After my gripe last night about Khalid a friend Justin from nexsoftware.net informed me of a cool app that I must have missed. My Market is described as an overlay for the market that allows for much more refined searching. You have the ability to filter out results by author name or by keywords.

My Market filter list

My Market add new filter

Adding in “Sapphire” immediately removed the offending Top Pretty Ladies that were flooding in at a rate that seemed to be about 2 per hour. I then added some other authors to the list and watched the market clean itself up. While that alone is enough to make this app a great one, it does not stop there! There is a built in bookmarking feature, the ability to email a link to a friend and even an internal rating/recommendation system.

My Market app list

My Market app list

About the only downside I could see to this app is that it does not install the selected program itself and instead sends you to the real Android Market to finish the download/install. While this is not a huge disappointment, it does leave you wishing for a better implementation. Overall I would have no problem rating this application 5 stars. If you have not already, go check this app out on cyrket.com.

Apple banned him so he went underground. He used to go by Khalid Shaikh on the Android Market, but lately his apps have been showing up under the alias Sapphire Apps. His company name Perfect Acumen can still be seen in his package names and the annoying flood of his “Top Sexy Ladies <insert female celeb name here>” apps (which most users seem to view as spam) keep him from being hard to find. He packages a few pictures he finds on various websites into a slideshow and attempts to sell them for $5 each. The vast majority of his apps have a 1 star rating, and mostly because that is the least you can rate an app.

Khalid Shaikh Spamming the market with low rated apps

He currently has 178 apps listed on cyrket.com and was up to over 900 when Apple banned him from the AppStore. Google, it is time to stop Market spam and give us a filter option!

*Edit* While I was writing this (and after counting) Sapphire Apps posted 2 more apps to the Android Market. This puts his count up to 180.

*Edit2* 3 more apps were posted within an hour of this post. Grand total 183 and counting. At this rate, he might hit 300 before noon tomorrow.

The results of the Droid Dev Challenge 1: Cupcake Widget are in. 18 widgets were submitted to be voted on and 2 were chosen as first and second place winners. The widget that won first place gets a prize total of $656 with the second place winner getting $164. While I could keep typing here forever to prolong the results, I will hold in my deep desire to be mean like that and just get on with it

First place goes to aniWidget from aniFree

Second Place goes to Weather from Android Apps

Thanks to all of the devs and those who donated. This will probably be the last contest here for Android-DLs.com but do feel free to check out the Android Bounty contest and AndroidandMe.com to get mobile Quake working on Android.

If you are like me, you probably check the market for new apps at least once a day. I was excited when I first saw cyrket.com had setup an RSS feed for the latest items and immediately went and purchased the first Android RSS reader that supported notifications. This was then set to check cyrket every 5 minutes for new releases. While that was good while I was away, I did not want to have to pull out my phone to see the latest releases. I recently added the feeds to a bot I run on irc.freenode.net in #android-downloads so that I could see the latest submissions when I am on irc. If you frequent freenodes #android channel feel free to add my channel to your auto join and come idle. If you are looking for a good irc client for the G1, try out Android IRC by nyt. It is not free, but in my opinion it is the best, most full featured client that has been released and it was definately worth the $5 I spent on it.

Also note that I have placed the last 10 apps feed on the right side of the home page.

A new site recently appeared called >Cyrket (pronounced circuit??) and gives you a web based view of the market. Great for anyone who wants to view the public embarrassment that some market commenters put themselves through. I will say this site has limited usefulness, but it still has a high cool factor. If we could ban users who have an IQ that does not contain at least 2 digits, the market might be a little more accurate. Check out this tool when you get bored and maybe find a new app that you cant live without.