Indie developers for Mac and iPhone have joined forces to help raise money for Haiti recovery. They are selling their apps at Indie+Relief and donating all proceeds to Haiti relief funds via one of three charities:

1. Red Cross
2. Doctors Without Borders
3. UNICEF

There are some amazing apps on this list. If you are a Mac or iPhone user whose been eyeing a popular app but just haven’t brought yourself to shell out the money, now may be the time. You can give to the Haiti recovery effort and get that app you’ve been wanting at the same time.

Here are the apps for iPhone I find most interesting:

• Birdfeed, a Twitter client
• Campfire, a 37Signals’ Campfire client
• Instapaper Pro, which is self-explanatory (I use this)
• Rowmote, a super-charged remote for your AppleTV, Mac and Mac apps (I use this)
• Things Touch, the iPhone version of the popular GTD app (I use this religiously)
• Tweetie, the best Twitter app around (I use this religiously)

If you are looking for Mac apps, check these out:

• Acorn, an easy-to-use but powerful image editor (I’ve tried this and finally bought it today)
• Billings, an app to track time and bill clients (I use this)
• Default Folder X, a valuable add-on to Save menus (I use this)
• Delicious Library 2, catalogues your music, DVDs, apps and other stuff (I use this)
• Fetch, a pretty good ftp client
• HoudahSpot, tags all your files on your Mac
• MarsEdit, a desktop blogging client (I use this religiously)
• Pukka, a Delicious Bookmarks client (I use this)
• Things, a GTD app (I use this religiously)
• Tweetie for Mac, a Twitter client (I use this but prefer iPhone version)

(Quick Note: I usually would link to the apps, but I want you to go to Indie+Relief and link to the apps from there.)

You’ll find more than 150 apps for sale here, ranging from productivity apps to games. Go check it out, and consider a purchase to help out Haiti relief. If you are not interested in purchasing an app, you can also find a link to the three above-mentioned charities from this site.

This sale is for Jan. 20 only, so please go see it today.

(Originally posted on my personal blog.)

Steven Frank makes a pertinent observation about his ban against the iPhone and App Store: The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is I’m not sure how I know when it ends.

I said I wasn’t going to return to my iPhone “until there’s a resolution” with the various well-documented app store problems. But what does that actually mean? What set of criteria would constitute a “resolution” here?

He goes on to layout his benchmarks, which are a good guide.

Panic developer Steven Frank is mad as hell, and he ain’t taking it anymore:

There’s been no indication that Apple want to do anything to resolve the problems with app store policies that have been laid bare a hundred times over. There’s no indication of anything, as a matter of fact. Nothing. After a year. It’s a black hole yawning back at us. How much has been written about this over the last year? What reason is there to believe anything’s going to change in another year if the policies (whatever they are, who knows) seem to be just getting worse over time?

I’ve reached a point where I can no longer just sit back and watch this. The iPhone ecosystem is toxic, and I can’t participate any more until it is fixed. As people have told me so many times: It’s Apple’s ballgame, and Apple gets to make the rules, and if I don’t like it, I can leave. So, I don’t like it, and I’m leaving.

This is just one example of the rage against the iPhone App Store machine. It’s growing, and hopefully Apple will respond appropriately soon.

I’ve finally gotten around to downloading the beta of NetNewsWire 3.2, which features Google Reader syncing. I’m excited about this, mostly for the impact it should have on the NNW iPhone app. As much as I love the NNW app for Mac, I loathe the iPhone version.

Google Reader is loved by many people, myself included. However, it does not offer what I need for my laptop work. I spend most of my time reading and browsing in NNW. I post from there, whether it be to blogs or to Twitter or to Delicious.

On my iPhone, however, I cringe every time I think of opening up NNW and browsing feeds. It’s too slow to sync. But no longer. No, I can use Google Reader on my iPhone and NNW on my desktop. And when the new NNW iPhone app appears, I’ll give it a whirl.

For more on NNW, developer Brent Simmons has set up a blog dedicated to the NNW beta. You would do well to follow his blog and his link blog as well.

Darrell Etherington at The Apple Blog is ready to leave MobileMe if Gpush makes it to the iPhone. Gpush is an iPhone app that would essentially bring push Gmail to the iPhone.

The question surrounding GPush isn’t whether it can pull off what it claims to be able to. That it can do just fine, as TechCrunch’s tests prove. The question is, will Apple ever allow GPush to exist in a form that’s widely available to all users via the App Store? Cupertino has a vested interest in blocking Gmail push, since some users (like me, for instance) might walk away from MobileMe were it to become available, resulting in an obvious loss in revenue.

First, I will likely stay with Mail on the iPhone. I have too many email accounts to jump ship. But even if I didn’t, I’d stick with MobileMe for the cross-computer syncing, iCal syncing with iPhone and Address Book/Contacts syncing for iPhone.

Certainly some folks will leave, but I bet more would stay and some of those who did leave would return.

On Twitter today, Wil Shipley (@wilshipley) of Delicious Monster posted this sad news:

Delicious Library for iPhone isn’t coming back as long as we’re using Amazon’s APIs, unless they decide to make an exception to section 4e.

As Brent Simmons said on his link blog: “I think this sucks, by the way.”

From MacNN | SIRIUS XM iPhone app reaches 1 million downloads:

The SIRIUS XM iPhone application has been downloaded by more than 1 million users since its release on June 18th. The title quickly became the top free app in the music category during its brief two-week stint on the App Store. The free app delivers sports, comedy, commercial-free music, and talk radio channels to an iPhone or iPod touch.

I’m going to have to seriously consider it now. I miss my XM radio.

From Prowl: Get Any Growl Notifications Via Push On Your iPhone:

Now you can receive Growl notifications on your iPhone, too, in the form of push notifications, thanks to Prowl. I can’t even begin to explain how useful this could potentially be, depending on your usage.

As John Gruber said, “This opens up iPhone push notifications for anything you can think of.”

Find Prowl here.

I’m stuck in a love triangle with two popular RSS readers, and I just can’t figure it out. I love them both but for very different reasons (and at very different times).

On the desktop, I prefer NetNewsWire for a variety of reasons:

• Keyboard shortcuts for blog posting, Delicious posting, Twitter posting, etc.
• Easier keyboard navigation
• Sorting by date either ascending or descending
• Natively selecting NetNewsWire as default RSS reader

Of course, I can mimic much of NNW’s keyboard shortcuts using bookmarklets in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar and activating them by using Command plus the number of the correlating bookmarklet. (i.e. Cmd-5 takes my selection and sends it to MarsEdit for blogging.)

But the problem with that is that I have three extra bookmarks in the bar, which starts to clutter it. Too, if I ever add or change a bookmark before the bookmarklets, I’ll have to learn new numbers for my shortcuts. (That may not seem like much, but if you are a power keyboard user and have repetitive actions you use daily, then the change takes a while to learn.)

So there it is, my love for NNW on the desktop is deep and true.

But then there’s the iPhone… I like the NNW iPhone app. I like Newsgator as a syncing system. But I love Google Reader on the iPhone.

Here’s why I prefer Google Reader to NetNewsWire on the iPhone:

• Better syncing. Since you are using a web app versus a syncing service, everything is always in sync.
• Faster. NNW’s iPhone app takes a while to open and sync before you can start using it.
• Mark as unread. You can easily mark items as unread on iPhone. Not so much with the NNW app for iPhone
• Nicer interface. I’m one of those people who loves the Google Reader’s native iPhone interface. I’ve not tried Byline or any other app for Google Reader on the iPhone because Google’s web app is so superb. (OK, no badge telling me how many unread items I have, but I have so many feeds I know I always have something to read. It’s not like email.)

And, so, my love for Google Reader on the desktop is deep and true.

Over the past few days, I’ve tried to use Google Reader on the desktop. And I’ll admit to a couple of pluses for Google Reader:

• It is always “synced” across my multiple laptops, desktops and iPhone (but save for the iPhone, syncing works perfect for NNW)
• I enjoy using the speed of Safari versus NNW’s integrated browser (which is also built on Webkit, like Safari)

I’ve also found a couple of major annoyances.

The main one: There is no way to view the original item in a tab opened in the background.

That’s counter to how I do some of my blogging. For a political news blog I run, I open all the feeds to which I want to link for that day and then I go through them. That kind of work flow is next to impossible with Google Reader.

So what am I to do? If the two products synced together, I’d use NNW on the desktop and Google Reader on my iPhone.

I’ve thought of splitting my feeds between the two, but I can find no logical way of doing so. (Besides, the thought of two RSS readers is absurd to me.)

For now, I’ll continue to test Google Reader on the desktop, but considering I spend way more time in a desktop environment versus my iPhone, I’m betting on NetNewsWire carrying the day.

(But breaking up with Google Reader on the iPhone is going to hurt…)

When I first started with Twitter, I tried a few Twitter apps for the iPhone. I settled on Twitterific, which I do not use on my Macs. (On my Macs, I use Twhirl.)

Twitterific for iPhone is great. I like the app. But it is missing a few things, such as

1. Not showing direct messages.
2. Not showing nearby tweets.

Still, I was content. Then I met Tweetie after it’s 2.1 release. And now, I’ve dumped Twitterific for Tweetie.

Give Tweetie a tweet. It’s a great app for Twitter and the iPhone.

Here’s the latest mind-numbing game to be added to Me Ol’ iPhone.

It’s Paper Football from Jirbo, Inc. There is both a free and paid version.

I can’t see paying $8 for the paid version, so I went with the free one.

It’s good for a novelty, and I played for a while. It won’t set your world on fire, but it’ll give you something to do while standing in a line.

One of my favorite iPhone sites is tap tap tap. They have great iPhone tips and news, plus when I read it I always get a craving for Sushi. Seeing as how I love Sushi, such cravings are always welcome.

John Casasanta, of MacHeist fame, recently shared his 10 useful iPhone tips and tricks.

tap tap tap ~ 10 useful iPhone tips & tricks: “The iPhone, like the Mac, is extremely simple and intuitive to use. Odds are that you’ve never even cracked open the user manual since the way just about everything works is pretty obvious.

But its simplicity can be a double-edged sword… there are many small ‘convenience features’ that are often hidden away. If Apple exposed them in a more obvious way, it’d take away from the elegance of the device. And its elegance is one of its strongest points.

I’m sure that many of you are ‘power users’ and probably know most of these tips and tricks. But I suspect that a lot of you are more casual iPhone users and will find this list useful. Even our team members that I showed the draft of this post to (people I consider iPhone experts), all picked up at least a tip or two that they weren’t already aware of. So I’ll bet there’s something for everyone here…”

And while, as he says, most should be well-known by users, a few are not. It’s worth the read, if for no other reason than you need a good Sushi craving.