Apple has a new approval process for apps, and among the first to come through is Napster. This app, based on the pioneering and onetime piracy-riddled music download website, offers a subscription service that rivals iTunes.
In keeping with a theme of (possibly) saving money, we introduce you to FriendCash, which makes collecting debts from pals a little easier to manage.
NAPSTER (iPhone), Free
Napster was the infamous music-sharing service that really kicked off the battle between record companies and users “stealing” music. But since that time, the service has been seriously domesticated.
Today, Napster is more like Pandora or Last.fm (both of which have iPhone apps). The service allows streaming music, but you don’t actually own the tracks like you do when you buy them from iTunes. Instead, you pay a $10 monthly subscription to Napster, and it makes its library of songs available to you. Those songs stream, but by adding them to a cache in the app, you can download them now and listen to them even when you’re not online. The app itself is free.
This new release is good news for Napster subscribers caught between paying for the subscription but not being able to use it on a mobile device like an iPod Touch. Whether letting Napster through onto iPhones will be the giant-killer some predict, however, is tough to say. In reality, Napster does for a fee what other music services have been making free for some time, but with a little less control.
FriendCash (iPhone), $0.99
Making your roommates responsible for paying up on those long-distance calls has never been so easy.The simple purpose of FriendCash is that it keeps track of spending and what members of a group owe each other. For the roommates mentioned above, users track what each spends and then can determine who owes what to who, for as many as 80 people.
The whole interface seems pretty simple, which is a plus, and it only takes hitting one button to set everyone back to a balanced budget. So now, at least, you’ll have an easy way of determining just how much money your friends are not repaying you for food and bills.
