iPhone Approll

(Credit: CNET)

Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.

The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go calibrates your location twice every time you open it, a repetition that quickly wears thin. Providing advanced search options to find, for instance, sushi restaurants nearby for under $30 would make the app immediately more winning.

iTunes App Store reviewers have also thoroughly picked a bone with the app over a "cheesy" link to other apps created by Zagat's mobile publishing partner, Handmark, and "frustrating," "misleading" information about the cities and countries covered. It's true that Zagat Survey is strongest in metropolitan US cities, with passable international coverage in the UK, Italy, and France, and some world cities, like Tokyo, Toronto, London, and Rome. Handmark should more explicitly list those cities to minimize the backlash.

It's also true that Zagat To Go will best serve the foodies who want to "cut through the garbage" found on Yelp's and Urbanspoon's iPhone apps and be funneled to finer dining. Big-city diners dedicated to Zagat's yearly survey have in this iPhone app a slightly more economical and much more convenient and interactive option than toting the book with them on travels near and far, or viewing the cramped mobile Web site from the Safari browser.

Update: 12/2/08 at 3:40 PM. Handmark commented in an e-mail that a new release being submitted to iPhone's App Store for approval today will request location access upon launching the app for the first time. A button on the main search screen will let you manually update your new location.

How many iPhone apps does it take to make 10,000? It all depends on how you do the counting.

(Credit: 148Apps)

Apple watchers this weekend have been ruminating on the overall tally and on the counting methods following a report on 148Apps, a site that keeps tabs on iPhone applications, seen here in its entirety:

In just 142 days, the iPhone OS app store has added over 10,000 apps! An amazing feat for any platform. To commemorate this we've put up a special page. More on this after the weekend.

10,000 apps!

(We'll hazard a guess that there are actually on the order of 10K mini icons on that "10,000 apps!" special page. A listing to the right side of all those icons gives the total number of apps as 10,091.)

MacRumors.com, meanwhile, quibbles with the overall number, even as it says the actual 10,000 active app mark should be reached "in the next few days":

While several sites have reported that 10,000 iPhone Apps have been released into the App Store, the actual number of active iPhone apps that can be downloaded is about 9,676 as of today's count. The discrepancy comes from the fact that many apps have been removed from the App Store for various reasons (trademark infringement, discontinued apps, pulled and released).

The biggest category of iPhone apps, according to 148Apps, is games (2,333), followed by entertainment (1,122), utilities (1,015), education (737), and productivity (517). The average cost of the apps is listed at $3.12; about one-quarter are free of charge, while one is listed at $899.99.

(Credit: CNET)

As the holiday season approaches, get-togethers have a tendency to grow...merry. After slurping up a couple spirited mugs full of glogg or 'nog, will you know when you're fit to drive home?

You might if you've tracked your drink intake with Buzz Buddy for iPhone and iPod Touch ($0.99). It can't guarantee you'd pass a breathalyzer test, but this blood alcohol calculator gets close.

After entering your gender, weight, and whether you've already consumed alcohol, you'll tap the drink type you're about to imbibe--standard measures of beer, wine, cocktail, and shots. That means if you're sipping a strong Belgian ale or Long Island iced tea, you had better 'fess up.

Using your weight and gender, Buzz Buddy will graph your calculated blood alcohol level over the hours, helping you predict when your levels will get back into the safety range. If you spill over from sassy to sloppy, the colored indicator will supposedly shift from green to yellow to red and you'll be warned that your blood alcohol level is far too high to drive. A small bug in version 1.0 kept the indicator green even as we "chugged" enough booze to fell a mule.

We have some other ideas for expanding Buzz Buddy's possibilities. What about calling an emergency contact from within the app? Or viewing an in-app map detailing late-night munching spots nearby? Entering submissions to the graph retroactively, to account for the drinks you may have forgotten to add as you got swept into your evening, however, is a more urgent request.

With a button you can tap to call a cab and arguably helpful tips to instill a sensibility for responsible drinking, Buzz Buddy is a good idea--as long as you have the the presence of mind to use it.

Color-blind players are not the main audience most developers think of when plotting their games.

They're not who Nitzan Wilnai of VGViews originally built for either when the Tetris-like games Tatomic ($4.99) and Tatomic Lite (free) first became available for iPhone and iPod Touch. Yet enough players requested a color-blind mode that Wilnai got to work.

In color-blind mode, green atoms become purple. Too bad the background still looks red, orange, or brown.

(Credit: CNET)

The color-blind mode, found in the Options menu, swaps Tatomic's green-colored atoms with purple ones. In the free version, players must connect chains of same-hued atoms to clear the row, reminiscent of Tetris's iconic puzzle. The full version of Tatomic, however, gives you 30 levels and two additional modes--one in which you must create puzzle shapes, and another that will only clear an atomic chain when you attach a radioactive atom catalyst.

We tested both of Tatomic's color modes on one of CNET's own color-afflicted, who appreciated the difference right away, but still registered the blue atoms as white in both schemes.

It mattered little--he proclaimed the game "All the fun of the Large Hadron Collider, but without the risk."

Video host Blip.tv has just launched support for iPhones letting mobile users view the entirety of its video collection on the go. Like visiting the site on your computer, you can both browse and search through Blip's videos and get them to play without having to download a special application.

As a result of the upgrade, Blip.tv's embed code can now point iPhone users directly to the .m4v QuickTime stream while still delivering the Flash version to users with it installed. Unfortunately this does not carry over to previously embedded Flash-based Blip.tv videos. Visiting an earlier post where I embedded a Blip.tv video, it still shows up with the giant Flash-fail icon.

Blip.tv's CTO Justin Day tells me there's no way to add backward compatibility to these old embeds, but that video publishers can go back and manually update the video to support it.

Below is an example of the new content portal iPhone users are greeted with:

Watch Blip.tv shows right on your iPhone with a new content browser that streams QuickTime files.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Update: Here's a how-to video posted by Day. You should be able to view this if you're reading from your iPhone.

Until Apple blesses the iPhone with a camera worth talking about, you're just going to have to improve photos by transferring them to your desktop to edit.

Not so fast, slick. Picoli for iPhone ($4.99) is a handy little photo editor that does a great job touching up entire photos--you can color-correct images by using a slider, flip the image, and apply a few effects, including converting to sepia tones.

Watch our First Look video to see how Picoli works and see if you should download a copy for yourself.

Related:
>>All iPhone apps

(Credit: CNET)

It isn't so much the technology behind Zumobi's free app Ziibii that refreshes RSS on the iPhone and iPod touch as it is its presentation. Ziibii, which means 'river' in Algonquin*, extends the metaphor to depict posts from your various RSS feeds as rafts floating along a stream of information.

Watching posts float by is fun concept--for a few minutes at least--and one that's heightened by the fact that stories, photos, and friends' status updates appear in random order as a round-up of all your RSS subscriptions.

Ziibii's feed flexibility is good, but not great. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube are represented, and you'll also be able to add presets from Ziibii's list of popular sites or add your own favorites. Hopefully soon, Ziibii will make it easy to select more popular sources and aggregators, as does Viigo's thorough RSS reader for other platforms.

Of course, not everyone appreciates this 'blended' view, nor the unconventional current-cum-display. My Type-A fellows can escape to a listed view of feeds and flick in either direction to see more mish-mashed headlines. When you're ready to read up on one feed at a time, the Filter button temporarily hides stories from all but your selected source.

Ziibii earns brownie points for including an in-app browser when you want to read a full article, and for being able to post stories to Twitter or e-mail them to a contact.

With the exception of a small library of feeds, Ziibii is an excellent and creative alternative to your iPhone's RSS reader.

*Fun fact: The 'ssippi' in 'Mississippi' is derived from 'zibi.' The etymology according to Wikipedia: "(cf. Illinois mihsisiipiiwi and Ojibwe misiziibi, "great river," referring to the Mississippi River.)"

Cooliris has put out a useful update to its iPhone application that adds YouTube videos to its search results. This joins the image search that made the application so popular to begin with.

You might be asking yourself how this is helpful since the iPhone comes with an official YouTube application. The answer to that is that Cooliris' presentation is slightly more appealing. Where the official YouTube app forces you to scroll down a long list, with Cooliris you can simply rock your phone back and forth an endless array of thumbnails until you find something you like. Videos play back in a YouTube window, then you're brought back to the search results. It's smooth and it works well.

Cooliris has also managed to fix one of my big qualms with the earlier version, which would not let you save images from the image search results. With the new version there's now an option to save the full resolution version (not just a screenshot) with one button. The picture goes straight to your camera roll and you can keep on using the application. Again, this is a drastically better system than having to snap a screenshot.

You can now get YouTube video search as a part of Cooliris' iPhone application.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

The mobile application continues to be a shell of its desktop self, which integrates with a wide range of sites, and can be programmed to work with your own blog or Web site. While Apple's SDK won't allow such deep integration with other iPhone applications, Cooliris continues to pack in more sites and sources into this one.

Cooliris is free and can be found on the App Store (iTunes link). If you've already got it installed, and the 1.2 update isn't showing up, just delete the app from your phone and re-download it.

(Credit: AOL)

It's been a busy two days for AOL Mail. On Wednesday, AOL launched a beefier version of the AOL Mail gadget for iGoogle. On Thursday, AOL won a few more fans with the introduction of its beta feature AOL Sync.

AOL Mail for iGoogle improves upon the previous gadget by replacing the preview-only capability with functionality that lets you compose, reply, and fully manage your in-box from the iGoogle page.

AOL Sync beta, launched today, targets mobile and desktop users with the ability to sync their AOL address book and calendar in real time to Microsoft Outlook, the iPhone, BlackBerry, phones running Windows Mobile, and phones made by Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung.

You'll get started on AOL's Sync site, where you'll sign in to get access to the mobile or Outlook plug-in. On that end, AOL has turned to Funambol, which brings open-source push synchronization to companies like AOL.

It's a little disappointing that AOL Sync beta won't yet sync e-mail, but we're always big fans of two-way syncing and if this beta catches on, message-syncing would be the next logical step.

Visual search engine Searchme has a sexy new iPhone app that brings its signature Cover-Flow-like interface to the phone's 3.5-inch display. Search results come in the form of large thumbnails with short content summaries underneath. To browse through them you simply flick your finger across the screen, just like you would with album covers in the phone's iPod application.

The app also supports pinch gestures for zooming in on thumbnails. This lets you see the the details of a page before visiting it in Safari--something that can be done with a simple double tap on any result. This may seem like a trivial feature, but it can be immensely helpful, and in some cases even prevent you from having to visit the site at all. In my case I was able to pull up a restaurant's address just by zooming in, saving me some time and data.

Searchme knows when you've flipped it on its side and will display the search results in gorgeous Cover Flow-style.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The application makes use of the iPhone's accelerometer, and can tell when you've got it in landscape mode. When flipped, you get an additional two thumbnails on the screen, and it does away with the summaries entirely. It's also marvelously fun to zoom back and forth.

This app is definitely more than eye candy. Over a 3G connection it took just 3 seconds to bring up search results that I was able to flip through, and another 15 to stream in the thumbnails. During that loading time I was able to browse through the titles and summaries with zero lag which is really impressive.

Searchme is free and can be found in the app store (iTunes link).

Previous Searchme coverage:
Searchme tries music streaming to attract users
Search interfaces of tomorrow you can try today
Searchme nabs $31 million from Google backer, others