The day after Thanksgiving, or Black Friday as its commonly known, is one big feeding frenzy for bargain hunters. Like hungry piranhas, they descend on malls around the U.S. on the hunt for the best savings of the year. Unfortunately, there are a lot of piranhas, so competition for the best deals is fierce. And many Black Friday shopping adventures end with more tears and empty shelves, than hundred dollar flat-screen TVs.

But, as one might expect, there’s an app for that. Actually, there’s a couple.

Mall Maps – You Are Here costs a mere $2.99 in the iPhone App Store, and provides shoppers with detailed floor-plans to over 1,000 American malls. It’s the perfect thing to plan the attack route and, perhaps more importantly, an effective exit strategy. Currently it’s the 9th most popular reference app in the store.

TGI Black Friday is a free app put out by the online coupon repository, Dealcatcher.com. As the source would indicate, it offers more than 8,000 discounts at major retailers.

ShopSavvy is another free app, available for both iPhone and Android users. And it scores well both for technical innovation, and retailer angering. Using your camera’s phone, you can go into a store and scan the UPC code of a product. The app will then tell you exactly how much that same item costs at all the competitor’s stores. Great for bargain-hunters, annoying for the folks selling the products.

So if you are the U.S. and you plan to brave the crowds on Black Friday, don’t leave home without spare water, pepper spray for crowd control, and your app-equipped iPhone.

There’s a new app available for iPhones that may help finally settle one of the grave issues of our time. To function properly, society has to be divided into haves, and have nots. Currently, one of the ways that happens is the stratification between those who own iPhones, and those who don’t. Those who don’t are obviously a mass of unwashed rabble who can be safely ignored. And those who do own one of the sexy little devices are awesome. But there’s a problem with this division – pretty much everyone now owns one. So if everyone is a have, how do we as a society know who to look down on? And how does an individual iPhone owner know whether to be filled with self-confidence, or to hate themselves for being part of the unwashed masses?

Thankfully, a new app has been released that will make it much easier to draw this important distinction. Visit the App Store right now, and for 99 cents, you can download “Fit or Fugly”.

Here’s how it works. You upload a photo of yourself (or a loved or loathed one) and then attach “anchor pins” to all the important facial features: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, dimples, etc. The app then uses the data collected from the anchor pins and measures your features against Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio. If your face is symmetrical, you’re declared Fit. But if your facial symmetry resembles that of Ron Howard’s little brother, you’re branded Fugly. Oh, and it works on pets too!

Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, by the way, isn’t just something the app designers made up. It’s a mathematical formula that some maintain is an accurate means to determine how aesthetically pleasing things are, based on their symmetry.

But can Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, and a 99 cent app, really tell you if you’re Hot or Not Fit or Fugly? I wish I could tell you, but I don’t own an iPhone.

Happy first birthday, iPhone Apps store! Yes, it was one year ago today, on July 10, 2008, that it first opened its doors. And it’s been quite a year. Just a few months ago, the one billionth app was downloaded, and things have only gotten better since then. But does all that success translate into more and better apps for you, the consumer?

As this Snapshot of the iPhone Apps Store: One Year Later shows us, it sure as heck does. When the store first opened, it offered 500 or so third-party apps. Today that number has exploded to 56,667 and counting. Yes, that number does include approximately 50 different fart apps. But it includes many, many more that are fun, useful or time-saving. The average price of apps is still extremely low, about $2.57 per, and that average has to take into account a video surveillance application called iRa, which has a hefty pricetag of $899.99. Every day, the store receives 135 new app submissions. And that number is only growing.

Of course, with all those submissions, some sketchy stuff is bound to leak through. Apple just had to remove the app “BeautyMeter” from the store, after it was discovered to contain a user-submitted nude image of an allegedly 15 year old girl. But Apple’s quick action does show that, despite the flood of new applications, some with huge amounts of content, including user-generated content, Apple is still able to keep a pretty tight rein on things.