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Jul 10

The Week In iPhone Apps: Navigation, Inebriation, Multiplication

Posted in: Apple, apps, iPhone, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

Oh, I can keep going: financial news aggregation, slideshow presentation, carrier lamentation, lyrical collect-ation, and… and… tethering? Seven out of eight ain’t bad. Anyway, enough of that—here’s your weekly app dump:

Navigon Lite: Hark! Dedicated navigation units are dead, for the iPhone hath slain them! Except no, not at all, because navigation apps are still fresh, imperfect, and too expensive to “just try.” Navigon’s Lite version, then, is a great idea: It lets users test the app’s routing power, nice UI, and Navteq mapset—all 1.29GB of it, taking up space on your phone. The catch—and it’s a big one—is that GPS doesn’t work. But even as is, it’s marginally useful, and definitely worth your time if you’re considering taking the plunge on the full version—whenever it comes out, that is. So you’re not shocked when it does, the Euro app is $140.

Absolut Drinkspiration : Drinking apps are almost invariably junkware, and advertisement apps are usually a waste of time. Absolut Drinkspiration is both of these things, and nonetheless manages to be pretty good. At its core it’s a drink recipe and recommendation app; at this, it does fine, helped by the fact that Absolut is happy to accommodate non-vodka listings. (A true gentleman, this app!) If your drinking needs a little guidance, it can help with that too: it’ll recommend drinks based on parameters like taste, time and mood. It’s also got GPS built in so you can upload your mixes and see what others all over the world are drinking, and exactly where they’re drinking it. Free.

TroubleSpots: TroubleSpots is part of an ambitious project, providing a tool to report when, where and how your cellular network has failed you. The reports, with embedded geodata, are passed on to AT&T, who will presumably see them and feel guilty, or something.

Two things: I think AT&T probably already knows where its network is thin; and I have a sneaking suspicion that using TroubleSpots inadvertently draws you into a secret guerilla annoyance campaign run by, say, T-Mobile, waged with iPhone apps and complaint forms. We’ll never know! Anyhow, if having the ability to instantly file a complaint with your carrier will keep you from hurling your iPhone out the car window, this app is worth its (nonexistent) price of entry.

Pix Remix, Slideshow Builder : A pair of slideshow apps, both paid, which do very similar things. Both make Ken Burns-style moving picture shows, both can share presentations from phone-to-phone or though a web interface, and neither can export presentation into common slideshow formats, like PowerPoint or Keynote. The differences? Slideshow Builder pans more intelligently using facial recognition, while Pix Remix has many more presentation options. Another biggie: Slideshow Builder, though a dollar more expensive at $4, has a near-full-featured free version.

Lyrics+ : There are a few annoyingly obvious, dead-simple apps that we just weren’t allowed to have on account of the iPhone SDK’s prior restriction on music library access. Thank god for OS 3.0. Two weeks ago, we finally got a music-library-enabled alarm clock; this week, a real-time lyrics fetcher. There are plenty of ways to incorporate lyrics into your audio file tags pre-transfer, but this one will do it over the air (correction: it just displays lyrics. Nothing is written to your tags), while you listen. A buck for now, regularly $2. (via TUAW)

Finalprice: Fun fact: With a little help from the App Store, anyone can function as an adult without any understanding of math, at all. This is thanks to apps like Finalprice, which calculates discounts and sales taxes to give you an actual, at-register totals for whatever you’re considering buying. Or, you know, you could just figure this stuff out on the built-in calculator in a few seconds. Your innumeracy tax: one dollar.

CNN Money: A polished single-source news app with a solid video section, clean (but weblike) interface, and a real-time ticker, if you’re into that kind of thing. Good if CNN Money is your thing, although I’ll stick with multi-source aggregators like Fluent, or an RSS reader. Free.

MyWi: And finally, one for the jailbreakers. MyWi is an extremely slick tethering app that, instead of connecting to computers via Bluetooth or cable, sets up a zero-config wi-fi network, router-style. It even broadcasts an SSID (a network name) so you—and others—can easily tap into an iPhone’s data connection. It’s great, but $10 is a bit steep for a jailbreak app—especially one that violates your contract, potentially landing you in trouble with your carrier.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• NYC Exit Strategy: The Other NYC Subway App You Need

• The Cost of Buying Every iPhone App: $144,326.06

• SoundAMP App Turns the iPhone Into a Makeshift Hearing Aid

• Amazon Won’t Let Mobile Apps Use Its Product Info Anymore

• iTwitter: The First iPhone Twitter App With Push, Sorta

• TwittaRound Twitter Reality Augmentation Looks Amazing, Even If It Is a Horrible Idea

• Push Gmail for the iPhone, Finally (It’s Not What You Think)

• Prowl Pushes Growl Notifications to Your iPhone

• Nearest Tube iPhone App Adds Digital Directions to Your Surroundings

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.

Jul 03

The Week In iPhone Apps: Childhood v3.0

Posted in: Apple, apps, iPhone, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

Right, so bear with me here: this week our apps are all about learning new things, understanding the world around you, meeting new people, playing extremely silly games in large groups. Sort of like being a kid again! No? Ok.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Pocket Universe: It’s a pinchy, zoomy, 3D star map for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For the iPhone 3GS, for which the new Pocket Universe is designed, you get full-on astronomical augmented reality. Using location services, accelerometer data and the 3GS’s compass, Pocket Universe pseudo-overlays information about your stars, planets, constellations and general space things according to whatever you’re pointing at. Three dollars.

Loopt for iPod Touch: The Loopt iPhone app has been around as long as, well, iPhone apps. Since 2008, it’s earned its keep as one of the only useful friend-locating apps. Just about every mobile platform has a client, with one notable exception: the iPod Touch. That, along with Of course, Loopt isn’t quite the same without GPS, but Wi-Fi location will get you by in a bind. Still waiting for a proper 3.0 version though. Free.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Seek ‘n Spell: iPhone games tend to be a lot like games for any other portable device, and rarely leverage some of the traditionally non-gaming capabilities of the handset. Part of this is because, until recently, the developer SDK was sort of limited. Most of it, I think, is because developers just haven’t been thinking hard enough.

Take this clever, if obvious, idea for a game: A map of wherever you are is overlaid with letters, which you and you teammates can collect by physically running to their icons. Your goal is to come up with words for points, Scrabble-style. It’s a very, very cool idea, and decidedly sweatier than your typical iPhone game. A buck.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.MSNBC: Hey, look, another news organization has a content app! Let’s talk about it! This one’s less about news than about catering to fans of the network, with an emphasis on video content as well as Twitter feeds from MSNBC personalities. It’s a bit hard on the eyes, and occasionally goes stuttery on you, but it works fine. Fun fact: according to the iTunes description, this iPhone app, being an MSNBC product, uses “Microsoft’s Advanced Technologies.” What this means, I have no idea. Free.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Fluent News: If you could sense a lack of excitement about that MSNBC app, that was because of apps like Fluent. It’s far from the first multi-source news aggregator, but it’s one of the better ones. It behave like Google News, more or less, collecting important news from lots of sources and grouping it in a sensible way Why not just use Google News then, you might rudely interject? Well, for one, Fluent can cache news for offline reading, for plans, subways, caves, or wherever. It also prefetches longer articles, though I couldn’t really tell in my brief testing. Anyway, it’s free, so why not?

Skype: Another incremental update to another extremely popular app. This one gets an interface lift, but most importantly, two useful features for people who use Skype’s pay services: text messaging with SkypeOut credit (good for cheap international texts; bad for having no reply function), and Skype Voicemail support. Voicemail support is a bigger deal than it sounds: since receiving calls when you’re out is still pretty much out of the question, the voicemail access makes being out of touch a little less irritating. Still free.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Air Sharing Pro: We’ve always been impressed with Air Sharing—it’s a solid file storage/viewing solution in its basic form. The Pro version, though, is a different animal entirely. First of all, it’s expensive: $10, to be exact. It’s also got expanded support for file storage services like, MobileMe, MyDisk, and Drop.io.

The main draw is that there are tons of new file functions: emailing, which is a huge help; direct printing, via OS X printer sharing; archiving abilities, including viewing archive contents without extracting. It’s a bit like a walled-in version of Finder, and the closest to a proper file browser you’re going to get on a non-jailbroken iPhone.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Adds Events and Photo Albums, But No Push (Yet)

• Apple’s Nudie App Headaches Now Involve Underage Girls

• iPhone OS 3.1 Features: Better Video Editing, Voice Control Over Bluetooth, And More

• Remarkable Speech-to-Speech Voice Translator Coming to iPhone and Blackberry

• Birdfeed Twitter App Review: Lean, Fast and Pretty

• Doom Resurrection for iPhone Hits the App Store, Costs $10

• A Whole Lotta Quake Will Be Blowing Up Your iPhone

Jun 26

The Week In iPhone Apps: It’s Never Too Early To Dance

Posted in: Apple, apps, iPhone, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

iPhone 3.0 apps are still dropping fast and furious, left and right, cats and dogs, etc, but there’s some reprieve for non-3.0 stragglers this week, too. Morning music? Personal broadcasting? Smug food habits? It’s all here.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Locavore 2.0: An hefty update to an already decent app, Locavore 2.0 mixes social networking with its local, seasonal food-finding abilities. Since everything’s got some kind of “social networking” feature nowadays, here’s what that means: Facebook Connect provides Facebook integration, so you can brag about your totally rad local potatoes to your whole friends list, and the “I Ate Local” screen shows what people are eating in your 150-mile proximity. Four dollars.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Mass Effect Galaxy: This as much a promotional tool for Mass Effect 2 as it is a game. As both, it does OK: the top-down, tilt-controlled gameplay is passable, and there’s a little bit of fresh story (and a new character!) for fans of the franchise. EA says beating this game will unlock some kind of content in ME2, but doesn’t care to tell us what. For fans, basically. Three bucks.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.AlarmTunes: I’ve been quietly fuming about the lack of a proper music-based iPhone alarm clock for two years now now, so ugh, finally, 3.0 lets us have one—at least, by way of a third party. It’s not an ideal solution, since you’ve got to leave the app open all night, but it works, and it’s about time. A dollar.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.WorldVoice Radio: This app tries—with some success—to emulate the experience of operating a ham radio. In more modern terms, it’s a streamlined, centralized podcasting service that lets you broadcast content and listen to others’ streams. The podcast-service-as-a-shortwave-radio conceit is kinda cute, I guess, but the recording system is oriented toward shorter messages (longer messages have to be imported from the Voice Memo app) and I don’t get the sense there’s a huge “scene” that buys into the whole pseudo-ham community thing. Three dollars, with (very) reduced-feature free version. [via TUAW]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.AT&T Mobile Remote Access: AT&T has always been pretty good about letting their users control their U-verse IPTV DVRs over the internet (it’s been possible over a mobile web interface since 2007), and their iPhone app is an unsurprising addition to their lineup of management tools. Program search, scheduling, and deletion are all there, as are some helpfully specific search parameters. Free.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

•HP Invents Time Machine, Converts iPhone into Classic Calculator

•Say Goodbye To the Hottest Girls iPhone App

•iPhone 3GS’s Upgraded Hardware Means Console Emulators No Longer Suck

•First Apple-Approved iPhone Porn App

•iPhone Remote App Now Supports Apple TV Controlling With Gestures

•Shazam Now Tweets, Maps Your Music Journeys“>Shazam Now Tweets, Maps Your Music Journeys

•AT&T Wants You to Pay $10 a Month for Their iPhone GPS Navigator

•iPhone AIM and Beejive IM Apps With Push Notifications Are Live

•Navigon GPS Navi iPhone App: Europe-Only Maps, $95 “Special Introduction Price”

Jun 19

The Week In iPhone Apps: Here Come the OS 3.0 Apps

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, itunes, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

iPhone 3.0 has landed, and the first apps with the new features are squirming their way through the App Store‘s clenching gates of approval. How are they? Well, for starters, they all look awfully familiar.

Given that the firmware update has only been live for two days now, the vast majority of 3.0-utilizing downloads are just refreshes of older apps. In fact, you can expect that the be the case for a while; iPhone 3.0’s new features are nice, but most of them aren’t the kind of thing you’d build an entire app around. So, here are the best of the updates:

Leaf Trombone: World Stage: Apple demoed this thing way back in March, but that was pre-3.0, and most importantly for this App, pre-multiplayer. That’s the big update here: iPhone faux-trombone duets which can be played over Bluetooth. The “World Stage” aspect of World Stage is still intact, putting your performances in front of an anonymous audience for cheering and heckling, though it’s been padded out with some fluffy notification integration. It’s a buck, accompanied by a solid free version.

Textfree: Intended as a text message client replacement, this is one of the first mischievous uses I’ve seen for the iPhone’s push notifications. The app itself has been around for a while, but needed to forward texts to your email address in lieu of proper backgrounding/notifications. Now, it works all the time. It’s free for 15 texts a day, six dollars for unlimited.

Flick Fishing: Despite sounding like the king of all junk apps, Flick fishing isn’t so bad, if you’re a fan of fish, nature or accelerometers. With 3.0, it gets multiplayer and some in-app purchases. Completely bewildering fact: this is one of the top 10 most downloaded apps ever. What the hell, people?

Twittelator: There’s some smart 3.0 leveraging going on here, with an inbuilt media/web browser, wide video and audio support to complement the new voice recorder and the 3GS’s camcorder function, a Tweeter-tracking map feature, and a few more. No push though! Five bucks is a tough sell next to the free Tweetdeck, although previous users upgrade at no cost. Also, guys: What happened to your free version?

AP Mobile: Another early app gets a refresh: this one seems hell-bent on testing the practical limits of push notifications. It says it’ll only send “Breaking News” alerts, though I’m not sure what stories qualify. I’m guessing it’ll take some fine-tuning, or else it could lead the way towards Push Alert Fatigue Syndrome, which I’m pretty sure we’ll be writing about in a week or so. Free.

Bomberman 2: Volcano Party: The price reduction from the first version is enough to recommend this one, and the 3.0 features—mostly (synchronous!) Bluetooth multiplayer—are a huge bonus. As with most of the real-time multiplayer games, there’s no 3G support for latency and networking reasons. Three dollars.

Evernote: The free, does-it-all notes app now taps into 3.0’s Google Maps API, and organizes notes by location. Sound recording now much better, if a little redundant, and a raft of other features—mostly interface improvements—abound.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• First iPhone App with In-App Purchasing: $1 App, $10 Per Month

• Sirius/XM iPhone App Is Now Live (Also)

• MLB Streaming Full Live Games to iPhone Over 3G, Starting Tomorrow

• TweetDeck for iPhone Lightning Review

• Ngmoco’s Xbox Live-esque iPhone Service Set to Launch Tomorrow

• 94 God-Awful iPhone Apps Designed in MS Paint

• iPhone 3.0 Features Slightly Clueless “Objectionable Content” Warnings

Jun 12

The Week In iPhone Apps: Too Drunk to Play Brain Age

Posted in: Apple, apps, iPhone, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

All those apps at WWDC were pretty cool, right? Of course, they’ll be a lot cooler when they actually come out. Get your head out of clouds, and into some of this week’s iPhone apps.

KCRW Radio: It’s no secret that we love KCRW, but it seems to have been pulled from the free AOL Radio app and shoved inside an official, dedicated app, which costs a whole dollar. I’m letting this one slide because they’re a public radio station, and because the app—with on-demand shows and multiple streams—is way better.

Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima: Yep, that’s the same guy behind all those Brain Age games for DS, which this iPhone app closely resembles. I’m not gonna lie, I miss the stylus-based exercises. But the finger-friendly tasks are worthy of the series, in that they make my head hurt. Six bucks.

Star Defense: You know those tower defense games where you stop endless waves of monsters/dudes/robots from passing across a map? This is that, in 3D. As in, on a sphere. As we saw at WWDC it looks lush, and it’s one of those rare games that really, truly works with a touchscreen. Seven dollars and a safe buy if you’re a fan of CREEPING DOOM.

bChamp: This one’s a little weird. bChamp parses your beatboxing, and plays it back to you as sampled beatboxing, in theory making you into a better mouth-percussionist. I had limited luck getting my beats to register, and the test iPhone (not mine!) ended up covered in spit. Also an issue: beatboxing is dumb. $1. (via Techcrunch)

Get Home: This app figures out where you are and tells you the best way to get home. It’ll give walking directions, figure out a bus route, call a cab or ring a friend. It’s got huge, colorful buttons. IT IS CLEARLY FOR DRUNK PEOPLE. Be honest about what your app is for, Little Pixels. Two dollars.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• Apple’s WWDC iPhone App Wall Gets the Full Photosynth Treatment

• Doom Resurrection for iPhone Due Next Week; Here’s the Trailer

• Star Radio Communicator iPhone App is NOT AT ALL Like Anything from Star Trek

• Ngmoco Won’t Be Making iPhone-3GS-Exclusive Games

• Apple’s iDisk iPhone App Lets MobileMe Users View and Send Documents, Videos, and More

• Is Napster Making an iPhone App?

• Apple’s Huge, Throbbing Wall of iPhone Apps

• WWDC 2009 iPhone 3.0 App Roundup

Jun 05

The Week In iPhone Apps: My Life Is Indistinguishable From The Sims

Posted in: apps, iPhone, Software, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

This week, the App Store goes on a little gaming kick. Sort of like the real world. COINCIDENCE?!? Yes.

It’s not that there weren’t a few cool iPhone announcements at E3—there were!—it’s just that not much from LA actually made it to the App Store this week. Luckily, a few great ones did, along with some also-good, non-game stuff too.

The Sims 3: It’s not every week we get a full-fledged iPhone conversion game from a studio like EA, and it’s even rarer that they’re truly worth the price. Despite somewhat unwieldy controls and sometimes choppy framerates, the Sims 3 is one of the great ones. It’s an honest Sims game, not a half-assed mobile version, which is probably why EA feels like they can charge $10 for it.

Parachute Panic: In this simple little game, you direct pencil-drawn parachuters to a safe landing, avoiding helicopters, UFOs, and sharks (?) on the way down. The gameplay is engaging, if a little bit repetitive. The artwork looks great, and the soundtrack is fantastic, though it’s painfully apparent that the developers really, really like Katamari Damacy. A dollar.

Isotope: A fantastic top-down, Geometry Wars-esque shooter, Isotope wins the day for its control scheme: direct your ship with a nicely-size left d-pad, and shoot in any direction with a second d-pad, which spawns wherever you plant your right finger. The free version is worth an hour or two of play, and the pay version is just three dollars.

LightSource/Graycard: These two apps provide common photography tools—just not for the iPhone’s camera. Graycard is an adjustable white balance calibrator; useful if you’re not satisfied with your DSLR or video camera’s presets, but only marginally helpful in my testing. LightSource is much more practical—it simulates the colors of common photographic light sources. The iPhone’s screen isn’t that bright, so you can only use this to light still life or low-light shots. A dollar each.

Up: Whoa, hey, it’s another movie promo app! This one isn’t really worthy of its Pixar namesake, and the game—the most prominently displayed part of the app—is terrible. That said, the extra promo material might be worth the free download, since the included clips, bios and photos give a better sense of what the film’s like than all the rest of Disney’s cryptic advertising campaign, combined.

AppSales Mobile: How about one for all the devs out there? AppSales Mobile tracks vital app sales and download statistics, tapping into Apple’s iTunes Connect reporting system. It’s only fitting that such an app exists, though we shouldn’t expect to see it in the App Store anytime soon. But come on, you’re developers! DOWNLOAD! COMPILE! SIDELOAD! (via TUAW)

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• iPhone Zips Will Let You Unzip Jeans to See Naughty Bits

• Ideas We Like: App Store for Apple TV

• Rumor: iPhone 3.0 To Stop Allowing You to Re-Download Apps For Free

• Belkin’s TuneCast GPS-Assisted FM Transmitter Is Like Putting a DVR Into a VHS Player

• Sexy Screen Wash for iPhone Is Both Stupid and a Scam

• And this, obviously

May 29

The Week In iPhone Apps: Sonic the Hedgehog Learns to Read

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, itunes, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

Ok, let’s just acknowledge something so we can all move on. This happened. Now, some apps.

It’s been a hell of a week for the iPhone and the App Store, and one we covered closely. Here are a few apps that slipped through the cracks.

Melodica: It’s a bit like Bloom, except more rigid, more practical, and less whimsical. With Bloom, you discover ambient soundscapes with inexact pokes and unguessable time signatures; with Melodica, everything’s pretty much on rails, including your tempo. Halfway between an audiovisual toy and a compositional tool, and it’s pretty fun. A dollar.

Eucalyptus : This eBook app was at the center of a little controversy a while back, when it was rejected for linking to RACY .txt file of the Kama Sutra in its library. The blogs leapt to its defense and everything got cleared up, but is it any good? Yes! Page flipping animations and other assorted eye candy are nice, and it’s a well-organized, sensible reader, with a large (but closed) library of public domain content. Shame it’s hideously expensive—you might want to watch this video before you take the dive. Ten bucks.

Sonic the Hedgehog: I was really looking forward to this one, but I’ve been let down by Sonic ports in the past, so I kept my expectations low. It’s OK. Visually, it’s a mixed bag: the classic Sonic aesthetic is intact, but looks muddy and pixelated on the iPhone’s screen, as if they just dumped some assets from another platform onto this one. Adapting Sonic to the iPhone’s limited control options was an obvious challenge for Sega, and one I had hoped they would rise to. With their onscreen d-pad and single button, they haven’t. $6 feels excessive for a game that’s best described as “playable.”

Tic Tac Toe Ten: Ok, this week’s getting a little rich for my blood. How about some free apps? Tic Tac Toe Ten multiplies an old classic by ~~ten~~ nine, changing it from a worn-out game for children into a surprisingly engaging one or two player puzzle. Tip: instituting time limits is key. There’s a pay version with more options, but the free one’s aaaaaaalllright.

Zensify: One of a growing number of social media aggregators, Zensify gloms together most common social networks, as well as services like Flickr, YouTube and Digg that have central social networking functions. It behaves and looks like a Twitter client (also, it is a Twitter client) and helps you keep track of what’s going on in your little corner of the internet. It’ll also create a cloud to see what topics are trending between your various services, which is cool, if not overly useful. Free.

• This Week’s App News on Giz:

• A Week in the Life of an Apple App Store Reviewer

• Car Controlling App Is Fake, But Fun Anyway

• Would You Replace Your Baby’s Rattle with an iPhone?

• Peek-O-Matic Strips Pinups, Hunks, Flabby Gizmodo Editors

• The First Fuzzy Shot of the Sirius iPhone App

Get Girls Half-Naked in Your iPhone

• The First iPhone Clock App I Actually Paid Money For

• June 1st New Yorker Cover Drawn Entirely on the iPhone

May 22

This Week In iPhone Apps: Deer Carcasses and Browser Tabs

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, itunes, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

This week, we revisit some classics from your (and your grandfather’s) childhood, iPhone browsing gets upgraded, and I play what it probably the best 3D multi-animal hunting game available for the iPhone.

Boulder Dash!: Whether you’re just leaving college or having your third kid, there’s a pretty good chance that you played Boulder Dash as a kid. The official 25th anniversary iPhone edition is as faithful as you want it to be: you can choose either classic, spritey graphics or a modern, cartoonish look, and opt for either an overlaid d-pad control scheme or a new swipe-based system. The game looks great and both control system work a treat, so collecting jewels on the iPhone feels about as natural as it did on the Commodore. $4.99.

Deer Hunter 3D: A hunting video game! What kind of bizarre nerd bumpki—oh, wait, this is actually pretty fun. Deer Hunter 3D for iPhone, licensed from the Walmart-famous Deer Hunter PC franchise, takes you on hunting trips to various locations to shoot various animals with various types of guns. It looks great, and the aiming system—the core of the game—is executed well. The walk-aim-shoot routine seems repetitive at first, but the game has enough unlockable content to keep it interesting for a while. $5.99.

Nightglow: This browser brings proper tabs, more gestures and a few other little odds and ends to your iPhone. Its tab switcher is definitely faster than Safari’s, though the app as a whole can be a bit sluggish, and the screen grab feature, which lets you explore the page while still maintaining focus on a text field, is sometimes useful. It kinda reminds me of one of those old Internet Explorer tabbed shells from 2003: it’s mildly attractive for power users, but wouldn’t be necessary at all if Safari was just a little bit better. $0.99.

Pickin’ Stix: A vintage vintage game, this app asks you to do precisely one thing. Doing that one thing is easy, and strangely gratifying. It feels like it ought to be free, but $0.99 isn’t so bad.

HDR Camera: No, you can’t take DSLR-grade, hyper-realistic dynamic range photos with your iPhone. You just can’t. That said, HDR Camera does do a convincing fake. The app coaxes some decent pseudo-HDR imagery out of the iPhone’s sad little camera, albeit with filters and effects you could easily just apply in Photoshop. Its $1.99 pricetag is too high.

UpNext 3D NYC: If your life revolves around NYC, there really isn’t a better way—wait, let me rephrase that: a prettier way—to navigate the city on your iPhone. If it doesn’t, UpNext 3D’s exquisitely detailed view of the city is still great eye candy. It does everything you could want from a mapping app: subway schedules, local listings and basic mapping functions and restaurant reviews. Tapping buildings even tells you what’s inside (but only sometimes). Sorry, Brooklynites, it’s Manhattan only for now. $2.99.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• Card Master Pro iPhone App Exposes Brian Lam’s Poor Gambling Skills

• 8Bitone Chiptunes Synthesizer App Lets You Mix It Like Mario

• Kindle 1.1 for iPhone Now Available

• New Slacker iPhone App Works Harder to Smack Pandora

• iPrivus Brings Reverse Call Lookup App To The iPhone

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.

May 15

The Week in iPhone Apps: Grow Up, Slacker

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, itunes, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

This week’s iPhone apps are all about growing up, taking control, and inheriting new responsibilities. Get a job! Kiss important peoples’ butts! Organize your shopping! Record important things! And for some reason, SLEESTAKS.

First, a moment of silence for the recently departed John Mahoney, the great emcee of iPhone apps that everyone had grown to love so dearly and from whom I’ve inherited this hallowed feature. You’ll always live on in our hearts, other John. (And also in the real world, because you’re not dead.)

—

On to the apps.

Nobody wants to build a resume; it’s daunting, and usually depressing. ResumePRO streamlines the process for you, building a passably professional-looking resume from whatever information you enter into the various fields it provides (previous experience, education, references, pictures, whatever). It’s still up to you to grossly inflate your every modest accomplishment. Unfortunately for its intended audience (unemployed people?), ResumePRO is two bucks.

At some point, everyone has to start shopping like an adult. This means: planning, lists, budgeting, and muesli. Bazaar takes care of nearly all of these things, making it sort of easy to create shopping lists based on recipes, weekly plans, or preplanned lists from a picky spouse. This is definitely one for people with an organizational bent, but the ongoing basket price tally is pretty useful no matter how lazy you are. Three dollars.

In these hard times, you can’t blame people for turning to blatant sycophancy. Try it! Sometimes it works, but it always gives you a good gauge for how much your dignity is worth in the free market. Anyway, ExecTweets is a Microsoft-backed venture to collect and aggregate tweets from power players in a variety of industries. Now it’s got an iPhone app, which lets you peek the minds of various Twitter-inclined bigwigs, organized by industry, topic or popularity. FYI, Lee Iacocca just took a huge dump. Free.

Poddio is a great little sound recorder and editor, and the new free version is just as good, though it cripples most of your file sharing options. Still, it’s a dead-simple app that’s perfect for recording long interviews, meetings or events, and editing down to size with many of the features of a desktop nonlinear editing app. It’s free, but if you want easy recording transfers, you’ll have to go Pro, which’ll set you back ten whole American dollars.

And because, lets be honest, this whole “adulthood” thing is a hollow charade, here’s a game. I didn’t know about this until, like, right now, but Will Ferrel is about to star in a Land of the Lost remake. What the hell? Anyhoo, they made an iPhone game for it, and it’s kinda fun. It’s puzzlier than you might expect, but it’s a great time-suck and above-average for a piece of promotional material. Warning: if you don’t think that everything Will Farrel does is funny by default, do not expect to laugh. If you do, I guess the interspersed quips and quotes might work for you.

This Week’s App News on Giz:

• SlingPlayer Mobile For iPhone Review (Wi-Fi Only, $30)

• How to Hack the iPhone to Use SlingPlayer and Skype Over 3G

• Fake Txt’n’Walk iPhone App Is Now Real Email ‘N Walk iPhone App

• Resident Evil Degeneration Puts a Ton of Zombies in Your iPhone

• BitTorrent App for iPhone Gets Rejected on Anti-Piracy Grounds

• Twitterific 2.0 iPhone App Lightning Review

May 08

The Week in iPhone Apps: ONE. LAST. TIME.

Posted in: Apple, iPhone, itunes, the week in iPhone apps, Today's Chili, top

Hey guys. So this is my last time doing the iPhone apps column, because it’s my last day at Gizmodo. So it’s only fitting that we enter the DANGER ZONE.

That’s right, I’m moving on to other place in the internetosphere as of today (more later), and I will of course be leaving the weekly roundup of notable iPhone apps in the more than capable hands of one John “Mose” Herrman, so fear not, this isn’t going anywhere.

Top Gun: With no apparent peg whatsoever, Paramount has decided to make a Top Gun iPhone game. Since I’ve seen this movie upwards of, well, let’s just say many times, I am pleased. And better yet, it’s no dud—smooth accelerometer controls (with a recalibration option! yes!) guide either an F-22 fighter or B-2 bomber (yeah, no F-14s for some reason) through some pretty intuitive arcade dogfights. Plus, convincing covers of the classic Kenny Loggins soundtrack and some corny Advance Wars-type cutscenes. Well done. $2 for a limited time.

Michelin Guide Restaurants: The folks behind the famous Michelin Star, the mark of a Very Good Place to Eat, have compiled restaurant guides for several cities. Location-based search for when you know you want deliciousness, but you just don’t know where to go. NYC is $7, prices vary for others.

AT&T Wireless Mobile: Finally, AT&T got their shit together and released an app that you can use to monitor your cellphone minutes and text usage and pay your bills. It seems to accomplish those tasks just fine. Free

uHear: This app tests your hearing to see how many years all those hours rocking Mastodon at top volume on the ol’ white buds have set your hearing back. It’s a buck, which apparently goes to charity. [via Gadget Lab]