Inquisitor for iPhone was launched just a few weeks ago in the United States, and the response has been great. Right now, 44 of 46 reviews on the App Store rate it 4 or 5 stars, and the comments have been very kind:

“Hands down, this is the best search experience for the iPhone… Super fast, elegant design that saves you time typing by offering query suggestions as you type… You have to try this and see how amazingly fast it is. You won’t be disappointed!”

“Best. Search. Ever.”

“Better than Google. Easiest and fastest mobile search with high relevancy results.”

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Inquisitor is now available in 11 additional countries: Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand.

Please check it out on your local App Store – we hope you enjoy it! If your country isn’t on this list, stay tuned and we’ll keep you up to date as the rollout continues.

I’m pleased to announce that Acquisition 2.1 (v210) is now available for download.

This release brings auto-updater support (similar to the recent NewsFire beta) to make future software updates as painless as possible. There are also a number of minor cosmetic changes along with general improvements to the app’s ability to consistently find robust connections to the search network.

As an aside, if you’re a twitter user, you can now follow us for the latest news about Acquisition.

It took far too long for reasons I’ll never know, but Apple has finally approved the Inquisitor app for the iPhone.

Late last year, I released my first iPhone app, Ski Lodge, which brought a unique experience to skiers and snowboarders with the iPhone’s combination of GPS, 3G, and rich user experience. While Ski Lodge was my first iPhone app to make it out the door, it was not the first iPhone project I began working on. That particular honour goes to today’s announcement – Inquisitor for iPhone.

The iPhone is a unique platform with many strengths, but also many limitations. A small screen means that app design needs to be uncluttered, direct, and essential. Sometimes slow and error-prone keyboard entry means that search aids are critical. Slow website loading speeds mean that users cannot afford too much back and forth.

It turns out, these limitations map well to Inquisitor’s strengths. Inquisitor’s central premise is that providing a native search experience can provide a better, more direct way to navigate to the information you want. Visiting a webpage just to find another webpage, with all the hunting, pecking, pinching and tapping that entails, can get tiresome quickly.

Inquisitor has always been about speed and simple design. Instant search suggestions attempt to complete your thoughts and save you from the keyboard. Results are designed to be easily read on the iPhone screen, so there’s no need to hunt and peck. A built-in web browser means you can flip between search results and web pages with a single tap. There’s even an extended abstract preview that hovers over webpages while they’re loading, so you’re never left staring at a blank screen. On top of it all, Inquisitor remembers your history and personalizes the experience to you.

You can get it from iTunes. At the moment it is only in the USA store, but we’re working to get it launched everywhere once a few legal hurdles are passed. Oh, and it’s free ($0.99 is so lame).

Hot on the heels of the release of Safari140, I’m pleased to release the first beta of NewsFire 1.6. Similar to Safari140, NewsFire now supports direct posting to Twitter, using the same hotkey shortcut and interface.

In addition, NewsFire 1.6 has an updated visual design and now has built in auto-updater support (via Sparkle) for pain-free upgrades.

Download NewsFire 1.6 Beta 1
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard required.

Ski Lodge has been updated to version 1.0.3 in the App Store. This release now shows the number of open trails and lifts at your resorts, and fixes a minor bug involving the display of temperature information.

Fast on the heels of Ski Lodge’s release, I am today releasing the first update (1.0.1) to this ultimate snowfall, trail map, and overall mountain companion app.

This release brings support for display of base depths directly alongside recent snowfall info. This is a user preference, and like all preferences is available in the iPhone ‘Settings’ app. This release also adds support for simple reordering and deletion support in your Favorites list. These two simple changes help make Ski Lodge even easier to use and more helpful.

Looking forward, Ski Lodge 1.0.2 will be the App Store next week with even more great features.

As a bonus, in celebration of both this release and the holidays, Ski Lodge will be going on sale for $1.99, for a limited time only. This makes Ski Lodge perhaps the best value you’ll encounter this whole season. That $10 après hamburger will feel like unnecessary extravagance in comparison.

When I’m not writing code, you can often find me out in the wilds of British Columbia on my mountain bike in the summer or on the ski slopes during the winter. So, when I got my iPhone earlier this year it wasn’t long before an idea began to form about a user experience for the iPhone that would embrace and enhance the winter mountain lifestyle. This would be a niche product, for sure, but it’s a niche that I am passionate about.

So, I’m pleased today that this product is now a reality, having wound its way through the wilderness of the App Store review process. Today I’m introducing Ski Lodge (iTunes direct link), the ultimate companion experience for skiers and snowboarders alike. Ski Lodge brings together a plethora of interesting information on nearly 400 resorts in North America (Europe and the Southern Hemisphere coming soon!). First and foremost is constantly updated snow reports, along with live temperature data and resort cams, so you’ll know at a glance when to hit the slopes and when to stay home. Once you’re on the slopes, trail maps for every single resort are a tap away, fully zoomable and scrollable as you’d expect.

The features of this app are all wrapped within a lush experience, the most graphically rich one I’ve designed to date. The experience begins at your ‘Favorites’ list, where you can see snowfall and weather conditions for your hand-picked list of resorts. You can then drill down into each resort to get more detailed information such as the photos and trail map (complete with a cute graphical gauge showing you the relative number of green, blue, black, and double black runs on the hill).

Naturally I wanted Ski Lodge to be something that was something iPhone users could be proud of, and part of that is taking advantage of the iPhone’s unique capabilities. Case in point, Ski Lodge uses the iPhone’s GPS support to quickly show all the ski resorts in your geographic vicinity – great for when you’re in new surroundings or just as a way to use the app with zero configuration. Ski Lodge also integrates well with other iPhone apps. Each resort has a button that sends the resort’s geoposition to the Maps app, so you can get a satellite view or driving directions. And the iPhone is a phone after all, so each resort gives you a button that you can use to call the resort’s info line, for those times you need a human voice (or you need to call the ski patrol!).

As a final cherry-on-the-top feature (more for fun and not really central to the app), Ski Lodge has a sampling of ski news, where you can spend some time seeing what’s happening all around the ski universe. For those who are interested, this news section is actually a stripped down, purpose-built, ‘lite’ version of NewsFire for iPhone, so this is your chance to get a sneak peak of that. The challenge here will be finding good blogs to feature – if you know of one you’d like included, please let me know.

So, please give it a try and let me know what you think! I’m committed to pushing the user experience of this forwards over the coming weeks, but I think this is a solid start.

Thanks!

Note: If you are a blogger/media and would like to write about Ski Lodge, please send an email to get a free promo code for Ski Lodge.