SMS - the built-in SMS app has changed the way I use text messaging, and for the better. My contract with O2 includes 600 text messages per month, and in the UK where everyone texts everyone about everything all the time (and no-one gets charged for incoming messages), that's extremely useful. On old phones, even using predictive text software, I found composing messages too long-winded and dull, and consequently didn't text much. Now I can compose as fast as I can tap-type, and my friends are all wondering why I've suddenly become so flippin' chatty.
Cube Runner - Andy Qua's super-simple game is the only one I keep returning to time and time again. Nothing beats it for speed, simplicity, and fun. When I say simple, I mean simple: you pilot your triangle between the cubes. Hit cube, game over. That's it. There's not much that can improve it, except perhaps handlebars.
Face Melter - A cheesy bit of fun, but everyone deserves cheesy fun every now and then. Face Melter just lets you mess about with images, pulling and dragging facial features into amusing shapes. Hardly a new idea, but it's great fun to have in your pocket. Good for amusing kids while waiting in restaurants, and for amusing fellow geeks in the pub. I've also been exploring its potential for experimental photography.
Weather - I'm English. Need I say more?
I should stress -- and I suspect I speak for all my TUAW colleagues in this respect -- that this list of faves is merely a snapshot. These faves might change within days, even hours. The App Store is still only an infant, and holds many surprises for us in the future. I'm looking forward to discovering new faves as time goes on.
With 237 (and counting) almost universally glowing reviews, iFooty is one app that's scoring well on the UK iPhone App Store, riding high on the Top 25 Free apps list.
What it does it pretty simple -- aggregating football league data and news articles from a variety of BBC sources -- but it does it very well and with great style. As many of the user reviews [App Store link] point out, it's one of those apps that's really, genuinely, use-it-six-times-a-day useful.
I should point out, for the vast American majority of readers on this site, that when I say "football," I mean it in the UK sense of the word. I suspect you know it better as soccer. But over here it's football, or just footy, and iFooty's comprehensive coverage of the uppermost football leagues in England (Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two) and Scotland (Premier League) offers something for many millions of fans. And, better yet, it does so for free.
The official iFooty web site doesn't tell you much; you're better off going to the App Store for more info.
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September. Read on for a timely app update useful for students.
PDF management app Papers has been bumped to version 1.8.5, bringing what the developers claim are 100 improvements. Top on the list is a new sharing feature called Papers Archives, which lets you share a PDF file and its associated metadata with a colleague.
Papers isn't for everyone. Instead, it's specifically designed for students and academics, particularly those who deal with a lot of scientific periodicals in the course of their research. It lets you search them, sort them (manually or using Smart Folders), find them on any one of 14 different online repositories, rate them, browse your library in tabs, and much more.
Papers costs $42 for a single-user license, but students qualify for a 40 per cent discount.
Here's BtBx, for the iPhone and iPod touch. I think you pronounce it "beatbox". And it's lovely.
There's so much potential for music apps on the iPhone and I'm one of the people who's very keen to try them out. BeatMaker is top of the tree in the App Store right now, but there's a lot about BtBx that appeals to me.
The interface is cartoon-like, but I like it that way. It works and it doesn't crash, and those things matter more to me than aesthetics. The controls might be a bit confusing to anyone who's never used a sequencer before, but there's a brief user manual built-in. The app was built by the same team that created Rhythm for the PSP.
BtBx is cheap and it's simple, and simple is always good in my opinion. Right now there's no way to import custom samples (but that's on the way), nor can you save your patterns or export them elsewhere -- BtBx's greatest drawback at this time. For many people, that will disqualify it immediately.
But: the limitations and drawbacks haven't stopped me playing with it, messing with the patterns to build something interesting, and that's what I like most. The simplicity encourages creativity.
We're on iTunes, Dougal! In the UK store! Look at all the happy people waving at us! Wave back!
What people are you talking about, Ted?
The people out there with their Apple Macs.
It's not even raining, Ted.
Just shut up and wave, Dougal!
Are you imagining things again, Ted?
What do you mean, Dougal? When have I ever imagined things? I'm very rational, you know.
Well there was that time with that money...
It was just resting in my account, Dougal, I've told you before...
(Addendum, for the mystified: Father Ted was a hugely successful 1990s sitcom, broadcast by the UK's Channel 4, about three mad Catholic priests and their equally insane housekeeper, all living in peaceful chaos on a remote Irish island. If you've never heard of it before, just move on to the next TUAW post and pretend this one never happened. Any further questions will be answered by Father Jack: "That would be an ecumenical matter!")
Tate Liverpool, one of the Tate art galleries scattered around the UK (the two main galleries are in London, another is in St Ives) has opened an experimental online exhibition tour for iPhone and iPod Touch owners, which it says is the first of its kind in the country.
From now until the end of August, visitors to the Gustav Klimt exhibition will be able to browse the free guide content to their iPhones over the gallery's wifi network, or download it beforehand as a podcast. Spare iPod touches with the content pre-loaded will be available for hire for just $6 (£3).
According to an article about the experiment in Design Week magazine, the guide has been very popular and upped average visit times from 45 minutes to three hours.
If you want to try the tour for yourself without making the trip to Liverpool, you can enjoy it in full on the web.
Little noticed amid all the hubbub about Mobile Me, the App Store, iPhone killswitches and everything else, was the news from last week that Chandler 1.0 for OS X was finally released.
If that leaves you only fractionally less in the dark, here's some background: Chandler is a cross-platform, open source Personal Information Manager (PIM), and project of the Open Source Applications Foundation. The vision behind Chandler and the OSAF is that of Mitch Kapoor, designer of the original "killer app" for the PC generation, Lotus 1-2-3.
Chandler has been many years in gestation, but that's hardly surprising when you look at the feature set - there's a huge amount of stuff packed in there. The 3-minute guided tour (direct link to .mov file) is well worth watching for an overview.
The very first thing that catches my eye is the "Quick entry bar", which looks just like the search boxes you see in many other OS X apps like Mail and Safari. This one isn't just for search, though; it's also for rapid input. You type something, hit enter, and it instantly becomes a new item in Chandler for you to edit, expand on, and deal with later.
Chandler is a free download from chandlerproject.org. We'd be interested to hear what you make of it.
Noise.io is an interesting-looking synthesizer app for iPhone, due to appear in the App Store in the coming weeks.
What's interesting about it is the emphasis on live performance. This is an app designed for use on stage, and comes complete with the advice: "Simply connect the sound output of your iPhone/iPod touch to the mic/line input of your mixer, recorder or sound card - and there you are, now you can enrich your tracks or mixes with superb sound effects."
Right now, we shall just have to take the developers' word for that, because the app isn't officially released and all we have to go on are the screenshots and a single preview video that hints at what's to come. For seven bucks, it looks like it might be hard to resist.
Newly arrived in the App Store is pTerm, an iPhone port of the PuTTY terminal emulator. It supports SSH and Telnet, among other things, and has a built-in Control key.
But developer Eric Maland has been in touch with us to say that a 1.1 update is already on its way (it has been submitted to Apple and is awaiting approval). Unfortunately a handful of "major crashy bugs" (as Eric puts it) were discovered after the 1.0 release had been submitted.
Planned features for future releases include multiple simultaneous connections, custom sizes and colors, port forwarding and lots more. Details on the pTerm home page.
And in the meantime, if you download and experience crashy behavior, Eric's message is: be patient. The fixes are done, but when they reach the Store is out of his hands.
pTerm is $4.99US in the US App Store (We haven't seen it in the UK store).
Londoners like to know what's going on in the tunnels beneath their feet. The Tube is how every Londoner gets pretty much anywhere, and when bits of it are broken, it helps to know before you walk to the nearest Tube station.
The beauty of the Tube, (well, the central zones in particular) is that the lines are so intertwingled that it's often quite easy to route yourself around breakages or blockages. If the Northern Line's hosed, maybe the Piccadilly or Jubilee Lines might get you close enough to where you need to be. And if the Circle line's running slow (which is often is), you might be able to skip round the problem via one of the many other lines that bisect it.
Oddly, though, Malcolm had been hoping that it wouldn't appear in the App Store, while he sorted out some copyright issues with Transport for London, the body that manages not only London's transport network but also the data feeds about it that make apps like TubeStatus work. If we hear anything further on the status of TubeStatus, we'll let you know.
This takes me back to the 10.1/10.2 days, before anyone had invented decent webmail, the days when I still used Eudora and loved it. Passion for Eudora aside, I still experimented with alternative email clients (everybody did, right?), and one of those was GyazMail.
It was actually pretty good, at the time, and a serious rival to Apple's then-still-young Mail. In recent years I'd rather forgotten about it, but lo and behold, here it is popping up with new updates.
This new release kills a bunch of bugs and tweaks a few features, but what impresses me most is that the update is available for Jaguar users, with a separate (Universal Binary) version for those on 10.3 or later. That's what I call legacy support.
If you have a creaky old Mac that still serves you well running one of these older big cats, and you need a mail client for it, GyazMail is well worth a glance.
EccoNote is a nice little free audio recording app - one of many similar recorders available in the App Store.
I use the word "little" deliberately, because EccoNote is very simple. In a good way. You can record your audio notes, you can play them back, and that's about it. There are no settings to mess with. The audio quality is very good and the controls nice and obvious.
The only odd thing is that the developer's web site, as listed on the App Store, does not appear to exist (at least not as I'm writing this). Their notes in the App Store description field say that they plan to add an email-to-contacts feature within the next month, something I hope they succeed with because that would be very useful.
As I said at the top, there are many other voice recorder apps available. Some for free, some for a little money. I've tried a few (not all) and this is one I like best so far. Your opinions of Ecco and its rivals would be welcomed in the comments.
You've got all your iStuff inside Yojimbo (hands up who loves Yojimbo and I'll count, starting with me), but for some reason you need to get it on to another computer, perhaps one running a different OS. What to do?
This AppleScript takes your entire Yojimbo library (well, everything except the PDFs) and exports it to a Tiddlywiki that you can carry around and view on pretty much any computer.
Some means of trying software before you buy it It's frustrating, to say the least, that the only way to find out what an app is like is to buy it, unlike the 'try before you buy' scenario that's common with Mac apps. Sure, you can readthereviews, but they can't give you a complete reflection of the app's features, nor do they always offer fair comparisons between similar and competing apps. Example: you've bought FileMagnet, then Files comes out. Is one app better than the other? Might one suit your work habits better than the other? Is one a better value, or more stable, or have better features? The only way you can find out is by buying both. (Yes, the Ad Hoc distribution system exists for, well, ad hoc distribution, but it isn't the answer for consumer-level trying-before-buying.)
Ensuring reviews are fair A lot of TUAW readers have contacted us about the unfairness of App Store reviews from people that haven't actually downloaded and tried the apps concerned. Some people add reviews based on the price (or screenshot) alone. Should that be allowed?
Add a shopping cart At the moment, when you tap BUY, the next option is INSTALL. How about replacing INSTALL with an alert that says the app has been added to your cart, queue, or list? Then you could continue browsing, and return to the list later to confirm your purchases -- and remove anything that got in there by mistake.
Diamond is a free rich text editor with a difference. Lots of differences, actually, which combine to make it quite appealing. Developer Geoffrey Alexander has recently releasedDiamond 3, which makes this an excellent time for you to download and give it a try.
How is Diamond different? Diamond windows look different. Sometimes they're hardly there. They may or may not have title bars. They may or may not hover above a background (flat color, or photographic, it's up to you) that in turn hovers over everything else on your desktop.
Text inside Diamond documents flows in columns. Word and character counts float unobtrusively below the windows, as if hanging in space. If you want them to. Aspects of Diamond's differentness are yours to tweak in the prefs, of course, so you can de-weird things if you feel the need. But that takes all the fun out of it.
If I'm not making much sense here, I encourage you to take a look at the Diamond gallery or download the app to try it for yourselves. As Geoffrey himself once said: "Diamond isn't for everyone, and may not even be for anyone." But I rather like it, if only because it takes the mundanity of editing text and adds a bit of life that you don't find in other rich text editors.
We're all taking turns at this. My turn:
With 237 (and counting) almost universally glowing reviews, iFooty is one app that's scoring well on the UK iPhone App Store, riding high on the Top 25 Free apps list.
TUAW's going 
Look Dougal, we've done it!
Little noticed amid all the hubbub about Mobile Me, the App Store, iPhone killswitches and everything else, was the news from last week that Chandler 1.0 for OS X was 
Londoners like to know what's going on in the tunnels beneath their feet. The Tube is how every Londoner gets pretty much anywhere, and when bits of it are broken, it helps to know before you walk to the nearest Tube station.
This takes me back to the 10.1/10.2 days, before anyone had invented decent webmail, the days when I still used 
EccoNote is a nice little free audio recording app - one of many similar recorders available in the App Store.
You've got all your iStuff inside 
How could the 
Diamond is a free rich text editor with a difference. Lots of differences, actually, which combine to make it quite appealing. Developer Geoffrey Alexander has 
