ReadWriteWeb

Gmail users, there's one less reason to use your iPhone mail app and one more reason to stick with the native Gmail mobile Web app. Google announced this morning that it began offering priority inbox for its mobile Web app to help users sort through the flood of email while on the go.

While Apple updated its mail app with iOS 4.0, the mobile Web version of Gmail has a couple of features - now Priority Inbox included among them - that should make you consider ditching the Mail app for good.

There was nothing whatsoever metaphorical in that headline. This isn't an app that lets a soldier make on-the-go journal entries, write poems about his or her feelings or check vitals ala a mood ring. Tactical Nav is an app that lets a soldier map and plot waypoints on a battlefield, take photos and share coordinates with fellow soldiers and units, direct artillery and call in medevac.

Its developer is 31-year-old Captain Jonathan Springer of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne, who reportedly spent $26,000 of his own money to develop the app. It is set for release next month in the Apple App Store.

In what may prove to be the first "yanked from the App Store" story of 2011, TorrentFreak reports that there's a new BitTorrent app available for iPhone users. The app, iControlbits (iTunes link), offers an interface for Transmission, the popular BitTorrent client for Mac.

The iControlbits app allows you to control your BitTorrent downloads remotely, with an interface far improved over the alternative - the mobile web version of Transmission.

On the 50th anniversary of his taking office, MultiEducator has debuted JFK Historymaker 1.0.

The iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch app contains 36 chapters, 250 high-res photographs, the full text of over 200 speeches, 60-plus pages of bio, and 35 video clips.

Long a popular iPhone app for those looking for local recommendations, Yelp has finally released an app for the iPad. The app isn't simply a port of the iPhone features to the iPad, as it's designed to take full advantage of the larger screen.

You can, of course, still search for local businesses and view the results as a list or on a map. But the iPad app adds the option to view the results as a grid of photos. As the success of the food recommendation service Foodspotting has shown, photos - particularly at restaurants - can be a huge factor in making a decision on where to go, and by featuring the photos perhaps both users and businesses will feel more compelled to share more pictures on Yelp.

Today Amazon has launched Windowshop, an iPad application the company describes as "a complete rewrite of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad." The app does not appear to update or replace Amazon's previous iPad application called Amazon Mobile.

Instead, Windowshop is a new standalone experience with a completely different, more visual interface than its predecessor.

Antivirus software provider BitDefender launches the beta version of safego today. Safego is a Facebook app that's designed to bring Internet security features to social networking.

The timing is good. With an increasing number of malware attacks occurring social networks, more Internet users are probably looking for ways not just to scan their emails for infected files but also to scan their social networking profiles (and their friends' profiles) for malicious links. Add to these security threats, of course, the ongoing questions about privacy and the inadvertent revealing of personal information.

Mobile game maker Rovio released a free full version of their popular Angry Birds app for Android users today and the launch has subsequently taken down the company's website and, at times, has impacted the app's download page on the independent app store, GetJar, where the app is being exclusively launched. In fact, the app is proving so popular that GetJar is recommending users visit m.getjar.com from their mobile phone browser instead.

Today Google launched "App Inventor," a do-it-yourself mobile app creation tool that lets anyone build their own Android applications without needing to know how to program or even write a line of code. Instead, using an online interface, would-be developers visually design the app's interface and interactions, using drag-and-drop blocks that specify what the app should look like and how it should behave.

Want your app to talk to Twitter? There's a button for that. Want your app to use text-to-speech? No problem. Use the GPS? Piece of cake. Or so says Google, who had tested the app for a year prior to launch with groups that included "sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergrads who are not computer science majors," reports The New York Times, who broke the story this morning.

Feel like hacking your phone today? If you've got about 10 minutes to spare, you can turn your iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot using a combination of the latest "jailbreaking" software and an app called MyWi. The app takes your iPhone's 3G data connection and shares it out so other computers can connect to it as if it's just another Wi-Fi network. You can even share your 3G connection with your iPad, if you'd like.