I was speaking to my buddy Meni earlier today and he asked a question I thought others might also have about updating apps.

Like many others, Meni tends to update his apps directly on the iPhone. The App Store makes it easy by adding a badge to the App Store icon showing the numbers of updates available. Tap the icon, follow instructions, and your app gets updated. The next time you sync the updated version gets transfered over to iTunes.

Unfortunately, between the initial release of the firmware update, and now that Apple removed the ability to “Update All”, that means updating numerous apps can be a bit of a pain.

Disclaimer: Even though we normally do not do any sort of hardware reviews, we thought that since there were a lot of new apps being released for use in the car, and we have tried many different hardware solutions for mounting and audio input, some of you might also be interested in what we discovered.  So we are going to put up a few posts about different products we thought you might be interested in…

RAM Mount Mobile Phone Holder – Review

A few weeks ago, we went on a bit of a rant about how one developer launched the same app with different names, same price, and functionality.  Well, that number has since ballooned, and there appears to be no stopping this App Store polluter.

Todays app event isn’t quite so egregious, but it is a more than a bit ridiculous.  We received a number of emails from one of our readers, soundsgoodtome. He wrote–

EMAIL 1.  "wow — competing apps on the same day! Did you notice these two, competing apps, both released today?  one is $4.99, and the other is $0.99! (i predict a price-drop within 48 hours!)"

EMAIL 2.  "and a 3rd one! wtf???"

EMAIL 3.  "ok, this is ridiculous, now. (#4!) How can 4 apps that do the *same* thing all be released on the *same* day???"

Well, we had noticed too… 

UPDATED

I am a HUGE fan of Appigo’s ToDo and Notebook. Both work amazingly well at synching the web-based task management program Toodledo to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Tonight an app actually entitled Toodledo appeared in the App Atore. At $3.99 (vs $9.99 for ToDo and $4.99 for Notebook), the app is a deal!

Or is it?

I quickly got a copy and loaded my Toodledo account into its settings. The app has some powerful features. Unlike ToDo, Toodledo includes fields for Context and Goals.  Both of these are important if you use a "Getting Things Done" approach to your talk management.  In addition, it syncs quickly with Toodledo and includes useful sorting fields such as Hotlist, Starred Items, and more.  All of these are excellent and make this app much more like the web-based Toodledo than ToDo.

There is, however, a huge shortcoming in this release of Toodledo.

Update: Shaker is another game that will soon (read- hours NOT days) be MIA from the App Store.

If you want it… get it right now.

Thanks Kevin!

Alex over at WebIS (the developer behind Note2Self and Speedster GPS) was kind enough to let me know that the game Shaker, previously $9.99, is now free in the App Store.

Similar to a well-known classic puzzle game, Shaker has a twist– According to the developer-

Before the game starts choose how you want to control the game: Classic – by tapping buttons that appear on the screen below the play field, Stirred – by using simple finger gestures, and Shaken – by shaking your iPhone. As blocks fall down the playing field you can manipulate them, by moving sideways and/or rotating, with the goal of completing a row of objects without gaps. When such row is completed, it disappears, and any objects above the deleted row will fall. As the game progresses, the blocks fall faster, and the game ends when the stack reaches the top of the playing field, so no new blocks are able to enter. At the end of the game, if your score reaches the top-10 list one of 101 martini recipes stored in the program is randomly unlocked.

I haven’t played it but it looks like fun. You can get it HERE in the App Store.