Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon: We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of... read more

Mobile Safari, the iPhone's web browser, has surprisingly weak audio support. But here's a hack I discovered to embed audio playlists. read more

Buster McLeod is taking an "open data" policy towards his latest project, Locavore the iPhone app, by revealing the first month's stats. Locavore is a great app that helps you eat locally by showing you what produce is in season near you and what farmer's markets you can buy it at. It's a well-designed app that I look forward... read more

Apple crushed it (earnings in the most recent quarter). So much for the recession prompting consumers to stampede away from Apple's "high-end" products, as the prognosticators predicted (and the stock market priced into Apple's stock). So what's the moral of the story? Read on...... read more

As the "death of the newspaper" gets continuing coverage (mostly on television), new apps bring the New York Times, USA Today, and now The Wall Street Journal, to your iPhone. I have to ask: why do these apps look so much alike? is there a hidden danger that they might be confused with each other? Looking for an alternative to apps provided by these long-lived journalistic institutions, I decided to download the USA Today iPhone app to see if they did things any differently. While I wouldn't want to see the Times or the Journal mimicking USA Today's look-and-feel, they could learn a thing or two from some of the advanced techniques that USA Today employed.... read more

Over the next week, the iTunes App Store is set to record its billionth download, an impressive milestone given that it launched less than a year ago. Granted the actual usage of most apps is spotty. To mark the event, I'm updating a few charts that I produced for previous posts. Slightly over 35,000 apps have appeared in the U.S. app store. Over 31,000 were available in the last week alone, about 78% of which were PAID apps.... read more

I have what may be a radical suggestion for the “always control you content” types, you should consider making a change to your show’s site: instead of providing an “iPhone friendly” version of your site, send iPhone and iPod touch browsers right to your iTunes listing. This accomplishes two things: it keeps you from having to find (or make) a good mobile version of your site, and it gives your visitors the ability to add your podcast to their device immediately and start listening right away. For those of you who missed it, the most recent set of new features for the iPhone included the ability to download...... read more

There's a gold-rush happening right now in mobile marketplaces. However not everyone is able to participate and not all platforms are receiving equal attention. PhoneGap has the potential to be a great democratizer. It lowers the bar for developers to create powerful applications out of very familiar web technologies. It also enables sites to support versions of their apps for mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone (or even if you do) you should be cheering this project along.... read more