What’s you main iOS device, your daily driver, your gateway to the App Store? No doubt many of you have an iPhone, but which one? Those who don’t, did you go for iPod touch or iPad, and which model? Even if you have one of everything, which is your most used, your favorite, the one you simply couldn’t do without?

We already know a lot of you are just waiting for iPhone 5 to update, but now we want to know what you’re going to be updating from. And yes, it’s not multiple choice, you’re going to have to pick a side!

Vote in the poll up top and give me the details, why you use one more than the others, in the comments.

Apple released iTunes Match, their iCloud-powered music locker service, into beta yesterday and immediately — and rightly — it’s been Zapruder-ed by every eyeball online, especially when it comes to whether it downloads music, streams it, or both. And confusion and conflation have followed.

Sure, technically there’s a difference between downloading a song to your local iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Mac or Windows PC and playing, and streaming that song directly to your device from iCloud. But many downloads will start playing before they finish and most streams will cache locally to prevent hiccups due to the ever present irregularity of internet connections. The lines are blurry, and made even blurrier by the music industry who wants to nickel and dime Apple, and consumers, at every turn.

(It’s fair to say that if the music industry acted 20 years ago the way they act now, CDs would have been licensed per-player. You want to play that CD you bought in your car and in your living room? Pay us again! You want to play it in your bedroom? PAY US!)

As it stands, Apple technologically and no doubt contractually doesn’t want anyone to know or care about whether or not iTunes Match downloads or streams from iCloud. The same way Apple doesn’t discuss things like RAM, my guess is they’re not going to specify exact behavior for iTunes Match.

You’ll hit “play”, Apple will take care of managing the local/iCloud relationship. Just like they don’t think my mom should have to worry about file systems on iPad, they probably don’t think she should have to figure out download vs. stream. It should just work.

Once iTunes Match is stable and out of beta, no doubt every geek and their packet sniffer will pour over it, parsing out every nuance of the stream vs. download behavior, and keep us updated when Apple tweaks it and makes changes to it going forward.

Meanwhile my mom won’t worry about whether or not she’s synced the Lion King Musical soundtrack, or how many GBs she has left. She’ll just hit play and listen.

(Or she would if they released the damn thing in Canada.)

Marc Edwards of Bjango, and co-host of our Iterate podcast, has put up some pro tips and tricks on exporting iPhone, iPad, and other UI elements from Photoshop.

It's probably the least interesting part of designing software, usually entailing hours of grinding. Saving images to multiple scales — as required by iOS and other platforms — adds complication to the process. However, there are ways to streamline or automate exporting.

Check out Marc’s article, linked below, so you can get your pixel perfect apps and web sites out of Photoshop and into the hands of users.

[Bjango]

 

Bury council in the UK, is looking to provide its refuse (garbage) collection team with iPads to improve its service. Unfortunately the council is facing huge criticism for the plan due to the need to make £18 million pounds worth of spending cuts. The iPads will set them back around £9,000.

The iPads will be mounted on the refuse collecting trucks dashboard to provide route guidance for the driver. More importantly they will be used to gather data on households who do not recycle or fail to put out their bins altogether.

Glenn Stuart, Bury’s head of waste management, said: “The scheme is replacing paperwork, which can get lost or get wet. Waste collection is a dirty operation. iPads will be pre-loaded with information and streets and houses will be seen on-screen.” He added that taxpayers would get “a much-improved and more efficient service”.

The scheme has come under some severe criticism from tax payers and MP’s alike. Most suggest that a pen and paper would be a far more cost effective way of gathering the same information.

[The Sun]

If tech site Greek-iPhone is to be believed, they’ve got their hands on even more iPhone 5 components, namely an updated camera module. As always we will take it with a grain of salt but the images appear to line up with what many sites and other blogs have already heard regarding the camera getting an upgrade.

This one includes more megapixels (which is probably a given) and a different form factor from the current camera found in the iPhone 4. It’s slimmer and has a more rounded shape. We’ve been hearing that the next generation iPhone would carry a slimmer form factor and this lines up with that theory.

Next generation iPhone part leaks are getting more and more abundant, but that will come to an end when Apple makes an official announcement in the coming weeks.

[Greek-iPhone via 9to5Mac]

TiPb’s developer spotlights are like DVD/iTunes Extras for the App Store — a weekly look behind the scenes at the programers and designers that bring you the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games you love. This week Rene talks with Mike Smithwick of Distant Suns.

What’s your name? Mike Smithwick

What’s your company’s name? First Light Design, LLC, I was hoping to name it something like "Apple," I know, dumb name, but someone already had it.

Where are you located? San Jose, CA. Within walking distance of Cisco (really!), Intel, eBay, and only a few miles always from the Mother Ship.

What’s your website address? www.distantsuns.com

What’s your Twitter name? @distantsuns for any hot breaking news about, uh, Distant Suns (duh!). And @lazyastronomer for general space and astronomy geek stuff.

Why @lazyastronomer? When people ask me why I wanted to write Distant Suns, I just told them I was way too lazy to haul a telescope up a mountain and freeze off the stuff I wouldn't really want to have frozen off just to see something I could create on my iPad while I am watching Lassie reruns on Nickelodeon and eating Cheeze Whiz out of the can. I'm sure your readership can relate to that.

What apps do you make? Distant Suns-Lite, the freebie, Distant Suns 2, the iPhone only version, and Distant Suns 3, the super-double-maga-licious universal version. Then there is WeatherPlanet, Grand Tour-3D and the Live365 music client and a Cisco client for their Pulse software that helps people large companies connect based on specific experience tech expertise needed at the time.

What apps, other than your own, are currently among your favorites? I am a sucker for clock and weather apps. My favorite clock apps are CloqWork, one of the most charming apps I have ever seen, and one of the hardest to describe. You just gotta get it to "get" it. Then also in clocks, there is Observatory. It is just a stunningly beautiful piece of art to look at.

Weather HD is just nice to look at and have running all day

In the game department, I don't own many games as I am just too busy, but I had to get this one: Ancient Frog, for the shear force of the artistry on part of the designer. Plus it is a very charming game.

But the one I have to show everyone now is the History Channel's Civil War. On the 150th anniversary of start of the Civil last April, History Channel launched their app which gives you a daily dose of Civil War news told in present tense. There is new each day describing the events exactly 150 years before which include a short article, diary entries from 15 different people including scans of the original entries, Lincoln's notes and letters of the day, scans of newspaper front pages, maps, photos and body count. Just an extraordinary amount of content. And they intend to keep this going until @#$$!# 2015!

How long have you been a developer? Since 1981.

How long have you been an iOS developer? Since the day of the first SDK release when angelic voices rained down from on high.

Do you develop for any other platform in addition to iOS? If so, which one(s)?

Commodore Amiga, Windows, Old-school Mac, TiVO with their java based app kit, Symbian (oh, excuse me @**#& Symbian), Windows Mobile 6, early Sun equipment, and early SGI systems.

What primary computer setup do you use for your iOS development? MacBook Pro 13, with two external monitors. iPad 2, 2 iPad 1s, four iPod Touches, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 and an Apple III.

With all of this new shiny replacing the old, sometimes late at night I think I can still hear my gold iPod Mini softly weeping from the darkened corner of my old gadget drawer.

What iOS device(s) do you personally use most often? That'd have to be the iPad 2, "Sagan", which I waited four hours in line to get from the Palo Alto store.

What mobile devices, other than iOS, do you currently use? That'd have to be my red iPod Nano in the car, it qualifies as it doesn't run iOS. Can't use the iPhone as it doesn't have any tactile feedback needed so I don't have to look down at the thing while selecting a new podcast to listen to.

What’s your favorite thing about developing for iOS? It's just fun. The quality of the tools, documentation and frameworks let me spend much more time adding awesomely cool new features, instead of wishing I had the time to figure out how to add awesomely cool new features. And that's just awesome.

What’s your least favorite thing about developing for iOS? When I first started and told people I was working on iPhone stuff the reaction was a hushed respect. Now when I do so, the response is "well, who isn't?"

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the iOS 5 SDK? A means of tactile feedback to the screen that could render Braille and/or other basic graphics to help those with limited sight.

What feature would you most like Apple to add to the App Store? About two years ago Apple had their mini-one day long iOS developer's road show. The first stop was here in their back yard. I was chatting with one of the Apple people there about ideas for improving the App Store, and he was rapidly jotting down notes with my suggestions. The one I want most is to get some basic analytics so as to give us page views vs. purchases on each app. So, for example, if I am getting 100 pageviews a day, but am only selling 5 units, I'm doing something wrong. He looks at me and says "you mean we don't do that already?? That makes so much sense!" And as I was leaving to get some of the free food, I asked him what he did for Apple, and he responded, "uh, director of the App Store".

They still haven't implanted the analytics though, although one of the other things I suggested made it in there. Whenever I had to remove an app from sale for whatever reason, it took only one click. That in turn automatically toggled all 80+ regional app store entries off. But that didn't happen in reverse. To reactivate it I'd have to turn each store checkbox on one at a time. What a pain. So now I can finally turn them on with just one click. And what was really nice was when that feature was pushed I got a note to give it a shot and see if that was what I was looking for.

If we were to eavesdrop on you while you were coding, what curse word would we hear you use the most? What kind of frakk'n question is that? Oops! Can I say frak here?

What do you do when you’re not coding iOS apps? Vintage ballroom dancing. That is, recreating 19th century grand balls in costume. I am going off to Newport, Rhode Island shortly for a week of balls in the Gilded Age mansions along the shore

What should we look for from you next? Oh you little minx, I'm not going to give it up that easily.

Thanks Mike!

For today only, the TiPb Store has the Case-Mate Tough Case for AT&T iPhone 4 in pink, yellow, or green on sale for only $7.95!. That’s maximum protection meets maximum color… Now get them before they’re gone!

Shop Case-Mate Tough Case for AT&T iPhone 4 now!

Whatever changes Apple has been making to the iTunes Store back end lately seems to have caused iTunes app on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad to stream some podcasts as music samples, rather than handing them off to the built-in media player like they’re supposed to.

We’ve tested and everything seems fine and working properly for all of our TiPb podcasts like iPhone Live or iPad Live, or ZENandTECH, Superfunctional, or Iterate, or any of the Mobile Nations podcasts for that matter.

However, shows on other networks like 5by5 and TWiT do seem to be experiencing the problem, and it’s annoying to say the least. So what can be done?

First, huge props to Rene — whatever he’s doing to edit and upload our podcasts seems to be immune to this annoying iTunes bug. Second, iTunes on iPhone and iPad is an app wrapper around online content, so Apple can change things any time, without having to give you a new version of iOS to update to, or giving you a choice to update (yeah, pretty much my nightmare scenario). Fortunately, this also means they can fix bugs any time as well. So here’s where we stand:

Bug symptoms

• You click on a podcast in the iTunes app on the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad
• Instead of the media player coming up and your podcast playing, the little square music sample player pops up
• This means you don’t get full play/pause and other controls, you don’t get the timeline, and you can’t resume where you left off later

Bug fixes

• Download your podcasts instead of streaming them (you’ll need to be on Wi-Fi if they’re over 20 MB)
• Sync your podcasts over from iTunes desktop
• Get a podcatcher app from the App Store and use that to stream
• Wait for Apple to update

Seth and Rene have mentioned Instacast App Store link and Pocket Casts App Store link on past shows, but if you have a favorite podcatcher app you could recommend, please do so in the comments. Also, if you’ve found any other workaround, please let us know!

[Thanks Len!]

around with it — like they have been recently for downloads and category pages — y

OfficeTime – Time & Expense Tracking is an iPhone and iPad productivity app designed to help you track your time.

I can’t pass up a good looking app, and OfficeTime is no exception. The UI is strait-forward and easy to use as well as pleasing to the eye.

OfficeTime is an amazingly intuitive time tracker. Where other time keepers are clumsy or oversimplified, OfficeTime balances features and ease of use, allowing you to easily track exactly what you do each day.

• Track by project and category.
• Run multiple timers
• Rapidly switch tasks
• Time in the background
• Pay no monthly fees
• Work offline. No need for WiFi or 3G

Upgrade to the pro version and get:

• Track unlimited projects and categories
• Export to Excel or Numbers
• Sync to OfficeTime on your Mac or PC
• Get cross team reports on your desktop
• Keep your data when you upgrade

OfficeTime – Time & Expense Tracking is available on the iPhone and iPad for free.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

Every day, TiPb gets flooded with announcements for new and updated iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps and games. So every day we pick just a few of the most interesting, the most notable, and simply the most awesome to share with you!

• Poker Tweeter (Giveaway): A Twitter app for poker players. Poker Tweeter lets you quickly and easily send tweets with card suits. For example, “askd” is automatically converted to “A♠K♢”. It also calculates Texas Hold’em win percentages and adds them to your tweets with one tap. [$1.99 for iPhone - App Store link]

• IBM Connections: Social software for business. It enables you to build a network of colleagues and subject matter experts, and then leverage that network to further your business goals. [Free for iPhone - App Store link]

• iDML: Edit stories from InDesign documents on your iPad. [$19.99 for iPad - App Store link]

• iDuhKnow: Just when you think you have it all figured out…you get it WRONG. And back you go. This game is maddening, addictive, irritating, frustrating… And it might make you motion sick if you have been staying up to the wee hours trying to get to the end. [Free for iPhone and iPad - App Store link]

• MyStream: Wirelessly share music and audio files via Bluetooth or WiFi. [Free for iPhone - App Store link]

Giveaway

The good folks at FlopTech Engineering gave us 5 promo codes for Poker Tweeter to give away to our awesome readers! For a chance to win, just leave a comment below!

Any other big app or game releases or updates today?

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.