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"If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming." -Douglas Adams

Apps. If you haven't been living under a rock for the past few years, you know immediately what that word means. Apps, short for "Applications", are a key part of today's mobile phone technology market. No question, consumers are looking into buying a cellphone that doesn't just make calls. They want information and lots of it.

Of course, Apple realized this fact when they were developing the iPhone, and a few months after its release, the company allowed third-party developers to create their own application. In its first day of business, Apple's App Store only had 500 apps available, and all of those applications are downloaded 10 million times within the first 3 days. Five weeks later, the store exploded to 3,000 available apps. As soon as word spread about this billion dollar app market, suddenly everyone wanted to get in to the iPhone app development game. A garbageman came up with an application that allows people to share their urban sanitation problems with one another; the one man who created the iPhone game "Trisim" makes $225,000 the first two months of its release; and even two seventh graders created an app to test a wide range of math skills. Today, the App Store has over 100,000 apps available, and a whole slue of developers dish more out.

As great of a market this is, keep in mind that a good chunk of these applications are free. That's right, zero dollars. So, would someone really create an app just to help people with with menial tasks. Oh how I wished the world worked that way. Aside from getting minimal pay from ads running on the applications, the real reason is that the free apps are a great way to get up and coming software developers to get their names and products out in the world. Believe it or not, the world is full of really bright and clever people, and it's only a matter of seeing what a person can do, can you really give them any valuable credit for any field. It's as simple as that!

So that's where this blog comes in. We will look at all the new free applicaions or "zero apps" as we like to call them, and ask the questions that every app consumer wants to know; Should I care about these apps? Would you want to use them everyday? Which one's are interesting? Efficient? Necessary? A good chuck of these and other questions will be answered here as reviews for new up and coming free apps are critiqued. Here, we makes sense out of the apps that make no cents.