Words is designed to assist you when solving Scrabble and WordScraper types games, crossword puzzles and anagrams.

The interface is clean an intuitive. Simply enter the letters you have in your rack, or those you already know from the crossword and Words will provide you with a list of possible words.

Crossword mode

If you enter “A?E”, Words will return all words beginning with A, ending with E with a single letter in the middle.

Scrabble mode

Searching for “A?E” will return all words which contain an A and/or an E and/or any other letter.

Words currently uses the SOWPODS dictionary.

Watch out for future free upgrades with additional dictionaries and functionality.

Airports is a database of over 9,000 worldwide airports, searchable on IATA, ICAO and Airport Name.

The app is free (ad supported) and I have many plans for future enhancements.

It’s not searchable on the App Store yet (Apple take an age sometimes, but that’s a story for another day) - use this download link to get the app.

Update: Airports is now available from iTunes. Search for Airports and look for the free one from Mark Avey.

To celebrate, they’ve build an “icon wall” representing every app, which must’ve taken some doing!

This is quite an achievement for Apple and all the developers out there. One can only imagine how many there will be in another 12 months, although how many are actually worth installing is another matter.


iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

I’m not quite sure of the appeal of this just yet, apart from the “it can be done” challenge, but it may be something keep an eye on once they get drivers issues etc resolved.

Here’s the story from the Google Blog:

Even before we introduced Google Earth back in 2005, the team had long dreamed of being able to carry the Earth around in your pocket. Well, today that dream becomes a reality as we introduce Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch. With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of our 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:

• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It’s available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store. To learn more, check out this video tour and read the blog post on the Lat Long Blog.

You can read more about this stunning app over on FlightSimX.

I’ve just purchased the app and will be writing a full review, but in the meantime, here are some of the key features:

• Tilt, turn and twist your way through the primordial ooze with your motion-sensing accelerometer
• Pinch, pull and poke your creation in the Creature Editor, customizing the texture, shape and body parts to fit the way you play
• Personalise your game-play by skinning your creature with pictures from your device’s Photo Albums (interesting!)
• Experience 2 exciting game modes - Evolution and Survival
• Navigate trecherous caverns to explore various strange worlds
• Enjoy vivid graphics, dynamic animations and atmospheric music on your evolutionary journey

You can purchase Spore from the iTunes App Store.

Many sites are reporting on the potential of some previously unannounced additional functionality for the phone with the firmware update and also, hopefully a bug fix for the “frozen apps” problem.

Also due is the iPhone version of Spore, which I’m sure is going to keep people hooked.

If it is a wind up, it’s a pretty good one

Has anyone seen or used one of these things? Does it really exist? I’d love to find out!

Setting up the sync is a doddle. Make sure both your iPhone and Mac are on the same network, select iPhone from the Preferences menu, start Things on your iPhone, enter the supplied access code and you’re all set. From then on, as soon as the app is open on both your Mac and iPhone, they’ll automatically sync themselves.

This latest functionality now escalates Things to being my favourite iPhone app.