San Francisco, CA – The 2008 Best App Ever Awards nominees have now been announced and the voting is open. Sponsored by 148Apps, the inaugural competition is the first iPhone OS Application achievement awards to recognize the best iPhone apps and games released in the iTunes App Store in 2008. The goal is to help publicize the very best apps available, not just the best-selling apps.

The nomination process lasted a little over 2 weeks and saw 17,758 nominations for 1,259 different apps submitted to the site. In addition to the public nominations, a committee of industry people and iPhone developers was gathered to help nominate apps. 5 nominees from the public and 5 nominees from the committee were combined to come up with the nominees for each category.

Read more…

Blacksburg, VA – Gotow.net, the creator of NetSketch, is pleased to announce the release of Mathomatic for iPhone. Mathomatic is the first full-fledged symbolic math solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch. More than just a calculator, Mathomatic solves algebraic problems, from simple middle-school homework to complex polynomial and multivariate systems. It sports an attractive, easy-to-use interface fine tuned for the iPhone. Scroll through recent output, tap expressions to select and re-use them, and “flick” through long inputs. After a few days, you’ll find yourself trying to tap through the output on your graphing calculator!

Mathomatic makes a great companion for anyone who wants to speed through complex equations. It solves systems of equations, showing intermediate steps and all possible solutions. It simplifies and factors expressions, computes derivatives, indefinite integrals, laplace transforms, taylor series expansions, and more! Imaginary numbers are fully supported, and complex expressions are beautifully formatted, much like the output of high-end desktop mathematics applications.

Read more…

This is very interesting — while investors and consumers alike are panicking every time someone says “Jobs” and “sick” in the same sentence, MacLife has decided to take a more optimistic view of the prospect of His Steveness leaving the company, by compiling a nice list of ten Apple products they say Jobs had nothing at all to do with. As you probably already know, Steve left the company once before, from 1985 to 1996, and during that time, while Steve was working on NeXTstep (which would eventually become OS X), Apple didn’t exactly sit on its laurels.

The Newton is first and foremost, and while some may laugh at the handwriting recognition, let’s not forget that it can still do things the iPhone can’t. And while many of Apple’s products were finalized under Jobs’ watch, their beginnings come from before his return: the Powerbook, Macintosh TV (which could definitely be seen as a precursor for the AppleTV), and the Power Macintosh were all released without Jobs. Even among the most faithful Apple fans, you have to agree that Apple is willing to get wacky without Jobs to squelch some really crazy ideas: the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, the eMate, and the adjustable keyboard are all examples of that.

Read more…

The iPhone dev team will be releasing their software method to unlock iPhone 3G today.

They had announced that they will be releasing the world’s first software method to unlock iPhone 3G on New Year’s eve and had also broadcasted the live demo of an iPhone 3G being unlocked.

Read more…

iPhone developers Chilli X are looking for a little help with the App Store promo materials for their new ToDo list app, Done. First, though, a little bit about Done.

Read more…

How would you like to be able to shoot photos on your iPhone, and then immediately print them on your HP printer?

HP has a new product called iPrint Photo (click opens iTunes) available in the App Store that makes it very simple to print your iPhone pictures. The free download opens to a list of photo albums that looks very similar to the list in the Photos app on the iPhone. Tapping on a photo brings up a Print Photo page with a large Print button on it (see photo at right). If you only have one networked printer available, just tapping the Print button sends a 4×6 inch (10×15 cm) print job to that printer.

Read more…

12seconds.tv is a site that started up a little while ago that seems to be aiming at a “Twitter-for-video” kind of idea — you upload just twelve seconds of video, whether that’s you saying something, video of a short scene, or whatever else you want. The site was in alpha but has recently opened up to beta (so anyone can join), and they’ve also released an iPhone app, available for 99 cents in the App Store right now.

“But wait, Mike,” I hear you saying, “the iPhone doesn’t record video!” And it still doesn’t, but it does record pictures and audio, and the 12seconds app will combine a slideshow of three pictures you take with any 12 seconds of audio you record, thus creating a close approximation of a 12 second video. You can see my sample upload here, just a few pictures of my apartment’s hallway and some Mountain Goats playing from my speakers. You can use pics you’ve already taken, and the whole process of recording, combining, and uploading works pretty well. You don’t have any control over how the images slide across: it’s more of a “throw it all into the mix and hope something good comes out” thing.

Read more…

Hello and welcome once again to The Obvious News. Our top story today: the sky remains blue, and we’ll have a full report by our man on the scene Chip Thompson about that later. But first, this: apparently App Store downloads are up thanks to large holiday sales of the iPhone and iPod touch. This comes as a shock to absolutely no one, but reports are coming in from developers, publishers, and browser reports and search terms alike that App Store downloads and interest have jumped up three and four times over, thanks, it seems, to more people receiving iPhones and iPod touches for Christmas and the other winter holidays.

Read more…

As much as I hate to do it, I’m always willing to admit when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about Ocarina. Not about the app itself, per se — I still think it’s one of the silliest, most pointless apps I’ve see on the App Store. But it has been nothing but popular since its release, so apparently lots of people out there are into it. That’s fine — I’m willing to accept that there are best-selling apps out there that I think are dumb.

And maybe this will be another one: Smule, the company behind Ocarina, has decided to follow up with a new app called Zephyr (not to be confused with the MacBook cooling system) that seems just as silly to me. You can draw out messages with an airy sound-and-snowflake interface, and then send those messages blowing around the world (represented, in the official video above, by Las Vegas) to random people who, if they like your messages, will pass them on around the Internet. “What’s the point?” you might say, and in that opinion, I’d agree with you. There are lots of ways to send messages around the world, and more than a few of them are quite free and will let you be clearer than drawing snow with wind sounds in the background.

Read more…

There are now over a thousand games listed in iTunes and they vary greatly in quality and price tag. So its can be a real nightmare trying to find the good ones. Over the next few posts we will be reviewing some of the recently released games. For now, we will stick to those targeting the Christmas season.

There are eight Christmas-theme games listed in iTunes – six released in December and two in November. All carry a price tag! What is troubling about these – and other recently released games – is that in many cases the support site and/or game home sites listed for the developers don’t actually have information (or even mention) the game! The game will get a solid rave on itunes, but when we follow the link – nada!

Read more…

Filed under: iPhone

When Apple was planning to sell the iPhone in France, Orange was identified as the exclusive carrier. The problem was that France prohibits a carrier lock to extend beyond 6 months. Additionally, French provider Bouygues Telecom SA filed a complaint with the Competition Council about that agreement back in September.

A decision was reached earlier this month when the Competition Council decided that any French carrier should be able to offer the iPhone 3G. While Bouygues Telecom and SFR (the second-largest carrier in France) haven’t begun selling iPhones, retailer FNAC has, and they’re unlocked as far as we can tell. It’s unclear (at least to us) if they’re unlocked completely or only open to French carriers.

Read more…

The highly-rated and popular drawing app for the iPhone and iPod touch, Sketches, has been on sale through Christmas. Now LateNiteSoft has extended the sale through December 31 to give more people the opportunity to draw on their pocket devices.

Sketches (click for TUAW review) is not only fun to let the kids play with, but it’s great for creating quick drawings and annotating iPhone pictures. It comes with a bunch of pre-created shapes, you can use photos or a map of your current location for a background, and there’s even an eraser available. It’s the most drawing fun you can have without a Newton MessagePad (by the way, my MP2100 will be accompanying me to Macworld Expo again next week).

Read more…

News junkies: Every headline is our toke, every cutline is our crack. A true news junkie doesn’t stop at just one app, feed, or source; s/he wants them all. Thankfully, your iPhone or iPod touch can be your connection to news from your community and from around the world.

While RSS feed readers like Byline and NetNewsWire let you customize feeds tailored to your interests, there are dedicated apps for a wide variety of news outlets and subject areas.

Read more…

There is no shortage of iPhone/touch apps that allow you to use the navigation capabilities of your device to figure out where you are or where you need to go. Google Maps, already built in, does a great job all by itself.

Increasingly, there are many paid and free apps that can do the job in a simpler, more specialized, or more efficient way. One of the highly praised and heavily downloaded apps is AroundMe, which can show you nearby restaurants, hotels, theaters, parking, hospitals and much more.

Read more…