Steve Jobs in an interview at Apple headquarters said that 60 million apps for the iPhone and iPod touch have already been downloaded to the “tune” of an average of $1 million a day for a total of about $30 million in sales over the month.

There are over 1,600 apps now available in the iTunes App Store for the iPhone. Many are free. In my opinion probably less than 100 of them are worth it. I truly question the quality control or should I say lack of any quality. It sure seems it is quantity that Apple is after.

Continue reading The iPhone App Store Money Grab…

Seems NetShare ($9.99) that used networking to share your iPhones cellualr broadband connection with your laptop, is not the only app for the iPhone to disappear from the iTunes App Store. I have seen three others disappear. BoxOffice (free) a movie finding app, Light (free) that turned your iPhone or iPod touch into a flashlight and iPint a free entertaining game with the drinking a brew simulator have also disappeared.

No explanation from Apple for any of this. Developers for at least two of these seemed puzzled and were apparently told nothing. If this keeps up expect to see third party app stores and installers on an iPhone near you.

Let us know if you have noticed and other app that has disappeared.

One of the most sought after features for the iPhone is tethering. That is using your iPhone’s 3G (or EDGE) cellular broadband connection to use with your laptop. This feature’s availability would certainly sell more iPhones for Apple and might even make more money for AT&T (in the US).

However no official tethering has been announced by either Apple of AT&T. Jail-broken iPhones with some terminal hacks have accomplished tethering, but it is not supported by Apple or AT&T and is not for everyone.

NetShare [direct iTunes link, at least it was], and iPhone app showed up unannounced in Apple’s iTunes App Store for purchase last night for $9.99 that allowed iPhone users to connect their Macs (or PCs) to the Internet using the cellular network. As you might imagine this caused quite a stir among iPhone users. For the price of two lattes at my favorite coffee chain, road warriors could gain what some Blackberry and Windows Mobile have, a way to connect to the Internet when there is no hotspot in sight.

Here is were the story gets weird. Within 20 minutes of the NetShare app appearing in the US iTunes Store it disappeared without a word from Apple. Only a few lucky iPhone owners were able to snag a copy. This instantly gave the NetShare app a special place in Apple history!

Continue reading NetShare: The Case of the Disappearing iPhone App…

MagicPad should soon be coming to the App Store near you. MagicPad is a rich text editor for the iPhone similar to TextEdit’s functionality on the Mac allowing six fonts, five sizes and eight colors to be used in documents. This app shows the first rough version of a copy-paste feature on the iPhone. Other options include bold, italic, underline and strikethrough formatting. Looks a bit useful, but I thought having to type a “captcha ” to send an email was a bit odd on an iPhone and slowed down the process. See video.

Now that did not take long. I counted 1010 iPhone applications available in the iTunes App Store this morning. The best is yet to come as far as the most wanted iPhone apps.

Let’s hope Apple can get an iPhone software update to us that will make the crashing, freezing and syncing problems go away.

I think Apple will need to update their website (image on right).

Posting to your WordPress blog from your iPhone is now possible with Automattic’s WordPress app for the iPhone [App Store link]. It is now available for free in the App Store supporting WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress 2.5.1 or higher.

Apple has reported at their earnings call today that iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded 25 million Apps from the iTunes App Store in the last 10 days. Amazing.

Agile Web Solutions has announced on their website that 1Password for iPhone is in development, is almost ready and coming to the App Store soon.

Looks fantastic. As a user of the Mac desktop app I am looking forward to the iPhone version.

Continue reading 1Password Coming Soon to App Store…

Byline [App Store link], $9.99 is available in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch bringing a great RSS feed reader that integrates with a Google Reader account. Landscape mode and offline reading make this the best RSS I have tried on the iPhone so far. Well worth the $9.99 price in my opinion. See the video.

I was using NewsGator’s NetNewsWire [App Store link] for the iPhone as it is free and I have used the Mac desktop version for many years. But I have to say Byline has captured me. If you are serious about reading RSS feeds on the go or you are a commuter that uses the subway and is often without connectivity Byline may be the iPhone app for you.

One my favorite apps being sold in the AppStore for the iPhone (or iPod touch) is Band [App Store link]. It sells for $9.99 and features the ability to play guitar, bass, two octave piano, and drums with an impressive recording functionality. You can overdub, solo a track, mute tracks, and make basic edits, all on a handheld device!

It is not quite GarageBand, but that is what you will be thinking when you see the video or try it out. I love this app. It was one of the first I bought. Ars Technica has a nice review.

Editing your WordPress blog from your iPhone could be an awesome thing for many people (me included). The iPhone for WordPress project has announced that they have successfully uploaded a new app to the AppStore and the product should be available for sale soon. Supporting WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress 2.5.1 or higher. I can’t wait!

The App Store has been one of my favorite places to have fun the last week or so. Launch day I counted about 550 plus apps for the iPhone. That number has increased in a week to around 875 plus with Apple adding cool apps everyday. Here is an RSS feed to help you keep track of the new apps being released.

Incidentally, I have downloaded about 86 apps so far and am having a lot of fun with my new iPhone.

Apple is adding new apps to the new iPhone/iPod touch App Store daily. On launch day I counted 553 iPhone apps and today it is up to about 830. At this rate there may be 1,000 third party applications for the iPhone by the weekend!

They are off to a fantastic start. Mocha VNC Lite was just made available, which is a free VNC remote desktop app. It allows to to see and control your Windows or Mac OS X desktop from your iPhone or iPod touch. A more full featured $5.99 app will be available soon. I am looking forward to trying it out. Be great if there was a Back To My Mac app from Apple.