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When Jason Kincaid tried out the iPhone app online music streaming startup Grooveshark built and showed off in July 2009, he wrote that it was great but that he “wouldn’t expect this to pop up in the App Store any time soon”. He was right on both counts. Grooveshark now says it has given up on its ambitions to get approved for the official App Store, claiming that Apple has been “ritually rejecting” the app for “primary selfish reasons”. We’ve heard that song before.

Topics: Software , iPhone , iPad When I was young, my mother spent Sunday mornings with grocery store flyers, a pen, and a pad of paper. Once she had identified the best weekly deals, she’d send my dad to buy some items from Grocery Store A, some from Store B and so on. Barclay Jiang has devised a convenient, contemporary solution to the same problem. His free app for the iPhone and iPod touch, Grocery Pal , uses GPS (or Wi-Fi location) to find all of the grocery stores in your area (you can adjust the range of search) and downloads the current sales. From there, you can generate…

Topics: App Store Last week, Apple announced through the iPhone Developer News feed that the iTunes App Store is now supported in 13 additional countries: “You can now distribute your apps to more customers with the addition of App Store support in Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.” Unless an app has been set to “sell in new territories,” developers will need to update their iTunes Connect preferences before their products will be available in the latest batch of added countries. If your apps already have the “sell in new…

Topics: Multimedia , Odds and ends , iPhone We all knew it was coming , and it’s here. Yes, Apple has finally approved, with the belated blessing of AT&T, a version of the SlingPlayer Mobile app that now works on the 3G network. The original release of SlingPlayer Mobile [ iTunes link ] was WiFi only, and was one of the great disappointments of the whole iPhone experience. The folks at Sling Media worked hard to get the app approved, and AT&T finally relented, probably because the FCC has been breathing down the necks of the cellular providers who seem a bit, shall we say, arbitrary about what gets on the network. AT&T had no problem with streaming MLB games, but …

A skeptic might see the Doom II RPG ($4, iPhone/ iPod touch ) as a lame reboot of the Wolfenstein 3D RPG which was a lame reboot of the original Doom RPG. And…wait…that’s kinda true. How absolutely soul-crushing. [ iTunes via Kotaku ]

It ain’t the first company to do it, but Logitech ’s new iPhone app is certainly one of the easiest to get into. Oh, and did we mention that it’s completely free to download? Available now in the App Store, Touch Mouse transforms your handset into a wireless trackpad or keyboard, and thanks to its reliance on vanilla WiFi signals, you won’t need any proprietary equipment to get it up and running. It’s fully compatible with both Mac and PC platforms, and it’s obviously a pretty fantastic way to control your HTPC without dragging a full-fledged keyboard / mouse into the living …

The Apple App Store set the standard for a centralized, trusted marketplace of device-specific software applications. Now, three billion downloads later, technology titans like Intel and Ford are attempting to strike pay dirt with their own app stores. While Apple’s 100,000 strong App Store is the unquestioned champion of the software colosseum, it became clear in interviews that the directors of new stores were taking a distinctly different approach to development. While Apple has been widely criticized for what was perceived as a lengthy and secretive review process , three stores in particular — Twitter’s OneForty, Intel’s AppUp, and Ford’s Sync Open API — each embody a more laissez-faire approach to the app marketplace. Faith in…

Topics: App Store On September 27, 2005 Jon Rubinstein , Palm CEO and former Apple Vice President of the iPod Division, said Apple would be silly to get into the mobile handset marketplace: Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee? There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine. It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices. We all know what’s happened since - Apple dominates the smartphone market while Palm struggles . But you gotta give them something, don’t you? So Palm, congratulations on finally crossing …

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space . A new service, Rally , believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them. It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds , one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large …

A few minutes ago, we got tipped off that Apple has begun a rollout of a redesign of the iPhone App Store within iTunes. It only took a quick check of Twitter and the iTunes store to confirm that, indeed, the application description pages of the iTunes store have changed. The new-look app store is cleaner, whiter, and brings the most important information closer to the top. The new screenshots section of the app store is immediately apparent (and welcomed). It’s not live for every app page, but it is working for most of them. Want to compare the differences? Here’s a screenshot of the old design: Notice the blue-gray background, the location of important description information on the right-hand side…