“‘There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,’ Freeverse’s Ian Lynch Smith says of the App Store boom. ‘This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content,’” Jenna Wortham reports for The New York Times.

“As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications into what analysts and aficionados describe as a platform that is rapidly transforming mobile computing and telephony, it is changing the goals and testing the patience of developers, bolstering sales of the Apple motherships the applications ride upon — the iPhone and iPod Touch — and causing Apple’s competitors to overhaul their product lines and business models,” Wortham reports. “It even threatens to open chinks in Apple’s own corporate armor.”

“Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year,smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age,” Wortham reports. “They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars.”

Wortham reports, “‘Apple changed the view of what you can do with that small phone in your back pocket,’ says Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst. ‘Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years… The iPhone is changing our behavior. The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.’”

Full article here.

Source: MacDailyNews

“Yahoo has announced three new mobile apps this morning for some of its most popular properties,” Paul Boutin reports for VentureBeat.

The new apps, for iPhone and iPod touch, are:

• Flickr: This free app lets you upload, share, and tag photos and videos.

• Yahoo! Finance: The new, free app tracks companies, market indices and news, plus it lets you drill down into specific companies for more data.

• Yahoo! Fantasy Football ’09: Yahoo expects 30 million people to play during the coming season.

Full article here.

FreeAppAlert catalogs all newly free iPhone apps. The site (a must-bookmark for iPhone and iPod touch owners) lists an updated-daily collection of each newly free app along with its former price tag and one or more thumbnail screenshots.

When you mouse over a thumbnail, the full-size version of the screenshot appears immediately—a nice alternative to clicking all the way through to the App Store just to see what an app looks like.

Likewise, you can show or hide an application’s description by clicking View Description; no need to leave the page.

FreeAppAlert has a Twitter feed; you can also become a fan on Facebook and subscribe to an RSS feed.

Bottom line: If you like free apps, you’ll like FreeAppAlert.

People are hooked, and so are you. Even our grandparents are enjoying Facebook. And there’s new reason to get hooked even more with Facebook – its app 3.0 version can be accessed now through iphone.

Tech Crunch’s Jason Kincaid wrote that the new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.

Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created.

One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them).

It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely. I couldn’t agree with him more.

[Read more →]

With iPhone having a lot of application developers without paying them, this is one way for microsoft to tap not “all” but “some” developers to earn more…

“In my brief comments yesterday on the new touchscreen Zune HD that is set to debut September 15, I noted: Clearly, the Zune HD is going to be compared to the iPod Touch. Its biggest shortcoming is that it’s just a media player and web browser; no apps, no games,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball.