Right away upon opening the app, you’ll be asked if you want to enable push notifications, and you’ll also encounter a dialog box asking you about contact syncing. Turning syncing on will automatically add links to the Facebook profiles of all the people it finds in your address book, and you can also choose to replace the photos for those contacts with their Facebook profile pictures.

As for the push notifications, they apply whenever someone sends you a new message, or whenever you receive a new wall post, friend request, friend confirmation, photo tag, event invitations and updates, and comments. If that seems like a lot, you can go ahead and selectively disable any options you don’t want to receive a push notification about. I’m actually very happy with the implementation. It means I can disable email updates for most of those things. Here’s what it looks like when you receive a message. Not too much info, but it gets the job done.

Contact syncing seems to be a little hiccupy at the moment, but that might only be because I’m also using MobileMe to sync my address book across all computers. It does appear to be working very slowly despite some error messages, though, but I find that the “fb://” format links don’t open anything on the Mac. Probably because the Facebook app developers didn’t count on people who have a desktop syncing system implemented. They automatically launch the FB app on the iPhone, though.

What do you think? Well done, or were you looking for more from Facebook push?

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This is the ultimate roundup of essential apps for your iPhone from 2009.

Best Game: Rolando 2: Quest for the Golden Orchid

The sequel to 2008′s Rolando expands on the tilt ‘n’ swipe platforming action of the original. This time round, we’re brought an entire troupe of colorful Rolando characters to protect, alongside a tropical island inhabited by new baddies and a lost Rolando tribe. The artwork is gorgeous, the gameplay is excellent and, thanks to NGMoco’s Plus+ awards system, it’s got bags of replay value too.

Runners-Up Best Game: Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, Doodle Jump

Best Social & Communications App: Tweetie 2

Having formed his own development studio after working at the Cupertino campus, Loren Brichter has established himself as one of the premier App Store developers. Brichter’s skill is feeding his experience at Apple into his apps, Twitter client Tweetie 2 is an impressive showcase of his ability to distill a feature-rich experience into an app with a clear user interface. The app also rolls in a few unexpected new features including video tweeting, profile management and improved location-based searches.

Runners-Up Best Social Communications App: Skype, foursquare

Best Use of Push Notifications: Boxcar

Despite the arrival of push notifications on iPhone earlier this year, it’s still taking many developers time to implement these handy pop-up notifiers in their apps. There’s no push for most Twitter clients, no Facebook push and not even native email push from Apple. Boxcar is the missing push notifier for your favorite apps. The app includes push for Twitter, email, Facebook, RSS and even Growl.

Runners-Up Best Use of Push Notifications: NotifyMe, Ping!

Best News App: Byline

Under the hood, the app updates with the latest news in seconds, syncing happily with Google Reader. Unlike other news readers, while Byline is updating with the latest news, you’re able to keep browsing articles without suffering from any lag. It’s certainly not the most feature-rich news reader, but Byline brings together a clean interface with a robust RSS reader.

Runners-Up Best News App: The Guardian, Newstand

Best Use of Content: NFB Films

The National Film Board of Canada have brought a vast quantity of their video content to the iPhone, all of it wrapped in an easy-to-use free app. There are over a thousand videos available to browse, soak up and send to friends: from documentaries and animations to shorts and trailers for forthcoming releases.

Runners-Up Best Use of Content: McSweeney’s, Panelfly

Best Video App: ReelDirector

Apple may be stalling on bringing iMovie to the iPhone, but that’s nothing to worry about thanks to ReelDirector. With it’s powerful features, the app enables you to edit video footage into your own shorts before sending your latest amateur epic to your friends. In particular, the selection of high quality video transitions really add to the wow effect.

Runners-Up Best Video App: UStream Live Broadcaster, iTimeLapse

Best Photography App: Photoforge

Just like ReelDirector brings video editing to the iPhone, PhotoForge does the same for your photography. First-time users will be drawn to the impressive array of filters on offer, including Blur, Tilt Shift, Simulated HDR and Lomo. Once you’ve got to grips with the filters, there’s also a selection of Photoshop-style tools, including smudge, clone and brushes in a variety of shapes.

Runners-Up Best Photography App: Flickr, QuadCamera

Best Sound App: I Am T-Pain

The year’s most over-used and perhaps abused audio-effect, the auto-tune, has landed on iPhone as Smule’s I Am T-Pain. The app essentially makes even the most cat-screechingly awful singer sound as perfectly tuned as Kanye West. Most importantly, you’ll need absolutely no musical ability to have fun with this brilliant sound toy.

Runners-Up Best Sound App: Mujik, Touch DJ

Best Productivity Tool: NotifyMe

If you’re all about organization and productivity, NotifyMe will keep up-to-date with your task list. Thanks to a sleek user interface and ultra-fast startup time, there’s very little friction between you and the app, meaning you can be entering tasks and then getting back to work in moments. When it’s time to get a task done, the app will send you a push notification, plus there’s even a snooze option (perfect for habitual procrastinators).

Runners-Up Best Productivity Tool: Quickoffice, Pastebot

Best Lifestyle App: Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals

Jamie Oliver brings cooking to the iPhone and true to his style, the entire app is friendly, fun and approachable. There are currently 55 delicious recipes in the app, each one can be whipped up in 20 minutes. To help you along the way, in addition to a range of quick kitchen tutorials recorded by Jamie himself, there’s an interactive shopping list tool and portion calculator.

Runners-Up Best Lifestyle App: Couch to 5K, I Am Safe

Best Utility: Dropbox

The Dropbox service brought off-site backup to the masses. On the desktop, it runs in the background, securing your files and even letting you share them with friends, colleagues and clients with a couple of quick clicks. Although long-awaited, the iPhone app didn’t disappoint. You can browse your Dropbox using the app, plus share files and even save specific content to your iPhone for quick access.

Runners-Up Best Utility: OpenMaps, TimeTuner

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In a tweet on Monday, Joe Hewitt, developer of the iPhone Facebook app, announced that the next major update (version 3.1 to be precise) will finally bring Push Notifications to the popular application.

Facebook is easily one of the most popular free apps available in the iTunes App Store. I think you’d be hard pressed to find an iPhone without it. Version 3.0 was a mammoth update to earlier, functionally limited releases, and was eagerly anticipated and reported widely in the tech press. And yet, the lack of support for Apple’s Push Notification Services was, and remains, conspicuous. Adding Push Notifications is the no-brainer icing on the cake function for end-users who don’t spend every second in the app but value being kept in-the-loop with timely updates. It’s also the last major hurdle to making the social networking app practically perfect. (Probably.)

However, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler has suggested that the long-awaited introduction of Push Notifications in the Facebook app will also make it the unwitting poster child for illustrating all that is wrong with Push, and more directly, how Notifications are handled on the iPhone. Siegler writes:

The Push Notification management system beyond a certain threshold is basically useless. That is to say, when you’re getting a large number of Push Notifications on your iPhone, it’s almost laughable how bad the built-in system is for trying to figure out what you just got notified about beyond the most recent message.

If you’re an iPhone owner you probably already know exactly what this is about. Let’s say your iPhone is locked. You receive an important SMS. That familiar blue pop-up box appears on the screen. A moment later, you also receive a Push Notification from one of your apps. The blue box is replaced with another.

The next time you hit the Sleep/wake button and look at your screen (just look, don’t unlock) you’ll see only the latest notification. You’ll have no way of knowing that important SMS is lurking in the background, waiting for your attention, unless you unlock and check for that little red notification badge on the Messages icon. If you’re in a hurry (or in a meeting) and can’t spend more time on the phone than is absolutely necessary, you’re not going to see that important SMS until much later.

What Siegler is saying – and many iPhone owners are likely to agree – is that the iPhone needs a more sophisticated notification system. He adds,

The Push system is such a mess right now, that many of the most popular developers are letting others deal with it. Loren Brichter, the guy behind the excellent Twitter app Tweetie, tells us that he’s tabled Push Notifications for the time being, letting others like Boxcar handle it, because it’s a potential headache.

To date, applications are forbidden to run as background processes on the iPhone. It’s important to remember that Push was created to provide application developers with an elegant solution to the challenges they faced due to that functional limitation. Even so, I find agree with Siegler – the iPhone OS desperately needs a more sophisticated way to handle multiple unread notifications, because if nothing changes, the advent of Facebook 3.1 (not to mention the growing number of other push-enabled apps) brings with it a future filled with those little blue popup boxes.

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Remember Google Sync? It’s the service from Google which allows you to synchronize your contacts and calendar with your iPhone or iPod touch, in much the same way that MobileMe users can, only using a free service instead of a paid one. With Gmail push support, the trifecta of basic services is now complete.

True, MobileMe users still get some questionable value-add services like photo and video media-sharing via their MobileMe gallery, online disk storage space, cloud data backup, and Find My iPhone and other remote anti-theft and security features, but will those be enough to stop people from switching over to Google’s free, just-the-basics service? Time will tell. I know I’m thinking seriously about not renewing my MobileMe subscription at this point.

Google Sync allows you to mix and match, so you don’t have to enable all three of the syncing services. That’s a good thing for people like me whose Google Contacts is in a state of utter disarray, but who often uses Google Calendar and Gmail.

You can get set up with Google Sync by following the instructions posted here, if you haven’t already been using it. If you have, check out these instructions to get Gmail’s push features working for you. Gmail push also works on Windows Mobile devices, which no one in their right mind should be using anymore, unless forced to by the company they work for. Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to thumb my nose at BlackBerry users.

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The first week of September has seen a deluge of new arrivals at the App Store. It’s time for me to search through the latest releases for iPhone and hand-pick my recommendations for the past seven days.

This week I’ve been looking at Button, Facebook, BlogPress and Quicksilver.

Button (Free)
One of my favorite sci-fi novels, “Better Than Life,” oscillates between a deep space distopia and an almost perfect Earth as it follows the surviving crew members of the Red Dwarf mining ship. It’s soon revealed that the crew’s collective vision of Earth is actually a highly addictive massively multiplayer online game beamed directly into their brains, leaving their real bodies in a seemingly catatonic state. Rather than take a giant leap towards this sinister style of multiplayer gaming, Button instead takes baby steps. There’s a big button, everyone around the world sees the button, when the button lights up you must push the button, sometimes you win a prize, usually you don’t. Button is effectively a nonsensical distraction that seems to tickle just the right bit of your brain. Plus, you can ramp up the futility by playing as a team. I’ve created a special team called tab just for readers of TheAppleBlog, come join my group and let’s push buttons together.

Facebook (Free)
The official Facebook app has finally received its first major update for some time, bringing the service’s iPhone implementation almost (but not quite) up to speed with the 3GS and 3.0 firmware. For starters, the app’s user interface has been streamlined and tidied up — gone are the tiny buttons, pointless scrollable horizontal groups bar and crash-happy inbox. The main feed benefits from having a clutter free interface and now incorporates likes and comments. The menu screen features several big chunky buttons, designed for ease of navigation. Notably, the app now allows video recording and uploads, a real boon for iPhone 3GS users. However, it’s seems that when Facebook update their app, there’s always something missing. In this case, there are no Push Notifications, an OS 3.0 feature which could have been designed solely for apps just like Facebook.

BlogPress ($2.99)
The official WordPress app just isn’t working out for me. While I appreciate the WordPress app being free, I’m still not impressed by the app’s sluggish navigation and overly technical user interface. In essence, the WordPress app doesn’t feel pretty and it doesn’t work as it should. With this in mind, I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement and BlogPress seems to be just the app to knock WordPress off my iPhone. The app features a WYSIWYG editor, incredibly important as you certainly don’t want to be tweaking your latest post’s code on your iPhone’s keyboard. There’s also video uploading, something which the WordPress app doesn’t currently support, handled by uploading your video to YouTube and then embedding within your latest post. BlogPress also supports posting simultaneously to multiple blog services, including Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, Drupal and Joomla.

Quicksilver ($1.99)
And finally, while on the subject of replacing apps, I’ve been on the hunt for an alternative to Nimbuzz — while it’s an excellent feature-rich iPhone IM app, and free too, I’ve been feeling like I need a more streamlined solution. With it’s minimal iChat-esque interface, Quicksilver is the perfect app for a quick bit of iPhone IMing, with one caveat: it’s made for XMPP-compliant servers only, which, in non-geek-speak, means it’ll work with Google Talk but not MSN. The really great thing about Quicksilver is that it incorporates Push Notifications, making it more than worth the two buck asking price. When you close Quicksilver, you’re not logged out of chat, instead you’re status is changed to away. If one of your contacts should get in touch, the message will arrive on your iPhone as a push notification.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with more news from the week and picks from the App Store.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

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If you are new to chatting, the three major players in the market are AIM, Yahoo and Microsoft (what market are they not part of?). While AIM remains at the top of the mountain (offering great integration for MobileMe customers), rival Yahoo is making it harder for users to stay attached to AIM’s service. For those who aren’t completely satisfied with what AIM has to offer, Yahoo! Messenger is a great alternative or supplement and is a bit more robust, with support for adding users of Microsoft’s MSN Messenger service.

Yahoo has been vocal about its dedication to the iPhone platform, and its support is appreciated and apparent. Unlike AIM, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone also supports sending/receiving photos via your built-in camera. It also exists as a free application, and isn’t cluttered with ads like AIM’s free counterpart. Several unique features of Yahoo! Messenger are also supported, including its popular “Buzz!” feature. In true iPhone style, you activate it by simply shaking your phone.

If you are someone who enjoys chatting with users who do not use either service, Yahoo! Messenger also features the ability to send messages to mobile users over SMS, saving iPhone users from SMS charges (similar to AIM).

Having used both AIM and Yahoo! Messenger on my iPhone, I’m a bit biased towards Yahoo’s offering. With better support for seamlessly moving between mobile and desktop use (actually forcing me to sign off my desktop), this keeps me from “losing” messages in one location, unlike AIM. During testing, I kept inadvertently leaving AIM “signed on” on my iPhone and messages were being routed there, instead of showing up in iChat, on which I was logged in as well.

Yahoo! Messenger for iPhone is a free download on the App Store. Check it out and let us know what you think!

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When push notification finally made its way to the iPhone, a lot of people were anticipating IMs pushed to their iPhone. At first, I scoffed at this idea. I’d always figured IMs were based around the “instant” part of the phrase, and someone pushing an IM to me might be disappointed if I don’t get back to them right away. Well, guess who’s been a big iPhone IM-er since 3.0 came out? Go on, you’ll never guess. Yep, it’s me. I’d like my crow with a side of au jus, and a loaded baked potato, please.

First a quick word of warning: by no means are my comments here to be construed as any sort of a formal review. While I’ve tried to run all of these apps through their paces, I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling any of my comments a review — they’re more like first impressions.

That said, while there are 10 apps we tested out, it quickly became clear to me this was a race between Beejive and IM+ Push. The important criteria for me were: the ability to connect to multiple IM protocols (and multiple accounts of the same protocol), the ability to do push notifications, and the app not requiring its own server-side account to operate. Price, as they say, was no object. When you get right down to it, the difference between many of these apps is only $5-7. My afternoon brownie indulgence costs more than that.

Over the last week, I’ve been receiving push notifications from at least one of these apps during testing, if not more than one, and I didn’t notice a detrimental effect on my battery life — with the usual disclaimer that if I spent my entire train ride home IMing friends, I’d see a battery hit.

Without further ado, here are my findings.

IM+ Push ($9.99)

IM+ Push is a very full-featured app with two specific features I enjoyed: I can set how long I’m online for up to three days (perfect for getting through a weekend); and I can change the wallpaper behind the messages. However, I found the app overall a tad on the slow side. As a speed comparison, by the time I had opened IM+ and viewed the IM, I would have also replied to the IM in Beejive. While it does claim to connect to Skype, I had some issues getting it connected, and never got a push from Skype.

IM+ Lite (Free)

IM+ Lite is the free version of IM+ Push and the only differences between the two are that you can’t change the wallpaper and the push notifications are email only.

Beejive ($9.99)

I found Beejive to be the fastest app in my tests. I could very quickly see what IMs had arrived, preview them and reply to them. Like IM+, I can change the background, but I can only be online for up to 24 hours (which was the standard time period for all the apps). There was one nice feature I found in Beejive that I couldn’t find a corresponding setting for in IM+: I can set how long I show as “available” after I close the app. One of the chief complaints from people I was IMing during this test were the frequent “crumpy is available”/”crumpy is away” notifications they were receiving. By staying “available” for 20 minutes, the person I was IMing with had a much better experience. It was a minor detail I hadn’t thought of until a few people complained about it.

One other feature I liked is I can set how many IMs from contacts are shown when I launch the app. The default is I only see the most recent message from each contact, but I set it do display more, up to and including all messages.

Agile Messenger with Push ($9.99)

For the price, I found Agile Messenger to be a very poor solution. You can only connect to one account of each protocol (I have two AIM accounts: my personal and a work one). I also found the type size on the IMs to be too small to read, and there was noticeable lag when typing.

AIM ($2.99/Free)

There are two AIM apps from AOL, one that’s free and one that’s $2.99. I’m grouping them together since the only differences between the two are that the free one has ads and the paid version does not. While I found the app to be very responsive, there are two big issues I had: I can only be signed into one AIM account, and all push notifications have an SMS-style popup. I couldn’t stop the pop-ups, but I could control how much information was displayed — the ranges are from “new IM” to the full contents of the IM, including sender information. The only reasons I’d recommend this app is if money really is an object, you only have one AIM account, and don’t mind the obtrusive pop-ups.

Yahoo! (Free)

Well, about all I can say is, “Yep, it connected to Yahoo.” You can only connect to one Yahoo account and there is no push notification, nor any announced plans for push.

Palringo (Free)

In my tests, Palringo failed on liftoff. It requires a server-side account, and when I went to setup the account via the iPhone app, the captcha image didn’t even display — really, who needs captcha on an iPhone app? The app does not currently do push, although as of this writing they have submitted a push version for approval. At this point, for a free IM app, I’d recommend IM+ Lite over this one.

Skype (Free)

Since the purpose of this article is IM apps, I’m going to gloss over the voice portion of the Skype app, which is arguable its greatest benefit. However, I was able to connect to my Skype account and IM with friends just fine. There are no push notifications for IMs, however.

Fuze (Free)

Fuze is another one that requires its own server-side account to run. You can also only connect to one account of each protocol, and there are no push notifications. Also, for some reason even after quitting the app, it kept me online, but I didn’t receive a test message I sent myself when I logged back in. As with Palringo, if you need an IM app that’s free, go with IM+ Lite.

Chart of Instant Messenger Features

And the winners are!

For free apps, IM+ Lite blew the doors off the competition. I could connect to multiple protocols and multiple accounts.

In the paid category, while it was a close race, I felt Beejive edged out IM+ Push. While the ability to stay online longer than 24 hours was nice, I felt the speed and the ability to quickly see received IMs edged Beejive over the finish line.

As always, we welcome your comments about what IM apps you prefer.

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One of the only reasons I’ve stuck it out with my MobileMe account, despite numerous quirks, annoyances and outright failures, is push email. For the iPhone to be useful to me as a business device, I need it to keep me up to date on my email in real time (or as close to it as MobileMe’s push can achieve). Contact and calendar syncing are nice, but both can now be done using your Google information if you’d rather not pay the $100 annual MobileMe subscription fee. Gmail push would complete the picture, and it could be on the way.

And by could, I mean it definitely exists, as demonstrated by TechCrunch’s hands-on with the app that makes it possible. Yes, it’s via a third-party app, and there is no official word from either Google or Apple that Gmail push on the iPhone has finally arrived. Not surprising, considering the money Apple stands to lose in MobileMe subscriptions if Gmail, which is not only incredibly popular, but free, manages to replicate the one trick MobileMe still has up its sleeve.

The app, called GPush, is the product of a development company called Tiverias, and it uses Gmail’s IMAP IDLE feature and Apple’s push notifications to deliver near-live updates from your Gmail inbox. All the app itself does is provide a login screen, after which point you never really have to open it again. Once set up, it will display text alerts containing the sender address and subject from each new email you receive. That is, if it’s allowed to.

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.

If Apple does block the app, regardless of what (if any) excuse it cites as the reason for the rejection, it will cast even more doubt on the already suspect App Store submission review process. Basically, it seems like the only reason to keep IMAP IDLE support out of the built-in Mail app is to block Gmail push, so it wouldn’t surprise me if GPush never sees the light of day. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

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Something’s rotten in Cupertino, and Apple fans running the 3.0 firmware are beginning to get anxious as a result. I’m talking about push notifications, of course, which have yet to dazzle and amaze most iPhone owners running 3.0. A few apps are trickling in with some push features, but by and large, the headline apps that would provide game-changing push functionality have been left out in the cold.

If you’ve been monitoring “push notifications” on Twitter like I have to try to catch new apps as they come out, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The majority of talk seems to be vitriol against Apple for not approving the push-enabled version of the popular Beejive instant messenger, which has been under review for at least a week and a half now. Also in high demand is IM+, also currently under review, and AIM. Basically, people really want an IM client with push, and also a Twitter client, though I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that there is definitely one that is either pending review or in the works.

News now comes from a site that was trying to monitor and aggregate all live apps which include push notification, AppAdvice.com. They received word from an iPhone developer that Apple is to blame for the delays regarding push-capable apps. Dominik Balogh, who worked on the app NotifyMe, which uses push to remind you of to-do list tasks, reportedly received an email from Apple App Store staff claiming that the problems are on Apple’s side of things, and that they haven’t worked through all of the push bugs just yet.

Note that some apps, though, are live and are working fine, such as Tap Tap Revenge 2, among a growing list of others. I’m still running the AIM Developer preview released prior to 3.0′s official launch, and it is working like a charm, with virtually no lag time. That tells me that Apple’s servers are up and running, so the problem is probably more an anticipated one than something that’s already having an effect. Balogh describes a problem in the MacRumors forum having to do with feedback check, which he explains there, but it only happens 4 percent of the time, and probably wouldn’t justify a complete freeze on heavy-use push apps alone.

My bet is that Apple is only now realizing how much it will have to scale its infrastructure to deal with the volume that will come with push support for widely used apps like Beejive, which would presumably be making very frequent calls to the server for each user. The 3.0 release was attached to a pretty fixed timeline, so it isn’t terribly surprising that not everything was ready for launch. Better a little catch-up on the back-end than significant bugs and failures on the user’s side, like with the 2.0 launch. That said, gimme my Beejive push!

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The app, which expires in seven days, appears to only be available through the U.S. iTunes store, which doesn’t seem to have stopped Apple from sending out emails to all developers, regardless of their country of residence. The email specifies that devs should choose U.S. English as the app’s default language at first run, which suggests that they are fully aware that people already have or are able to create U.S. store accounts without actually being residents.

A forum thread on MacRumors details some developers’ progress so far with the test app, which is varied. Some, like Ben Dodson, have successfully received push notifications from the app (check out a lengthy post on his blog for details and screenshots). Others have yet to receive any notifications at all, myself included. A cursory survey of those who’ve also been unable to receive any push updates from AP finds that most, if not all, are located outside of the U.S., but I don’t have nearly enough information to cite that as the definite cause.

Chime in and let us know your experience if you’re also helping Apple test the app.

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