Macworld’s iPhone apps of the year

The App Store is bursting with mobile applications -- 100,000-plus of them to be more or less exact. But never fear: We've scoured the store to find the must-have apps for your iPhone and iPod touch to pick 20 of our favorite apps from the past year.

Cellar 2.0 is iPhone Wine Management Aged Well

Cellar [$2.99 - iTunes link] is a gorgeous app that lets you manage your wine collection on your iPhone or iPod touch, and with version 2.0 just now hitting the App Store, it’s pairing some interesting new features:

• Search (based on any data) and sort (type, region, vintage, price, or rating)
• Wishlist and trash (hey, you can’t have your wine and drink it too).
• Backups, restores, and merges for added data safety.
• Share bottles via Email (and others ways, not fully supported yet, but tweet-tastic none-the-less).
• A bunch of new bottle styles, labels, and fields like “drink by”, and “pairing”, and support for blends, name and wine type.

Truth be told, I’m more UI and function geek than wine aficionado, but the team behind Cellar continues to nail both niche and presentation to a degree I want to go buy more vino just to store it on my iPhone. TiPb was able to taste-test Cellar 2.0 for a few days already and it works as good as it looks. Bottles sent to us by email arrived in our cellar perfectly; whole backups were restored flawlessly, and yes we felt sad for those empties we kicked over to the trashy curb.

Cellar comes by way of the same finer-things-in-life folks who created Barista for coffee loves, so you know they enjoy their beverages. If you’re an iPhone user, wine is your passion, and you just love apps-as-art, check out Cellar 2.0. Then hoist a few bottles and let us know what you think.

Gallery after the break!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Cellar 2.0 is iPhone Wine Management Aged Well

Chrome Drops Safari Into Fourth Place Among Browsers

Computerworld reports on data from research firm Net Applications showing that Google's Chrome browser has slipped past Apple's Safari to snag third place in worldwide Internet browser market share behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. The surge com...

Warrior Epic MMO releases iPhone tie-in

Filed under: Gaming, iPhone

This is an interesting trend: Warrior Epic, an MMO game by True Games, has announced that they've released an iPhone app [iTunes link] version for free, featuring "a small portion of the strategy, role-playing and battles found in the online MMORPG," kind of like a taster for the actual PC game. The game itself isn't a 3D action game like the full game, but rather a "stat game," much like many of the minigames being released on Facebook and other social platforms (in fact, Warrior Epic is releasing this game as a Facebook game as well).

Unfortunately, the only real tie between the games seems to be having the same name and being set in the same universes -- we don't have any characters to test, but it doesn't seem that you can transfer your actual characters or items from the PC game across to the iPhone. But this will be a trend to watch -- two other major MMOs have started work on official iPhone apps, and of course the 800 lb. gorilla of the MMO world, Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft, has shown a strong interest in the iPhone as a platform, even though they haven't quite released any games on it yet. In the future, you can probably expect to see platforms like the iPhone host access (if limited) to your favorite persistent online games even while you're away from your computer. Should be exciting.

Warrior Epic MMO releases iPhone tie-in originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Warrior Epic MMO releases iPhone tie-in originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pastebot clipboard manager debuts for iPhone and Mac

Pastebot is a unique new clipboard manager that offers some basic editing tools, as well as some useful integration for passing clipboard content to and from your Mac.

Rumor: Toshiba’s 64GB NAND flash chip for iPhone

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Rumors, iPhone, iPod touch

Last week, a brief tweet from Mobile Review's editor-in-chief, Eldar Murtazin sparked a rumor that Taiwan-based manufacturer Foxconn had received orders to build the next-generation iPhone. This week Toshiba has announced their 64GB NAND flash chip -- the largest capacity in the industry. Is this what Foxconn will be stuffing into future iPhones?

Apple has doubled the capacity of the top-of-the-line model in previous updates. You'll remember that the curent iPhone contains either a single 16GB or 32GB Toshiba NAND module. We're not in charge of production at Foxconn, but it seems that six months is enough time to produce a pile of these. This is speculation, of course, but speculation is fun.

Note that Apple uses a pair of NAND packages in the 32GB or 64GB iPod touch. Can you say 128GB iPod touch? We don't know who would need that much storage space, but Apple sells a 160GB hard drive-based iPod, so what do we know? Apple chews up a substantial slice of the worldwide NAND market, so any tweaks to capacity or manufacturing are definitely noteworthy in Cupertino.

Last month the Korean Times accused Apple of manipulating flash memory prices. It's been estimated that Apple consumes 25% of the world's flash memory.

Rumor: Toshiba's 64GB NAND flash chip for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Rumor: Toshiba's 64GB NAND flash chip for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple Braces Itself for Another Record Breaking Quarter for iPhones

64GB 4th Gen iPhone, 128GB 4th Gen iPod touch Next Year?

It was bound to happen, but with Toshiba announcing that it’s managed to cram 64GB of NAND flash memory onto a single chip, we can now officially start the rumors of a 64GB iPhone and 128GB iPod touch… perhaps as soon as next year’s 4th generation models if prices get low enough fast enough.

The iPod touch doesn’t have to worry about all the phone-related radios, and so has double the slots for memory, and will likely always get twice as much storage as the iPhone. Question is, at 128GB might Apple finally retire the veteran (and last) hard drive-based iPod classic?

9to5mac also posits those same chips would work mighty fine in a mythical iTablet in lieu of an SSD drive.

Apple typically releases new iPhones in June/July, new iPod touches in September, and hasn’t announced any iTablets… yet.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

64GB 4th Gen iPhone, 128GB 4th Gen iPod touch Next Year?

Cellar 2.0 adds handy email hooks to wine manager

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone, App Review

What cheers the soul more on a cold winter's night than a fine glass of wine? An app to keep track of that wine, perhaps. The new 2.0 version of the $2.99 Cellar for iPhone [iTunes link], out now, adds more fun and new sharing options to the good-looking wine management tool. If you're a high-level oenophile looking for a hardcore wine research and cellar inventory app, Cellar may not be for you (I'd recommend the powerful and savvy Drync for $4.99, or the free ad-supported version), but for casual imbibers and wine fans, it's a charmer.

Cellar is simple to use and fun to show off. You add bottles one at a time to your collection (slotting them into the cellar, the garage or the wishlist), customizing the look and label of each bottle and adding vintage, price, ratings and other details if you have them.

Your bottles are displayed attractively in a horizontal rack, which can be swiped back and forth; turning the iPhone or iPod touch from landscape to portrait mode switches you into a new detail view where you can see your notes and other info about a particular wine. The UI is graceful and well-detailed without being garish; an app about wine, after all, should carry itself with a degree of classiness.

When I first looked at Cellar last summer, one of the drawbacks of the app was that there wasn't a good way to share your wine collections or favorite bottles with friends, nor could you easily back up your cellar data. Both of those issues have been amply addressed. You can now create 'bottle links,' very long encoded URLs (amenable to abbreviation by URL shorteners like TinyURL) that, when opened in the iPhone mail app, Mobile Safari or popular iPhone Twitter apps, auto-launch Cellar and load the bottle into your collection, label and all -- magical.

You can also backup and restore wine libraries from your Mac or PC, or merge libraries with other users in the vicinity using the app's built-in Web server via Wi-Fi. New searching, sorting and statistics options add to the improved/introduced feature list with 2.0.

Cellar 2 doesn't have the wine search capability of Drync or some of the other wine apps on the store, but it does have panache; it's a showcase app for my iPhone on looks and functionality, and it's perfect for keeping track of the bottle you drank out on the town that you want to remember for purchase later on. Check out more of the Cellar interface in the gallery below.

Cellar 2.0 adds handy email hooks to wine manager originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Cellar 2.0 adds handy email hooks to wine manager originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Snow Leopard Server Not Playing Nicely with iPhone?

Ars Technica puts font to screen explaining how, even after the jump to version 10.5 Snow Leopard (and several updates), Apple’s own Mac OS X Server still fails to integrate push notification and other compatibility for the iPhone:

The iPhone’s e-mail, contact, and calendar features integrate poorly into a Mac OS X Server environment, and even after Snow Leopard Server’s (SLS) release, they continue to lack instant push delivery capabilities for e-mail, contacts, and calendars to an iPhone from a Mac server. Irony of ironies, the iPhone works better in a Microsoft Exchange world than with Apple’s own server.

Mind boggling. Read the whole article for the technical details and if you’re Apple, let’s get that fixed, shall we?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Snow Leopard Server Not Playing Nicely with iPhone?

64GB iPhone and 128GB iPod Touch Possible in 1st Quarter 2010?

Toshiba announced (via 9to5Mac) that they have launched a 64 gigabyte (GB) embedded NAND flash memory module. The new chip offers 64GB on a single chip and will start mass production in the first quarter of 2010.

The reason the larg...

Details of Core i7-980X (Gulftown) Mac Pro Processors Leaked

Chinese site PCOnline.com.cn (via HardMac) leaked details about the upcoming Gulftown 6-core processor that is expected to be used in Mac Pros in early 2010. The processor has been previously referred as the Core i9, though it seems it will ...

Review: Chore Bank for iPhone

This app aims to help you track which chores your kids complete and how those tasks tie into their allowance. But the app is so lacking in polish that using it is a chore unto itself.

Best iPhone games of the year picks start to roll in

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store

Gamasutra wins the award for being the first (that I've seen) to pick awards for their best five iPhone games of the year, and the list is respectable, if a little short for such a huge set of possibility. Unfortunately, they don't win any TUAW points for going with Skee-Ball over our preferred Ramp Champ, but Rolando 2 was a worthy sequel to a worthy game, Edge (now Edgy) and Eliss are both great games (too bad you can't play the former, but the latter was underrated for sure), and Space Invaders Infinity Gene deserves to be on almost any end-of-the-year iPhone game list.

Good picks in there for sure. DigitalTrends also has a long list, though strangely, they tend to stick to big names and brands. There are a few gems in there -- Spider, UniWar, and Vay may be a couple good choices that you haven't heard of yet. And here's another top 10 list with some repeats from the ones above and a few more nice picks. I guess with the end of the year upon us, we'll probably have to choose TUAW's favorites of 2009, too, eh? Stay tuned.

Best iPhone games of the year picks start to roll in originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Best iPhone games of the year picks start to roll in originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Orange launches 3G iPhone service in Uganda

Orange Uganda has become the first mobile provider to bring the iPhone to the country.

Watch out AT&T: Operation Chokehold is coming

Filed under: iPhone

After Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, stated earlier this week that he wants iPhone users to limit their data usage the web exploded with anger. The New York Times sided with AT&T, but others thought that was bogus. Now Fake Steve Jobs is getting in on the action. Fake Steve is telling iPhone users to go crazy with their data usage this Friday, December 18, to teach De La Vega a lesson in for trying to stifle his customers contract-given-rights for unlimited data usage.

Subject: Operation Chokehold
On Friday, December 18, at noon Pacific time, we will attempt to overwhelm the AT&T data network and bring it to its knees. The goal is to have every iPhone user (or as many as we can) turn on a data intensive app and run that app for one solid hour. Send the message to AT&T that we are sick of their substandard network and sick of their abusive comments. The idea is we'll create a digital flash mob. We're calling it in Operation Chokehold. Join us and speak truth to power!

I'm in the UK where we have multiple providers to choose from (as many countries do), but I can understand the frustration US users have with being limited to only one carrier with poor network performance and then being lectured about their data usage.

So TUAW readers. What's it gonna be? You going to do a little choking come Friday?

Watch out AT&T: Operation Chokehold is coming originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Watch out AT&T: Operation Chokehold is coming originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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