If you're into entertainment, the newly updated i.TV for iPhone (iTunes link) offers more content than ever before. Now in its sixth release, i.TV aims to keep you on top of listings, DVD rentals, and more.

If there's a single word that describes this iPhone application, it's "cluttered." i.TV offers more choices, more features, more everything than you'd ever expect. It's a lot like walking into Aunt Marge's trinket-strewn living room with her 27 cats-complete with the chaos you'd expect from a large-scale multi-cat household.

And yet, despite this clutter, there's a lot of usable content on-offer. If you're willing to put up with too-many-kitties syndrome, i.TV provides some information gems.

As a standout feature, i.TV offers a very nice TV listings browser. It automatically detects your location and shows you what's playing on the services in your area. The interface for the show browser is well designed and it's easy to pick a date and time to examine.

When you find a show you want to watch, you can request an e-mail alert or invite a friend to watch with you. You can also use the TiVo scheduling API to create a recording schedule direct from your iPhone. The application even offers a Wi-Fi based TiVo remote.

i.TV doesn't stop with TV. It offers movie listings and reviews as well. You can scan your local theaters, find show times, or if the movie is older, add a request to your Netflix queue. If a movie is available via iTunes, you can tap a link to connect you to the iTunes Store.

As you can tell, there's an awful lot to love about i.TV. Yet, at the same time, there's an awful lot that needs work. In many ways, i.TV feels rushed. Its user interface design needs some serious re-thinking, especially given how many features and options are packed into this hand-held application.

As an example, when you sign up for an i.TV account, you must confirm that you're over 13 years old. The control that's offered for that option is a standard "On/Off" switch. With just a little more thought and programming, the i.TV developers could have created a standard button (rather than a switch) that toggles from No to Yes and back.

In the same sign up sheet, you must use the iPhone keyboard to laboriously enter your e-mail address. Twice. A simple register-by-email form could have let you use your current iPhone's mail settings with a pre-filled note to do the same work with far less typing burden.

Sometimes the application misses obvious usability elements. For example, if you want to record a show to your TiVo, you must work through the "Link to your TiVo account page," but there's no "Back" button offered on that page or any other hint as to how to return to where you were. You can move forward (enter your account data and tap Link My Account) but not back. Yes, you only encounter this page until you set up your account but it's just a basic development principle that you should provide a way to cancel out of an action.

Missteps like these are surprising on an app that does offer some very nice user interface features like the pop-down menu that appears when you tap on the Watch button. I'm enamored with that particularly clever UI element presentation. Unfortunately other UI choices fall short. I haven't played with earlier i.TV releases, so it's hard to tell which elements have been added on for the new update and which are original. But i.TV really needs to hire a usability engineer and work on the overall application flow and feature choices to integrate these million-odd possibilities into a better whole.

So even with these interface issues, do I recommend trying out i.TV? Why yes, I do. Its TV and Movie information retrieval is both useful and on-point. Despite the clutter of its million other features, i.TV puts you right on top of now-playing information. And if you can sort your way through to a few of the features you'll use in addition to that core functionality, you'll find it a handy tool to keep on your iPhone.

i.TV is a free download and well worth giving a spin.

The enthusiastic developers of Parranda were at WWDC to show off their app, a simple one-man-band party in your hand. Parranda (iTunes link) has a lot of polish, too, with instruments that aren't just one big button, like some "soundboard" music apps. The cowbell, for example, allows you to tap on different parts of the instrument, which any decent cowbell player will tell you, creates very different sounds. Mostly. You can zoom in or out on the instruments, something you will have to see in the video, but it is a nice effect and adds to the experience.

Parranda has pre-set rhythms to choose from, plus vocalizations to add a little spice to the performance. Already a hit in Puerto Rico, I think Parranda has a good shot everywhere, as it's a fun little app. Perhaps a bit more than you're used to paying at $2.99, but I think it's a fair price for the quality of the app.

Balloons! for the iPhone (and iPod touch) made me smile. It's like Distant Shore, but more personal and fun. Don't get me wrong, I love Distant Shore, but Balloons! reminds me of being a kid and tying a message and photo to a balloon to send up into the stratosphere. Plus, you get a real sense of community. It's just plain fun to pick up a virtual balloon supposedly drifting past you. To see what I mean, check out the video. But if you ever tied a note to a balloon and let it go, that's what this does. Except now you get to catch other balloons, have conversations and attach photos all from your iPhone.

Unfortunately Balloons! isn't in the store yet, but from the build I saw looks pretty close to being ready. The Balloons devs are looking for beta testers, which you can apply for here.

Adutainment, the art of mixing advertising and entertainment, has been popular in the iPhone app space since the App Store first opened. Grooming product giant Gillette has teamed with developer AIM Proximity on a fun little free app called uArt (click opens iTunes). uArt is the iPhone app equivalent of drawing mustaches and beards on pictures of people in magazines...not that I've ever done that...

You provide the photo, taking a shot of yourself or a friend with the iPhone camera, or importing a picture from Photos. After sizing and placing the photo with a pinch and a finger swipe, you can begin to have fun with the full beard that appears on the photo. A single control makes the beard and mustache go from sparse to bushy, while another control lets you apply the digital equivalent of "Just for Men" to the facial hair in 12 different colors and shades.

Now comes the really fun part: touching the shave button on the bottom of the screen brings up a virtual Gillette Fusion razor (it vibrates!) that you can use to trim or remove parts of the hair. Now you can see just how good or bad you'd look with a Fu Manchu. There's a way to save your work of tonsorial art and even give it a name before sending it to your friends.

Personally, I'm holding out for Rogaine® to sponsor a free hair-growing app. Be sure to check out the rogue's gallery of famous TUAW personalities below.

Thanks to Ivan for the tip!

Spawn Illuminati version 2 just hit the App Store (iTunes link). If you haven't seen it, it's an amazing time-killer which allows user interaction with something akin to a screensaver on your iPhone. It's a little hard to explain, which is why we have video. You can also check out some user-contributed screenshots on the developer's Flickr page.

An interesting aspect of the Spawn story is the author's success with pricing it above the .99 "sweet spot" after mediocre success at that standard price. The second video is a snippet of Spawn's developer Nikolai riffing about App Store economics. Spawn is currently back to .99USD in the App Store, but only for a limited time. Read on for a demo and some pricing opinions from an experienced App Store developer.

This is interesting: the prevailing argument about App Store pricing seems to be that developers are rushing down to 99 cents because apps priced there sell better (and developers say they can't fund really great apps priced there). But Mobile Orchard did a little number crunching, and their conclusion upends the whole premise: 99 cent apps don't sell any better than their more expensive counterparts. They plotted each app's popularity against its price, and while there are a few 99 cent apps out there selling better than any higher-priced app, the only real way to make the app "sell" better is to give it away for free. Above $0, price doesn't really matter than much in terms of popularity.

You could argue that Apple's 0 to 1 popularity scale doesn't tell us much (we're not looking at actual sales here, just a number Apple has given to each app in terms of downloads), but Mobile Orchard's conclusion makes sense, in a strange way: free apps, we know, are much more popular than any paid apps, and if people are willing to pay 99 cents, why wouldn't they be willing to pay more? Why should a 99 cent app sell better than an app of equal usability that costs $1.99? It shouldn't, and according to this data, it doesn't.

Very interesting. There is an exception -- in the Entertainment category, 99 cent apps do sell markedly better than the apps above them (Games, also, as you can see above, seem a little stronger in the 99 cent bar). But in the Business and Productivity categories, higher-priced apps actually sell better than their cheaper counterparts. People will pay what your app is worth, whether that's $1, $10, or even higher. The problem may be getting people to understand the app's worth in the first place (and that's where something like an App Store trial system might work), but Mobile Orchard's data says that price isn't a factor in an app's sales.

Thanks, Dan!

When I was growing up I used to do magic shows at kids parties to earn some extra money. It was fun for awhile, but those kids could be pretty rowdy.


Here's how the trick works. You launch the app and the phone does some nicely rendered videos with a curtain opening and some show-bizzy music. Screen prompts ask your innocent assistant to pick one of three objects and say the name of the object out loud. Without further ado you hand the person your iPhone and with music, a puff of smoke and some suspense the phone announces the object the person picked. Yes, it can be repeated, and the effect would be pretty astounding for most people. Fun to try around the office cubicle, or at a bar, or anywhere really.

It's $2.99 at the App Store and worth it for the fun and mystification it can provide. My only suggestion is that there shouldn't be an obvious link to the performance tutorial on the application's main screen. If someone is browsing through the apps on your phone, they are only one click and a 90-second video away from the secret.

Try it and see if people are fooled. I predict they will be.

Shawn Blanc has wrapped up his series of great software reviews, and now dives into the scariest of waters: those of the major minds in Mac journalism. And he goes first after the biggest shark in the ocean (or at least the one with the sharpest teeth), everyone's favorite Daring Fireball, John Gruber.

The interview is first about interviews, and then goes on to cover Gruber's past (he worked with Bare Bones and Joyent before going on to write the blog full time). Gruber also gives out some great tips for writers, from things as practical as setting a goal the night before to guide your workday and always drinking coffee black, to ephemeral tips like how to become a better writer without actually writing anything (save about a dozen books' worth of message boards and blog posts).

Gruber also talks specifically about Daring Fireball, his favorite stuff on the site, and where he wants to take it, and how far. Definitely a great read -- as always, Shawn makes sure to hit on all the important notes and leave no stone unturned, and Gruber reveals lots of insight on what it's like to put his posts and the Linked List together every day.

As if you can't waste enough time at YouTube, Sport Monkey Design has doomed the productivity levels of Tiger users everywhere by bringing YouTube to the Dashboard. The YouTube Widget isn't so much of a viewer for videos, but it lets you view a list of new videos and filter them by tags, user and even most viewed, most discussed, etc. The only way this widget could be more of a threat is if they integrated an actual video player so you never need to leave Dashboard.