Free apps roundup for February 19th, 2010

This week is all about IM since we finally saw the release of Meebo. This app has been a long time coming, but it will likely be worth the wait. BeejiveIM now has some serious competition, especially considering Meebo is free. But even if IM isn’t your cup of tea, I have you covered with this week’s list.

• Meebo – Easily the app of the week. Finally, some competition for BeeJiveIM. This app aims to be the end-all / be-all of IM apps. It supports nearly everything you’d consider to be an IM network, so yes, AIM, Google Talk, Facebook etc. It allows for multiple chats, searchable history, even push notifications for when you close the app but still want to stay logged in. It synchronizes your chat histories between the app and Meebo.com allowing you to keep track of your chats on your iPhone, online and on your desktop (there’s also a desktop app available). There’s an in-app browser for links that you may stumble upon. The feature list is so long that I could just keep typing and typing, but I won’t. Meebo has pretty much all fronts covered here. This is the best free IM app on the App Store.
• Duck Shoot Sketch – This app has some serious style. It’s the classic game of shooting ducks that travel across the screen on varying levels, but it doesn’t look the same. Instead, the whole scene looks as though a middle schooler has drawn it in blue in on graph paper. Lovely. You can even buy more levels if you really like the game.
• RemixMonkey Pocket DJ – The freeness of this app will likely not last, so it’s a “download it now or pay for it later” type situation. This app isn’t exaclty a full blown DJ app, but it does allow you to use your existing music library instead of requiring you to import songs with another method. As such, you can’t do things like scratch or mix two songs together. What you can do is change the beginning and ending times of each song (something you can actually do in iTunes anyway), and automatically fade in and out. More features are said to be coming soon.
• Air Video Free – This app has an amazing concept that actually works. It allows you to watch essentially any video (sans DRM) you have in your video library on your computer (Mac or PC). You have to install an app on your computer as well, but that’s to be expected. It converts your videos on the fly, so there’s never a worry of whether your video is in the right format. It even works over 3G provided you have a UPnP or NAT-PMP router. It’s worth noting that the restriction on this free version is that not all item in folder are displayed. But it’s still mostly functional and quite an app.
• Touch Pets Dogs FUN – I’ve recommened Touch Pets Dogs before, but this is a different version of the virtual pet app. This one comes with free in-game objects and is themed with the Olympics in mind. Remember, there are seven breeds of dogs from which to choose, and you can interact with your virtual pet in numerous ways including the Plus+ Network. I just love Ngmoco (the makers of this game if you didn’t catch on—although that might be a good name for a virtual pet…just saying).

By the way, I’m not entirely sure why’d you’d want to do this, but you can now view the whole iTunes Store front end from your web browser by following this link. Could be useful if you’re at work and can’t access iTunes, but that’s the only scenario I can think of.