apps

For DJs, the transition from vinyl to today's digital rigs has been a tense compromise between control and convenience. Year after year, a new crop of DJ software and USB gear attempts to fuse the responsive feel of vinyl with all the conveniences of digital audio. Invariably, these digital DJ rigs end up being too expensive, too messy, or downright gimmicky.

Enter the iPad. Here's an affordable device, roughly the size of a vinyl record, that offers quick multitouch control, integrated storage, a wireless digital music store, and a popular graphically rich software platform tied to a competitive app marketplace.

Could the iPad be the digital turntable replacement that DJs have been waiting for? Hell, at $499 each, you could grab two iPads and still spend less than you would on the majority of professional digital DJ solutions on the market.

For the most part, the software has already been worked out. iPhone applications such as Touch DJ, Virtual Deck, and Quixpin, have proven popular with adventurous DJ.… Read more

After revealing at Demo the winners of its Developers Challenge, PayPal had a consolation prize for the companies that didn't win the award: the company is announcing a funding project for new apps builders. Participants in the PayPal Startup Accelerator Program can get not just funding, but space at the PayPal building as well as access to PayPal's marketing muscle.

Given the inevitable growth of competitive payment technologies (see Square), it's smart for PayPal to encourage companies to build on its platform in whatever way it can. And let's not forget: Doing a start-up on a … Read more

I first wrote about Muziic, the YouTube-searching music streaming application created by teenage developer David Nelson, last March. Since then, he's updated the app with radio and MP3 playback and survived a squabble with online music video distributor Vevo.

On Friday, Muziic took another big step with the release of its free iPhone app. It's the first free app that lets users search for and play songs on demand on their iPhones. Like the desktop app, Muziic for iPhone gets around content owners' licensing restrictions by taking content from YouTube, which already has a deal with Apple to … Read more

Google has released an open-source Web security scanner called Skipfish that is designed to allow people to scan Web applications for security holes.

The tool scans a Web application for flaws including "tricky scenarios" such as blind SQL or XML injection, Google developer Michal Zalewski said in the Skipfish wiki.

Skipfish prepares a site map annotated with interactive crawl results, highlighting flaws, after a recursive crawl and dictionary-based probing of the target site. The tool can also generate a final report that can be used as a basis for a security assessment.

Read more of "Google releases Skipfish Web-security scanner&… Read more

Navigon has taken its MobileNavigator app for iPhone and split it into three.

More specifically, the new MobileNavigator MyRegion apps take Navigon's United States map data and breaks it into three regions: East, Central, and West. People who don't stray too far from home can simply grab the region of their choosing to get from point A to B for a reduced entry cost. If you decide to add more maps--for example, to plan a family vacation in another region--the omitted maps can be added later as an in-app purchase.

Navigon says that there is no additional download … Read more

If you ship a lot of packages or find yourself sitting in your front window waiting on the delivery truck--or perhaps if you're obsessively calendar-watching for the day (April 3) to come when some new gadget (iPad) will be delivered--you should consider a tracking app for your iPhone.

Junecloud's Delivery Status Touch does the trick, sells for $2.99 (iTunes link), and lets you track multiple packages from UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, and more than 20 additional global delivery services.

The feature I like the most in Delivery Status Touch is the ability to track orders from Amazon, … Read more

Worldwide demand for mobile applications is set to explode in the next three years as the total value of the market could grow to $17.5 billion, according to a new report released Wednesday.

A study commissioned by GetJar, the second largest mobile app store in the world, predicts that mobile downloads will climb to 50 billion in 2012 up from about 7 billion in 2009. This rapid uptick in downloads will generate about $17.5 billion in revenue for the mobile app market. The mobile market was worth about $4 billion at the end of 2009.

"The global … Read more

Google's assault on Microsoft's enterprise software business continues to advance with a new tool that helps companies move away from Exchange.

The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool will launch later today, designed to give Exchange administrators help in moving their users' data into Google Apps. It's all part of Google's pitch for the benefits of cloud computing, which might sound nice to some administrators in theory but can require a lot of work.

Administrators can now download the tool from Google and move 200 users per hour from Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 to … Read more

TomTom's latest version 1.3 update to its navigation app for iPhone went live this week, adding a handful of new features that we were expecting, and a few that we didn't.

We'd heard previously that the 1.3 update would bring integrated Google Local search and TomTom Traffic. However, rather than rolling the traffic service into the update, TomTom gives users access to the service as an in-app subscription. For U.S. users, this means shelling out $19.99 per year to gain access to live flow and incident data for more accurate routing and arrival … Read more