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This morning, Amazon launched its Amazon Appstore Developer Portal, the first step towards the creation of its own Android App Store, which will exist outside the official Google Android Market. The Amazon Store has been the most highly anticipated of all third-party efforts to date, mostly because of Amazon's brand name recognition, business model and potential for marketplace disruption.

Champagne and fireworks not your thing? Instead of partying it up this New Year's Eve weekend, why not take the time to do a little hacking instead?

??Every so often, we like to feature a "weekend project" here on ReadWriteWeb. These generally consist of the kind of things you'll want to try out and play with when you have some free time, like over a weekend. Past projects have included things like hacking Nike+ for automatic Foursquare check-ins, a resource list on how to get started hacking Microsoft Kinect, experimenting with a customized, third-party version of Chrome OS called "Vanilla," and more.

This weekend, we've decided to round up a few resources detailing how to peek inside your mobile applications.

Mobclix, an iPhone analytics firm and mobile ad exchange network, has released a year-end report which examines the top application trends from 2010. The report, called the "2010 App Game Changers," neatly summarizes what have been some of the most notable developments in mobile over the course of the year.

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available in iTunes, how do you find the good ones? You can read reviews online, seek out new releases via third-party app recommendation sites, check iTunes' Genius picks or its "top sellers" lists, but at the end of the day, one of the most popular ways to find new apps is still the most traditional: personal recommendations.

Now, it looks like Apple is working on technology that will capitalize on that trend. A patent application reveals that Apple has developed a system for sharing applications through peer-to-peer connections with other phones.

ReadWriteWeb doesn't do a lot of mobile application reviews, but every now and then (ideally, every month, but realistically, every 2-3 months) we like to round-up some of our favorite newcomers to the smartphone application scene.

We last rounded up our picks for top new apps in October, when there were 225,00 apps available in iTunes. Today, Apple offers over 300,000 apps, according to its website. And in October, Google announced there were 100,000 apps in the Android Market. Now, independent Android app tracker Androlib puts that number at closer to 195,000 apps. How on earth can you find the good ones? We hope to help...a little.

Contrary to earlier reports that the new Mac App Store would see a pre-holiday launch, Apple today has unofficially announced the real launch date: Jan. 6.

The Mac App Store will offer an iTunes-like experience for finding apps that run on Apple computers running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the latest version of Apple's desktop operating system.

Today, Apple has released its annual "iTunes Rewind" feature, a listing of the most popular content in music, movies, TV shows and mobile applications in its iTunes marketplace. This year, Apple has placed a large focus on mobile apps, providing lists like the top free and top paid iPhone and iPad apps as well as lists of the top grossing apps on both platforms.

But the mobile world is bigger than Apple these days, so a year-end app list can't focus solely on iPhone and iPad. To get a handle on other application popularity trends, we reached out to a number of other companies, like GetJar, the world's second-largest mobile app store, plus other app recommendation and search services like Chomp, AppStoreHQ and Appolicious.

Handset maker Nokia today announced the creation of an experimental app called "Nokia Situations" that can automatically adjust the phone's behavior for various situations and contexts. For example, the app could shut off the ringer whenever you go into a meeting, without you having to explicitly change settings on the device.

According to the application's description, Nokia Situations is able to "sense" things like the time of day, your location, what networks you're connected to, and then adjust one or more phone settings accordingly.

HTML5 was one of the top trends of 2010 (see Richard's post for a detailed analysis of what has been accomplished so far). And one of the areas seeing increased use of HTML5 is mobile devices. In fact, Richard wrote earlier this week, the Mobile Web is one of the key reasons for the emergence of this technology - it allows developers to create applications that function similarly to mobile apps written in native code.

But is HTML5 good enough as it stands today? Should developers be turning to it over native code? Or are native apps still much better? Participate now in one of the mobile industry's hottest debates in this week's poll here on ReadWriteMobile.

Yahoo! Mobile has teamed up with the second largest mobile applications store, GetJar, to integrate mobile apps into its search engine results. Starting now, users conducting searches on their mobile phones via m.yahoo.com, will see a separate section called "apps" which will feature relevant results from GetJar's collection of over 75,000 downloadable applications.