apps

Hilton Worldwide announced plans to launch several free iPhone applications on Monday. The applications reference the company's various hotel chains and offer users features such as being able to locate the nearest Hilton-owned hotels, and make, cancel or alter reservations. Other planned options include room service, and the ability to check loyalty points.

I recently got a call from friend of the site Jordan Satok who wanted to tell me about his new project, App of the Day. AotD does one truly awesome thing; it recommends one iPhone app based on user submitted nominations. The app that receives the most nominations becomes the app of the day. Anyone can nominate an app, all you have to do is register. There's a one nomination per day limit to keep things fair, but nominations are carried over each day and no app will appear twice.

If you're addicted to apps (and we know you are), you should definitely check out App of the Day.

I'm guessing that many of you have run into the dreaded "not enough free space" message once while installing apps onto your iPhone even though the app should be small enough to fit. So why does the message appear? The truth is that, even though an app may report that it's small enough to squeeze into the last few gigabytes on your iPhone, every app is compressed before it's downloaded. This means that an app is transferred to your phone, uncompressed, and then the compressed version is discarded, effectively requiring a little more than twice the space of the reported size of the app.

So how much space does a large app need in order to be installed?

Apple Inc. today announced that more than two billion applications have been downloaded from its App Store, which currently hosts more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program.

Earlier this month the geniuses at Smule (same guys who brought you Ocarina) released their latest app, I Am T-Pain [App Store, $2.99]. In case you haven't heard, the app turns you into "musical genius" T-Pain, complete with Auto-Tune goodness along with original T-Pain tracks to sing along with.

But rather than reading about it, you honestly need to see incredibly fun app in action. Jump down to see I Am T-Pain in all its Auto Tune glory.

Last month Real Networks announced that their Rhapsody music streaming service would be coming to the iPhone in the form of an iPhone app. Today the company has announced that the app is now available in the App Store [App Store, Free].

Rhapsody subscribers can download the app and immediately start enjoying their subscription on their iPhones. If you're not already a subscriber, you can sign up for a 7-day free trial, which includes full access to the service.

At Apple's "It's only Rock and Roll" event today in San Francisco, CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes 9. This latest version now includes the ability to add, remove, and rearrange applications on the iPhone and iPod touch. This now makes it easier than ever to load up your iPhone with apps and quickly arrange them the way you want. Additionally, iTunes 9 now sports improvements to syncing.

You can now specify which artists, playlists, and genres you'd like to automatically sync, in addition to playlists and other specific options.

The iPhone has long been the most camera phone used on Flickr and it's only appropriate that an official App Store application emerge to support this. Per Macworld, Flickr released an official native application [App Store, Free] this past Saturday.

The app sports features such as access to a slideshow of your contacts' recent photos, zooming in-and-out in Ken Burns-style, searching, browsing (by sets or tags), viewing recent activity, and uploading pictures snapped with your iPhone.

It won't change things overnight, but it does show that Apple is opening some new doors for emulators. TouchArcade has reported that Apple has approved Manomio's C64 Commodore 64 emulation application [App Store, $4.99] after rejecting the application back in June, making this the first officially-available application emulator for the iPhone.

Edovia has released a new app that turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a fully functional trackpad for your Mac. It gives you remote control of finger-based gestures, including horizontal and vertical scrolling, on-screen keyboard support for Command, Control, Option and Shift keys, a connection manager and more. It operates over Wi-Fi based Bonjour connections. You can get it in the App Store for US$3.99.
[via iPodObserver]