BeamMe's Twitter integration lets you beam information from your iPhone or iPod Touch directly to Twitter userIDs (@username). This could be a much easier way to send information to your recipients as it will often be faster than typing in a phone number or email address in many cases. It's also a useful feature if you don't have that information on hand, yet need to share your information with someone on Twitter.

But before you panic about an oncoming wave of beamME spam, take heed. The service has introduced some safety precautions to make sure that doesn't happen. For one, you have to activate this feature before it will even work. (You can do so here.) Also, the recipients of your "beam" have to already be following you on Twitter in order to receive your card as it's sent via DM so as to keep your personal info private.

If, however, the recipient isn't following you on Twitter, the beamME app will send them an @ message first, asking them to follow you to receive your card. No additional @ messages or DMs are sent after the initial exchange takes place and if either party wants to unfollow the other later on, that's their choice.

To use this new Twitter integration, you'll need to download the update to your beamME application from iTunes then activate the feature.

beamME Pitch - Could Be Used for More than Just Pitches

Next up from rmbrME is a brand-new application to complement their growing suite of beaming tools which include beamME (the free app), beamME Pro (well worth the price for the extra features), and beamME CV (the "beam your resume" app).

The new app is called beamME Pitch, and, as its name implies, its purpose is to allow sales professionals the ability to beam marketing materials to other phones, email addresses, SMS (worldwide), or again, Twitter. The app lets you send a PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or Text document directly from your iPhone/iPod Touch to your recipient and it will even format it correctly for viewing on a mobile device if necessary. The document is accompanied by your vCard and customizable introductory copy.

Like beamME Pro, beamME Pitch uses the iPhone's geo-location system to place your contacts on a map where you can then tag them with the name of the place you met. It also provides a contact's feed section which tracks your complete beaming history.

However, calling the app "beamME Pitch" may have been a mistake. Using it to beam sales and marketing information may end up being one of its top use cases to be sure, but an app that beams documents wirelessly - sans email - could definitely appeal to a broader crowd. You could easily see this app being used as an email alternative by busy, working professionals who can't carry their laptops with them everywhere but need to send and receive files. It could also become popular among students. Unfortunately, with "Pitch" in the name, we're worried it will get overlooked by the larger crowd of potential users.

This app is available now in the iTunes App Store for $5.99.

Save a Tree, Buy beamME

If you tend to forgo buying premium applications because you're pinching pennies, you should reconsider when it comes to the beamME apps. Not only are they incredible timesavers, the company has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant a tree for every app purchased. So not only are you saving paper by sending documents wirelessly, you're actively helping reverse global deforestation in the process.

Evernote

The newest version of the popular Evernote note-taking app introduced one of the most requested features: offline notes. Through a new button called "favorites," you can mark notes for offline access. If you have Evernote on your iPhone already (who doesn't?), then check the app store for updates because this one is a must-have. Evernote newbies can just download the app now.

Stanza

The Stanza ebook reader lets you port reading material from your computer to your iPhone wirelessly so you can take your books with you when you're out and about. Once loading up with books, you can read them anytime, whether or not you have an internet connection. Download Stanza here. (Another option is Readdle, or check out our previous article for even more ebook readers.)

Instapaper

The Instapaper bookmarking tool for iPhone lets you bookmark web pages for offline reading. As any iPod Touch user knows, mobile Safari's tendency to auto-refresh pages means you can't open up web pages and save them for later reading offline. You could also choose to buy the Pro version for $9.99 which uncaps that limit while also adding other features like tilt scrolling and an adjustable text size. Download here.

Encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia app from Steam Heavy Industries delivers a complete copy of Wikipedia to your iPhone/iPod Touch for offline access. By complete they mean the complete article text, but not references, image descriptions, user profiles, etc. Being warned, though, this app needs quite a bit of storage space: 2 GB. Download here.

NYTimes

The NYTimes iPhone app lets you read the news from the New York Times right on your iPhone. You can navigate through the stories quickly, select up to four favorite sections for one-touch access, choose to browse by photos which link to the stories upon touch, and, of course, read the news offline.

MiGhtyDocs

The MiGhtyDocs iPhone application takes your Google documents offline for access anywhere. You can't edit them and save your changes, but at least you can get to them. Currently, only text documents and spreadsheets are supported. No word on slideshows yet.

An RSS Reader

There are actually quite a few RSS readers available from the iTunes App store, many which sync with your Google Reader for offline access. However, this author's personal favorite is Byline, a $2.99 app which offers a 2-way sync with Google Reader. You can even star, share, add notes, and email your RSS feeds, just like in Google Reader itself. To really juice it up with tons of feeds for an extended period of offline time, go into your Settings app and configure it to archive 200 items instead of its default limit.

What prompted the debate in the first place was Apple's decision to reject an app known as the Podcaster, which would have permitted you to listen to podcasts without first downloading them in iTunes. Because the app "duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," says Apple, they decided to reject it from inclusion in the App store.

Unfairly Rejected?

On almerica.blogspot.com, Sokirynsky wrote how he doesn't understand why Apple can reject his app for duplicating iTunes functionality when similar apps do the same. Specifically he mentions how any calculator app duplicates the functionality of the Apple calculator. Yet what's even more strange, he notes, is the fact that there are already several apps that allow you to listen to a podcast outside of iTunes. For example, popular apps like Diggnation and Mobility Today are designed just for streaming podcasts. Those apps are not banned from the App Store, so why is his?

Working Around Apple: Ad Hoc Distribution

Designed for use in the enterprise environment, Ad Hoc distribution was created so I.T. departments would have the option to distribute apps from their company's own servers. This allows a business to maintain security and save on external bandwidth, while making it simpler to update and remove apps from users' phones. In order to utilize this method for distribution, a developer needs to register 100 iPhones and/or iPod Touch devices.

Obviously, an app distributed this way will have less chance for success than one made publicly available in the App Store, but it appears to be not only a perfectly viable workaround for getting past the Apple censors, but a perfectly legal one as well.

How To Sign Up For Podcaster

Alex has set up a web page at www.nextdayoff.com where he's signing up those interested in downloading the app. Here you must enter your email address and UDID as the first step in the Ad Hoc distribution process. The UDID, or Unique Data Item Description, is available from within iTunes. To see your UDID, you have to click on the word "serial number" which displays beside the picture of your iPhone/iPod Touch when it's connected. The UDID is a long string of alphanumeric characters which will appear in place of the serial number. You can copy this number to your clipboard by using "Ctrl + C" or "Command + C."

After you enter your email address and UDID on the nextdayoff.com web page, you'll receive a confirmation email within 24 hours. (Mine came much quicker - only minutes). Upon receiving confirmation, you can then return to the nextdayoff.com web page and re-enter your email address. At this point, you'll be prompted to make a donation of $9.99, payable via PayPal. After the donation is received, you'll receive an email with a download link to the application, which is distributed as a .zip file. Installation involves unzipping the files and dragging them to iTunes, but be sure to read the included instructions, especially if you're a Windows user, as there are some technical details you'll need to know.

Will Apple Shut This Down, Too?

Alex appears to be the first application developer who thought to use the Ad Hoc method to distribute a banned app. (If you know of others, please comment). However, given that Apple has confirmed the existence of a "kill switch," we wonder if they will start using it to wipe banned, but distributed, apps such as this from our iPhones. If that's the case, you can bet the uproar over that decision will be even greater than it was over the original ban.

It seems like Apple is stuck between the proverbial "rock and a hard place." If they choose to ignore this, Ad Hoc distribution will almost certainly become the method of choice for distributing banned apps. But if they pull the "kill switch," they could then potentially alienate their community of developers. What do you think Apple will do? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

To learn more about what the Podcaster app does, you can view this video:

For us, the install for the new firmware went very smooth and was actually completed a bit faster than our previous updates. The update weighs in at about 250 MB.

Here are some of our first impressions (we have not been able to test Apple's claims about better battery life yet, but we will update this post once we have some more information):

• application updates are now a lot faster
• backups to iTunes are now completed within a minute
• contact information now appears almost instantaneously
• the keyboard is noticeably more responsive (in the SMS application and elsewhere)
• checking for mail still takes a long time
• Genius playlists did not appear functional at first - we had sync the phone without interruption before they were finally working
• 3G reception is improved - at our desk, we now get three or four bars where before, we would at best get one

Overall, we feel this is a very good update that takes care of a large number of annoyances with the original 2.0 firmware.

Some of the updates to the iPod application are also nice, including the new status indication for podcasts, display of album and artist in the 'songs' view, and the addition of the 'Genius' feature to the iPhone.

Notification Server Still Missing

Still missing from this update is the long awaited push notification system that Apple promised during iPhone 3G launch. Given how many users had problems with their battery life when using push email, it makes sense for Apple to try to fix the battery life issues first, though.

Also still missing is copy-and-paste. Hopefully, now that Apple has fixed the major problems in the original 2.0 release, one of the next updates will also add this feature.

iTunes 8 BSOD Fix

Reviews of iTunes 8 and the 'Genius' feature have been mixed (our review was relatively positive). However, the major problem plaguing iTunes 8 has been a steady stream of Vista blue-screens for a large group of users. Apple has acknowledged and fixed this problem.

However, if your system had these issues, you will not see an automatic update in iTunes - instead, you have to either re-download and install the application, or uninstall the faulty driver by hand. The instructions for doing this can be found in Apple's knowledge-base.

The new WordPress App for iPhone supports both WordPress.com installations as well as self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs that are version 2.5.1 and above.

The app includes the following features:

- Embedded Safari previews of posts
- Full support for tags & categories
- Photo support for both camera phone pics and library photos
- Support for multiple blogs
- Ability to password protect a post, save as draft, or mark for later review
- Auto-recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls

You can see WordPress on the iPhone in action in the video below or check out screenshots here:

More information can be found on iphone.wordpress.org where you can review the Frequently Asked Questions and/or report issues with the application.

To download this app from iTunes, click here.

Thanks to Digital Inspiration for breaking the news.

According to Apple's press release, more than 10 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store went live. That is indeed an impressive number. Medialets has crunched some data on these apps and noticed a couple of interesting trends:

• the average price per paid app has fallen from $6.03 at launch on Friday to $5.47 on Sunday
• in general, reviewers on iTunes are rating free apps higher than paid apps
• free apps are rated 25% more often than paid apps

As more apps are added to the store, it makes sense that the average price would drop.

While there are no exact download numbers for the apps available from Apple, Medialets used the number of reviews as a proxy to estimate the number of downloads. Obviously, users are going to download more of the free apps than the paid apps, but if the number of reviews is any indication, the market for paid apps is also very active.

Mobile Gaming

Users are clearly thinking of the iPhone and iPod touch as a mobile gaming platform as well. Currently, except for MLB's At Bat (iTunes link), all the top downloaded apps in the store are games.

This demonstrates that users are quite willing to pay for iPhone applications, as long as they are reasonably priced and easily available. Most of the games are priced between $4.99 and $9.99.

Crashes

While the arrival of native applications on the iPhone and iPod touch was looked forward to with great expectations, reality is slowly setting in and a lot of users and developers are reporting numerous crashes. Most of the time, applications are just crashing right back to the homescreen, but some crashes are taking down the complete operating system, forcing a reset of the phone.

As noted by TUAW, a lot of developers are blaming Apple for this. Judging from the fact that Apple's own Remote application has crashed here quite a few times, it seems that developers rushing out their apps with bugs to beat the deadline isn't the only reason for these problems.

Looking Ahead

While the App Store is still going through some growing pains, it is already clear that there is a huge demand for native apps and that users think of the iPhone as a platform and not just as a fancy mobile phone. Apple is currently facing two major problems: crashing applications and also some cheating among developers. Chances are that Apple is going to (hopefully) release a firmware update pretty soon that will fix the crashes (if they are indeed Apple's fault) and will change the way it sorts applications to prevent some of the more blatant cheating by developers.

Overall, the store has been a major success already, now the question that remains is if it can keep this momentum going after the first wave of curious users has tried it out.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen says that, with or without Apple's blessing, the company plans to develop a Flash player for the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

During yesterday's earnings call (see SeekingAlpha transcript), Narayen told investors that that Flash was "synonymous with the Internet and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the web and experience the web’s glory really needs Flash support".

With new research suggesting that the iPhone has already established itself as the No.1 mobile browser in the U.S., and No.2 in the UK, Narayen would say that.

However, only a week or so ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs poured cold water on the idea of Flash on the iPhone/iPod touch, saying that the version designed specifically for mobile devices - Flash Lite - wasn't good enough, and that Adobe's more powerful desktop offering runs too slowly on the iPhone. What was needed is a “missing product in the middle”, argued Jobs.

Is Adobe committing itself to building the missing version of Flash that Jobs demands?

Or does Adobe really believe it can go-it-alone?

Without Apple providing the hooks to enable Adobe to tap into the iPhone's Safari web browser, it's hard to see how a Flash plug-in could be implemented. Instead, Adobe might be able to create a work around: some kind of stand-alone Flash Player that opens full screen to play certain content. This would work best for playing Flash video but would be useless for viewing websites that integrate Flash with regular HTML components.

Therefore, presuming that Adobe needs Apple's support - which I think is almost certain - and that users want the kind of experiences that Flash supports, how long can Steve Jobs hold out before agreeing to work with Adobe?

The answer: quite a long time, if not indefinitely.

Firstly, the biggest user of Flash video - YouTube - already offers a non-Flash version of the site designed specifically for the iPhone/iPod touch.

Secondly, rather than utilizing Flash to build "rich" Internet-aware applications (RIAs) for the iPhone/iPod touch, Apple is providing developers with an official SDK that will enable them to build native clients for a range of Internet services (as an example, think of the Google Maps application for the iPhone).

And thirdly, in Safari, Apple has already raised the potential of web-based applications by providing a very capable mobile web browser that supports modern so-called Web 2.0 coding standards. In fact, Adobe's own Rich Internet Application Evangelist, Ryan Stewart, recently described the latest desktop version of Safari (3.1) as Apple's own RIA platform, "complete with video and animation support (and offline storage)." Since Safari mobile is built on top of the same codebase as the desktop version, we can expect to see those same improvements brought to the iPhone/iPod touch very soon.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.