The Sims, a popular video-game franchise from EA, has been ported to the iPhone as a life simulation game.

As many fans know, The Sims allows users to create people, design their homes, and control their lives. The iPhone version allows for many of the same features, but is heavily centered around the ‘life control’ aspect of the game.

For users that are interested in building and designing homes on-the-go, The Sims 3 for iPhone won’t fill your desires. There are minor moving, rotating, and purchasing methods for furniture, but these tools can’t compare to the features of the desktop version.

While controlling your Sims’ life, you’ll need to keep them satisfied and fill their wishes. Satisfaction levels include ‘Hunger’, ‘Energy’, ‘Bladder’, ‘Hygiene’, ‘Social’, and ‘Fun’. There are up to 73 goals and wishes that your Sim could come across for you to complete.

Within the game there are mini-challenges that improve a Sims’ skill set, which include ‘Cooking’, ‘Fishing’, ‘Repairing’, and ‘Gardening’. Of course, relationships are also a huge part of the game, in which you can befriend, anger, date, or marry the other Sims.

The Sims 3 is an extremely addicting game, that has engrossed me for many hours. There are numerous features and aspects to the game, some of which were mentioned here, that make it worth the expensive price tag.

See more about the Sims 3 for iPhone.

If you’re like me, you’ll often find yourself with numerous tabs open in your web browser and an array of news articles and blog posts that you want to read. Unfortunately, it seems as though there has been no simple-solution storing place for all of these “to-read” items. On the fortunate side, there is an online service by the name of Instapaper that aims to serve as this “storing place”.

As an online service, it allows you to bookmark and import online posts from the website, or by using the handy bookmarklet. For the iPhone, there are two viewing applications for reading these saved items – a free and paid app.

The free version comes with basic functionality, allowing you to read and delete the articles saved in your account. After refreshing the iPhone app, all of your articles are then saved to the iPhone for offline viewing. The app will even strip out photos and other formatting to give you a simple reading interface.

At $5, Instapaper Pro offers a few more features, including Folders, a dark interface, tilt scrolling, article starring, adjustable font & text sizes, and background updating. The Pro version is almost a must-have with support for folders. With the free version, you do not have access to saved articles placed in folders from the website.

Instapaper is a great online service that saves time and makes reading convenient for you. Articles can be taken on-the-go, and are available wherever you have an internet connection, or anywhere, if you’ve downloaded the saved items to Instapaper on the iPhone. See more about both apps by visiting the app store.

Analog recipe managers aren’t fun to use, or easy for that matter. One of the new digital recipe managers for the mac is SousChef from Acacia Tree Software.

At its simplest, SousChef allows you to import and create recipes. Recipes can have pictures, ingredients, directions, notes, and other information assigned to them. Each recipe can then be printed, blogged, or emailed.

SousChef can also store Grocery lists, that can either be printed or emailed. There’s even a full-screen cooking mode that includes support for control via an Apple remote and voiceover reading. Recipe search can be done with any number of factors, including name, ingredients, category, and cuisine. These factors can be combined and modified to any degree.

One feature that is unique to SousChef is a vast online database of recipes that, at the time of writing, has totaled over 103,000 recipes. The cloud database is accessible by the in-app search. SousChef will also keep track of recently imported and recently cooked recipes.

For the most part, SousChef is an excellent recipe manager and stacks up nicely against the other competition. It offers great features and has a supreme ease-of-use. SousChef costs $30, and can be downloaded for a free trial from Acacia Tree Software.

Blogging, as most people know, is typically done by writing posts in an online client. Yet, if you find yourself blogging a lot, and to different blogs, using the web interfaces can become tedious and even annoying. Luckily, MarsEdit is here to improve that experience as a desktop client.

The main window in MarsEdit is set up to display blogs on the left, with a list of posts on the right and previews of the selected posts below the list. Above all of that is the toolbar, which holds many basic functions. There’s nothing slick and flashy about MarsEdit, but it is functional and gets the job done.

Creating or editing a blog post opens up the blog editor and preview window. The editor is based around a large coding window. Of course, no coding knowledge is necessary to add text to the post, but the editor does support HTML and is not rich-text based. The editor window also has options for choosing categories, editing server options, adding media, and even some service-specific functions (such as choosing a post type in Tumblr).

There are many other powerful features to MarsEdit that aren’t located in the editor, such as the ability to schedule and edit posting dates, edit trackbacks, adding tags, and adding technorati tags. Unfortunately, some of these functions are hidden, or buried away, instead of being placed in the prominent editor window.

MarsEdit is also extremely powerful, with the ability to add and store local drafts, adding custom preview templates, support and ability to add macros, ability to upload photos to google, options regarding sending new posts, and sending pings. Each blog that you register can also have specific settings that pertain only to that blog. There are numerous blogging services supported, including but not limited to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Typepad.

While there are other blog editors that are a bit flashier and do certain tasks well, none excel like MarsEdit does. It’s easy to use, simple to figure out, and powerful in more ways than one. Plus, their service is excellent.

From Red Sweater Software, MarsEdit 2 costs $29.95 and is available for a free 30-day trial.