All Articles in Quick Apps

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!

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]

Looks like Google Wave, the big G’s cloud-based take on next-generation communication and collaboration, already works on the iPhone. No big surprise, though, it’s browser powered and the iPhone still has the slickest browser in mobile. Google even showed it off on an iPhone during its debut at IO 2009. TechCrunch, however, found this interesting little bit of behavior:

Just like with any Web page on the iPhone, you can save a bookmark on your Home screen, and it creates a little icon which launches mobile Safari to that page. When you save the Wave bookmark to your Home screen, however, something different happens. You go to Wave, but without the Safari wrapper which allows you to navigate to another page or search the Web. Instead, it looks more like a regular app and there is no way to navigate away from it. Everything else works the same as in the mobile browser version.

This feature, as TechCrunch states, has been available to iPhone developers for a while, and helps blur the line between highly localized WebApps, and highly cloud-dependant widgets. If you’re using Google Wave on your iPhone, let us know how it works for you. (And if you work for Google, send us an invite so we can try it.)

Ramp Champ [$1.99 - iTunes link] is a skee-ball-like, old school boardwalk arcade or amusement park-style game for the iPhone and iPod touch. Co-developed by the Iconfactory and DSMediaLabs, it’s also gorgeous. Of course, I’d expect no less from the pixel perfectionists behind it (and behind other well-loved apps like Twitterrific and Frenzic).

The premise is simple: using your finger and the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, you flick balls up a ramp and try to hit targets, win trophies, score points, get tickets, and redeem those tickets for prizes. The art is sublime, from the included Clown Town, Breakwater, Spaceswarm, and Icon garden to the in-app purchasable add-on packs like the Ninja Attack and Tiki Island combo ($0.99 each). Other add-ons currently include Voyage, Halloween, and Challenge. This part of the app is implemented particularly well, and there’s even a “restore purchases” button should you even need to re-download the add-ons.

In-jokes abound for the attentive as well. Developer Ged Maheux points out the classic icon sizes 16, 32, 48, 64, 128, etc. used as ticket cost for the prizes. And, of course, the first prize I bought was the Twitterrific blue bird itself.

There are three “goals” to each ramp. The first one tends towards the easy, a cookie to reward us for playing. The second and third range from difficult to how-the-frak-do-I-do-this. (Obvious tip: try to time your shots so that you hit more than one target with each ball). That you can often get close works only to make it more frustrating and addictive to play.

The frustrating part may be a double-edged sword, however. Sometimes flicking the ball seems absolutely intuitive and under your complete control, and sometimes it seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to where the ball goes relative to how you flick. In the real world, and number of quirks in a ramp could account for chaotic end results. On the iPhone, it might just be a matter of tweaking the physics engine a bit more.

All-in-all, it’s a beautiful, engaging, casual time-filler of a game, perfect for occupying interstitial moments. As a test, however, I gave it to an 11-year old to try out. I only got it back an hour and half later. So, yeah, it works for a wide range of players and time constraints as well.

If you give Ramp Champ a go, let us know how how many goals you get, and which prizes you pick up.

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PushMail [$2.99 - iTunes link] has just gone 2.0. For those unfamiliar with PushMail, its a middleapp that creates an account for you to forward email, and when it’s alerted to that new email, it sends out a push notification to your iPhone. New features this time around include:

• 25 sound options
• Set silent periods (e.g. during the time you typically sleep)
• History, to view past notifications
• Customize notifications (choose what info you want to display, and what you want to keep private).
• View button to open message in PushMail, Mail, or Safari
• Configuration help and trouble-shooting
• Profiles to let you override certain settings based on specific criteria. (e.g. don’t push any email from the mother-in-law!)

Both the history and the profiles options sound terrific. For those who want GoogleSync-style push Gmail but are already using their only ActiveSync slot for Exchange, this is another option.

If you try it out, let us know what you think!

Stickam Live Video [Free - iTunes link] brings the popular live streaming website’s content right to your iPhone or iPod touch… and it even works over 3G!

No doubt they’re using some magic behind the scenes to transform the Flash-bound web content into racy H.264 for the iPhone, similar to how other video platforms have adapted. With it, you can watch featured shows and popular live shows, and view, search, and chat with live friends and users. It also supports both portrait and landscape mode.

If you’re a Stickam fan and you try it out, let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Just so everyone is clear, the developer did this as a parody, Apple didn’t censor anything. B’okay? Read the full 8008135 story on Three Letter Acronym…

PCalc RPN Calculator [$9.99 - iTunes link] for iPhone has just updated to version 1.8, and the update is… rather unique:

Have you, or somebody close to you, ever turned your calculator upside down and accidentally seen a mildly suggestive word? Have you ever been in a maths class, and had to put up with groups of giggling boys performing elaborate calculations that are not part of the lesson?

Yes, it’s one of the main problems affecting the calculator industry today, the so-called “calculator words”. These otherwise harmless devices can be made to display smut at the press of a few buttons. Added to that, the iPhone App Store is very strict about having inappropriate content in apps. Nobody wants their app to get a 17+ rating, or worse, to be rejected entirely.

Which is why we are happy to announce that the latest version of our PCalc scientific calculator for the iPhone contains a new patent-worthy profanity filter.

Simply enter a number such as “5318008″, turn the calculator upside down, and the offending word will be discreetly censored. Many common calculator words have been included as standard, and we plan to increase this over time via software updates.

The new version also comes, you know, calculator features, and a $9 off coupon for the Mac version (which doesn’t seem to change when you turn your Mac upside down… hmmm… feature parity?!)

Dropbox [Free - iTunes link] is now available in the App Store, and allows iPhone and iPod touch users to access their online Dropbox storage remotely.

For those unfamiliar with Dropbox, it provides something similar to Apple’s MobileMe iDrive, but with a free option at 2GB, and paid options at $9.99/month for 50GB and $19.99/month for 100GB, and syncing between any computers the Dropbox app.

The iPhone version lets you:

• Access your Dropbox directory
• View your files
• Download files to your iPhone
• Sync downloaded files
• Take photos and videos and upload them to Dropbox
• Share links to Dropbox files
• View photos

If you give it a whirl, let us know how it works for you!

{Thanks Frank for the head’s up!]

Boxcar [$2.99 + In-App Purchases - iTunes link], a push-enabler for iPhone and iPod touch originally launched with support for a couple of Twitter clients. Then it added a bunch more. As several Twitter clients now offer support for push themselves, what’s Boxcar to do for a 2.0 encore? Add Facebook and Email push, of course, as well as Twitter Search and Twitter Trends.

Okay, sure, some major Twitter clients like Tweetie and Twitterrific still haven’t added push support, so if they’re your go-to apps, Boxcar may still be a go-to middleapp. Likewise, while Google supports Gmail now via GoogleSync, Exchange users can’t hand over their only ActiveSync slot, so email push-enablers still have their place. Lastly — and it’s a big lastly, while Facebook 3.0 for iPhone just launched, it did so without push support, and so if you don’t want to wait for 3.1 to get your push on, well, here’s your middleapp for that as well.

But… it comes with a price. The $2.99 app price comes with one service built in. If you want to add another, like Facebook, you need to make an additional $0.99 in-app purchase. Email, that’s another $0.99. Twitter Trends and Twitter Search likewise. And since you can have multiple Twitter, Email, Twitter Search, etc. set up, you can go from that base $2.99 to $4.99, even $9.99 or more. Basically, you pay for what’s valuable to you. If you’re working customer service and being push-alerted when your company (or your competitor!) and the word “problem” hits Twitter, $0.99 is a steal. If you don’t care about trends or searches, or Facebook for that matter, you get a cheaper entry price for the app.

So, whether this particular app is worth it to you, and whether or not the in-app purchase upgrades are worth it to you, we’re liking options and being able to choose — and pay for — only what we find of value.

So, if you need push now and you decide to try Boxcar 2.0 out, let us know how it works for you, and what you think of the pricing model!

More screen shots after the break…

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