Apple is about to reach its 25,000,000,000 billion app downloads and wants to give you $10,000 to celebrate it. Yes, for the lucky number 25 billion, Apple will give an App Store Gift Card with a value of $10,000.

The numbers are remarkable. A little over a year ago, they had celebrated the 10 billion mark and had another contest to give away $10,000. Given that the App Store launched in 2008, with 10 million app downloads in the first week alone, the growth has been exponential.

Here are some more numbers. There are currently over 500,000 active apps and over 100,000 that are inactive (no longer available). There are over 130,000 active app publishers in the U.S. App Store. The monthly submissions at the App Store are about 9,000 (and growing), with over 84 percent of those being games. The current average app price is $2 while the current average game app price is $1. With over 300 million iOS users, you can see why these numbers are so important.

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Kik App — No Pun Intended

Kik has become one of the leading companies in instant messaging, with over 6 million users worldwide. Along the way, the company faced a few legal problems over patent infringement with Research In Motion (RIM, makers of BlackBerry), but that hasn’t stopped the firm from continuing to grow. And now they’ve seen a new business venture on the horizon. Not only do they want users to be able to connect via their application, they also want to make a content-sharing application that will allow users to share documents with one another.

Kik to Start

The new API is designed to help users share content from one app to the same app on another device. With this API, there will be no need to utilize Facebook, Twitter, or emails to send links to open webpages. Users will be enabled to send each other restaurant reviews, drawings, and even gameplay levels. In order to do this, both users need to have Kik installed. If, however, a user doesn’t have the application, they will get a message prompting them to download it. How thoughtful.

Kik is also implementing an option called Apps That Kik in Kik Messenger, another thoughtful way to introduce you to other apps that are enabled by Kik. The new version of Kik Messenger became available on the 22nd of December and is currently compatible with Android and iOS devices. Kik is also working on having the API on FileKicker, DrinkOwl, Smiler, Zwonks, and FlyScreen.

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The Mobile Life Guard: Guardian of Safety or Big Brother?

Mobile Life Guard, a smartphone app developed by researchers at the University of North Texas, promises to keep an eye on drivers—just in case no one else was watching.

What is Mobile Life Guard?

It always starts the same way: well-meaning scientists and researchers developing something that they think will benefit the public and improve society. Soon enough, someone—perhaps one of the well-meaning scientists themselves—realizes that in addition to serving the public good, there is money to be made. Full stop.

Then comes the inevitable sales pitch to the big corporation followed by the greedy capitalist writing a big check knowing full well they are paying pennies on the dollar. The start is always the same, but the ending differs. The question for the researchers at the University of North Texas and their team at The Mobile Life guard is simple. Financial considerations aside, are you prepared to accept the distinct possibility of a Big Brother endgame?

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Ice Rage for Your iDevices

Ice Rage by Mountain Sheep is a highly entertaining hockey experience for the iPhone and iPad devices. Just think of Maurice Richard as one of those little cube-like LEGO action figures and you can start imaging what this experience might be like.

Ice Rage Layout

Ice Rage can be played in both single player and multiplayer mode. You have three difficulty levels to choose from: Easy, Medium, and Hard. When you begin, you are the red team—no, not the Russians, take it easy!

First, you select the avatar that will represent you on the ice. Your choices are, well, interesting. You can be a light-on-his-toes Santa Claus; a politically incorrect, hard-hitting Enviro-Bear; or John Gore from the Mountain Sheep game Minigore. Even the Bike Baron makes an appearance.

You then get a virtual stick wielded by a single-shot button and have one minute and 45 seconds to score on the blue team. A ‘joystick’ gets you moving around the screen, and you hit the puck with an action button. In the single player mode, these buttons are on the bottom part of the screen. In the multiplayer mode, two sets of these buttons appear on either side of the screen.

Ice Rage Gameplay

Your objective in Ice Rage is simple: score as many goals as possible. In case of a tie, you go into the proverbial overtime. Some of the game restrictions make Ice Rage a little more interesting. For example, you can only shoot the puck in the direction you are facing. The goalkeepers react well to direct hits. However, it is easy to confound them with rebounds and shots from awkward angles. And if you hit the right slap shot, the puck goes rebounding off the walls and possibly into your own goal.

In multiplayer mode, the game gets more opportunistic, as the players make their own mistakes. Since neither you nor your opponent has any control over the goalkeepers in this mode, their ineptitude makes it only more amusing.

Ice Rage for the iPhone and iPad is like having a slapstick comedy (no pun intended) unfold on a virtual hockey rink. Hilarity abounds.

Ice Rage can be found at your virtual App Store.

Draw Pad Pro App Review — an App for Analog Users

Draw Pad Pro: Amazing Notepads and Sketchbooks! ($1.99) by Fishington Studios (makers of some pretty nifty aviation apps) have put together a sketch-up app for those analog members of society who still cannot fully integrate with their machines.

As cellphone screens get smaller, our fingers bring about usability issues with iOS devices, especially for drawing and note-taking apps. With a stylus and the Draw Pad Pro app, this is now a simpler task. A great, free-drawing app, Draw Pad Pro allows you to organize notebooks, create pages within the notebook, and choose different styles for each page. You can even choose to export entire notebooks or individual pages in PDF format.

Draw Pad Pro’s Features

For creating a sketch-based note, the Draw Pad Pro gives its users plenty of features. From the main screen, you can create a new notebook and give it a title with a descriptive title. The color of the notebook’s cover can also be selected, as well as a default paper selection. For individual papers, the app provides dozens of different styles to choose from, beginning with blank music sheets, all the way to a hangman style. These can be browsed using the page-turning gesture that is associated with iDevices.

When the user is ready to add pages to a notebook, eight icons appear at the bottom of the page: a magnifying glass, a pencil, a paper styler, trace, photo, a large X, an eraser, and a road sign signaling a curving turn to the right (which is a kind of back button).

Draw Pad Pro’s Functionality

The magnifying glass in Draw Pad Pro might be confused with a feature that would allow the user to magnify a portion of the page. It is, in fact, a manual search function, showing the thumbnails of pages in any given notebook. The pencil is a link to the edit mode, which is where the user can choose from various colors and tip thicknesses for writing utensils. Paper style can be chosen for individual pages. Trace allows the user to either take a photo or select an existing one and use it as a backdrop for tracing with adjustable opacity. The photo feature has to be purchased as an app-in. It can add a photo to a drawing, while rotating and scaling the photo.

If you are not happy with your drawing, you can delete the entire thing with the X. An Undo/Redo function is a strange omission for the Draw Pad Pro app, given the chaotic nature of sketching. You must either delete the entire drawing or use the eraser. Once the drawing is finished, you can click on the road-sign icon, which will return you to the cover of the notebook or to the notebook itself.

Draw Pad Pro in Comparisons with Other Apps

Although Draw Pad Pro lacks the polish of the more mature sketching apps, like Brushes, it makes up for it with its array of styles, features, notebook themes, paper designs, and export options. Its beautifully rendered notes, high-quality pages, and attractive notebook covers make for a high-visual appeal. Two features, the draw responsiveness and the ability to zoom-in on your drawing to fill-in details, make it a top-notch app.

Future Expectations for the Draw Pad Pro

The navigation experience in Draw Pad Pro is a little disappointing, however. For example, the magnifying glass icon shows a screen full of thumbnails pages. While selecting the pen color or a paper style, the user is unaware of their present selection and cannot exit without making a choice. Additionally, it only allows a single choice at a time, which means that you will have to go to the same menu twice to select line color and then to line weight, although both are shown.

Even though the hangman blank page shows you a landscape mode, all drawings are made in the portrait mode. There is no landscape feature.

Overall, the Draw Pad Pro seems to be a good contender in the Productivity category at the App Store.

Urge App Urges You to Save

Urge for iOS devices helps you control your impulsive buying. Yes, that decision to buy something before you’ve even made the decision to buy it. The app is simple and easy to use—and if used regularly, it could save you thousands of dollars per year.

Controlling the Urge

Stop for a moment and think. That coffee on the way to work this morning. At the time, you found the $5 inconsequential, trivial. You know you can get coffee free at work, but you bought it anyway. A habit, an impulse—an indulgence. A recent study by British energy provider npower found that, on average, a couple spent close to $4000 a year on impulsive purchases.

The basic concept behind Urge is not new. Harvard Professor Shawn Anchor—in his book, The Happiness Advantage—introduces us to the “20-second rule.” Simply put, if you delay an impulse purchase by as little as 20 seconds, odds are that you will avoid it. You stop and think. You turn from impulse to reason.

What Urge does is take a simple concept and use it as the foundation for an app that packs in the tools to make the process simple and painless.

How Does Urge Work?

One of the main reason we don’t automatically stop ourselves from impulse or habitual buying is because we have no motivation to do so. Urge provides that. The app lets users set goals and targets that are visible and tangible. When you are about to buy that coffee or donut or that 15th pair of shoes, you can take out your phone for a quick reminder.

That vacation in December or the credit card you want to pay off. Your child’s field trip or that new video game console. Urge helps motivate you by helping you to set goals—and to keep those goals front and center.

A quick tap and that 5 or 7 or 20 dollars is added to the running total of what you have saved. The Urge app keeps track of your progress in search of your goals. If you choose to, built-in Facebook integration even allows you to share some of your saving info with friends. Best of all, it’s free.

When You Feel the Urge…

The second thing that Urge does is provide you with the tools to quickly and effortlessly transfer that money to a savings account. There are two ways to do it. The easiest way is through an in-app purchase for $1.99 that allows the Urge app to do it for you automatically. If you prefer, there is also a $0.99 option that will enable the feature, but you will have to manually transfer the funds.

Of course, you still have to want to do it. If you have the desire though, Urge may be just what you need to turn your dreams into reality.

Urge can be downloaded for free at the App Store.

If you’re ever looking for an example of competition resulting in innovation and, ultimately, improved consumer products — you need look no further than the technology marketplace, and a little story about two rivals by the names of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  There’s no questioning the genius of either man — but it’s also clear that, without the rivalry they shared, neither Jobs nor Gates would have achieved quite as highly.  Steve Jobs, in particular, took some painful lessons learned from his nemesis and turned them into pure Apple gold.  To understand that ironic cause and effect, you have to go back to the beginning…

Back in the eighties, in the true infancy of desk top computers, the field was crowded with companies attempting to gain market share.  At one point Atari was a market leader, with their box-like 16K contraption that offered nothing more than the most basic programming.  There was also the Commodore 64 – Atari’s main competitor.   But, as the industry started to grow,  two main players started to emerge.  One was a company called “Apple,” with its self-contained, giant-toaster-looking computer built in Steve Jobs‘ garage.  The other was a little company started by a Harvard drop out named Bill Gates.   Gates had shrewdly purchased the rights to something called DOS at the time, and then wrote a new program called Windows that made operating a personal computer much more simple for the non-technical user.

Steve Jobs had his fans

Right from the start, Steve Jobs’ company had its loyal — some would even say ”fanatical” –  user base.   Mac users were as die-hard then as they are now.  But back then, Apple was engaged in a life-and-death struggle to gain market share against this nerdy kid in Washington state who had a company called Microsoft.  The future of computing was at stake — and each of the two major players in the game was determined to win.

In retrospect, Steve Jobs and Apple really didn’t stand a chance.  Microsoft and Windows was licensed out to just about every major hardware company on the planet.  The result of that was that there were essentially two types of computers – Apple’s proprietary devices,  and every other computer by every other manufacturer in the world, all of which were running Windows and DOS.

For the consumer though,  what really made the computer was the software and programs you could run on it.  Computer gaming was a new trend back then – after all, this was a generation that had grown up in seedy mall arcades across North America.  It was an exciting development when you could suddenly play in your own living room, on your own computer.  The only  question was:  which computer would you buy?

In that dark time before the Internet, downloading, and file sharing, software was something you bought from a store.   And when you were deciding which computer to buy — your decision was largely influenced by how much software it was compatible with.  On one little wall in the corner, you’d see the Apple-compatible software – and, then, taking up ten shelves and four aisles of floor-to-ceiling space, you would see the software dedicated to Windows programs.    This is where Windows had an insurmountable lead over it’s main competitor – a lead that it has never given up.

It didn’t take a degree in psychology to know that Steve Jobs was not a happy camper when, in 1985, the company he created was wrestled away from him in the boardroom of Apple Inc.    Jobs went on to found Pixar, the company responsible for such huge hits as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.   He also created a new computer company called NeXT which was acquired by Apple in 1996 – a move that brought Jobs back into the near-bankrupt Apple organization.  As he took over the post of CEO and Overall Supreme Warlord – Jobs took those painful lessons he learned from Microsoft and turned them to his advantage.

Steve Jobs Applies the Lessons Learned…

It started with a new service called iTunes – introduced at the same time as a new portable music player called iPod; a handy little device that could hold 1000 songs in your pocket.   Then, in 2007, Apple announced that it was getting into the cell phone business and the world caught its first glimpse of the iPhone.   Shortly after that, Apple introduced the App store – a giant online software retailer where Apple was the only kid on the block.   It signalled the end of one era and heralded the beginning of another — an era where Apple no longer had to play second fiddle to Microsoft and Windows.  Steve Jobs had learned the hard way that no matter how cool or smart the device was – the real key to consumer loyalty was in having the software applications to make that device an indispensable element of the owner’s life.

Twenty years earlier, Jobs had learned from Bill Gates that no matter how smart your computer was – what made people buy it was the programs they could run on it.  Applying that knowledge, he built the entire Apple mobile empire on software that was only compatible with Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPod , and iPad.

It’s a lesson that other companies may be learning right now — a lesson that is bringing Blackberry creator Research In Motion to the brink of bankruptcy, and a lesson that many new players in the Tablet and Smart Phone industry will learn as they fail commercially.  As the school of hard knocks taught Steve Jobs, it’s ultimately the software programs that make any device a must-have item.

Movie Trailers Go Social with MoviePal

Online incubator YouWeb has just launched the iPhone app MoviePal. And it will change the way you watch movies—well, movie trailers.

Cue Lights

So, you’re in a theater. You settle in your chair, establish the perfectly triangulated position between you, the buttered popcorn, and your soda. The lights dim—and a barrage of upcoming trailers are flashed on the screen. Admittedly, a few of the trailers will be stinkers (maybe not the actual movie, but that’s a whole other discussion).

There will be a couple, however, that will make you turn to your girlfriend or best friend (or the stranger sitting next to you, admit it) and say, “Wow, that looks amazing.” Then, the minute you walk out the theatre and try to remember the trailers so that you can tell a friend, you’re like, “What was that film? I remember there was a dog. And it was really funny.”

But you can’t remember the title, the actors, perhaps even your own name at this point. It’s like that awkward moment at a party where you are introduced to someone and a second later you are left searching the tendrils of your memory for the girl’s name.

Enter MoviePal

MoviePal takes the work out of sharing your movie tips with friends with a simple, full-featured service. When a trailer comes on, you just tap a button and the app will analyze the sound and identify the trailer (i.e., the movie). It will then automatically store that information for you—all at the touch of a finger. If this sounds familiar, it is. Shazam has a similar application that allows you to identify music anywhere you hear it.

So now the movie trailer is there for you to use in a variety of ways. From within the app, you can pass the trailer along to your friends. The app can also send you a notification when the movie is playing at a theater near you.

Another cool MoviePal feature is the ability to schedule movie dates with friends. And what if you just want to find trailers the old fashioned way? Well, you can—by searching through its database, which currently lists over 500 titles.

One really big plus is that none of your friends need to have the app. In fact, none of them even need to have an iPhone or any other iOS device. MoviePal allows you to quickly send the trailer using established channels such as text messaging and email. Facebook and Twitter are also supported.

The New Consumer

Increasingly, a new type of consumer is emerging, consumers who want what Peter Relan—brother of MoviePal co-founder Rohan—calls the “dual screen” experience. This type of interaction is gaining widespread appeal in sports and politics. People seem to love the ability to pick up their smartphone or tablet and pull up stats on players while they watch a football game, for example. What this app does is take that experience and apply it to entertainment.

YouWeb is best known as the outfit that created OpenFeint. That start-up was famously bought for 104 million by the Japanese social-networking service GREE. OpenFeint is currently used by over 5,000 games and is said to reach an audience of 75 million. Shazam has recently extended its service to movies, and the free app MovieGoer is also a competitor in this emerging category.

Some might see this latest development as just another way of further dividing our already fragmented attention. Those who welcome this type of service, however, see it as method of integrating knowledge—even if that knowledge centers on a new Beethoven film (the Saint Bernard, not the composer, and they have made seven in the series—and counting).

MoviePal was released December 22nd and is available for free at the App Store.

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) has released its 2011 Holiday Gift Guide, with special focus on iPhone apps for students. TUAW is recognized for being a trusted source for all things Apple, and this latest guide for students promises to bring in the new semester with joy, mirth, and technological merriment.

The following are some of the highlights from the guide:

1. Pocket Money ($4.99)

Okay, finances are probably the last thing you want to think about after the holidays, especially given that most of us spend feverishly in the weeks leading up to them, which is precisely why it might not be a bad idea to let this app set you back on track. Pocket Money is reputedly the number one finance app in many countries, while other sources suggest that it got all the way to number two in Taiwan—overall. No small feat in a nation where mobile devices are as common place as coconuts.

2. University Apps (Free)

Most major universities now have an app you can download that provides all kinds of useful information on libraries, transit, courses, events, and maps (which would have been invaluable for those of us who grew up in the dark days before GPS and mobile devices). I suspect, however, that information on the best campus watering holes will require another application all together.

3. Find My Friends (Free)

This app should be used with discretion. It allows your friends and family to track your whereabouts using the iPhone GPS. This will undoubtedly prove useful when trying to locate a friend at a busy campus, but may have dire consequences when your mom, whom you gave your timetable to, sees that you are at a matinee instead of in your afternoon Organic Chemistry class.

4. Grades 2 (Free or $0.99 to remove ads)

Remember when some of your classmates used to sit around before a final exam and wonder how much they needed to score to pass a class? Well, now there is an app for that. Through what must surely be intricate computational analysis, this little app decides what the path of least resistance is, academically speaking (it should be noted that it can also calculate what you need to get to be on track for an A).

5. Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock ($0.99)

By placing your iPhone under your pillow and leaving the app on, it will determine when you are in deep sleep and thus calculate your optimal wake time (during the lightest phase of your cycle). This all works great, assuming you have not been out all night and just have time for a catnap.

For more information on these apps and the guide go to

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/20/holiday-gift-guide-iphone-apps-for-students/

Also, check out TUAW’s iPad apps guide for students:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/14/holiday-gift-guide-ipad-apps-for-students/