As another week passes, the seams of Apple’s App Store have been stretched even further with a deluge of new releases. Digging through the latest apps, I’ve selected four fresh picks for you to check out.

It’s Halloween and so my top pick for this week is Alive 4-ever, a top-down zombie shooter with plenty of guts and gore to go around. I’ve also been checking out TowerMadness Zero, NASA and WordPress 2.

Alive 4-ever ($1.79)

As it’s Halloween, I thought that at least one of my top picks this week should be themed for the occasion. Despite the clumsy sounding name, Alive 4-Ever is a surprisingly polished top-down shooter. The plot is simple and disgustingly cliché: for whatever reason, a zombie apocalypse happens, you take to the streets to rescue other survivors.

The game takes its inspiration from some of the best zombie titles out there, including Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead. There’s a battalion’s worth of weaponry on offer, including zombie-slaying classics like the AK-47. Plus, if you’re after more firepower you’re able to purchase bigger, stronger, faster guns in the shop after each level.

There’s also a Bluetooth multiplayer mode, allowing you to jump into the action with three other friends. Alongside guns, zombies and survivors, the game throws in experience points too. Completing a stage earns experience points, these precious points go towards upgrading your character. In effect, you’re able to become the ultimate undead-destroying warrior.

TowerMadness Zero (Free)

Earlier this month, our own Alfredo Padilla took a look at 49 different tower defense games for the iPhone. Owing to the epic nature of his list, days later Alfredo distilled the document down into five tower defense games worth owning. All of Alfredo’s picks costs a few bucks though and, in this cash-strapped climate, some of us don’t have much money to burn on iPhone games.

That’s where TowerMadness steps in. The game is available in two monetary flavors. You can purchase it for a couple of bucks, or you can download the Zero edition: a totally unrestricted ad-supported version of the game for free. The ads are unintrusive and targeted in such a way that, for the most part, they feel relevant.

Of course the iPhone doesn’t need another tower defense game. Aside from being free, TowerMadness is a pretty good representation of the best qualities of the genre. All the usual TD staples are there — waves of enemies, upgradable towers, strategic play — but it’s all wrapped up in excellent graphics too.

NASA (Free)

National organizations seem to be slowly switching on to the iPhone. Last year, the BBC decided to create an iPhone-specific version of its excellent iPlayer site. Canada’s National Film Board just released a wonderful app for viewing its content on the go. And now NASA has released its very own app, allowing us earthlings to keep up-to-date with space mission news.

The app is essentially like having a tiny mission-control in the palm of your hand. There’s a listing of all NASA Missions, all of which have awesome names like Mars Express and Mars Odyssey. Tapping through to a mission section provides a mission briefing, photos, videos and an ever-so-slightly ominous countdown timer.

For me, the best part of the app is the video section. Rather than attempt to visualize the various space happenings described in the app, the videos bring these extraordinary happens closer to home. You can observe spacecraft launches, see astronauts float around in zero gravity, listen to people in space describe their experiences, and watch history in the making.

WordPress 2 (Free)

The original WordPress app just wasn’t so hot. With a clunky and convoluted interface that was all function and no form, it immediately felt dated. And, for writers and bloggers alike, it certainly wasn’t the most inspiring environment in which to attempt to pen a post.

The user interface has been updated but still, on first look, the app looks worryingly basic. In fact, it’s disconcertingly similar to its clunky counterpart, WordPress 1. I appreciate that the WordPress app is here to serve a function, but, discounting features, surely it could have been executed with a little more pizazz?

Anyway, looks are not the most important thing with WordPress 2. This version introduces several new features to the mix. There’s automatic saving and restoring of posts. A new comments interface which includes author URL and Gravatars. The app even stores password in the keychain. If you’ve got your own WordPress blog, this is certainly an app worth checking out.

That’s all the picks for this week. I’ll be back in seven days with a fresh selection of App Store recommendations.

In the meantime, what apps have you been using this week?

Much like a migratory bird is genetically driven to fly south for the winter, I am driven to bloviate online. And so over the years I’ve accumulated my fair share of blogging accounts. I’m very active on Twitter, have a WordPress blog, a Flickr account, Facebook, and a rarely-used LiveJournal account. Keeping them all updated is frustrating, though. I’ve ended up just posting to WordPress and using the Twittertools plug-in to feed the post to Twitter (which also feeds into Facebook). It’s not elegant, but it works.

I’ve said before that my iPhone is the command center for my life, and at the same time noted that there’s no real end-to-end solution that will let me blog across all services on the iPhone. The full-featured WordPress site is unbearable, and the iPhone app for the same just doesn’t cut it. I can use the drafts method to get an article off my iPhone and into a better front end, I can use Tweetie for Twitter, and I can easily email photos to my Flickr account. But I was struggling to find a one-button solution, but now I have: Posterous.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you folks: While we at TheAppleBlog pride ourselves on bringing you All Things Apple, All Day Long, this post doesn’t necessarily require a piece of Apple-made technology to work. However, if you’re like me and just like reading fun tales of how people use their iPhones in their daily lives you’ll forgive me this one transgression.

Posterous is the latest entry to the micro/social blogging scene; its closest competitor is Tumblr. I’ve got a Tumblr account and have found it lacking, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think when I started using it I was trying to force it into being the one-stop solution it wasn’t. I could get my tweets to work with it, and I could get my WordPress account to suck up the feed and Tumblr to do the same, but it always felt like a duct-taped solution. Part of the problem is Tumblr has a counter called Tumblarity which goes up and down as you use — or don’t use — the tool. I’m OCD and that number’s lack of movement bugged the heck out of me because only posts that originated in Tumblr affected that counter; using the feeds didn’t.

Posterous is shining where Tumblr let me down, thanks to a very ingenious tool: email. I tell Posterous what email addresses to accept missives from and it will then happily feed all of my blogging services the contents of that message. It’ll dump them right into my personal blog, create a self-promotional tweet with a link, upload the photo to my Flickr account, create a LiveJournal post, and (something that keeps my OCD happy) create a Tumblr post in a manner that will make my Tumblarity go up.

If you click on this link to my Posterous account, and the links to all the sites I linked to above, you’ll likely see a post with a picture of a very nice motorcycle. That entire post was created on the iPhone and Posterous did the dirty work of cross-posting. So far, the only negative I’ve seen is just when the photo is uploaded to Flickr — I was hoping the message would get added as commentary.

Since my iPhone is always with me, Posterous is letting me carry through on ‘That’s neat, I should blog about that’ inspirations with a tool that requires no set-up or even an Internet connection until I want to upload. I love that I can see a picture of a neat bike on a street corner, snap the pic and in seconds have all of my blogs updated. With so many friends using different blogging platforms, Posterous feels like the Adium of blogging tools.

So, am I right in assuming that a lot of you have already seen the culmination of the on-air feud between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer last night?

If not, I would recommend checking out the full interview at Comedy Central’s web site, and check out the background context, via a simple “Jim Cramer” keyword search on YouTube, if you’re not familiar with what’s been going on. Here’s the short version: Jon Stewart called out all of CNBC for shoddy financial reporting in a lengthy montage, Jim Cramer took personal offense, John fired back at him, specifically, then Jim went on John’s show and basically got eaten alive. Believe me, I’m not doing it justice.

You might be thinking “I thought this was an Apple blog, because of the name,” but bear with me, there is an Apple angle to last night’s events. During the interview, Jon is continually backing Cramer into a corner and then playing a clip of something he said earlier that completely contradicts or points out the absurdity of what he just said to Jon. During one of these clips, taken from a 2006 interview on TheStreet.com, Cramer mentions Apple by name. And not just briefly, as a throwaway example. He mentions Apple as an example of a company where manipulating buzz around a product is simple, and will definitely affect stock pricing.

Why is this so? Cramer infers that it is because of people like us, who devour any shred of Apple news or information with such zest and zeal that letting slip a simple hint that AT&T and Verizon aren’t interested in Apple’s then-upcoming iPhone would catch like wildfire, and share prices would tumble as a result. Aside from Cramer’s very concrete example, I can think of at least a dozen other times when this sort of thing has happened, and suddenly rumors that later prove to be false take on a more sinister character, since they might be misdirection instead of just accidental misinformation.

It would be easy to accept the role of the patsy in these circumstances, the unwilling conduit of information. But really, I can’t help but feel that I deserve at least part of the blame Stewart is laying on Cramer’s shoulders, since we bloggers often put entertainment before more serious concerns of what cumulative effect our pieces might have, taken together. Also, I really just don’t like the feeling that I’m being used as a plaything by financial gamers.

So what’s the answer? Not to refrain from producing content, obviously. The Apple user community is a rich and vibrant one, and participating in that discussion is too valuable to give up. Instead, we should do what Stewart suggests Cramer do, and be more critical about the information we receive. It’s less about what we report, than how we report it. Too often dubious rumors get reported as the gospel truth, without disclaimer. That’s just as bad as Cramer passively taking for granted every word out of a CEO’s mouth.

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably run into MarsEdit at some point or another. Maybe it stuck, maybe it didn’t, but in my experience people who’ve blogged for some reason or another, and who own a Mac, have played with MarsEdit. Whether it appealed to you before or not, it might be worth a second look now that the public beta 2.3 version has been released. You can grab it at the Red Sweater Software blog.

Now, I won’t lie, I haven’t been partial to MarsEdit or other software-based blogging solutions in the past. This is actually a point of contention between me and my girlfriend, who is a die-hard MarsEdit devotee. I recognize the many benefits of it, and I do think that it’s a nice piece of software, but I just prefer working directly in the WordPress editor with Google Gears enabled.

The big change in this update is Tumblr support. Before, MarsEdit supported WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and many others, but this is the first time Tumblr support has been included. If you’re unfamiliar with Tumblr, it’s a relatively recent player in the weblog game, but it offers a degree of customizability not available for Blogger or WordPress users without additional paid features or self-hosted installs. There’s a couple of outstanding issues, like MarsEdit won’t recognize your Tumblr blog if you have your own custom domain name, but you can still edit it, as long as you point your software at the Tumblr-based URL they provide you.

Tumblr support may not seem like that big of a deal in and of itself, but combined with MarsEdit’s already long list of supported software, it definitely adds to its appeal as a one-stop source for all your blogging needs. Especially since Tumblr has become such a hit with the Twitter crowd, owing to its quick and easy posting of a variety of media in a addition to written blog content.

As a recent Tumblr user myself, I’m willing to give MarsEdit another try. I value software that centralizes or congregates otherwise scattered tasks, and that’s exactly what MarsEdit 2.3 does for blogging.

Other than the addition of Tumblr support, the only other improvements seem to be favicon detection, Technorati Tags editing, and some media manager updates. MarsEdit has a free 30-day trial. After that, it will set you back about $30.

WordPress launched an iPhone app for posting blog entries right from your device. With my Mac out of commission yet-again, I thought a good test would be a TAB post using only the client.

I used my 1st gen iPhone and the EDGE network to grab the app from the mobile version of the app store. It downloaded and installed very quickly and I was set to go in less than 3 minutes. The app enabled you to setup multiple WP blogs and only needs your site URL and credentials. It then sucks down all your customized settings for posts (quickly, even over EDGE) and lets you start blogging right away. The “Write” screen makes quick work of title, keyword and category entries (very well done interface) and you have the option of saving to local drafts or posting to your site.

Typing a full blog post on the iPhone is no small feat (esp. if you have large fingers) and I was disappointed that there was no option to rotate the display to take advantage of the larger width keyboard.

It does let you embed photos/pictures from your iPhone library (and lets you take one right from the app) – we’ll see how the Seattle library photo looks that I just took and attached.

The app also lets you preview posts in your site template and gives you the option to password protect it.

The WordPress folks obviously spent a great deal of time and energy working on the interface and functionality. While the iPhone autocorrect can make some typing annoying, my overall first impressions are very good. It did crash once on me, but most developers are quick to blame OS 2.0 for bugs.

If you give the app a try, let TAB readers know how it worked for your configuration by dropping a note in the comments.

This whole post was created solely on the iPhone except for the WordPress logo and interface screenshot.

Brainjiuce has updated its weblog editor Blogo to version 1.1. This update puts it closer on par to MarsEdit (my blogging tool of choice) by adding direct text formatting commands and better file format support (i.e. for posting graphics). The user interface has also been overhauled:

A neat Blogo feature it the ability to import the post template from your blog (to the best of its ability). This version also adds support for the “Post to weblog: command from newsreaders (and specifically mentions Safari and NetNewsWire). Bainjuice includes a bookmarklet that you can use as well.

A weird-yet-interesting feature is the inclusion of Twitter support. It’s a full Twitter client and even has a “friends of friends” view mode. Another Twitter integration feature is the ability to send new status updates to Twitter (with shortened URLs) when a new article is posted.

Growl support is also now included, but not very configurable (which means you have to get granular in Growl – potentially – to make it non-annoying). Blogo also now claims to support Drupal – one of the reasons I wanted to try it – but, I’ve not been able to get it to work with my Drupal sites, so until that happens, no nods to that claim.

The application crashed on me several times, making it feel more “beta” than “release 1.1″. The features are good and Twitter support rocks, but the interface is still – at least in my opinion – clunky. If they made it more straightforward and less “glitzy,” it would go a long way towards usability. It has quite a bit going for it, though, and version 1.5 or 2.0 should make for a top-of-the-line blogging & micro-blogging posting engine.

Blogo can be downloaded as a 21-day unlimited trial or purchased for $25 USD from the Brainjuice site. If you’ve tried the new version or used the previous version and have some thoughts to share, drop a note in the comments.

I’m not one to get excited about dot-update releases from a software vendor, but a tool that was mentioned in my “must have” post – MarsEdit – has just updated from version 2.0 to 2.1, with that “0.1″ adding far more than a tenth of new features.

One of my major complaints about the previous version has been the horrendous preview feature. While you could connect MarsEdit up to your site CSS style sheets fairly easily, rendering of your entries was always slow and buggy. The new preview feature is fast, responsive and (so far) bug/crash-free. This makes creating entries more fluid and enables you to trust what you see locally rather than having to preview posts on your site before publishing.

One other great, new feature is the ability to search your posts locally. If you contribute to a number of blogs (public or private) or just post quite a bit, this can be a great way to go back and see if you’ve already hit upon a topic before. It can also be a great way to gather support materials for a new post. Since you can use MarsEdit as a note-taking system (you don’t have to post drafts to a server), this can also be a fantastic way to organize small bits of info you keep promising to find a place for.

Finally – for Movable Type and WordPress users – authors have the ability to do free-tagging instead of picking from a list of defined keywords. I’m a huge Drupal fan, and Drupal does have free-tagging support, so perhaps Dan will read this humble post and work on interfacing with the Drupal API’s.

MarsEdit is not free, but it’s a bargain at $30. Dan is very responsive in the ME forums and both he and the app have a presence on Twitter (when Twitter is actually up, that is).

If you have any good/bad experiences with MarsEdit please drop a note in the comments and if you have alternative blogging client/post organization suggestions let us know as well (always good to hear from those three ecto users out there).