaining though. A dollar.

Foursquare: Now you can see who else is checked in at a given venue, who the current mayor is, collect nearby Tweets, and enjoy better Google Maps integration in this extremely strange, strangely popular, highly addictive territorial app. Free.

Reqall: Evernote integration. That is all. Free.

Strands: The best free exercise app for the iPhone now lets you replay your GPS-recorded running path, signals you with audio cues during exercise, includes route elevation profiles and supports in-app playlists.

Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan: A fantasy wedding planner that is evidently really, really popular. Maybe because it’s fun, or maybe because it’s the easiest way to make your boyfriend super, super, super uncomfortable. Three dollars.

Alive 4-Ever: There are a surprising number of zombie survival apps in the App Store, I guess because they’re easy to make or something? I don’t know. I do know, however, that this top-down zombie slaughter is extremely fun, and only a dollar. I would pay multiple dollars, even. Like two!

Kodak Smilemaker: A charming app that adds comical smiles to your photos, or a meditation of the tragedies of birth deformities? I have no idea, but either way, its free. So.

NPR News: Sorry to keep bringing this app up, but it’s great, and the biggest issue people had with the last version—the lack of fast-forwarding and pausing—is solved in this one. Still free.

Air: Brian Eno done made another app, y’all! The last one made amazing music based (partly) on user input; this one makes amazing music based (partly) on user input, except it sounds totally different. It’s as mesmerizing as the last one, but feels fresh. 2bux.

Polyghost It took me a while to figure this one out, partly because I’d never really heard of “Vinyl art” toys before. Well, this is what they are, and like them or not, Polyghost is an aesthetically cool app. Here what you do: Using microtransactions, you buy little 3D characters which you can transpose onto photographs. The pricing’s a little unfortunate—four dollars for the app, with new characters at at least a dollar apiece—but if you’re a fan of artists like Tim Biskup and DEVILROBOTS, the rendering in this app does the work justice. So twee!

Howard Dean’s Activism Book Thingeee: Whether or not you’re a LI-BRULL, you’ve got to admire the concept behind this book-cum-activism app, which gets its users fired up with a message, i.e. Dean’s writing, then puts tools at their fingertips to act on their feelings, like a location-aware “call your congressman” function. I think it might be a liiiiittle more effective if you didn’t have to pay for it. Five dollars to CHANGE THE WORLD, or whatever.

This Week’s iPhone App News on Giz

• Google: Apple’s a Liar, Did Reject Google Voice iPhone App

• Navigon Wants an Extra $25 for Real-Time Traffic Data on the iPhone

• I Am Sting App Is Even Whinier Than I Am T-Pain

• Army of Darkness Invades the iPhone

• Wall Street Journal iPhone and BlackBerry App Free Lunch Is Over

• Penn and Teller iPhone App Is as Magical as It Is Doomed

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. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Let’s take our minds off all this nasty Google Voice business for a minute, and focus on the apps that we do have. Google may not make an appearance this week, but how about Wikipedia? NPR? The Discovery Channel? Simplify?

NPR News: The unaffiliated Public Radio Player was great great great, but this is somehow better. It brings twice as many stations, adds written news content along with offline reading, on-demand NPR shows and a surprisingly navigable interface. Guiltily free, since you don’t even have to sit through pledge drives.

Wikipedia: I just assumed this app already existed, but Wikipedia somehow didn’t have an app until this week. Weird! It’s sort of a website-wrapped-in-an-app snooze for now, though it’s open source and Wikipedia would very much like you to help make it into something decent, that people might actually want. Free, and quite.

Fluent News (Update): A personal favorite news aggregator of mine, Fluent now supports Google News-style searches across sources and emailing from within the app. The search feature is more useful than it might sound, especially if you want to dig right into a news story right after hearing about it. Free.

WHOA: You know Telephone, the group game where you pass a complicated, whispered message around a circle of people until it turns into something about penises, usually? This is that, with writing and drawing, on the iPhone. Here’s what you do: You write a word, the next person draws it, the next person writes what he thinks the drawing is, and so on. A dollar.

Aha: Crowd-sourced traffic, with a big-buttoned, simple interface intent on not causing you crash into other people. It’ll let you see how traffic is on your preferred driving routes based on input from its users, who can literally yell at their iPhones to record short voice messages about how bad (or awesome, I guess) the roads are. It’s only available in a few cities for the time being, but the concept is promising, as are the early reviews.

Discovery Channel: Better than your average dedicated station or publication app, though it follows the same concept: This is video, audio, photo and text content from the Discovery Channel, home of Mythbusters and LOTS OF SHARKS, in a nice little packaged news-style app. No full show episodes—gotta buy those in iTunes—but lots of decent clips and plenty of meat for DC nerds, if there is such a thing.

Simplify Photo: Simplify’s other app lets you listen to your home music library from anywhere with a sort of zero-setup server app, and it’s absolutely indispensable. This one does the same thing for photos, letting you access your entire home photo library wherever you are, without taking up much space on your iPhone’s dinky drive. The experience is surprisingly seamless considering how much it depends on the iPhone’s data connection, and the app is only a dollar.

This Week’s App News On Giz

• You Can’t Read the Good Part of Google’s FCC Response

• Apple and AT&T Answer FCC About Google Voice Rejection: It’s All Apple

• App Store Approval Process Slowly Getting Less Horrendous?

• iPhone’s Sonar Ruler App Measures Distance Using Sound

• Native Twitter Location Data Means More Stalker Power With Every Tweet

• Blow Virtual Kisses with Happy Dangy Diggy

• i.TV iPhone App Grows a Remote Control Framework, TiVo Gives It a Whirl

• Apple Exec Phil Schiller Reaching Out to Rejected App Developers

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 swell weekend everybody.

This week in the unseasonably entertaining App Store: Another bizarrely amazing music app; free turn-by-turn directions of questionable reliability; a fat man on a tightrope; an interesting take on the classic-est of classics; and a treat for our dear developers.

Pac-Mac Remix: This is an official, sanctioned Pac-Man remake, and accordingly a pretty good one. Purists might be turned off by the 3D graphics, but the gameplay hasn’t really changed; in fact, using finger flicks to change direction is a brilliant way to control Pac-Man. For $6, as is, this is good; for $2—even if that would mean losing the flashy production—it would kill.

Mujik: An instrument-slash-synthesizer made of books, flies, cardboard and whimsy. It takes about five minutes to figure out what the hell is going on with Mujik, but once you do, it’s beautiful, and the musical possibilities are tremendous. This is as good as Brian Eno’s Bloom, if not better—not least because it’s free. (via TUAW)

Tightwire: A fat man on a tightrope wire, in 3D, who you keep alive by tilting your iPhone. The graphics are good, the impact animations forceful and satisfying, and difficulty level high enough to keep this simple concept entertaining for more than a few minutes. One dollar.

Waze: To be honest, crowd-sourced navigation sounds like a pretty terrible idea, but who am I to judge: Waze has been available in Israel for quite a while, and people swear by it there. In the US, its userbase is a little lean, and most the features don’t yet work as well as they’re supposed to—turn-by-turn navigation included. If more people join, I guess, the user-contributed information, like common speed traps, road quirks, and whatever else you can think of, should get much better. Cool, but couldn’t Google just do this by enabling user layers in Maps? Free.

Call of Duty: World at War Companion: Ha ha, that icon got you all excited, didn’t it? Sorry, this isn’t a new Call of Duty game for the iPhone. Actually, no, not sorry, because for anyone who plays COD: WaW (nice acronym), the detailed stats-tracking and player communication features are pretty neat. Free.

iSimulate: Alright kids, step outside—this one’s for the developers. iSimulate lets you display iPhone apps on your computer screen, mainly for the purposes of demo recording, which is tough in the SDK emulator on account of its awkward accelerometer and multitouch implementations. $8.

The Week’s App News on Giz:

• Gross Virtual Girlfriend App Is One-Upped by its Gross Fox News Coverage

• Apple Yanks Sex Offender Locator From App Store to the Relief of Perverts Everywhere

• Giz Explains: How Push Works

• Apple’s Phil Schiller Explains They Don’t Actually Censor Dictionaries

• Now Apple’s Blocking All Ebook App Store Submissions? Update: No

• The Stupidest App Store Incident Yet: Apple Censors a Dictionary

• Third Largest App Store Developer Gets Banned, For Sucking

• Windows Mobile Wants In On the iPhone App Action, Literally

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 swell weekend everybody.

This week in the App store, things got a little deep: We discovered haunting new sounds, created fine art, psychoanalyzed our friends, read great literature, experimented with prescription drugs, and even reconnected with an estranged child. Your turn!

Layers: Layers is a Sketches-style drawing app, except with, well, layers. That might seem a little excessive for a fingerpainting app, but for serious iPhone art—which is a thing, by the way—five layers and the ability to export in PSD format is invaluable. Five dollars.

Barnes and Noble eReader: Barnes and Noble‘s eBook+eReader megannouncement mentioned that their fancy new eBook store would be supported on the iPhone, and this is what they were talking about. The app is a readily customizable e-reader with integration for B&N’s store, which seems large and cheap enough, though I haven’t had much time to dive into it. The app worked fine for me, but quite a few folks are reporting glitches in this early build—some quite serious. Free, until you want some decent books.

iConcertCal: Another ultra-obvious iPhone 3.0 app that we just weren’t allowed to have until now, iConcertCal scans your music library to produce a list of concert dates for all your favorite artists. The $3 price would be excessive if the app weren’t as good as it is, but the inbuilt ticket purchasing, venue mapping and iTunes integration are thoughtful and, well, they work.

PhonyPhone: Babies love iPhones, for a lot of the same silly reasons adults do. So if you’re prepared to take on the risk of handing over a fragile, multi-hundred-dollar gadget to a being that hasn’t even figured out how to stop soiling itself yet, you may as well go for it. For a buck, PhonyPhone will give babies a colorful fake phone interface to play around with, which will speak numbers at them, play a song, and most importantly, keep your precious, dial-happy bundle from spitting up, long-distance, in your boss’s ear. I feel like there could be a little more functionality packed in here—more noises, more songs, more to play with, basically—but then again, I’m not a baby.

Rorschach: I’m a sucker for games like Rorschach, which drive you to become a moralistic, bloodthirsty vigilante bring a pass-around-the-phone element into their gameplay. (Human interaction is pretty OK! Who knew!) The concept is simple enough—you and your friends guess each others answers to simple questions about various ink blots—and it has a familial, board-game-like draw to it. Great road trip fodder, to be sure. Two dollars.

Ghostly Discovery: There are two reasons to download this app, both pretty convincing. First is the music selection, drawing from the Ghostly label’s eclectic stable of artists (if you like them, you’ll have heard the name). Broadly, though, it’s a cool take on music recommendation, which take into account parameter like how “organic” or “digital” music is, or what color “mood” you’re in (don’t worry, there’s a guide). Actually, there are three reasons: It’s freeee.

Medscape: Are you a doctor? Probably not. But if you are a doctor, or a med student, or an industry journalist, or a pharma-follower, or you’re just deep, deep into multiple pill addictions, WebMD has an app for you! Medscape keeps you from mixing your barbiturates with your muscles relaxants, and provides all kinds of pharmaceutical information, keeps you apprised of the latest medical news, offers free mini-lessons to keep doctors sharp (CMEs they’re called, for Continuing Medical Education), and most usefully to nonprofessionals, provides access to a massive directory of hospitals, physicians and pharmacies. And like pretty much nothing in healthcare, the app is free of charge.

This Week’s App News On Giz:

• Google Latitude for iPhone Is a Lame Web App Because Apple Thinks We’re Easily Confused

• Kensington Nightstand Dock Converts iPhone Into Retro Alarm Clock

• Half-Amazing, Half-Terrifying Concept App Combines Facial Recognition with Augmented Reality

• The App Store Is Just Like the Civil Rights Movement, and Other Lessons We Can Learn From iFart

• Navigon MobileNavigator for North America Hits the App Store, $70 For Now

• Don’t Expect a Huge Increase in Complexity Of iPhone Apps Any Time Soon

• Sports Illustrated Swimsuit App Is as Close As You’ll Get to an Official iPhone Porn App

• David Bowie Space Oddity iPhone App Lets You Remix the Thin White Duke Anywhere

• Public Radio iPhone App Adds On-Demand Content, Accidentally Kills FM Radio

• Augmented Reality iPhone App Helps You Find Your Mommy

• iPhone Icon Paperclips Appify Your Office Supplies

• Universal Hopes You’ll Actually Watch Blu-ray Special Features If They’re iPhone Apps

• Need Medicinal Cannabis? There’s an App For That

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.