Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

Chris’s Pick: Snood

I am out in the field right now (yes Rene, another trip!). Since my hotel room TV has only three stations, I need some other entertainment. I downloaded Snood, remembering the game from when I was a grad student. Short games, story mode, multiplayer - this game has lots of different options and has kept me entertained so far. Give it a shot for only… [$3.99 - iTunes link]

James’ Pick: Dailyburn

am forgetful. When I am at the gym, I need help in organizing my workout since I can never remember what I should be doing. Dailyburn helps me keep track of my workouts, but that’s not all it does. I can track my weight, target weight and calorie intake as well. Dailyburn also syncs with dailyburn.com so you hve an online backup of all of your data. A must for anyone who works out…and nest of all it’s free! [Free - iTunes link]

Josh’s Pick: Tap Tap Revenge: Dave Matthews Band

Tap Tap Revenge: Dave Matthews Band is a themed spin off of the popular iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge 2. The game is $4.99 in the app store but well worth the money with over 10 DMB tracks including 1 of their newest hits. Can’t seem to stop playing this game. is a themed spin off of the popular iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge 2. The game is $4.99 in the app store but well worth the money with over 10 DMB tracks including 1 of their newest hits. Can’t seem to stop playing this game. [$4.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick #1: Hitchcock

Filmmakers rejoice! Hitchcock is the first iPhone app of its kind - a storyboard creation app! The app utilizes the iPhone’s built in camera to take pictures as a basic background, then you add in the camera & subject movement (you can even add stand-ins) and viola you have a storyboard! I was very surprised at the ease of use and the fluid motion of adjusting objects in the app. Another thing that is super cool about it is that you can add audio & even play back your storyboard in “motion” & you have the ability to export to PDF, cool huh? [$19.99 - iTunes link]

Matt’s Pick #2: DailyBurn

DailyBurn is the companion app to DailyBurn.com which is a nutrition & fitness tracking site. If you are one of those people that tracks their nutritional or fitness, then give DailyBurn a try. This app makes it more convenient to track your daily food intake and also allows you to track your workouts offline as you do them (in case your gym has poor reception). Best of all the whole thing is FREE (app & DailyBurn.com account.) [Free - iTunes link

]

Rene’s Pick: Plantronics Voyager PRO

I can’t get over this headset. Again, I have ears battered and worn through years of abuse and almost no BT headsets actually stay on them. This one does, and it looks so badass every time I slip it on I feel like barking “bring the rain!” The size and boom might mean it’s not for everyone. But it’s for me. And it’s my pick. So there. Actually, here — [$89.95 - TiPb Store link]

Your Pick?

You’re part of team TiPb too, so what’s your pick? What app was your absolute fav last week? Let us — and everyone — know in the comments!

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

Snood, Dailyburn, Tap Tap Revenge: Dave Matthews Band, Hitchcock, Plantronics Voyager PRO — TiPb Picks of the Week

GrooveMaker Forum Review by msbaylor. For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!

The GrooveMaker Apps are a new way of creating great music on the go. Intermediate users of electronic music creation will find this app on top of their best music creation apps for the iPhone.

NOTE: This review is a blanket review for all the apps in the GrooveMaker series, having beta tested them all, they all operate in the same basic way (the main difference is the sound loops included in each version). Current versions include:

• GrooveMaker FREE [Free - iTunes link]
• GrooveMaker Club [$4.99 - iTunes link]
• GrooveMaker House [$9.99 - iTunes link]
• GrooveMaker Hip-Hop [$9.99 - iTunes link]

Buttons & Using the Interface:

The interface is quite intuitive and unique. When you open the app, you can choose from a set of songs. On the initial load, the song will take some time to unpack. After this is done, you will not have to do this again for that song. In the main interface you have pads in the middle, below that is a waveform. Tap on a pad and it displays the waveform for that loop, this will help you introduce loops on the beats you want especially if you are performing live.

The buttons of the right side are randomization buttons. These four buttons allow you to randomize the loops depending on the button you tap on - A - D. This is really a nice touch especially if you are just brainstorming to find your new groove.

Below these buttons is the Tempo button. By tapping on it 3 times, the app averages the beat and sets the new tempo. If you want to be more precise, you can hold down the tempo button until a set of buttons appear (about 2 seconds). You can utilize the tack wheel to speed up/down the tempo or you can even be more precise by tapping the “+” & “-” buttons. By holding down the tempo button again the tempo setting disappear. The only thing I really didn’t like about this was the fact that it actually changes the pitch of the loops, that’s not exactly something I like happening, I’d rather change them interdependently.

On the opposite side of the screen you have the interactive help. The interactive help is very neat as it…well… let’s you interact with the app & helps you get to know how to use the application very quickly. The other buttons are your preferences - allowing you to set which pads are randomized via the randomization buttons. While I found this nice, I didn’t fully enjoy it as I couldn’t pick pads out of order, rather I had to choose 2-5 or 2-7, etc. The next button allows you to go back to the song menu. Next is the sequencer, more on that later, lastly, the master button, this controls the master volume for your song.

In the middle of the bottom side of the screen you have 4 very important buttons. The far right one allows you to pull up a loops list and select a loop for the pad. Tapping on the Track button pulls up another set of buttons. The one on the left coordinate the pads on screen allowing you to empty, lock, solo, and/or mute the pads. The ones ones the right side of the screen allow you to control the volume of the pad/loop and it’s pan. Of course to remove the buttons you simply tap on the track button again. The play button is what gets your groove on (pun intended). Lastly, the Groove snap button, this is explained in the next section.

Music Creation:

I really loved how easy it was to create songs. You simply get the pads going the way you want to, then tap the “Groove Snap” button and this saves the “groove” you have created into the sequencer. Before I continue I must explain some terminology - A “Pad” contains a loop. A “Groove” contains a mixture of up to 8 pads playing at once within an 8 Bar/32 beat groove. The “sequencer” allows you to put multiple grooves together to create your song. With me so far? I hope so.

Continuing on… Once you have your pads in place you tap the Groove snap button, this saves you pads and whether they are on or not, you then can change the pads and press the Groove Snap button again to save another groove. These set of actions is what make Groovemaker so unique, you don’t have to turn off the music to save a piece of your music. Once you feel you have saved all the grooves you want, tap on the sequence button on the right side of the screen.

All the buttons will be replaced by the sequencer except for the buttons on the right. The sequencer is separated into four portions - the top one contains all the grooves you’ve saved, the second one (from the top) is your sequence, the third section displays where you are listening to in your sequence and the very bottom are buttons allowing you to empty you sequencer, place certain grooves into the sequencer, play the sequence, mix browser (allows you to save you song/sequence to edit later) and finally the almighty Export button - you’ll need WiFi for that.

The main thing that happens here is - you drag saved grooves (first row) into the sequencer (the second row). While I found this very easy to do, I wasn’t a fan of being limited to only 15 grooves in my sequencer… it broke my groove. I suppose a way around this is to export the first 15 grooves, create a new set, then export and so on.

If you are wanting longer song exports and more control in-between groove changes, I’d recommend exporting your grooves independently, then mixing them on another sequencer. Hopefully in one of their next updates they will allow this to occur.

Performing Live:

Live performances are possible however depending on how you are soloing & muting buttons, it can easily get confusing to which pad is actually playing. However, you can select multiple pads and press the solo/mute buttons. The main issue here is you have to “hold” down one pad while tapping on other pads to select multiple pads at once.

Overall:

I found this app quite nice and easy to use I’d recommend this to anyone interested in creating music in their spare time, but for anyone that likes making their trance (for instance) songs longer that 3.5 minutes or creating sudden changes in the song rather than over a 32 beat section, this might not be the best application for you.

Check out this MP3 I created using the app LIVE with the Hip-Hop version!

I simply plugged a stereo cable from my iPhone into my computer and recorded it live in Audacity. Nothing else was edited on the song.

Pros:

• Easy to learn UI
• Export your song via WiFi (as a *.wav file)
• Multiple song pack per app
• A lot of loops per app (about 70-100 loops per song)
• Loops stay on beat - no attempting to match the beat
• Tempo modifier (& pitch)
• Loads quickly (after initial load)
• Intuitive & Interactive Help
• Save songs/layouts

Cons:

• Song created is limited to approximately 3.5 minutes/ 15 grooves per sequence
• No fading between grooves
• No filters
• Changing tempo also changes the pitch

TiPb Review Rating

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

App Review: Groovemaker Music Creation for iPhone

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, Jailbreak/pwnage, App Review

There's no shortage of Twitter apps in the App Store. Even more surprising is the number of GOOD apps that connect to the popular microblogging platform. I like each for a different reason: Tweetie has a clean user interface, TweetDeck offers multiple columns that sync with its desktop counterpart, and TwitterFon has ReadItLater integration. There are countless others that have unique features, and many of us end up with at least a couple on our iDevices.

But I have a new favorite, qTweeter, developed by the folks at Efiko Software. You won't find it in the App Store, though, because this app requires a jailbroken device. Multitasking isn't officially allowed (yet?) on the iPhone OS, yet qTweeter relies on this capability to perform its best trick.

Say you're checking the weather and want to tell everyone of the approaching hurricane. Normally, you would close your weather application, swipe through pages of apps, tap on and wait for your favorite Twitter client to open and load all of the tweets that you really don't care about right now, and finally type your warning to get the heck out of town. By the time you do all of that, the highway is going to be grid-locked with fleeing residents and you'll be stuck boarding up windows and sweeping up the debris!

Instead, you could have just "pulled" qTweeter down from the status bar, typed your tweet, and went back to the app still running in the background.

In fact, per the recent trend, you could have also posted that same message to your Facebook status with just a tap of a checkbox. It's a much quicker way to get your message out of your head and onto the Net, a fact that you'll appreciate as you get older and those thoughts become more fleeting.

Continue reading Quicker tweets with qTweeter

Quicker tweets with qTweeter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Quicker tweets with qTweeter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone, App Store, App Review

Yes, all true. I'm talking about Roadee [iTunes link], an iPhone nav app that depends on the open sourced openstreetmap.com. That eliminates the high fees paid to license map data, and allows a nav app for under 2 bucks.

So what do you get? Well, sadly, not too much. The maps are OK, and reasonably complete. Direction of travel is supported, but when driving any direction but North, the labels are the wrong way round. Driving South, all the street labels are upside down. Nice.

Most, but not all of the addresses I navigated to worked OK. In some cases, I was given weird, very out of the way directions, but I still got to my destination. Routing info comes from cloudmade.com. If their server is down, no routing.

The map shows your route, the speed you are going, and what should be the time to your destination, but in my tests it always read 0. The app is a bit sluggish, and a few times it told me to turn after I'd gone through the intersection, but in most cases it was fast enough.

Now, about those points of interest. Sitting next to 3 fast food joints, I asked Roadee if there was any fast food around. Nope. Zip. I tried hospitals. Nothing. Shopping? Nil. Gas stations? Negative. In fact, I could not get a single POI to appear in a city of more than a million people. You may have a different experience in your town. Your reports are encouraged. One time I got an error message that the service was down. Another server outage perhaps?

When traveling down the road sometimes the map would blank out every few seconds while more data was being ingested. Sometimes the map downloaded but there were large blank spots where the map should have been. The maps are streamed over your data connection, not sitting on your iPhone. Unfortunately, each time the screen refreshed, the computerized voice felt obliged to announce my next turn. With the turn about 3 miles away, the constant refreshing of the screen gave me the announcement 25 times. Not good. You can turn the voice off, but then you are forced to look at the map, which isn't so safe.

You can navigate to addresses in your contact list, but that sometimes fails and the little spinning gear goes on for ever. The only way out is exit the app.

Well, the app is only US$1.99, and it will generally give you directions to most addresses. Don't count on it for POI searches, direct routing, or navigating to your contact list. The computerized voice is OK, but not on a par with the higher priced nav apps. On the other hand, none of the other apps have text to speech, although that feature is coming.

I think this open source effort should be applauded and encouraged. If you just don't want to pony up 80 or a hundred dollars for some of the better nav solutions, this is for you, but keep in mind that despite having niceties like text to speech, it just doesn't work very well. This latest release of Roadee is said to be much better than the original release, so there is hope. Keep an eye on user comments and hopefully an update will improve things. Roadee maintains an FAQ and it is honest about the limitations the app has.

Here are some screen grabs to give you an idea what Roadee looks like.

Nav with turn by turn, text to speech and only $1.99 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nav with turn by turn, text to speech and only $1.99 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TomTom insists on teasing us all with the above video yet there is still no mention of pricing or availability. As you can see, this car kit brings a lot more to the table than a simple window mount for your iPhone. With the following extras, you can count on this being a pricey addition to your accessory collection.

• Hands-free dialing
• Louder speaker
• Enhances GPS signal
• Charges iPhone

As impressive as the TomTom car kit looks, we are thinking you possibly may have to dish out up to at least $100 for this tricked out window mount. Are you still interested in making this purchase?

Sound off in the comments!

[Via Engadget Mobile]

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

TomTom Promo Video Shows Off Car Kit

Google bought Grand Central and rebranded it Google Voice, now Apple has rejected Google Voice for the iPhone and the FCC is looking into it. Based on the responses Apple had given the FCC, it looks like they might be afraid Google is taking over the iPhone and Google Voice is a big piece of that. So what if Apple had bought Grand Central instead? Or what if that new world-class data center Apple is building will be home to a Google Voice competitor? (Tip of the theoretical hat to Derek in our comments, who delightfully calls such a thing iVoice).

GrandCentral (not to be confused with Apple’s upcoming multicore processor handler, Grand Central Dispatch) was an innovative service that gave users a new phone number that could replace any number of other and assorted numbers (one line to ring them all), along with SMS, transcribed voice mail, conference calling, call switching, call screening, etc. It was purchased by Google in 2007 for $95 million, and relaunched in 2009 as Google Voice.

If Apple had bought it instead, they would of course now be spared the headaches surrounding the above mentioned rejection and investigation. But they’d also have a fairly compelling set of services to roll up into the iPhone…

The original iPhone 2G saw Apple neatly remove carriers from a large portion of the smartphone experience by handling the selling and activation themselves, and not allowing any so-called carrier crapware (or even physical branding) onto the iPhone.

iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 saw the removal of carrier application portals with the introduction of an Apple-controlled App Store (though that inarguably has crapware all it’s own, users don’t have to fight with it being pre-installed and/or baked in).

At the same time, the original iPod touch went from being a crippled, no external speaker, no external volume control iPhone, to a fairly good non-phone iPhone. In a couple of weeks, Apple is widely expected to ship an iPod touch with a camera and perhaps microphone as well.

That makes it a potential VoIP monster.

Of course, GrandCentral/Google Voice doesn’t use VoIP (despite Apple’s weak-tea response that they’re still investigating it). That doesn’t mean it couldn’t (as in never will).

An iPhone — or iPod touch — with “iVoice” phone, sms, voice mail, etc. behind it…? That removes the carrier further still (dumb pipe chants, if you will), and the iPod touch as a VoIP monster? Heh. It becomes the Balrog.

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

Apple Kicking Themselves They Didn’t Buy GrandCentral (Google Voice) First?

Techcrunch has an interesting “rebuttal” up regarding Apple’s response to the FCC over the rejection of Google Voice. I use the quotes because I think the rebuttal part itself is off-target, while the conclusion is fairly spot on. Worst things first:

[Apple's response] strongly suggests that the Google Voice app replaces much of the core Apple iPhone OS function. This certainly isn’t accurate, and we believe the statement is misleading. More details below, but in general the iPhone app is a very light touch and doesn’t interfere with any native iPhone apps at all.

The crux of their argument is that, while Google Voice provides separate voice dialing, voice mail, and SMS functionality outside Apple’s built-in Phone and Messages apps, users are still free to use the built in apps. More specifically, that Google Voice only replaces these things when the Google Voice phone number is used.

Um. Yeah.

Users, at least in part, are going to be replacing the AT&T number with the Google Voice number (likely the reason to get the Google Voice number for a segment of users). Ergo, they’ll be replacing the built in Phone and SMS apps with the Google Voice app.

No big deal, though, right? Why should Apple care if people replace Phone and Messages with Google Voice?

Here, Techcrunch makes the kind of sense that does:

Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. The Google Voice App takes things one step further, by giving users an incentive to abandon their iPhone phone number and use their Google Voice phone number instead (transcription of voicemails is reason enough alone). Apple was afraid, say our sources, that Google was gaining too much power on the iPhone, and that’s why they rejected the application.

Taking a look at the iPhone Home Screen, I see: Messages (could be replaced by Google Voice), Calendar (can already be fed by Google Calendar), Photos (no Picasa feed yet), Camera, YouTube (fed by Google), Stocks (Yahoo! ), Maps (fed by Google), Weather (Yahoo!), Voice Memos, Notes, Clock, Calculator, Settings, iTunes, App Store (no fair counting Google WebApps here), Compass, Phone (could be replaced by Google Voice), Mail (Gmail replacement app, MailWrangler, rejected from App Store, but can be fed by Gmail IMAP), iPod.

That’s a fairly hefty Google presence. Previously, TiPb’s mentioned how the iPhone gets the best of both worlds — Apple and Google developing for it, while Android only gets Google. However, part of the thinking behind why Google launched Android (and Chrome, and will launch ChromeOS) is because they see themselves as a threat to traditional OS and software makers, and want to ensure they have their own platforms — and control of those platforms — just incase Microsoft or Apple ever decide to cut them out of those traditional OS and software spaces.

So, while Google has Android to fall back on absent the iPhone, does Apple have their own cloud services to fall back on absent Google’s data pipes? Microsoft is working hard to make sure they do, and — wait for it — isn’t Apple building a new billion-dollar data center for some undisclosed reason?

I made this analogy yesterday and I’m sticking by it — IBM licensing DOS for the PC killed IBM and gave birth to Microsoft. Google has a near-monopoly on search-based advertising, the cash cow of the internet, and they’re moving into all manner of services, now including software and mobile and desktop OS. They’re becoming so directly competitive with Apple that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has left Apple’s board of directors.

Apple worrying that one of their biggest, best funded, best forwardly positioned competitors is taking over the iPhone to a degree that they, rather than Apple, control the device?

Yeah, that’s totally believable.

Do we think for one moment that, if instead of licensing ActiveSync to work in Mail, Calendar, and Contacts, Microsoft had wanted to put a Mobile Outlook app on the iPhone to handle all that separately, Apple still would have gone forward with it?

Would BlockBuster allow Netflix kiosks in their stores without worries? Heck, would you rent a room in your house if more and more people began living there, outnumbering your family, and began replacing your furniture with alternatives, even if better?

If, on the other hand, Google Voice transparently worked through the existing Phone and Messages application, maybe Apple wouldn’t worry at all (though AT&T might at that point). Google Voice would then just be another pipe, and as I’ve discussed before, Apple seems to be a firm believer that the interface is the app. As long as users have a consistent front end, Apple can re-arrange the pipes behind the scenes, add or remove partners, introduce or deprecate technologies even, but the user experience stays the same, and Apple stays independent from service providers.

Google Voice being a separate app means that Google could, however unlikely it seems right now, one day decide to pull Google Voice from the iPhone and make it Android exclusive. Again, swapping pipes is easy, replacing an app part of the user base has become accustomed too, not so much.

Techcrunch believes Apple, given the FCC scrutiny, will now have no choice but to backpedal and allow Google Voice onto the iPhone, the same way a landlord afraid of being publicly called out as rude may allow that tenant to keep taking over the house.

Arguably, of course, Google has Android and can run Google Voice on Android, and if consumers want Google Voice they can simply buy Android-based phones. However, Andy Rubin just admitted Android 1.0 couldn’t even run VoIP, and of those who did indeed loudly leave the iPhone and switch to Android for that very reason, several have been just as loudly unsatisfied with the current polish of Google’s mobile OS. (No doubt that problem will disappear over the coming months/year).

So maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s not just users that get the benefit of Apple and Google on the iPhone, and only Google on Android. Maybe Google gets the benefit of being on everything and Apple (and Microsoft, and RIM, and Palm, etc.) only get what’s left of their own, single platforms — those few icons not powered by Google.

[Thanks striatic for the tip!]

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

Apple Afraid Google is Taking Over the iPhone?