While our U.S. contingent have been preparing tender turkeys (or veggie equivalents), over in the UK I’ve been taste-testing the latest scrummy additions to the App Store.

This week I’m looking at MobileLinked IM, Project Polaroid, Touchgrind and lo-fi retro freebie Fire Engine.

MobileLinked IM (free)
In terms of iPhone IM clients, everyone seems to have their favourites. I dig Palringo – being able to send voice-messages and photos to my mates while I’m out and about feels like I’m living in McLuhan’s glittering global village. On the other hand, fellow TAB writer Darrell Etherington can’t get enough of Beejive’s sweet features. Choice is a good thing, so it’s wonderful that MobileLinked IM has joined the fray, yet, despite being free, it’s lacking in the features and polish of its older counterparts.

Project Polaroid (free)
The Apple Blog covered a cute desktop app called Poladroid a couple of weeks back. Chuck in a normal photo and it spits out a Polaroid-style processed version. Project Polaroid takes it to the iPhone, so you can get retro with your photos while you’re on the go. Frankly, I utterly adore this app — yes it’s as gimmicky as a diamond-encrusted toilet-seat, but I just can’t abide by the grainy cheap iPhone camera and Project Polaroid is the perfect retro-themed remedy.

Touchgrind ($4.99)
It’s a proper skateboarding game on the iPhone, packed with tons of moves activated through a deceptively simple control system. You’ll need seriously dextrous fingers to bust out impressive moves on Touchgrind, but getting your digits ’round the tough technique is worth it when you’re able to string together massive combo multipliers across the tiny skatepark.

The Classic – Fire Engine (free)
Back in the day, when the closest thing to an iPhone was a brick-sized cellular, the must-have handheld gaming gizmo was Nintendo’s Game & Watch. Now it’s pretty tough to track down of these desirable devices, so in lieu of the real thing, MG Interactive’s series of games brings Nintendo-flavored LCD goodness to the iPhone. Although it’s called Fire Engine, the game actually finds you rescuing escapees from a burning building and ferrying them to your nearby ambulance. Ever so slightly in bad taste yet undeniably classic fun.

As we scurry away from the week that was, there are but a few more moments to ponder an app I missed a few weeks back. Last week a fresh App Store oddity hit iTunes: developed by Yudo Games, SpyBugRadar finds you raising and lowering your iPhone to search for hidden bugs in the room.

SpyBugRadar is part of Yudo’s freshly launched series entitled, “1$ Games.” The game is like having your own piece of James Bond style gadgetry as you physically hunt around your room for the beeping bugs. And it’s free, for the time being, in the App Store. We need more developers like Yudo, designing games that are quirky and stuffed with tons of imagination, like lovingly prepared Thanksgiving poultry.

That’s all for this week, I’ll catch you next Saturday for more from the App Store. In the meantime, drop by the comments and let me know which apps you’ve been downloading.

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Macs are definitely not all-work and no-play machines, and this fact is made even more evident via a nifty little application called Poladroid. With holidays coming up, nostalgia will most likely be at an all-time high and Poladroid helps you inject some into your modern pictures in a very slick way.

Not content to just provide a Photoshop (or PhotoBooth) filter, the makers of Poladroid came up with a way to electronically “develop” your photos into Polaroid-like snaps, complete with the ability to shake the film while you wait!

Simply drag an existing photo onto the application, sit back and watch the results appear – slowly – right before your eyes. The process is done when the red mark appears and you’ll find a full-size JPEG, complete with oversized white border, in your “Pictures” folder ready to add to your online or in-print collection. You can save a copy of the photo during any stage in the “developing” process by right-clicking on the film and choosing “I want a sample now”. But there is one catch…you only get to process ten photos per application launch as that was the limitation in the original Polaroid film cartridges.

I have made the full size before and after images available, but the actual source photo was much larger. Poladroid auto-crops the images, so make sure you are working with what you want your end result to be. For those that make holiday DVDs through iMovie, you could save a photo at various points during the developing process to make for a very nice transition element or just use the resultant image to mark special moments on a timeline.

If you are inclined to share outside your normal circles, Poladroid has its own Flickr group and encourages you to add your own “new nostalgia” to the mix. If you are more of a DIY-type person, right click on the Poladroid application itself, “Show Package Contents”, and drill down into “Contents/MacOS/stuff” to find a Polaroid-style frame you can use in your own creations.

Poladroid is free, and available for download and is a great example of the fun one can have with REALBasic.

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