Personally my favorite part of the app is the videos and the current location of satellites. It’s like having a high tech super spy tracker in your pocket at all times. The photos section is also split into two. One for the NASA Image of the Day, and the other for the Astronomy Picture of the Day. Instant access, love it.

There are four main categories to the app; Missions, Images, Videos, and Updates:

Missions:
Here you can select any current or past mission to see detailed information. If it’s a future mission you get a countdown until launch, and if it’s a past mission you get a count since launch. Each mission has four sub-categories: Space Tracker to see where in space it currently is, updates specific to that mission, photos, and videos specific to that mission. You can also share the mission via email with anyone.

Images:
Here is where you have the options of the NASA photo of the day or the Astronomy photo of the day. Great feature as I’m always wondering what the APOD is while I’m on the go.

Videos:
The videos section is lengthy. Right now I’ve got over 50 videos available. This seems to include all of the mission videos in one place.

Updates:
This is the one place to get all updates for all missions. It even includes what astronauts are tweeting from space!

The app is free and is well worth your time. Do yourself a favor and learn something. This app is awesome.

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The app has a huge downfall, however. It automatically signs you out of eBuddy immediately, after 5 minutes, 10, or 30 minutes…. but you can’t simply stay logged in, like AIM does for 24hrs. So even if you choose the 30 minute option, you’ll be logged out and receive no notifications. Kind of silly to have to launch the app every 30 minutes.

Regardless, it’s a step in the right direction and it’s free. It’s got a nice built-in “tell us what you think” section with a form for you to fill out. Make sure to tell them you want longer Online times!

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Multiple accounts
Refresh by pulling down at the top of Tweets list
Translate Tweets
Save Tweets as drafts
Swipe across a Tweet for options (a la Email App)
Repost links from Tweets
Post link to specific Tweets
and lots more

The only drawback I’ve found is that I can’t create groups as I can in TweekDeck to organize all the Tweets I have to read throughout the day. The app is incredibly fluid and everything moves like butter. They’ve packed so many features that it makes it the king of Twitter clients and worth the $1.99. The only beef I have with it is that they’ve released it as a new app and you have to pay yet again even if you’re an original Tweetie owner.

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I looked at my last month’s usage and I was able to go down to 545 SMS (sent + received). From there I set my next goal to be under 300. This current billing period, which ends on the 22nd, I have used 176. So I have a 3 weeks for no more than 124 SMS which will be hard. Still, this is a significant improvement on the previous month in which I was already at about 300+ at this point.

How am I doing it? Social Networking. As it is I only use about 45 minutes of talk time for a whole month. Most of my communication is done via Facebook, Twitter, AIM, and (soon) Skype. Most of my friends are on at least one of the mentioned social networks. The only reason I haven’t been able to completely eliminate SMS is because most of these social networks don’t support Push Notifications on the iPhone and I’m unable to completely rely on them.

As you may already know, AT&T recently announced that they’ll allow apps on the iPhone to use voice over IP on the 3G network. What does this translate to? Use Skype (or other apps) to make your calls from anywhere, without using your minutes. The only thing that will keep me from using it all the time is the fact that Skype does not yet support Push Notifications. Imagine getting a notification for a call and it’s from Skype. You can talk all day long and it doesn’t affect your minutes at all.

In fact, since I’m only using about 45 minutes of talk time, why would I even need a voice or SMS plan? all I need is the data plan. In fact phone companies may begin to move towards a data plan model rather than minutes-per-month/SMS model.

The hard part about trying out this experiment is getting all your friends and family to contact you using these Social Networks. If all else fails I usually recommend emailing me, since I’ve always got my iPhone on me it’s as good as SMS.

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The first thing you wanna do is get yourself a couple of books. My recommendation is to go to both extremes in the case. First, get yourself an Objective-C book that doesn’t require any prior knowledge in C Programming. If you know how to program in C, Objective-C should take you only a few hours to master. If not, it will take you some time. My recommendation is to go with something like “Programming in Objective-C 2.0: A complete introduction to the Objective-C language for Mac OS X and iPhone development” by Stephen G. Kochan. This book requires no previous programming experience and in my opinion makes it simple enough to learn. I’m not gonna lie, some parts do go a little fast, but it’s very good. In fact, you don’t even begin to get into iPhone apps until the last fourth of the book. It’s all programming.

Second, I recommend going to the other extreme and getting a book that deals with nothing but making iPhone apps and requiring that you have some prior knowledge of Objective-C. I recommend “Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK” by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. If you read this book after the prior one, you should be doing pretty well.

You’ll also find plenty of sources online including video tutorials (which a lot of them are taught by 10 year old kids… really frustrating). There’s also the iTunesU Stanford podcast on iPhone Development which is very good, but also requires prior knowledge of the language. I actually watched this first before knowing how to do anything, and about 98% of the stuff talked about went right over my head.

Again, making iPhone apps is not an easy thing. If anything it will humble you and make you appreciate the apps that developers are able to come up with. Nevertheless, it isn’t impossible, and with dedication and time you can conquer this.

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First, theres several different modes you can play including Stealth where you can’t see your opponents attacking ships, Billiards, where all the planets move around, and more.

Second, there’s massive multiplayer options including network gaming and over the internet, both supporting up to four players. It’s a really simple game but everything from the music to the visuals were thoroughly crafted. The game costs just $.99, but with the amount of hours you’re guaranteed in play time it should be more like $3.99.

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If you’re not aware of Ego yet, you better. It allows you to very simply and quickly get stats for everything from Twitter to Google Analytics, and for as many accounts as you want.

A while back something went wrong and we were unable to check our Google Analytics. Sure, we still had Analytics App, but Ego did it so well! It just wasn’t the same any more. An update was submitted and Apple finally approved the update.

The App costs just $1.99 and is well worth it. If you’re the blogger type or the Mint type or the Twitter type, this app is for you.

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You can now also protect your information by locking the app with a passcode; a feature I’m sure will be quite popular.

The design has pretty much remained the same, witch is fine, the only beef I have with the app is that it doesn’t do enough. I wanna be able to get some of the functionality I get on the web, like trends, graphs, compare spending per month/year, and much more. For now, the only thing I really use the Mint iPhone app is to check my bank balance.

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Download the videos here (iTunes link)

It will walk you through the very beginning stages during which you’ll install Xcode and the other developer tools, as well as giving you an in-depth look at these tools and how to use them. Highly recommended for any aspiring developers.

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Along with the UI enhancements came a plethora of new features that have been requested since day one. These include the ability to Like statuses, get every kind of update instead of only Requests, the ability to call and SMS everyone who lists their phone number on the profile, being able to see common friends between your friends list. Not only that, you can even re-arrange the icons on the app’s home screen just like you can with your iPhone. Hold an icon and they all begin to wiggle.

Like everyone else, my only complaint is that this app doesn’t (yet) support push notifications. If it did it would be hands down the best application yet. Supposedly it’s coming in the next update or two. What are your first impressions?

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