Delayed but not forgotten! Ok, so this is the most people I've ever had to apologize to at once, well except for that night in Vegas...on stage with Cirque Du Soleil...I've said too much. Regardless I must apologize for the delay of our Design A GelaSkin contest, as it turns out even we are not immune to the technical difficulties of the interwebs. Alas it's all done, our galley is set up and awaiting submissions, our voting plan is setup, and I'm just itching to see what kind of creativity you, our readers, are really made of.

If you haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about here's a brief recap of my blog post a few days ago. Today we are beginning a new contest called Design A GelaSkin, if you're not familiar with them, check out their site, each case is truly amazing and we need you to design one for us. If yours is chosen not only will you get a free skin for yourself and your very own 148Apps T-Shirt but also your design will be on a limitless amount of skins that we will be sending out for promotions and giveaways around the world!

Even if your not an artist we still need your help on picking out the best design so please come vote!

More contest details after the break...

It's official, 365 days & 1.5 billion App downloads later 148Apps has officially turned 1 Year old, Hurray!!!!!!! Now that you know, mark it on your calendar for next year, this year is your freebie but if I don't get a birthday card from you on July 16th next year we will sooo be fighting!

Seriously though, can you say "wow," just look at how much we have changed and grown from that very first Aurora Feint: The Beginning Review Jeff started us out with. We've reviewed hundreds of apps, added a staff of over a dozen writers, launched our sister site (148apps.biz), and have a Web Fourm section up and kicking, it's amazing, we are now easily the best gosh-darn iPhone review site this side of Mars.

We have you, our readers, to thank for all of it, so thank you. So in the spirit of thanks I want to announce a new contest. While I know we all love the App & ITMS Gift Card giveaways, we thought that this called for something special, Design your own GelaSkin. Let me explain, for those of you who aren't familiar with GelaSkins you definitely need to check out their site, they describe it as "Protection with style. Not Bulk." And it's true, their skins are ultra thin with amazing print quality.

Alright, I'm getting to the point, we are asking you guys to design a skin/logo for us. I'm not talking about a design for just a few skins, we'll be ordering tons of these things for different contest and promotional giveaways. Think about it, if you win your artwork could be on iPhones around the world, how cool is that! On top of that we'll obviously be giving you a free skin of your design and also your very own 148Apps T-shirt.

So heres how it's going to go down:

The Design
Your design can be of anything, App related or not, but it must be tasteful. You can get some great ideas and inspiration from the GelaSkins gallery page. Although it need not be directly related to iPhone apps we do ask that you work our 148Apps logo into it somewhere. If you check out the GelaSkins gallery you'll notice that many of the iPhone skins are cropped down from larger pictures, we can definitely do this as well, in the end the picture printed will need to be cropped to 1500 x 1500 pixels. You can grab a large version of our logo artwork here. You'll also notice that they recommend designing an optional wallpaper to go with the skin which if your skin is chosen we will post the downloadable artwork on our page.

Choosing the Winner
We're going to be stealing a page from the American Idol book here. The judging panel will consist of 3 148Apps representatives, each counting as 1 vote and then all of the readers will be allowed to vote on their favorite design. The most popular choice of the readers will count as 1 vote in the final panel. If there are enough submissions then there will be a semi final round where the designs are narrowed down to the top 3 to choose from and a new vote will be taken.

Viewing and Voting
There will be a submission gallery page setup where readers can browse through all of the submitted artwork for their favorites. The official voting and design submission procedure is still being discussed and details will be released soon.

Run Dates
While the contest is being announced today it will not officially begin until Monday, July 20th, 2009. Submissions will then be accepted until 11:59 pm Friday, July 31st, 2009. Votes will then be counted at 11:59 pm Monday, Aug 3rd, 2009. Results will then be announced on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009.

**One note about the artwork submissions. At 148Apps we fully appreciate artistic nature and encourage everyone to follow that nature and design anything they would like. But because of the wide demographic of readers we have we request that all submissions remain tasteful and reserve the right not to post any which we consider to be inappropriate or offensive. Thank you and have fun!

Welcom to the Design A GelaSkins Gallery Page. All submissions are added the night of submission so if you don't see yours right away don't fret, it will be there in the morning. To keep things honest voting will not take place until all the submissions have been made. In the mean time feel free to make comments about them at the bottom. Click here for more contest details. Spread the word!

[gallery columns="4"]

So Apple had a big day yesterday announcing new computers, the new iPhone 3G S, and of course the long awaited software upgrade to 3.0 with Copy & Paste, MMS, and the new Video Recorder (3G S only). As great as these features are though, I think they’ve completely over shadowed some other great additions, many of which, on a daily basis are going to be far more useful than being able to receive that picture message of my parents dog in a pig costume, scary...I know. I’ve gone through all of the information I could find directly from Apple’s website (these aren’t rumors) and pooled together some of the new features that have slipped through the cracks.

iDisk
MobileMe got some major revision with the “Locate My Phone” feature and the “Remote whipe” but there is also a free application coming out called iDisk. Yup, you will now be able to remotely view you iDisk content straight from your phone, sorry MobileDisk and Air Sharing Pro. An added bonus is that through this app you can send a direct link to any file on your iDisk via e-mail so that anyone you like can view it, this is especially useful for content that is just too large to be sent through an e-mail itself.

Contact Syncing
More good news for MobileMe and Exchange users are the new advances in over the air contact and calendar syncing. Right now turning on syncing from a cloud to a phone will erase all information currently on the phone and replace it with the new info. With 3.0 though users will get the choice between erasing, merging all data, or creating separate profiles.

Apple also states that on top of MoibleMe and Exchange the phone will be able to sync contacts and calendars from Yahoo!, Google, iCal, and Microsoft Outlook. At this point it’s unclear if these are going to be new over the air features or more likely ones that need to be synced through iTunes. We do know though that you’ll be able to add subscription based calendars directly from the phone over the air, this is great for some one like me who needs an alert every time the Cubs are going to play a game or Special Holidays are coming up.