I've been waiting a long time for someone to come up with a way to get push notifications on my iPhone for my Gmail accounts, but up until today there wasn't really anything available. Thanks to an iPhone app called Prowl I'm now receiving nearly instantaneous push notifications on my phone.

I've been an iPhone owner for about a year now, and I have jailbroken it off and on throughout the time that I've owned it. When I first got the device I jailbroke it to play with some of the apps people were developing, but I really didn't see any that were must-haves, and they especially didn't touch the quality of what's available in the official App Store today.

A few weeks ago I bought the WunderRadio app for the iPhone because it did something most other Internet radio apps couldn't: play local stations via MMS streams. I flipped through the screenshots and read through the reviews to see if it could play Clear Channel stations (namely KISS FM), and there was plenty of confirmation that the program did.

There have been a few different radio applications that have come around, but one frequent complaint is that none of them offer a way to stream music in the background. This is a limitation that Apple has placed on third-party programs, but the native iPod app has this ability.

Ever since Apple's App Store launched, we have been waiting for a free app to view Wikipedia articles. Up until today, the only Wikipedia application for the iPhone that we knew of was called iWik, but you had to pay for it. Today Wikipanion launches, it's nearly perfect, and it's free.

There are both pros and cons to the fact that Apple has so much control over iPhone application distribution. One area that they have control over which might be seen as both a pro and a con is the removal of "bad apps" from a phone. You read that right, Apple has the capability of disabling unauthorized or malicious applications from your phone.

There are a lot of great applications that are coming through Apple's App Store for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but one of my new favorites would have to be the 100% free WordPress for iPhone.