Applications

Great news for fans of short fiction: The Colossal Short Stories Collection just landed in the App Store packing a whopping 2,222 public-domain works.

There are, of course, other story collections available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but this is by far the largest one.

You'll find authors ranging from H.G. Wells and Mark Twain to Leo Tolstoy and Ring Lardner. All the greats are here, along with plenty of authors known mostly in scholarly circles.

The app lists them alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, that's the only way to peruse the collection: you can'… Read more

If you're the kind of person who feels bewildered in a pharmacy, here's a free app to test drive.

Evincii's new Pickka Med app is designed to function like an "expert pharmacist in your pocket," where people are able not only to search by phone for the best over-the-counter FDA-approved medicine in any given participating pharmacy but in the process avoid touching all the germ-addled bottles lining the shelves of the one place where sick people invariably shop.

Previously, Silicon Valley-based Evincii installed kiosks at hundreds of retail stores, providing guided-search technology to help shoppers … Read more

Would you like to let AT&T know when your iPhone has dropped a call? Well, now there is an app for that.

AT&T on Monday released a new application called "Mark the Spot," which lets iPhone users submit complaints about dropped calls, poor service coverage, and less-than-perfect voice quality.

The application is free and available in the iTunes App Store. It uses GPS technology in the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS to pin point where the user is when experiencing the problems. For first generation iPhones, it uses cell tower-triangulation to get a … Read more

Frequent Yelp users will be pleased to see a Yelp for Android app take its place in the Android Market on Monday. Be forewarned, however, that the app contains the minimum services from Yelp.com in this iteration.

There's the usual search for restaurants and businesses nearby, which Yelp sniffs out using GPS or cell tower triangulation. Results records include ratings, reviews, and photos you can view from the phone. You can click or press a button to call the business. There's another button to map the location to a movable Google map, and this version thankfully includes … Read more

Every week I try to list the updates for utilities that can help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems, an outline one that I've not discussed before. This week I noticed an update to "Maintenance", which is a program that has a variety of performance optimization and system cleanup routines for OS X.… Read more

For a friend's birthday the other night, we all went down to his rehearsal space (he's in a band) and played music, often switching instruments to see what we could come up with. Not everyone there was a musician, but with drums, guitars, basses, a keyboard, percussion instruments, and microphones, everyone found a way to get in on the jam. To add to the fun later in the night, my friend also had a cord to connect an iPod or iPhone to the PA system which meant I could try out some of my music apps. Among the … Read more

As the number of apps and games continues to grow for Android, it's getting harder to keep on top of everything. Rather than trying out every title that enters the Android Market, I like to look for specific genres of apps.

For instance, I really enjoy casual games on my T-Mobile G1. I always find at least a few minutes of downtime throughout my day so I'm constantly trying to get a new high score or unlock a new puzzle. However, as much as I'd love to try out every brain game that's released, it's … Read more

Fans of Midomi, the song-identifying app for iPhone, will still recognize the app when the iPhone prompts an update to version 3.0, even if they don't recognize the new name: SoundHound. The app's core remains the same with its outsize orange button you tap to sing, hum, or record a song you want to ID, buttressed by another button for shier folk to speak the artist or song name, and a text field for old-fashioned typing. What's new is big, and it centers on two additional tabs below, one that lets you browse music trends and … Read more

Update: Shortly after this post went up, the app was removed by the developer.

File it in the "get this while you can" category. Last week Apple approved a 99-cent application called iRwego that features both the sounds and artwork of the Super Mario series from Nintendo. And yes, it's still up--though probably not for long. Update: the app has since been taken down by the developer.

The app, not blessed by Nintendo, plays more than a minute of music from the Super Mario game while using the iPhone/iPod's accelerometer to take into account any … Read more