app

One of the most striking things about this early batch of Android apps is how many excellent freebies there are. Ringdroid is yet another sophisticated, intuitive freeware app that will prove a boon to T-Mobile G1-toting ringtone-lovers.

Ringdroid lets you create ringtones from MP3, WAV, and ARM files you load onto your phone through the SD card or that you purchase through the Amazon MP3 store.

Unlike many Android apps that use the Menu keys to store some software functions, most of Ringdroid's controls are out on the interface and all respond to touch. You can set the start … Read more

ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner (by the ZXing team), and CompareEverywhere (an Android Challenge winner) are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.

At their core, they're nearly identical, using the phone's camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year. (You can also search by product name.)

While these shopping apps share a back end, the front ends are distinct. Unfortunately, they all produced varying results that … Read more

Mercedes-Benz AMG is the next automaker to join the battle for customers' attention in the Apple iTunes App Store. Except while the other automakers have built apps that actually do something aside from advertise cars (for example, Audi's game and Ford's photo editor), Mercedes-Benz's app does nothing more than showcase the C63 AMG.

The main menu of the application features four options: Video, Photos, Sounds, Specs, and Find a Dealer.

Disappointingly, the Videos section is essentially a list of four videos that stream from Mercedes' Web site. Sorry, iPod Touch owners, this means that you'll have … Read more

As you know, I check out the iPhone app lists every day on my iPhone and at the iTunes Store. As I look for cool new apps, I find it interesting to see what moves to the top of the most popular lists every week and for what type of programs people are willing to pay money. One thing I've noticed is that programs (free or paid) continue to get more complex. As developers get more comfortable with the platform, we're starting to see games and apps that offer much more polish than the ones that came out … Read more

I cannot stop playing Lux Touch for the iPhone. It's far and away the best game I've played yet on the device. While not quite perfect, it's an intensely addictive and fast-paced version of the board game classic Risk, but with a modern twist. And it's a free download.

You play the blue forces. Each turn, you get three armies, which you place in your territories. At certain times you can cash in "cards" (which you get as you conquer new regions), and those can be traded in for more armies. Get a full … Read more

OurStage, a service that allows you to discover new, alternative, and underground music, has launched a version of its service for the iPhone. OurStage Radio for the iPhone can be found now at the App Store for free.

We've covered OurStage before and so far, the iPhone app just seems like a mobile version of its site/service.

Users are able to select different music, categorized in a surprising number of genres, like hip-hop, alternative hip-hop, and rap. There's also a Guitar Solo genre that actually has a huge number of artists available. Once you've listened, you'… Read more

Does it strike anyone else as odd that Google has left some basic capabilities to third-party Android developers? Video playback in the day where multimedia is king seems like such an obvious application to perfect and include on a platform with a lot to prove, yet the only video-related application the T-Mobile G1 sports is a YouTube application.

That makes perfect sense, YouTube having been bought by Google and all, but what if the videos you want to see plain haven't been uploaded yet?

Thankfully, the Android add-on Video Player reliably fills a basic role by playing MPEG4 or … Read more

UPDATED: Clarified the end result of AppCompactor on a standard program.

When you gotta go, advanced users should strongly consider using AppCompactor to stay mobile. Just introduced by John T. Haller of PortableApps, this portable power user's right-hand man crushes program files, often shaving 50 percent off the size of a disk.

AppCompactor melds 7-Zip and UPX to compress and archive DLLs, EXEs, JARs, and other files essential for running any program into a package that doesn't need to be unarchived to run. Programs that have been compacted run smoothly from a flash drive or other on-the-go storage … Read more

Reports out of a Google developer conference in India indicated that Google was primed to add support for Java programs running on its presently Python-only Google App Engine. Java support is a top request for the Web application hosting site, but fans would be better off holding their horses for now.

The reports based the Java-on-GAE conclusion on remarks from a speech by Prasad Ram, director of Google research and development in Bangalore. Google, though, said nothing is happening soon.

"While we don't have any immediate plans or announcements, we are working on other languages for App Engine. … Read more