You might remember that some time ago Apple launched its first attempt at a social network with “Ping“. When it launched, many thought this would be a perfect spot for Apple and Facebook to partner by sharing and selling music on Facebook’s platform.

That turned out to not be the case, and many stories surfaced about how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see eye to eye with then Apple CEO Steve Jobs. No deal was done, no partnership between the two were made. That fact however, hasn’t stopped Apple from utilizing Facebook for marketing purposes, just as other companies do on the platform.

The folks on the marketing team for Apple’s App Store and iTunes have found its Facebook pages as a great way to promote new apps and music available, and interact with people who are doing the buying.

Its Facebook page has 4,087,987 Likes and currently has 99,795 talking about it in status updates and comments on the social network. Its iTunes page is doing even better with 19,391,307 Likes and has 460,070 talking about it.

What’s more interesting than the numbers is what Apple is doing on its pages. For example, on the App Store page, the company is playing word games with fans by scrambling up the name of an app and letting people guess which app it is:

The iTunes page is currently taking advantage of Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime performance by promoting her new album:

While Apple’s Ping product has proved to be a serious loser in its attempt to becoming a huge music-focused social network, it looks like Apple hasn’t taken the lack of partnership with Facebook personally at all. So while no deal could be made between the two companies, Apple wasn’t willing to run away from the social network, because without Facebook, Apple would have nowhere else to turn to socially pimp its wares. Facebook knows that, and ended up getting Apple to use them just like everyone else.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about a company called TagMyDoc that found a pretty useful purpose for QR codes. I was hard pressed to find other actual useful purposes for QR codes, since they’ve become a bit of a marketing fail.

One company disagreed and sent me its QR code pitch, and it’s pretty darn good.

App2Card helps you build simple business cards to promote your app specifically, with a QR code on the back that brings people directly to your download link upon scanning it. The impressive part of the site is that the card itself is unique, in that it takes your app’s icon and makes it the entire front of the card.

If you’re a developer, it’s the perfect handout to get people to check out your app later, especially if you have a great icon.

Find your app, create cards quickly

The site requires no design work from you at all. Simply perform a search for your app if it’s on Apple’s app store, or create a custom card if it’s on another platform.

Creating cards for iOS apps is super simple, as the site grabs your icon and URL automatically. You’re shown the preview of your card, and can purchase them for a pretty good price, considering that they’re a cool custom size.

When you’re at a tech party or in a meeting trying to impress VC’s, dropping a few of these off is way more impressive than giving them your old boring card. After all, it’s your app that’s important, not you. They’ll stand out too.

So perhaps I was wrong, QR codes can be quite interesting when the idea presenting them is unique and executed well.

➤ App2Card

Google+, which just updated its Android app, has released an update for its iOS version today.

Interestingly enough, Google refers to its chat feature as “Messenger”, which is the same name Facebook has given to its messaging product.

The Google+ mobile team says this about the new release:

What’s new:
- Support for Google Apps users
- Messenger now lets you know if someone’s online, and if they’re currently typing.
- Lots of bug fixes including some of the crash issues you’ve been reporting!

We hope you enjoy the improvements. As always, please keep the feedback coming!

You’ll also be able to +1 photos with the new version.

It’s nice to see Google staying consistent with its app designs, and the iOS version led the Android one as far as its recent iteration. Keeping apps on multiple platforms consistent is difficult, since separate teams are working on them.

The focus on its messenger product, a hybrid of Gchat, shows that Google isn’t ready to give away messaging to Facebook just yet. Recently, we reported that Beluga had been shut down and Facebook Messenger sits atop the free apps on the Apple app store.

It’s intriguing to see the iOS version of Google+ getting features first, as the submission process on its own store would most certainly be a simpler one than that of Apple’s app store.

We’re starting to find out what you can do with pictures other than host and share them online. Apps like Apple’s Card app and Photogram have sparked interest in making real-world physical goods at a price for your friends offline.

Today, Calendagram hit the Apple app store, letting you connect to your Instagram account, select 12 photos, and have a physical calendar sent to you or a loved one.

It’s a brilliant idea that creates a layer on top of the photo filtering and sharing phenomenon, Instagram. By far, this is the best Instagram API usage I’ve seen. The app is free, and it costs $24.99 to make a Calendagram. It’s a little pricey, but for the customization opportunities, this could be a perfect gift for the upcoming Holidays.

Creating a Calendagram

Once you connect Calendagram with your Instagram account you’re shown all of your photos. Unfortunately, you can only choose from your photos. It makes perfect sense, because those photos are yours to do with whatever you like, after all. It would still be nice to be able to tap into photos from friends. Perhaps the company can build a permissions based system for that usage.

Once you have your photos pulled into Calendagram, you can start selecting photos in the order, from January to December, that you’d like them to display in.

Previewing and buying your calendar

Once you’ve selected your photos, you can pick between three colors, white, black, and brown. You can flip through your calendar, and if you’re ready to purchase, it will cost $24.99 plus shipping. If you’re purchasing for a group, the cost gets less as you order more. If you purchase ten or more calendars, the price is $19.99.

More than likely, the lion share of the cost comes with the printing process. Again, with the customization options and simplicity of creating a calendar with Calendagram, it might be well worth the cost.

Will Instagram start paying attention to others and build its own services for its platform ala Apple and Twitter? It might be a smart bet if something like Calendagram takes off.

Innovation is coming from all angles in the application world, and an area ripe for that innovation is calendars and scheduling. We have to-do apps, and Apple’s core calendar and reminder apps, but nothing really ties communications into reminder apps. Other players in the space are natural language calendaring apps like Fantastical.

TouchBase, created by app developer tomo wants to let you enter in all of the information about your meetings and not worry about entering in contact information or addresses. The company calls the app a “day planner”.

Making your calendar social

The goal of TouchBase is to turn meeting requests into a more social and communicative experience. For example, with TouchBase, once you arrive at a meeting, you can tap one button to let everyone know that you’ve arrived. Or you could send them an SMS saying you’re running late, again with one tap.

Since the app matches people’s names with your contacts, you can even give people a call with one touch, and without searching through your contacts. This is key, because when you’re late for a meeting, you’re usually either driving, running down the street, or waiting for a train or bus. You don’t really have time to look up a name, tap it, then tap call or message.

All calendars in one place

The other major strength of TouchBase is tying all of your calendar systems together, including Google Calendars, Apple’s own Calendar, as well as Exchange and Outlook into one place. This alone makes using TouchBase worth the 99 cents the company is charging.

The app isn’t without some issues though, as syncing speed and reliability depends on the service that you’re using. Apple’s built-in service is the most reliable since it’s local, but services like Yahoo! take a bit to sync, and can skip a cycle. If you’re not someone who has a calendar full of meetings and calls, it shouldn’t be an issue for you.

We have all been in mourning since the passing of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week, and we’ve read a lot of the tweets and thoughts everyone has had on the subject.

The Next Web has heard from several developers on the topic of how Steve Jobs affected their lives, career, and companies. Without iTunes and the App store, some of them may never have had the chance to succeed in the way that they have.

From Allan Petersen, Co-Founder of Memoir Tree:

Without Steve Jobs, my startup would not exist. It’s as simple as that. Our private beta launches in two weeks. We’d be doing something completely different, if Steve Jobs hadn’t been such a visionary.

The iOS platform has proved to be a very successful one for developers, giving small teams of developers and creatives a new canvas to paint their mark on the world. Steve Jobs realized that experiencing something on a computer with a web browser simply wasn’t enough, you had the hold something in your hand and touch it to get the full experience. Companies have benefited from that vision in a big way. For example, Angry Birds continues to be amongst the top games on the App Store. It’s crazy to think that the game may never have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the platform that Steve Jobs thought up out of thin air with help from his friends and colleagues at Apple.

Bobby Ghoshal, founder of FLUD News, shares a very personal story about his interactions with Apple and Steve Jobs:

The day FLUD News launched its iPhone app last december, I emailed Steve and thanked him for his contribution to the app industry. I also asked him to check out the latest FLUD when he got a chance, the next day I got a call from Apple heads telling us that we were the number 1 featured app in the app store and that we were invited to meet with people from the app store team. It gave me goose bumps.

We’ve heard many stories like that, including my own, but one young developer stood out.

Tom Harris, InsiderApps’ 17-year-old founder and creator of the App “Tweet Now”, perhaps sums up best what Steve Jobs meant to developers with this:

I never really thought about it much before until today and it sort of hit me as a bit of an overwhelming moment, the fact that if Steve Jobs hadn’t been here to create the iPhone and therefore iOS as we know it today, then I and thousands of other developers wouldn’t have been able to create apps that help people. Me, personally, am just an indie 17-year-old dev who codes in my spare time, but the fact that I have had over 40,000 people download one of my apps to make their lives a little bit easier for a short moment, it just made me think how many people’s lives have been improved upon, thanks to Steve and his team at Apple, and how one person really can make a difference. Even for me, if out of the 40k downloads, if just a handful of people saved themselves a bit of money by using my app, then I’ve helped some people to be potentially be able to support their families in the future just by that little bit, and that’s the sort of thing that’s hard to come by, but it does make you feel really great inside and thankful for Steve’s visionary personality. RIP Steve, you’ll be missed by millions.

The show must go on, and as long as Apple is around there will always be “One More Thing…”.

With the help of developers, of course.

Are you an Apple Developer? Share your stories about Steve Jobs in the comments.

There is a lot of information at our fingertips on the internet. But sometimes, we forget about things from our past, so searching for them online isn’t an option.

Retro Recall, from the company appcreatives, is a fun iOS app that randomly shows you TV shows, music, and movies from the 80′s and 90′s in a fun and sharable way. It’s 99 cents, and you can bring back memories from the US or the UK, whichever country culture you’re interested in recollecting.

Remember when?

The Retro Recall app is simple and beautifully designed. The best part is that you don’t even have to sign up for an account. Simply open the app and you’re presented with a random memory from years past, with the option to get more info, share, or favorite the item.

When you tap “more info”, you’re shown either a Wikipedia page, or in the case of the show “Small Wonder”, you’re shown a YouTube video of the theme song. The app is slick, and doesn’t force you to leave it to enjoy the content.

Swiping your finger from right to left will go through a seemingly endless stream of content, and I was reminded of quite a few pop culture items from the past.

Take the Seinfeld “Puffy Shirt” for example:

You can share the recalled item on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Email. All of these places are ripe for sharing this kind of fun content. Our only concern is that there is indeed an end to the content, and you’ll be stuck with nothing new. Hopefully the company will stay on top of that.

We won’t ruin the app anymore by telling you what gems you’ll find here, but it’s well worth the 99 cents for Retro Recall to bring back some long lost memories.

While we may think of notifications as something that is primarily for mobile apps, they’re also incredibly useful on full-fledged computers as well. One of the most popular solutions is Growl, a notifications protocol that takes all of the various status updates you get from apps running on your Mac and presents them to you in an attractive way.

New emails, IM conversations or Twitter updates; if an app is trying to get your attention, Growl is its conduit.

Now Growl has taken it to a new level with version 1.3 and for the first time, it’s only available on the Mac App Store, and it’s $1.99. Up until now, Growl has been free.

The Growl team had to update the app for the latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X, Lion. Up until now, the free version of the software has tucked itself away in your System Preferences. Growl now has its own application and preferences window to easily customize all of your system notifications.

New in Growl 1.3

• History

There is now a history for all notifications you’ve gotten from apps. This is stored on your machine, but you can disable it if you like.

• Notification Rollup

Much like iOS notifications, Growl “rolls up” notifications while you’re away from your computer for easy viewing when you get back.

Other notable updates

• Speech display for hearing your notifications.
• Send Growl notifications from Cocoa or Applescript
• Networking two or more Macs to forward notifications to each other
• Works with the iPhone and iPad via Prowl

Even if you’ve never used Growl before, if you’re an Apple diehard this is a must purchase and essential utility. The $1.99 isn’t a bad pricetag, considering the team is dedicating itself to staying up to date on all of Apple’s OS changes.

Only the best Web, mobile and desktop apps get reviewed at TNW Apps.

Adding filters and effects to your photos is a popular trend on the web right now, and Instagram is leading the charge. Path also lets you do similar things on its super small social networking app. But what about when you’re on your actual laptop or desktop computer?

There are a lot of desktop apps to edit photos, like Photoshop, but they’re more for professionals. That’s where Analog by Realmac Software steps in. It only works like Instagram, but isn’t currently sharing to Instagram.

The main features of the app are very specific, Filters and Borders. This is what I’d expect from an Instagram desktop app. The app is available on the Mac App Store for $7.99 (for a limited time), so if you’re an Instagram fan and a Mac user, this could be worth it for you.

The features of Analog are simple:

Crop and Rotate
Stunning Filters
Stylish Borders
Sharing

I’m running Lion, and if you are too, the latest OSX Full Screen and Restore features are put to work here.

Using Analog is fairly simple, just drag any size photo into the app and then start changing the filters. You can toggle over to the borders and change them too, to find the right combination. Once you’re done, export it and share it if you like.

One of the limitations that jumped out immediately was that there is no share to Twitter functionality. Twitter has its own photo sharing and hosting now, so this is something I would expect from an app like Analog. You can currently share to the CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. Also, it would make sense for the company to use Instagram’s API to upload directly to Instagram.

The other thing that we have to keep an eye on is whether the Analog developers will update the app with new Filters and Borders. That’s the real draw of apps like Instagram, the company listens to its community and add new things quickly.

Otherwise, if you’re looking to make the photos sitting on your desktop look cooler or retro, then Analog is a nice app to do so.