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They’ve done it again, those Tapbots boys. Pastebot the third iPhone app they’ve released, after Weightbot and Convertbot and they’re getting better every time.

Pastebot is a clipboard manager for your iPhone and your Mac. Quite simply, with this app anything you copy, image, text or link can be pasted into Pastebot. Run the app, hold down on the item and it will be put into the iPhone’s clipboard to be pasted anywhere. The magic really happens when you get Pastebot Sync, a free system prefpane on OS X. Once connected with the iPhone when it’s running Pastebot, anything you copy on your Mac will automagically transfer to the app on the iPhone. Copy an image, a block of text (with formatting), html, video or an mp3 file and it pops into a slot in the iPhone.

Now how would this be useful? Here are a few recipes I picked up from different websites. As you can see I copied the recipe image and text and Pastebot did it’s duty and created slots for each item. The really cool thing is if I hold down on any image or text on the app it’s pasted into the current running application on my Mac! This operation is so quick it feels as if I hit ⌘-V on the keyboard.

Click to see the full interface.

As with the previous apps Tapbots conjure up, the interface is magnificent. Guys, you’ve done it again. Pastebot costs a paltry £1.79 in the App Store.

Amazon finally released a free iPhone app for the UK. Aside from searching for items as you would using a normal browser, this app has an interesting feature called Amazon Remembers. It will let you take a photo of an item you’re interested in, upload the photo and Amazon will try to find it for you. Yes, you read that right. Amazon will analyse the photo and match it to the items available for purchase.

Actually, that’s partly incorrect. The service doesn’t computationally analyse the photo, it uses Mechanical Turk to farm the job out to people who match the photo with items Amazon sells. Mechanical Turk is their online market place for people to carry out repetitive data-based menial jobs for a few cents per task.

When I tried the Remembers feature, the results came back within 15 minutes of the upload. I took a photo of our juicer and kettle and sent them off. The juicer was matched perfectly but it returned a coffee machine instead of the kettle. I’m sure the service will be refined and only improve over time.

It’s clear that Apple created a very compelling platform on which developers are using in inventive and brilliant ways.

Finally, the iPhone has more than one network in the UK. Two days ago Orange announced that they’ve broken O2′s stranglehold on the iPhone and will be selling all models by Christmas. Yesterday Vodafone declared they will be selling the iPhone as well from early 2010.

What will this mean to the iPhone? Considering that Apple recently reported that there are over 85,000 apps in the App Store and over 2 Billion downloads in its first year, those numbers will now skyrocket. There has never been a better time to start writing apps for the iPhone and the Mac platforms.

I’ve been dabbling with Xcode for a little while and found some really good resources to help me get started. The best guide so far has been BecomeAnXcoder and I highly recommend Aaron Hillegass’s book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. When you have a handle on Xcode and want to get started on iPhone development, there’s Stanford University’s excellent iPhone Application Programming podcasts.

Do it now if you can. The iPhone application market is about to expand massively.

After using Caffeine for a couple of hours I was hooked. It’s a free utility that stops your laptop from dimming the screen or going to sleep. How is this useful? How many times have you been watching something on YouTube for the screen to dim? Cue irritated push on the trackpad to get the brightness back.

Caffeine lives in your menu bar in the shape of a cup of coffee. When you want the display not to dim, click on the empty cup which changes to a full cup and et voilà, no more display dimming. When you’re not watching the screen anymore and listening to music whilst working, click on the full cup to drain it and revert the dimming back.

There are plenty of Sudoku games in the App Store but this one is a real “Look at what my iPhone can do!” game. You can photograph a game from a newspaper and Sudoku Grab (iTunes link) will digitise the puzzle… and then solve it for you. It will also let you email it to anyone who has a copy of the game installed on their iPhone.

The developer even posted how his application does it’s magic. Even though I don’t usually play Sudoku, this is enormous fun! Click on the images for larger versions.

Dateline is a free application which puts a month-view calendar line on the desktop and it does that beautifully. I love minimalism in applications (well, in everything really) and this app is prefect in that sense. You can customise the colours and width of the calendar, as well as whether the calendar is displayed above all windows or at the desktop level. Double-clicking any date will take you to iCal.

Here’s how it look on different wallpapers on my Mac. Click for a larger view.

Back in November I posted a quick review of one of my favorite iPhone apps, Weightbot. When the app was first released, the units of weight were either in kilos or pounds. I wanted an option for stones & pounds so I put in a request on the Tapbots support board, along with many other UK users. And they listened! A couple of point updates later, Weightbot had all three units.

I’m not 100% sure but I suspect this give the guys at Tapbots the idea for Convertbot. I bought the app just before our holiday in Bahrain to do quick currency conversions (even though there are free apps to do this). I wasn’t much surprised to see that the Bahraini Dinar wasn’t on the initial list of currencies. As before with Weightbot, I put in a request on the support site. As of version 1.1, the Bahraini Dinar is in the list!

Of course, Convertbot isn’t just a currency converter. It does length, mass, power, temperature, speed and lots more. The interface is very well thought out and nearly sublime. At £1.19 on the App Store, it’s well worth getting. Tapbots also have a free, stripped down version called Convertbot Mini.

Here’s a quick and handy tip if you want up-to-date exchange rates on the iPhone. The Stocks app lets you do that for free. All you have to do is add a new stock with both currencies three-letter codes like so:

GBPUSD=X

That’s it! You should get the current rate as well as a historical graph underneath.