All Articles in App Store Apps

Earthworm Jim [$4.99 - iTunes link], an iPhone and iPod touch remake of the classic Sega and Nintendo game of the same name, has just landed in the App Store.

Confession: I was a huge Earthworm Jim fan back in the day. The animation sold me instantly, and that animation looks just as good on the iPhone. I’m downloading it now. If anyone else gives it a try, especially old-school fans, let us know what you think.

Sean Cooper Games and MEDL Mobile have created a highly addicting gem of a game, Boxhead: The Zombie Wars. [$0.99 for the next two days - iTunes Link] Playing this game makes me feel like I’ve died and gone to zombie heaven.

Boxhead: The Zombie Wars is a extremely fast paced action-shooter where you get to play as Jon Bambo, a mercenary with a kick butt arsenal of weaponry which includes – pistol, shotgun, C4 explosives, minigun, turret machine guns, etc…

The premise is simple, kill as many zombies as you possibly can without dying. The more zombies you kill in a row, the higher your points multiplier will go. The higher you get your multiplier, bigger and more destructive your weapons will be at your disposal. Zombie destruction on your iPhone has never been so enjoyable.

Enjoy!

Apple has announced an iPhone Tech Talk World Tour, which is billed as expert advice, coming to a city near you.

Apple technology evangelists are coming to a city near you with expert advice on how you can maximize the innovative technologies of iPhone OS within your apps.

Advanced content for advanced developers

The iPhone Tech Talk World Tour features a range of sessions for advanced developers who want to enhance the capability, functionality, and usability of their iPhone apps. You’ll dive deep into coding and design techniques that will help you take your apps to the next level.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity available only to you as a member of the iPhone Developer Program. The event is free, but space is limited. Register for an iPhone Tech Talk today.

Cities include San Jose, Seattle, New York, Toronto, Paris, London, Hamburg, Bejing, and Tokyo (already full). Schedule, agenda, and registration information can be found online via developer.apple.com.

Anyone going?

This weekend GigaOm brought word that Mozilla was working on an iPhone app. Of course, thoughts turn immediately towards their most famous product — Firefox. However, Apple doesn’t allow 3rd party code interpreters and that means no Gecko HTML renderer and no TraceMonkey Javascript engine. And again, I don’t think there’s any need for Mozilla to make a WebView wrapper…

So what else is there? Browser link sync? The iPhone will sync Safari links, or Internet explorer on Windows, but syncing links for Firefox users is thus far unsupported, and no doubt many would love to have that functionality:

Later, I sat around gabbing with Lilly and Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s VP of Mobile, talking about Weave and the Awesome Bar, which is a way to get access to all your browsing history and bookmarks by just typing them in the URL bar on your browser. And while we were talking about Weave, I asked them if it was going to be part of this new, mysterious iPhone app. Lilly and Sullivan smiled and remained silent. Interestingly, they didn’t correct me.

Malik notes that Weave might be too competitive with MobileMe for Apple’s tastes, but that of course will depend on the exact implementation offered on the iPhone, and how flexible Apple is feeling (more so than ever, it seems of late). And if ever a Weave there was, bringing it to the iPhone certainly makes sense.

Early this morning developer of the iPhone Facebook application, Joe Hewitt, posted that Facebook 3.03 is on it’s way to squash a few bugs. Even bigger news is that update will then be followed by Facebook 3.1 which will include push notifications.

Facebook happens to be one of the most used iPhone applications today while push notifications is the most sought after missing feature from the application. Techcrunch brings up a few valid points regarding how these notifications are currently handled and the potential issues that can arise from an application that will pop up more than a few notifications on your screen. The major issue being if you receive more than one notification you are completely lost as to what the previous notification(s) were for.

Personally I tend to turn off the alerts in certain applications that push a lot of notifications to my iPhone. Applications such as Beejive and Twitbit are just a few that I simply leave the “badge” option on so I can just see how many messages I have. That still does not change the fact that I want a better push notification system…

What are your thoughts on the current push notification system and how would you like to see it improved? Sound off in comments below!

Rockband [$9.99 - iTunes link] for iPhone and iPod touch is now available in the iTunes App Store. It has guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and both single-player and multi-player (via Bluetooth) action.

20 songs come with the app, including music by Smashing Pumpkins, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foo Fighters, Blink-182, The Beastie Boys, and more can be purchased in-app.

If you get your Rockband on, let us know how it works for you!

[Thanks everyone who sent this in!]

Wolfram Alpha [$49.00 - iTunes link] for iPhone (and iPod touch) is the “computational knowledge engine” made mobile. While the website is (currently?) free, the iPhone app is decidedly not. But is it worth the premium price? Christina Warren from Mashable says:

It’s a high end graphing calculator (that supports discrete number theory, Calculus derivative and plotting of functions), an almanac, a currency/unit converter and a pretty sophisticated stock analysis tool. And that’s just the beginning.

She shows several examples of the kind of results the Wolfram Alpha app produces, and is particularly impressed with its mortgage calculations and graphical math calculations.

So, for students or those who work in fields that require these specific types of computational features, and Mr. Spock, it very well could be. If anyone tried it out, let us know what you think!

Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

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(iGo My Way 2009 – North America For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!)

iGo My Way [$79.99 - iTunes link] is the fourth turn-by-turn app I have reviewed. As with the other three, I have used the app around town as well as planning for a long trip (the same trip I have taken with the others). It generally suggested very reasonable routes, it had the vast majority of POI’s that I was looking for (in fact, I don’t recall a single instance where I couldn’t find something). So how did it compare in the long distance travel?

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Layar Reality Browser [Free - iTunes link] is technically an augmented reality browser for the iPhone 3GS (it depends in large part on the compass to work its wonders).

For the uninitiated, augmented reality typically uses GPS location and internet data to layer information on the screen over live video. In Layar’s case, for example, to show local search results for “pizza” over the restaurants in an intersection you’re looking at on your iPhone.

Whether cool translates into usefulness — we’ll see. But on cool alone, it’s definitely worth a look. (You can also view search results in map and list view, but what’s the fun in that?”

[Layar via TechCrunch]