Uiphone It

Getting your baby to smile for the camera long enough to take a perfect picture can be a challenge. Using BabyCam’s sound button to play one of the app’s fifteen prerecorded noises—bells, drums, doorbells and songs including “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” helps. For pictures of your kids in action try QuadCamera, which takes four to eight continuous pictures and then turns them into one image. (Baby Cam $.99/QuadCamera $1.99)

 BabyCam

Scribble

Nursing Tracker

Lose It!

BigOven

aSleep Kids / WhiteNoise

Toddler Cards

Does your dad hit the links? Maybe with his socks pulled up to the knee? His fashion sense may be irredeemable, but teeing off with GolfCard can up the cool factor a bit. This app keeps track of scores and analyzes trends in a player’s game by comparing it to previous rounds. Find local greens with the GPS range finder and track ball distance too. When the round is over, he can email his scores to everyone he just played with or upload them to the golf social networking site, Oobgolf.com. (GolfCard, $7.99)

Remember when cell phones were just for making calls? The new iPhone 3G, which launched on July 11, dials phone numbers, but it also runs some 800 add-on applications — developers are creating more daily — that enable you to compare hotel room prices, read Shakespeare, even examine brain scans. About a quarter of the miniature applications, or apps, are free (others mostly cost less than $10 each), so Apple users are snapping them up like candy, with 10 million downloads so far. Glitches may be common as the programs work out their debut-stage kinks, but here are our picks for the coolest of the free programs.

1.  Sorting the Jewels from the Junk in the iTunes StoreX
2. PandoraX
3. MidomiX
4. RemoteX
5. YelpX
6. ShoZuX
7. NYTimesX
8. WritingPadX
9. StanzaX
10. JottX
11. Google Mobile AppX
12. InstapaperX
13. PodcastX