The last days really have been thrilling: The first reviews of our shopping app CompareMe for the iPhone and iPod touch came out. The first two reviews on the US AppStore – really exciting, because when somebody is interested to buy the app – this is where he or she is always looking at before pressing the buy button. Unfortunately, there still is no demo feature at the AppStore
But also at several app-review-sites, like AppCraver.com, TouchMyApps.com and also at iPhoneAppPodcast.com checked out CompareMe … and I think we can really be comfortable with. The best price gadget catches on – or in other words:

• “CompareMe is a Good Calculator for Hard Economic Times”
  Michael Alexander @ AppCraver.com
• “Very useful app! Recession friendly ”
  reubensitos @ US iTunes AppStore

Let me take this opportunity to thank all reviewers for guiding users to useful apps they need. And a special thank to all reviewers who took the time to review CompareMe I also want to thank the growing number of CompareMe users – have fun shopping with it. And if you feel like sharing that you use it with others by pressing “I use this” at iphone.iusethis.com.

Apple just published a maintenance release of the iPhone OS 2.2.1 for the iPhone, iPhone 3G and the iPod touch. It’s pretty heavy with more than 240 MB and brings some bug-fixes and improvements:

• Safari: stability improvements – feels snappier now
• Native Mail app: Fixed issue where some images saved from Mail do not display correctly in the Camera Roll – no fuzzy jpegs anymore
• iPod: Fixed issue that caused some Apple Lossless (ALAC) audio files to skip during playback

As the Safari WebViews are used in many apps to display information this upgrade brings more stability to the whole platform.

How to update to 2.2.1: Ensure you have a good internet-connection and some time. Plug in your iPhone to your Mac (or PC) – within iTunes you’ll get a dialog box. Click update … and be patient

Microsoft’s Windows Life Hotmail service wasn’t fun on the iPhone (and on other mobile devices), until now: You had to check the emails via the hotmail website. This was possible with modern smartphone browsers – but it was a usability nightmare.
Now, it looks like Microsoft had to give in the pressure of their customers and add POP3 service to access emails from Hotmail. It’s an old hat for all the other free-mail-providers – but an “innovation” for M$. Now even M$ customers can access their Hotmail-emails via a standard email-client.
This way, it’s even possible to use the native mail app on the iPhone to receive and edit and send mails via a Hotmail account. Also other smartphones like the T-Mobile Google G1 or the Blackberry can now access Hotmail. On the Mac and the PC mail clients work, too – like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or M$ Entourage on the Mac.

The following account settings are needed:

• POP-Server: pop3.live.com (port 995)
• SMTP-Server: smtp.live.com (port 25)
• SSL-Encryption for POP and SMTP connections must be turned on.
• SMTP password authentication must be turned on, too.

New email-accounts can be set up on the iPhone via “Settings” > “Mail, contacts, calender”. Maybe this makes Hotmail a little bit more attractive …

Source: news.softpedia.com

The registration for the – again – biggest Ruby-on-Rails conference in the US is now open: RailsConf 2009. O’Reilly organizes the conference again. but this time it’s not Portland but Las Vegas where the rails community meets again. Las Vegas is not only the US center of gambling and entertainment – it’s also one of the much sought-after conference locations
If you register before March 16th 11:59pm you’ll get an early-bird bonus and save 200 USD.
All rails-pros who want to share their knowledge and give a presentation at the conference, the Call for Participation deadline is extended to February 17th 2009. So you have to be fast!
The conference will be at the Las Vegas Hilton from May 4th to 7th 2009.

Viva Las Vegas!

Sources: rubyonrails.com, RailsConf.com

Really amazing to read these new figures: 500,000,000 app downloads. Never heard of a number like this at one of the mobile operator portals of the pre-iPhone century Vodafone life or T-Motion would have dreamed of numbers like this.
But the 500 million app downloads can not be compared with the number of songs, sold on iTunes: Apple only revealed the complete number of app downloads – free and payed apps. So there is a fundamental difference between the number of (paid and free) apps and (only paid) songs.
More than 15,000 apps is also quite impressive – but it is getting harder and harder to find the apps you really like on the AppStore. There is a lot of room for improvements to meet the needs of consumers as well as developers.