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Following up on the unofficial news earlier last week that Apple had crossed the 10,000 app mark, Apple has announced 300 million downloaded apps.

The milestone was reported in ads placed in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal rather than the typical press release.

Only one additional marker has been reported since the iTunes App Store first opened in July of this year.  In October, Apple reported 200 million apps downloaded and the availability of 5,000 apps.

Not bad.

According to website “148Apps,” the Apple iTunes Apps Store has reached the 10,000 application milestone.

They’ve posted a nifty page showing mini icons for every application and a bit of interesting data on release frequency and cost distribution.

TechCrunch notes:

About 24% of apps are free; 35% cost $.99. The average cost is $3.12, including free apps. About 34% are games or entertainment, and there are 49 weather related apps for the iPhone despite the fact that a weather app is built in.

[via techcrunch]

Google released Google Earth for iPhone this morning.  The app integrates with the built in GPS for positioning, but obviously lets you explore the entire globe.  Great integration with Panoramio photos too-

The creators of the Shazam iPhone app say that 20 million iPhone requests have been made for song identification on the company’s servers. This is 2-3 look-ups per person, per week vs. 3-5 times per phone on other platforms. 

Is this solely due to the success of the iPhone platform or could it be that they charge money for these lookups on every other platform?

[via MacNN]

An iPhone book app, Stanza [app store],  has been downloaded more times than the number of Kindle units sold by Amazon.

The free Stanza app downloads public-domain books directly to the iPhone. Developer Lexcycle reports 395,000 downloads and growing at a rate of 5,000 per day.

Citigroup predicts that Amazon Kindle will sell 380,000 units in 2008, which is four times longer than Stanza app has been available.  Lexcycle says it is planning commercial book distribution in the new year.

[forbes via macnn]

Apple has finally dropped the iPhone non-disclosure agreement:

To Our Developers

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

To view status comments on the new Facebook 2.0 for iPhone, click on your profile, then scroll down (this is the traditional “wall”).  Nifty little icons show you how many comments there are.  The process works pretty much the same way in the “new” Facebook web application. 

Surprising how buried the “wall” is now.

While researching how to get the Firefly Media Server working on iPhone firmware 2.1, I found the answer (yet again) on RupertGee’s iBlog.  This time, he’s included resources for controlling the server with BossPrefs.

iPhone Atlas has an interesting article about iPhone application makeup.  It turns out those .ipa (iPhone application) files are indeed standard packages just like MacOSX .pkg apps- they’re just flat packages so that you can’t open them using the contextual menu in finder.

Using more advanced tools like Pacifist will work fine.  Hack away!

There’s a great new security feature in iPhone 2.1.  It’s located in the “Passcode Lock” section of the Settings app.

This new option let’s you set a default amount of time before the passcode lock is set and can optionally erase all data on the iPhone after 10 failed attempts. 

This sets a nice balance between hardcore security and convenience. Perfect for anyone worried about a lost or stolen iPhone.