As some of you might know, my husband and I live in Austin. One of the great things about living in Austin is that you can take advantage of all the fun stuff that surrounds SXSW every spring. Last year we designed a mobile site to help us get around all the free parties and unofficial events that were going on and it was so helpful we thought that this year we’d share it with everybody as a full-blown mobile app. We’re really proud to announce that Thinx Drinks is now available in the iTunes App Store and its totally free!

Some of the app features:

• Nearby feature shows all the parties and events near your current location, plotted on a map for easy navigation.
• Browse events by date or use the searchable database to find events by name, band, or venue.
• The My Parties feature lets you mark your favorites for quick reference later.
• RSVP from many events from within the app.
• Other features include social media and iOS Calendar integration. The app syncs to information stored the cloud to give you up-to-date listings.

I hope you find it as helpful as we do and hopefully I’ll see some of you around town!

Sol Explorer for iPhone and iPad by Reason Interactive is a super cool app that lets you zip around the solar system in your own spaceship and learn about the planets and their moons in a fun and interactive way. It’s got impressive graphics and a neat video demonstrating the scale of the planets. It’s exactly the kind of interactive eye candy that makes apps so much fun.

Brian of Reason Interactive happens to be a friend of mine and sometimes friendship  comes with perks. In this case, he’s offering it for half price ($0.99) for today (Sunday, Oct. 21) only. 

The British Imperial War Museum has culled from its collection of over 20,000 wartime posters their favorite 30 from World War II and released them in the form of a free app. Each one has details about its designer as well as the stories behind the designs and comments from IWM’s curators. You can also buy prints of the posters, including everybody’s favorite:

There are some cool new toys coming out that are about to make capturing the stars or the stuff under your microscope a whole lot easier. Startup Arcturus Labs is in the process of funding a new product called Magnifi, an iPhone case/adapter that allows you to attach your phone to a microscope, telescope, binoculars, or any other optical instrument. Also, Canon has launched its EOS 60Da model with a “modified infrared filter and a low-noise sensor with heightened hydrogen-alpha sensitivity” for astronomy enthusiasts. I hope this is the beginning of a trend.