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Apple's App Store within the iTunes store has revolutionized the way users expect to find and install applications on their mobile phones, but it is also a bit of a resource hog and it often takes quite a while before pages finally load.

Now, however, thanks to an online version of the App Store which scrapes the content of the store in iTunes, you can quickly browse for applications, read reviews, and see screenshots from any computer that has access to the Internet without ever having to open iTunes.

A funny thing happened on the way to the airport. I searched through the iTunes App Store on my iPhone for a Southwest app that allowed for flight check-ins, only to find that it didn't exist. I don't know why I expected it to be there, but I did. Southwest is one of those companies that seems so "with it" when it comes to this digital age we live in. They have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a flickr account, and a YouTube channel. So why no iPhone app?

If you own an iPhone and you're fairly technical, then you've no doubt gone through the steps necessary to "jailbreak" your iPhone - the process that opens up the phone to allow for the installation of unapproved third-party applications. However, for the non-technical consumers who are now purchasing the iPhone in droves, this final, critical step in making the device more usable is often unknown or overlooked.

At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

Apple today announced an online component to its iWork productivity suite. This, however, is not the rumored online version of iWork we were hoping for, as it only allows you to share documents online through iWork.com. After you share a document through the newly released iWork '08 desktop software, your friends and co-workers can comment and leave notes on your Keynote, Pages, or Numbers documents, though the documents themselves can't be edited online.

Ever since Apple finally lifted the NDA covering the iPhone SDK, a small number of developers have started to open source their native iPhone apps. Today, Freshbooks, a popular online time-tracking and invoicing service, joined this group by open sourcing its native iPhone application. Other open source iPhone apps include Wordpress, the applications from Apps Amuck's 31 Days of iPhone Apps, and a collection of source code for handling the iPhone's touch controls.

Have you ever wondered what iPhone apps are hot in Japan? If you're attending this year's MacWorld conference in San Francisco, you'll have a chance to find out. There, Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japanese Mac and iPhone tech journalist and blogger, is hosting an event called "Japan iPhone Apps: State of the Market," which will be held on Wednesday, Jan 7th. If you can't make the event, here's a sneak preview of the apps being featured.

According to some rumors today, Apple might be working on an online version of its iWork productivity suite. 9to5Mac reports that they have received information about this from credible sources, though as with all Apple rumors around this time of year, it is hard to discern truth from wishful thinking. However, given that online office suites are clearly an up-and-coming market, with Microsoft poised to join the fray early next year, it would make sense for Apple to be heading in this direction as well.

The one feature that is still sorely missing from the iPhone is copy and paste. While we have seen a few third-party developers attempt to hack together a working system, none of these ever really worked out because they exploited loopholes in the iPhone operating system that Apple simply closed.

Today, however, copy and paste between Safari and Mail is really coming to the iPhone, courtesy of two nifty JavaScript bookmarks from Pastebud. Instead of trying to hack the operating system, Pastebud elegantly circumvents these problems by outsourcing most of the copy and paste mechanism to the web. We have been testing it for the last two days and it does indeed work as advertised.