Billboard has announced that it will be giving awards out for iOS music apps (of all things). At the Music App Summit on October 5th, Billboard will choose winning iOS apps in six different categories, from Best Artist App and Best Music Creation App to Best Branded Music App. You can find the full list of nominees after the break, and there are some recognizable names on there, including a Phish touring app, TUAW favorite I am T-Pain, and the now Disney-owned Tap Tap Revenge.

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Sometimes you roll along, having a pretty good day… and sometimes, you just want a giant worm to rise up out of the ground and destroy everything. Super Mega Worm is for that second type of day. (You’ll have to find something else for the first — Doodle Jump, perhaps?) It’s a game where you control a gigantic worm on a 2D field. You use a slider (or the accelerometer) to direct it through the soil and up onto the surface of the Earth, where puny little humans await their inevitable destruction. The game is funny in a morbid way; you end up cheering for the little worm as it grows (and learns new abilities) over time, and eventually, you’ll find yourself reveling in the destruction of the human race.

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Plex’s big tease last week turned out to not be an Apple acquisition, but instead a big release, of both a rewritten Mac client to keep all of your media together in one place, and also a brand new iOS app, available now in the App Store for $4.99. Sure, the app’s a little pricey, but if you use the new Plex as your media center, it’s actually a must buy — not only does it work as a remote control, but you can actually stream media from your Plex library directly to your iPhone or iPad from wherever you are.

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Apple set another milestone over the weekend when it reached 250,000 apps available in the App Store. Last Saturday, 148Apps recorded 252,227 apps currently available for the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch. Expect Steve Jobs to tout these numbers on Wednesday at the beginning of Apple’s scheduled press event.

As Electronista reports, Apple still has the numbers when it comes to mobile app stores. Unofficial statistics suggests that there are over 100,000 apps available in the Android Store, and far fewer — around 9,000 — in RIM’s BlackBerry App World.

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There are plenty of hurdles between a good idea and App Store success; even after your killer app hits the virtual shelves, the challenges of discoverability and competitors sandbagging your app with Astroturfed bad reviews add up to plenty of headaches. Still, once past the biggest stumbling block — Apple giving a thumbs up or thumbs down — things should get easier, right?

Unfortunately, some intriguing apps end up in approval limbo, the stranded state between all-clear and no-thanks that’s reserved for some of the most innovative and paradigm-busting apps; the apps that make Apple go “Hmm…” and force the app approval team to exercise the pocket veto. Without a clear rejection (telling the dev what can be fixed), there’s nothing to do but wait.

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Chapters (US$3.99 on the iPad) looks like a terrific app for your various notetaking enterprises. I haven’t yet been completely sold on the iPad as a blogging or writing device; so far, I’ve stuck with my MacBook rather than an iPad when I need to be out remotely somewhere keeping notes or writing things down. But Chapters is exactly the kind of app that could change that. With a simple and powerful interface and a set of features that steps aside and lets you write in whatever fashion you want, it could easily help your iPad replace a more powerful notebook computer.

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Touch Arcade got to speak with none other than John Carmack himself at QuakeCon last weekend, and he had some disappointing news about getting old school id games on the iPhone. While Carmack said that he’s excited about releasing Rage on the iPhone, he admits that id’s past titles haven’t sold up to snuff on the iPhone. That means that Orcs & Elves, originally created for mobile phones and then later released on the DS, won’t be coming to Apple’s App Store.

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The very insightful Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment has compiled an amazing primer on all of the numbers behind the app market (which you can also see by clicking the “Read More” link, although it’s not viewable on an iPad or iPhone). If you want to know anything about how many apps are rolling out of the store, how many apps are installed on the average device, or what kinds of apps those are, Dredge’s presentation will tell you. It’s a really excellent compilation of everything we know about the App Store and the app market at large thus far.

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Wherever you live, lightning can be dangerous if you spend a lot of time outdoors. In the USA alone, an average of 58 people per year are killed by proximity to lightning strikes. PinPoint Lightning (US$5.99), a new app from MyWeather, LLC, hopes to reduce that number by providing push notifications of lightning strikes within 30 miles of your present location within seconds of a strike.

This app only provides lightning strike data for the USA and Canada, with information coming from the National Lightning Detection Network in the 50 states, and from Environment Canada in the Great White North. The strike data used by PinPoint Lightning is rather expensive, which explains the rather high cost of the app. For hikers, bikers, golfers, and anyone else who spends time working or playing outside, $5.99 is a small cost to pay for advance warning of nearby lightning activity.

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Students and educational institutions already get some nice perks from Apple in the form of hardware discounts, and from some development firms (such as Microsoft) in software discounts. Imagine being able to get an educational discount when you buy an iOS app in the App Store.

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This is a weird one. FutureTap was surprised to recognize one of their app’s screens in a strange place: a recent Apple patent outlining how a possible travel application could work.

The company wasn’t quite sure what to do next — as you can see above, it’s a straightforward copy of the Where To? screen. Without any contact from Apple on the issue, FutureTap was puzzled — the company calls Apple its “primary business partner.” Having your app show up in an Apple patent filing

Not that Apple is above cherry-picking UI and functionality from third-party apps — the iBooks interface was more or less borrowed whole from apps like Delicious Library and Classics, and further back there was the homage of Karelia Software’s Watson reinterpreted as Apple’s revision to Sherlock. In those cases, both developers just sort of shrugged, felt flattered, and let it go. That’s not the situation here — these screenshots probably aren’t illustrations of a product Apple wants to make, they’re explanations of how the patent would work.

As Engadget’s Nilay Patel clarifies for us (so nice to have an attorney around), not only is this merely a patent application (which could possibly still be denied), but Apple isn’t trying to lay claim to the actual screenshot; rather the company is using an example application which illustrates the to-be-patented functionality (in the case of Where To?, the ability of an iPhone to auto-detect when a user has been traveling). As Nilay puts it: Read more…

We’ve all been using FaceTime like crazy here at TUAW central — it’s really great to be able to conference with friends in real time without having to arrange things in advance. Nearly all of us have been video-conferencing-ready for years. But with the iPhone 4, there’s no more “Do you have iChat set up?” (or Skype) or “Can I call you now?” time-wasting prologues.

Instead, we can just call. Knowing that your friends have iPhone 4’s makes video conferencing incredibly easy. You don’t have to call or text to arrange the call, you just place it and you’re immediately good to go. We may have already had webcam equipment on hand but it’s only with the iPhone 4 that, at least here at TUAW, that we’re actually using video calling.

With that in mind, we’ve been seeing how far we can push the technology. We’ve put together a list of the coolest techniques that we’ve actually tried out and tested and can confirm as working. Without any special ordering, here they are.

Call Internationally for free! [No special hacking required] Got a business colleague in Switzerland that you need to talk to for a current project? Do you have family overseas or otherwise outside your normal calling plan? If they’ve enabled FaceTime in Settings and activated their service, you can chat over international boundaries or across the ocean for free.

Once you’ve entered contact details, FaceTime availability automatically shows up in Contacts. Don’t forget to add the “+” sign needed for International calling. Connect to a Wi-Fi network, tap the FaceTime button, and you’re good to go.

TUAW tested US to Europe calling and found the response time and video quality to be excellent. There were no significant lags beyond what you’d normally expect with VoIP, i.e. somewhere between hardly noticeable and nonexistent.

Call home from a plane! [No special hacking required] If your airplane Read more…

Sometime early this morning, Apple quietly unleashed the genius section of the iPad app store, something that’s been in the iPhone app store for quite some time. It’s interesting how Apple is always “quietly” releasing new things, while making a big to-do about others. What’s also interesting is how a new feature in the app store can be made without a software update.

Not only does the new genius section of the iPad app store provide the same type of recommendations as with the iPhone, there’s a new tab titled “iPad Upgrades,” which shows you all of the iPad (aka, “HD”) versions of the iPhone apps you already have. This is a great new feature for both consumers and app developers because, previously, there was no easy way to know.

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9to5Mac spotted a new section in the App Store called Try Before You Buy, but don’t get too excited about the idea of demos finally coming to the App Store. As of right now, this is only an index of “Lite” or free versions of apps. If you were hoping to try OmniFocus for iPad without shelling out $40, you’re out of luck. What you’ll find are about 100 apps that developers purposefully made because the App Store doesn’t have demo versions.

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