12.16.11        For those new to the world of the iPhone, the discovery that you can easily and comfortably read on that little screen is a bit of a revelation. Suddenly, you can carry entire volumes of prose in your pocket, as easily as your contacts list. App developers are keen to this, and so the iTunes App Store is flooded with e-readers and e-books. Some are better than others. Read on to discover the very best of bunch. Stanza is an e-book reader app so good, Amazon snatched it up before it could pose a threat to their Kindle iPhone app. Thankfully, you can still download Stanza for free and use it to read Kindle files, or any other e-book files, for that matter. Stanza has a gorgeous, easy-to-use library view, access to online book repositories like Project Gutenberg, and a clean, distraction-free interface for reading. You can Read More

Chris Ware is an amazing cartoonist out of Chicago, and he's done a lot of work with McSweeney's, the literary journal run by novelist Dave Eggers and his company. Now, Ware has released an iPad-only comic, released inside the McSweeney's app, and co-developed with Spaces of Play, the studio behind the recent iOS game Spirits. The comic is called Touch Sensitive, and it's apparently 14 pages of art and animations by Ware, featuring his great style and pace. The piece itself is a 99 cent purchase inside the McSweeney's app, which is a free download available now. There's a lot of other content in there, too, including a month long subscription to their service called The Small Chair, featuring stories, essays, interview, and other works from the McSweeney's stable. If you haven't checked the app out yet, you should definitely pick it up. And the Ware comic is a great first Read More

I've said before that I'm a huge fan of McSweeney's, the publishing group founded by author Dave Eggers. The company has had an iPhone app for a while, but it recently updated to a universal version, so now all of that great content (from daily posts to various blogs, books, and the eponymous quarterly) is available to read on the iPad any time you want. The app is set up on a subscription basis, so the original purchase of $6.99 gets you access to six months of daily content from the company, plus "semi-eternal delivery" of material from the website (which is publicly available anyway). There's also an ebook store in the new version of the app, where you can buy any books the company has published, at prices from $6 to $15. All together, that may sound like a little much compared to some other apps, but compared to actual Read More

...Price Drop: "McSweeney's" just dropped from $5.99 to $0.99 http://bit.ly/fFUytS... Read More

Bolstered by arrival of the 3GS, launch of in-app purchasing and push notifications, the iPhone apps of 2009 have become richer and more robust experiences. Across 11 categories, we’ve selected the best apps of the year. In every category, each winner is an essential addition to your iPhone. This is the ultimate roundup of essential apps for your iPhone from 2009. The sequel to 2008′s Rolando expands on the tilt ‘n’ swipe platforming action of the original. This time round, we’re brought an entire troupe of colorful Rolando characters to protect, alongside a tropical island inhabited by new baddies and a lost Rolando tribe. The artwork is gorgeous, the gameplay is excellent and, thanks to NGMoco’s Plus+ awards system, it’s got bags of replay value too. Having formed his own development studio after working at the Cupertino campus, Loren Brichter has established himself as one of the premier App Store developers. Read More

Bolstered by arrival of the 3GS, launch of in-app purchasing and push notifications, the iPhone apps of 2009 have become richer and more robust experiences. Across 11 categories, we’ve selected the best apps of the year. In every category, each winner is an essential addition to your iPhone. This is the ultimate roundup of essential apps for your iPhone from 2009. The sequel to 2008′s Rolando expands on the tilt ‘n’ swipe platforming action of the original. This time round, we’re brought an entire troupe of colorful Rolando characters to protect, alongside a tropical island inhabited by new baddies and a lost Rolando tribe. The artwork is gorgeous, the gameplay is excellent and, thanks to NGMoco’s Plus+ awards system, it’s got bags of replay value too. Having formed his own development studio after working at the Cupertino campus, Loren Brichter has established himself as one of the premier App Store developers. Read More

...Dave Eggers' McSweeney-Verlag bietet auch eine Luxus-App für anspruchsvolle iPhone-Leser: http://bit.ly/4UYTJx #paidcontent... Read More

...damn! I found, via the ads in @tweetie desktop, that McSweeney's has an iPhone app. A damn good one. Bought. http://bit.ly/6VikE3 #fb... Read More

As another week draws to a close, the App Store expands even further with a torrent of new toys and tools. As ever, I’ve hand-picked four recent iPhone releases for you to take a look at. This week I’ve given our picks a creative vibe, selecting four different apps that let you engage with your artistic and cultural side. My top pick for the week is Xewton Music Studio, plus I’ve been looking at Snapture, GraffitiGeo and McSweeney’s. Armed with an iPhone, there’s never been so much choice for making music on the move. Despite all the choice, the recording app I keep coming back to is FourTrack. It’s a fully-featured 4 track recorder, complete with bouncing, panning, metronome and Wi-Fi sharing. When it comes to full on audio sequencing and sketching out bigger ideas, I head for Intua’s BeatMaker. The app costs twenty bucks, but for producers it’s definitely worth Read More