One of the long-standing iPod rumors has been a model that included an FM tuner. Some people still can’t believe Apple never included that “simple” feature. Now, with the iPhone/iPod Touch being able to stream music from the Internet, I think it’s safe to say there will never be an iPod with a terrestrial radio. And using an app like Slacker Personal Radio, you wonder why anyone would still want one.

There are several streaming music players in the App Store, with Pandora being the most popular. Slacker is very similar to Pandora — choose an artist or song, and Slacker builds a radio station with similar music. There are also several pre-built genre stations to choose from. Slacker doesn’t seem to use the “musical fingerprinting” that Pandora does. Instead, it appears to be based on the genre of the artists. Still, it manages to put together a good playlist.

Slacker has a very diverse music selection of both independent and mainstream artists. To help me really put it to the test, I enlisted my friends on Twitter to suggest music to try. Searching for everything from Irish folk to Viking metal, I was able to find all but a few really obscure bands. I had less luck with song searches. About half the time, the band would be in Slacker, but the particular song I was looking for would not. This isn’t surprising considering how convoluted music licensing is, but it’s still disappointing.

But when it does find a song, Slacker plays that song — not just a similar song, which is what Pandora does. To me, this is a major improvement over Pandora. When you’re in the mood for a particular song, that’s what you want to hear first, not just something from the same genre. On top of that, Slacker gives you some control over what gets played on a station — you can increase how often songs you favorite get played, for example.

Overall, Slacker is an easy application to use. The UI is simple, and if you don’t have an account you can register for one right in the app. One minor issue is with searching: If you click on a search result to listen to the station and then go back, your search results are gone. If you wanted to try something else from your results, you have to search again.

I didn’t have any problems streaming music with Slacker. It took a little longer to start playing when I was on the EDGE network, but once it started playing it sounded smooth and clear.

With a free Slacker account you can skip up to six songs per station and (from the web interface) request a limited number of specific songs be played in a particular station. A paid account gives you unlimited skips and requests. With its large selection and advanced features, Slacker makes an excellent radio for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Slacker is a free download and available in the App Store.

There are several different ways to design a website or a software application. Some people like to start with Photoshop or Illustrator and create the complete design. Others like to start with code, and build up the look at the same time they are creating functionality. Another technique is wireframing, where you mockup just enough of a page or screen’s layout to understand the functionality, then turn it over to a designer to create a finished look.

For a couple of weeks, I’d been using OmniGraffle to do just that. Then I had a chance to try Balsamiq Mockups. If OmniGraffle is a complete painter’s workshop, then Balsamiq Mockups would be a box of 64 crayons. And that’s a good thing.

The UI is very simple. You have your workbook area, where you create mockups, and your available elements at the top. Drag or double-click one to add it to your mockup. There’s also a UI library search at the top, so if the element you want isn’t visible, you can quickly find it. All the elements have a hand-drawn look, which gives the whole process a feeling of sketching out an idea. Balsamiq Mockups is very easy to use, but it is not an OS X native app (it’s built on Adobe Air, so it runs on all platforms) so it lacks the standard Mac look. It also lacks some standard functionality, like hiding the window.

Any element that has text can be double-clicked to change the text. For an element with multiple items, like a list, you can type in a comma-separated string to generate as many items as you want. There’s also a tool window that pops up when you select an element that gives you context-sensitive tools for editing the element.

I particularly liked the full-screen view, which displays your mockup with a big blue arrow you control with the mouse. It’s great for presentations and pointing out specific elements.

Balsamiq Mockups can print your creation, save it as a PNG, save it to the native Mockups format, or export it as an XML file. Having an export option is nice, but since the output will only work with Balsamiq Mockups, it’s not particularly useful.

Professionals that do wireframing all day, every day, will probably be better served by OmniGraffle, with all its tools and options. For developers that just want to get their ideas down with minimum fuss, Balsamiq Mockups is a great tool. At $79 it’s a little pricey, but it is cheaper — and easier to use — than a lot of the alternatives.

It’s possible that Twitter is the killer app for the iPhone. Or maybe the iPhone is the killer platform for Twitter. Either way, the two go hand-in-hand — I don’t know any iPhone owners that aren’t Twitter addicts. It’s no surprise, then, that there are so many Twitter apps in the App Store. One that’s gained a lot of popularity recently is Tweetie, from atebits LLC.

Since buying my iPhone, I’ve used Twitterrific almost exclusively. While reviewing Tweetie, I couldn’t help but compare the two. Both are excellent apps, but written for different Twitter users.

Tweetie allows you to read and manage multiple Twitter accounts from its easy-to-use interface. In fact, except for changing your personal account settings, just about anything you can do on Twitter you can do from Tweetie: follow and unfollow, search, view user profiles, and more. Many of the things other Twitter clients send you to the Twitter website to view, Tweetie presents in a user-friendly, iPhone native way.

The main screen in Tweetie is your timeline, which shows the most recent tweets from people you follow. There are also separate screens for your @replies, direct messages, and favorites. As I mentioned, you can search directly from Tweetie, and see keywords that are currently “trending” on Twitter.

Posting from Tweetie is easy, just tap the post button in the upper right-hand corner. If you want to post a photo, you can take it from within the app or use a picture you’ve already taken. Photos are uploaded to the popular TwitPic service and the URL is attached to your tweet. The URL isn’t shown so it doesn’t clutter the screen while you’re writing, but this does limit how much control you have over placement of the URL in your post.

The one area I found Tweetie lacking was in the reading experience. Every time you open the app it starts fresh, loading the most recent tweets from your timeline. It has no concept of where you left off reading previously, it just starts you at the most recent tweet. This makes it more difficult to read from oldest to newest and to follow conversations. Also, while you can see from the timeline that a tweet has a link or a photo, you can’t visit those directly from the timeline. You first have to tap to go to the tweet detail screen, then tap again to visit the link. And when you’re on the detail screen, you can’t navigate your timeline in that view, you must go back to the timeline view to keep reading. And when you favorite a tweet, a modal dialog pops up that keeps you from doing anything until the favorite is saved. This seems like something that could happen in the background so you can return to reading.

The way Tweetie shows you TwitPics is nice — it scrapes the page and just shows you the image. I’ve always thought TwitPic should have iPhone-optimized pages. I wonder, though, how long it will be before TwitPic (which is advertising-supported) asks atebits to stop doing this.

Overall, if you’re a power user — someone that monitors/manages multiple accounts and wants all that Twitter has to offer in a single interface — Tweetie is probably the app you’ve been looking for. If, however, you’re a power reader — someone that doesn’t want to miss a single tweet, and wants to process those tweets quickly — Tweetie may not be for you.

Tweetie is currently $2.99 and available in the App Store.

The most recent release of the Google Mobile App for iPhone received a lot of attention for including a new voice search feature. Now, it turns out that version has something else noteworthy: a hidden settings page that lets you change colors, sound effects, and more.

These aren’t particularly jaw-dropping features, but the way they’re hidden is kind of interesting (which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader). It’s also notable because there’s been, as far as I know, very few “Easter eggs” found in iPhone apps so far.

Google Mobile App is free and available from Google in the App Store.

iNeedStuff comes pre-loaded with a few hundred common grocery items. The user interface is a good example of iPhone app design — simple and built with standard iPhone UI elements. To add an item to your list you can start typing its name in the search box and the list narrows down quickly as you type. When you find the item you want, tap the + button for the quantity you want. If the item isn’t found you can add it from the search box.

When you go shopping, iNeedStuff uses your iPhone’s location to know where you are. For a place you’ve been to before, it identifies the location instantly. One problem with this is if you’re inside a store it can’t get a GPS location, so it could recognize the store you’re in or another nearby store. If you haven’t shopped at that location before, you will be asked to add the store or manually choose a location. From then on, whenever you shop at that store, iNeedStuff will divide your list into things you’ve bought there before and things you haven’t. As you check things off your list, the app tracks the order in which you get things at that store, so it can put them in that order for future shopping trips. The more you shop at a store, the better it learns what you buy there and what order you shop in. The down side to this is, until you have it trained for most of the things you buy, you have to scroll up and down your list a lot, shopping from both sections. There is also no way to pick a specific store where you want to buy an item.

iNeedStuff also lets you sync your list with their online site, so you can share a list with other iPhone owners. While this functionality is nice for a family that splits up the shopping duties, the online list manager leaves a lot to be desired. The interface is not nearly as attractive or usable as the iPhone UI is. After making changes to your online list you must hit the syncronize button, or the changes will not show up on your iPhone. This seems like an unnecessary extra step. The online list has also been known to hang while synchronizing after renaming an item. The changes have been saved, but the page sits there as if they haven’t. Also, location and order data are not synced, so when your family shops at a store, your iPhone does not “learn” from that shopping trip.

The app itself, however, contains lots of small UI details that make it easy to use. On the shopping list, for example, it only shows a quantity if it is greater than one.  Another nice feature is the ability to turn off screen rotation. As you walk around a store, you tend to hold the iPhone in front of you until you find what you’re looking for. Then you’ll drop that hand to your side, while the other hand picks up the item. This can cause the screen to rotate, so when you pull the list back up to look at it, it could be in landscape, or in the middle of switching back to portrait. Allowing you to turn off rotation shows attention to how people use the iPhone.

iNeedStuff is in active development, and you can even vote on new features from within the app itself. Despite the disappointing online list manager, the app itself is a very capable shopping list. iNeedStuff is currently $8.99 and available in the App Store.