RjDj (iPhone only) is a reality-hacking music experience that you have to see and hear to believe. RJDJ takes different musical "scenes" and incorporates the sounds of your surroundings into a unique, immersive composition. The developers pride themselves on creating "a digital drug which causes a mind twisting hearing sensation," and artists are creating new scenes all the time. RjDj is a great way to show off the possibilities of that new iPhone to the person you're giving it to. ($2.99)

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Google SearchWiki lets you customize results
• Google adds new features to BlackBerrys and iPhones
• LIFE Magazine's photo archive comes online
• GrandCentral App comes to Mac
• Google plans to work with OEMs to pre-install Chrome
• Access Google Docs within Gmail

iPhone and iPod Touch users can upgrade their software to version 2.2 today. The update, which weighs in at around 250 megs, adds some highly-anticipated features. The two biggest for me are Street View in the Maps app and the ability to download podcasts from the iTunes Store. There are some smaller tweaks that you might appreciate, as well: that bug that sometimes kept messages from downloading in Mail is fixed, and you can click the home button when you're on any page of the home screen to go back to the first page.

Street View on the iPhone is every bit as cool as it sounds. It looks good in landscape and is really smooth to control. I suspect it won't be long before we start seeing photos of people holding up iPhone street view pictures of the place they're standing. Less flashy, but just as useful, walking and transit directions are available in maps now, as well. If you're an iPod Touch user, you're unfortunately out of luck on Street View for now, so far it's iPhone only.

Downloading podcasts was at the top of my wishlist for the iPhone (although I know a lot of you have lists of your own). It's always frustrating to finish an episode of a good podcast while you're out walking or on a train, and then wait until you get home to hear the next one. Not a problem anymore, thanks to the latest iPhone update. All in all, 2.2 offers some excellent new features. The only thing I have to complain about is the new Safari layout, which feels cramped with the address bar and the search bar smooshed in next to one another.

When you back up your iPhone or iPod Touch, iTunes can use the backup to do a restore, but not much else. It's nice when Apple's stuff "just works," but what if you want to see inside the black box and interact with the data on your phone? This is especially important for developers, who can fix bugs a lot more easily if they can look at a user's backup to figure out what's causing problems with an app. iPhone Backup Extractor is a tool that makes this possible.

With iPhone Backup Extractor, you can convert an iPhone/iPod Touch backup to make it readable by the OS X Finder. This lets developers get access to application resources that there's no way to see in iTunes. It might be of some interested to curious non-developers, too, if you just to figure out what files a 3rd-party app has created on your phone.

[via furbo.org]

It wasn't too long ago that I chose Twitterrific as one of my favourite three applications for the iPhone as part of our 'Favourite Apps' series. Even then, there were plenty of alternatives out there for you to use: Twinkle, Twittelator [and Twittelator Pro]. However the release of Tweetsville today appears to have changed my mind as my Twitter client of choice.

The most noticeable difference between Tweetsville and its competitiors is that the application sticks to a very conventional user interface: users will be instantly familiar with most of the controls, and a hybrid of both the iPod and Mail-esque look to the application [along with some nice touches that shows you posting tweets as messages 'To the Twitterverse'] mean you'll feel instantly at home.

On top of the nice little touches, there's TwitPic integration for posting photos and linking to them in tweets, a customisable toolbar [and two timeline views to pick from], not to mention built-in support for Twitter Search and Twitter Trends - Twitter's two biggest service additions recently.

Even though there's almost every feature you could need on the go, it's utterly intuitive to use and almost instantly has become my de-facto iPhone Twitter client: sorry Twitterrific.



Some will be unhappy without there being a free version to try - though it's worth remembering the application costs just $3.99, which isn't exactly bank-breaking - and there's no inline @replies to be found in one of the two timeline views. It's also worth pointing out that other clients include features for re-tweeting links. Despite these [admittedly few] pitfalls, for a true Twitter control panel that has almost all the features you need - along with a clean, familiar and above-all thought-out user interface - I can't help but give Tweetsville a very firm thumbs-up.

I Can Has Cheezburger, the Internet's most famous site full of pictures of cats with captions, now has its own iPhone app. From the Cheezburger app, you can look at pictures from any of the 8 "Cheezburger network" sites, including Failblog, I Has a Hotdog!, Graph Jam. You can also save them to your photo library for convenient offline LOLZ later on.

Currently, that's about all the app does, but the Cheezburger team has big plans for it. Eventually, you'll be able to create and submit LOLcats from your phone. Not only that, but they're hoping to release an API, so coders everywhere can LOLerize their own apps.

If you don't know anything about the iPhone, the MobileSafari browser, or web design in general, creating an iPhone version of your website can be daunting. Intersquash.com makes it easy. Just put in the address of your site's RSS feed, give it a name, and click iPhoneize. If you want, upload an icon. That's all you have to do: Intersquash gives you a little bit of code to paste into the body of your site, and it's magically optimized for iPhone viewing.

Last time I looked, Intersquash had already iPhonized around 2,000 websites. The results are nothing fancy, but you get a clean, readable, functioning iPhone site. It definitely beats making iPhone users wait for for your full site to load. You do need a working RSS feed to use Intersquash, but you've probably got one of those if you use any major blogging platform. If you're having problems, try a service like Feedburner.

One of the first things that iPhone and iPod Touch users noticed was the lack of a built-in "disk mode," where your device would appear on the desktop as a drive that you could use for file storage. Other iPod models even had a setting to specify how much of their storage space should be used for music, and how much should be used for disk mode, but the latest and greatest ones didn't. But thanks to an app called DiskAid, you can still transfer files between your iPhone and your Mac or PC without jailbreaking or using iTunes.

Sure, you may already know how to access a jailbroken iPhone's hard drive via SFTP, but that's a pain in the butt compared to DiskAid. You can just plug your device in, start it up, and start transferring files in a straightforward interface that anybody who's ever used Windows Explorer or the OS X Finder can figure out. As a brief disclaimer, realize that storing files on your iPhone doesn't mean your iPhone can interact with them. It's like putting music on an old iPod in disk mode: you can store it there, but you can't play it.

There's no shortage of eBooks available for the iPhone and iPod touch [App Store link] however one of the latest releases Classics looks set to take the crown as the best around.

The application comes with a dozen public-domain books ready for you to read: with more promised in future (free) updates. As you might expect, there's plenty of attention paid to the application's handling of your reading too: pressing home places a neat ribbon bookmark on the page you were reading, for example.

To see how Classics fared in day-to-day use, I read The Jungle Book on a 2-hour train journey home. I'm a stickler for actually reading a physical copy of a book - and no big fan of eReaders to date - however I was pleasantly surprised at how readable the books were: for someone who loathes reading books on a screen, I was absolutely happy to keep on reading.

My only gripe about the application is that swiping to the next page [which cues a stylish animation] takes too long: however as I'm something of a fast reader, and devour each page rather quickly, I'd imagine this isn't something most users will experience.

Classics is currently just $2.99 on the App Store: there's no word currently on when this introductory price ends.

If 'Portable' blogging apps aren't your cup of tea, and you're looking for something that's a little more mobile, the Tumblrette application for iPhone and iPod touch might be right up your street. Tumblrette [App Store link] is a mobile client for the very excellent Tumblr tumblog service - if you're not familiar with Tumblr be sure to check out our previous coverage here.

Tumblrette not only allows you create entries in any of the post types allowed by Tumblr, but also allows you to save draft posts to come back to later as well as write posts using Markdown formatting. The latest release sees the addition of a nifty record-and-upload feature that allows you to use the iPhone or 2nd-Generation iPod touch's built-in microphone to record a message and upload it to your Tumblog.

The application is both well thought out and beautifully designed. Best of all, it's something of a steal if you need to be blogging on the go: costing just $1.99 in an App Store near you now.

Do you have a gripe about your iPhone? If you're one of the many people who wishes the much-hyped gadget had basic things like copy/paste or the ability to shoot video, now there's a place to take your gripes. Please Fix the iPhone is a very attractive site about people's problems with Apple's mostly-very-attractive phone.

The format of the site is pretty simple: a list of people's wishes for improvements to the iPhone, with the ability to vote for any you agree with. The front page shows the top 10 of the thousands of wishes people have submitted. I knew people had problems with the iPhone, but I didn't know they had thousands of problems with it. Take that number with a grain of salt, though: wishes range from the serious (no physical keyboard) to the not so serious (no self-destruct button).

In an impressive case of two great tastes that taste great together, Google Earth for the iPhone is now available in the iTunes app store. If you like Google Earth on the desktop, you'll like it even more when you can manipulate the globe with your fingertips. Zooming and rotating are easy with the familiar iPhone pinch motion, and the iPhone's GPS adds a new dimension to Earth.

I was hooked on this app from the first time I made Google Earth zoom in on my location. The visuals are stunning, and you can activate Street View once you're zoomed in. It literally took two clicks to get a view of my front door: one click on the location button, and one to allow Google Earth to use the GPS data. There's also a compass button to point you North, and a search function that even includes your Address Book contacts. The only thing missing is a tilt mode: it would be fun to explore the earth by using the accelerometer, but it wouldn't be very practical.

UPDATE: Google Earth does have a tilt mode! You can turn it on and off in the preferences. Thanks, Belden.

CORRECTION: Street View isn't coming until the iPhone 2.2 firmware is released. The satellite image of my apartment is just at an odd angle and looks really good on an iPhone screen. Thanks, Steve.

I'll admit, I'm not a huge Google Reader fan. I much prefer the interface of NetNewsWire on my desktop and have been very impressed with Newsgator Go for the BlackBerry (it blows Google Reader away and has all my feeds). That said, Google Reader on the iPhone is actually pretty spectacular.

This is important, because the iPhone and Android use very, very similar browsers. Both are based in WebKit and they render pages almost identically. This is great news for Android, because newsreaders and smartphones really are a match made in heaven. Instead of the typical mobile Reader page, Google has created an optimized WebKit page that really, really shines.

Google Reader is so good, in fact, you probably wouldn't expect it to be a web app. You can easily view all new items in your account, view new items or all items from a certain category or view items from an individual feed. If a feed is truncated, clicking on a link immediately launches a new browser window to that article. Sharing and marking feeds with stars is easy and intuitive as well.

The real joy in using Google Reader is in how easy reading articles and feeds actually is. Instead of having to squint like I do if I view Google Reader on my BlackBerry (a problem I don't have with Newsgator Go), everything is clear and easy to navigate.

Check out the gallery to see some shots of Google Reader in action. I also threw in some images from my iPod Touch 2.0, to show off the similarities between the interfaces.

Suddenly Google's big play to make iPhone optimized sites is making a lot more sense!

BrightKite was already the Cadillac of location-based social networking, but it just got even better with the release of an iPhone app. Checking in is a breeze using the iPhone's GPS, and the app is pumped up with new features that make it a dramatic improvement over the old web version. There's been a buzz around Brightkite for iPhone for some time now, and it totally lives up to the hype.

The ability to message nearby users in an iChat-like interface is definitely a plus, and helps to make the service more social. "Place snapping" quickly attaches a name to your location, giving you a street or intersection that you can use with Brightkite's placemark feature. You can also turn on notifications, making sure you don't miss any messages or comments. Even better, all of this happens within a slick, intuitive user interface that takes no time at all to learn.

Cooliris is a fantastic browser plugin that displays image galleries on sites like Facebook and Flickr as a wall of photos that you can manipulate by dragging. It's an attractive visual effect, and it's actually a fast and efficient way to get an overview of a gallery and find a specific image. Unfortunately, the Cooliris iPhone app isn't as useful as its browser-based counterpart.

The upside is that Cooliris for iPhone looks just as cool as the web version, and it's more fun to play with. The drag and pinch interface of the iPhone is designed for something like this. Unfortunately, the mobile version of Safari isn't. Because a browser plugin would present some seriously problems for an iPhone developer, Cooliris is a standalone app. Instead of activating it within Facebook or Flickr -- photos you might really care about -- you're limited to its search function. It's a cool toy, but it doesn't feel nearly as essential as the desktop version.