Last October, after I'd spent all night in line for an iPhone 4S, I hightailed it into the city for two days of iOS and OS X talks, drinks, and conversations -- the Çingleton conference.

Assembled by Luc Vandal of Edovia, Guy English, and Scott Morrison of InDev in my home town of Montreal, the Çingleton Symposium featured an octet of presentations by Apple developer and media personalities.

Thanks to the filming and editing skills of designer Thomas Unterberger, many of the videos are available on Vimeo for everyone to enjoy, including Dan Moren, Craig Hockenberry, Brent Simmons, Chris Liscio, Daniel Jalkut, Alykhan Jetha, Paul Kafasis, and John Gruber.

If you're looking for some interesting, Apple-centric content to enjoy this summer, Crack open a tasty beverage, browse on over to the Çingleton videos, queue them up on your iPhone, iPod, iPad, or Apple TV, and enjoy.

Marc, Seth, and Rene iterate through the 4-inch, 16:9 iPhone, Coda 2 and Diet Coda, Photoshop masks and text, Windows 8 UX, and Timer, and interrogate Louie Mantia of Pacific Helm. This is Iterate!

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• Coda 2 and Diet Coda
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• Timer: Apps, Apps, Every Where (Buttons!)

• Louie Mantia of Pacific Helm

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If you're one of the best-of-the-best-of-the-best in mobile design for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, webOS, or Windows Phone, we'd love to get you on the show, or if you've found a drop-dead gorgeous app on any platform and really want us to talk about it, contact us and let us know.

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Apple is apparently fiddling with the way in which it handles App Store searches. Previously, what an app was called and which keywords it used seemed to be the greatest influence in how it ranked. Now, how many downloads, and perhaps even what the app does might be what's getting ranked. TechCrunch reports there might even be some Chomp algorithms at work, the App Store discovery app Apple purchased earlier this year.

Matthäus Krzykowski, cofounder of app search and data company Xyologic, has another explanation. He says that Apple has been incorporating download numbers into its rankings for a while now, and he suggests that what really changed is that Apple has gotten better at "topic detection". In other words, it's now better able to infer what you're looking for when you type in a search term, so if you type in the word "gas", you probably want apps that help you find gas stations or low gas prices, rather than driving games or apps that happen to have the word gas in their title (like fart apps). His team also says that the search rankings seem to be looking at other indicators of popularity, like ratings and comments.

That theory seems to be backed up by Chomp's description of its technology: "Chomp's proprietary algorithm learns the functions and topics of apps, so you can search based on what apps do, not just what they're called." In other words, if Apple is getting better at topic detection, it's plausible that Chomp's technology played a role.

App Search has been painful for a long time, returning results that had similar names but wildly different purposes, or suffering from keyword stuffing and other unsavory scam/spam practices.

At this point anything Apple can do to improve App Store search and discovery is welcome, even their experimenting with different methods and algorithms. There's very little place to go but up.

So go hit the App Store, run some searches, and come back and tell us -- are you getting better results? And if so, just a little better or much better?

Source: TechCrunch