In this week’s Steve-approved app roundup: Your music library, converted into baddies! Twitter, visualized in 3D! Byplanes, flown! Xbox Live accounts, accessed! Cars, salvaged! Overprotective parents, abetted! Live video calls, called! And more… The Apps To view the gallery as a single page, click here This Week’s iPhone News On Giz • An Exploded iPhone Is a Major Frat Party Buzzkill…Or Is It? • Apple Sued For iPhone Patent Infringement, Again • The New Mobile Twitter Site Is Actually, Um, Nice • Droid Commercial Paints iPhone as “Digitally Clueless Beauty Pageant Queen” • Wolfram Alpha Is Tired Of People Not Paying $50 Dollars For Their iPhone App • New Mercedes iPhone App: Hands On • iPhone Orchestra Hacks Touchscreen, GPS and Accelerometer to Create “Music” • Just a Cheap iPhone/iPod Adapter USB Hub • Mirror’s Edge Coming to the iPhone In January • iPhone Fitted With SLR Lens (It Was Bound to Happen) • Top 5 Assclowns Laughing at the iPhone Back in 2007 • RedEye Makes Your iPhone a Universal Remote Control • Stolen Belgian iPhones Traced to Russian Black Market • Where Is My iPhone Videochat, Apple? This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments.

In this week’s never-gonna-switch-so-stop-asking app roundup: Free games, reinvented! Airplane anxiety, averted! Photos, wirelessly printed! Cool apps, discovered by other cool apps! Navigation, cheapened! Black Friday rush, preempted! Google Wave, appified! Screens, pointlessly tapped! And more! The Best Chorus : Hey, Apple, when people start making apps just to help people find new apps, take it as a sign that your App Store interface could use a little help. Chorus crowdsources the effort to cut through the endless jungle of trash: Chorus is a bit like Apple’s native App Store app, except with drastically shifted emphasis: instead of giving category “Top” lists, which rank apps by overall download numbers, Chorus only pitches you apps that’ve been explicitly recommended by someone. These someones could include other friends who use Chorus, nearby Chorus users, or a stable of “App Mavens”-online reviewers and tech journalists, mostly. Free. ZenApps : An even better sign that the App Store could offer more in the way of search tools, filters and sorting options than a company making an app-finding app? Two companies making app-finding apps

In this week’s net-neutral iPhone app roundup: Wild Things, physics games, Photoshop!, Twitter again (but that’s ok!), horse music, human music, and much, much more. The Best Where the Wild Things Are : Promotional apps are normally garbage, and in a few areas, this is a little fluffy (though there’s some neat media in here—it’s fairly generous). But hey, the people marketing this movie know exactly whose heartstrings they’re pulling at, and how to pull them. And the 3D monster toy is genuinely cool. Free.

Don’t listen to the pasty dude with the Arsenal shirt who lives downstairs—FIFA 10 isn’t the only good thing to land in the App Store this week. Not even close. AP Stylebook : Anyone who has to crank out copy on a regular basis is probably familiar with the AP’ stylebook, but an iPhone app seems like an odd incarnation. It’s more portable and convenient that the hard copy, sure, but there’s an online version too, which makes more sense for most folks, since you don’t do a whole lot of actual writing on an iPhone, and flicking an alt+tab to your browser is faster than thumbing through an iPhone search query.

Let’s take a second to reflect upon how far we’ve come , from phone owners without the near-decade-old service that people don’t really use that much, to people with it. That far! In other, slightly more scheduled iPhone news: some apps! 12Mail : MMS has only been working on the iPhone for what, four hours? So, uh, here’s an alternative! 12Mail sends short—12 second, to be exact—video messages to your Twitter or Facebook account instantly, and for free. And if you designate a recipient who also has 12Mail, they get a push notification for you message. In other words, it can behave exactly like an MMS, except without using any of your monthly allotment.

This week in your facelifted, more searchable, iTunes-sortable app roundup: Flickr goes official; Navigon grows more sociable; spiders poop web; your homescreen gets organized; rhythm games find a new muse; and robots master the art of pillow talk. Tick Talk Robot: In the mornings of the future, humanoid, quasi-British, deep-voiced robots will lull you with a reading of the day’s news, stroke your hair, and breathe fragrant, bacon-scented air across your cheek until you wake. Until then, there’s Tick Talk Robot , which does pretty much the same thing, except without all the roboculinary eroticism. Two dollars. AppButler : This isn’t quite as cool as the press materials make it out to be, but it’s still not a bad idea, considering how much easier it is to arrange apps with iTunes 9

In this week’s leisurely, labor-friendly app roundup: Watchmen grows up, and grows large; you avoid getting sick; lots of TV gets watched; and Robocop’s got a few things to say to you. Outbreak : An app that aggregates disease outbreak information into either a list or a map overlay, giving you just enough information to be nervous, but not quite enough to really do anything about it. Most useful for hypochondriacs and/or residents of Sub-Saharan Africa. Free. Watchmen 2.0 : Back around when Watchmen came out in theaters, there was a little iPhone game called Watchmen: Justice is Coming . It was one of the first 3D MMOs for the iPhone, but felt a little underdeveloped

Finding restaurants, learning recipes, hunting down local food, eating with a conscience, feigning culinary expertise, and everything else food : Welcome to this week’s Friday iPhone apptacular, Taste Test edition. People who don’t really care about The Victuals, what’s wrong with you? don’t worry!: I’ve still trawled the App Store for non-food downloads this week, and there are plenty—just scroll waaay down. Everyone else? Commence feast…NOW.

Let’s take our minds off all this nasty Google Voice business for a minute, and focus on the apps that we do have. Google may not make an appearance this week, but how about Wikipedia? NPR? The Discovery Channel ? Simplify? NPR News : The unaffiliated Public Radio Player was great great great , but this is somehow better

Sid Meiers does a thing; Duke Nukem makes an appearance, exactly as you remember him; social conspiracies are aired; eBay!; and a thing called “e-mail.” All this and more in your unusually 90s-centric weekly app dump, after the jump. Civilization Revolution : Real-time strategy doesn’t really suit the iPhone—it can be a little frantic, and controls aren’t perfect. So how about an iPhone adaptation of one of the greatest turn -based strategy games of all time? $10 is right at the acceptable ceiling for non-professional iPhone apps , but this is real, true-to-form Sid Meier stuff, right here. Duke Nukem 3D : Oh, by the way, everyone who likes strategy games is a nerd , right guys? Because real men play DUKE NUKEM’, with the boobs, and the cursing! This is a fairly direct port of the classic game, but with crappier—though not terrible, for the iPhone—controls, and sadly, no iPod Touch 1G compatibility