We met up with both Victor Toporkov and Murad Nazaraliev of Vito Technology during WWDC this past week, and while we know the company's name well from their great Star Walk and Solar Walk apps (the first one won an Apple Design Award this week, and the second one is quite popular, too), we learned some interesting facts about the history of the company. Toporkov now lives in the United States, but the company has its roots in Novosibirsk, the biggest city in Siberia. Back in the 1950s, Russia created a scientific center out in the middle of Siberia, consisting of a whole group of nuclear and scientific research facilities. Toporkov was one of those nuclear scientists, and now that the Cold War is over, he and many other scientists in that community have moved on to creating various kinds of software. In fact, the region itself is now sometimes referred to as "Silicon Forest," in a comparison with Silicon Valley in the US.

I found that background fascinating. But of course, Vito is looking to the future -- after a couple of solid educational astronomy apps on the App Store, they're looking to come back down to Earth with Geo Walk. I first got to use this app back at Macworld Expo this year, but the latest version has come a long way, with lots of various nodes to browse around a 3D globe, featuring historical locations or individuals. The app is due out next week on the App Store, with an iPad version coming later in July, and Vito says they'll be pricing the app at just 99 cents -- it's meant for kids, and they're trying to find the lowest acceptable price possible.

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As of 8:45 a.m. eastern time USA, The Apple Store is down.

New Mac Pros? New iPods? Has the new iPhone arrived early?

Well, to answer my own questions (in order): Doubtful, no (wait until September), and of course not.

It's probably just routine maintenance. I doubt anything will have changed when it comes back up. But since I'm posting this (to let you know that we know it's down) let me ask you this:

if you could have this downtime actually lead to one new updated product, what would it be?

Update 10am: Back up! Still no unicorn ponies. *sigh*

It's been a busy few weeks for iPad RSS clients. The Early Edition saw an update, Pulse got keynote love followed by a quick yank from/return to the App Store... it's almost as if the whole Newspad idea is starting to catch on.

Judging by our inbox volume, a lot of you are very excited about the latest entrant in the iPad reader race: Reeder, a strong favorite on the iPhone, is now shipping in an upsized version for the bigger device. The US$4.99 client syncs with Google Reader, and provides a clean and clutter-free interface to your chosen feeds or foldersful of feeds. You can easily share selected stories on Twitter or via email, save items to Instapaper or ReadItLater, mark items as unread or bookmark them on Delicious.

The app is carrying a solid five-star rating on iTunes right now, and we're looking forward to doing a fuller review soon. In the meantime, if you're looking for another strong option for feed reading, check it out.

Erica Sadun got a chance to see Bartleby's Book of Buttons a little while ago, and her writeup does a good job of explaining exactly what it is: an interactive book for children that uses the iPad's various features to entertain young users while also giving them a fun story to read and explore. Developer Kyle Kinkade also brought the work in progress to WWDC this past week, and we were able to see an updated build with a few new pages ready to read.

"We wanted to make something that could only exist on the iPad," Kinkade told me. "As if someone had transported it back to 1937 and given it to Walt Disney" to see what he'd do. And indeed, the graphics are bright and clean, and the interactive features are both simple enough for a child to play with, but deep and varied enough to support multiple readings. Kinkade said the book was really designed for parents to read along with their children -- some of the text is a little tough for young readers, but rather than teach the kids to read, the object is to keep them interested, and help them to think about interacting with books in a new way.

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I have to admit it. I just love optical illusions. I remember buying books full of them when I was a kid, and sharing them with anyone I could find.

Now, an incredibly complete collection of illusions called Eye Illusions has come to the iPhone and the iPad. For this review I've tested the iPhone version, which sells for US$0.99.

The illusions are in categories, like disappearing objects, weird lines, color illusions, etc. The app has something my books didn't have -- video. There is a great collection of videos of seemingly impossible objects. You watch the video, and then you get a look behind the scenes to see how the illusion was accomplished.

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I believe we've mentioned Moodboard exactly once on the site before, as one of Brett's picks back when the iPad first released. But it deserves another mention -- developer Chris Nurre of A Tiny Tribe (a company founded with a friend to help pay for skeleton equipment and travel) stopped by to see us at WWDC to both show off the app and let us know how is experience on the App Store has been going. While I'm not a designer (a mood board is a real designer's tool, kind of a collage of photos created to give inspiration or show direction), I was duly impressed by how the app has matured to fill out its space on Apple's tablet.

Nurre got his app on the App Store the first day the iPad launched -- while he's also published a few iPhone apps, he wanted to try to get something right out of the gate with the bigger device, and Moodboard was it. He built the whole thing on a simulator without a real iPad, which itself is pretty impressive -- the app makes good use of multitouch to scale, size and move pictures, and he did a lot of option-clicking to simulate those in the SDK. The one thing he did have to change was a "long press" feature -- "it's a lot easier to keep a mouse still than a finger," he said, so that had to be adjusted once he actually got a device.

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Any dice game review is required by law to compare the new game to Yahtzee (if we don't, we lose our right to ever roll a d6 again). So, let's get this out of the way early: the Roll Through The Ages app [$2.99], released last week, shares but three features with Yahtzee: it uses dice, you roll them three times (keeping the ones you like between throws) and you mark things off on a scorecard after each roll.

Instead of collecting simple numbers, in Roll Through The Ages, the goal is to quickly build up an ancient civilization from three small cities to, well, that's the challenge: do you go for more cities? Monuments? Developments? Goods? Or a little bit of everything?

RTtA (which is how the name appears when installed on your iDevice) faithfully implements the tabletop game, but it doesn't do so elegantly. Right now, the app is pretty much a trial-and-error mess with no tutorial or well-written rulebook explaining what it is you want to actually do in the game. Still, by using the limited in-app help menu and some online resources (the video pasted at the bottom of this review was quite helpful), we managed to struggle through.

Of course, anyone who's played the tabletop version of Roll Through The Ages should be able to adapt to the iPhone version in mere minutes. The app had better improve fast, thought, in order to attract people who aren't familiar with the dice version, lest it suffer the fate of getting lost in the never-ending barrage of good game apps. Thankfully, there's some precedent for board game apps that start weak and improve quickly. The Small World app didn't have a good way to learn the game at the beginning, either, but look at it now.

Read on to see if you want to give RTtA a chance now, wait for the improvements to come or pass altogether.

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WWDC is wrapping up here in San Francisco today, and after a week of having most of the best Apple developers in the world all in one place, we're hearing some speculation and solutions for what happened to Steve Jobs on stage Monday. He had Wi-Fi issues while accessing the New York Times website during a demo with iPhone 4, and of course it led to the awkward pause where he asked the over 500 Wi-Fi users in the room to please unplug their computers and stop liveblogging (of course, not everybody complied).

But were those users the problem? NPR cornered Glenn Fleishman for an explanation, and he says while that many Wi-Fi users might not have caused problems, many of the people in the room were using MiFis, the personal wireless network devices that aren't necessarily designed to be used so closely together. It wasn't a bandwidth problem then, Fleishman suggests, but an interference problem, with local Wi-Fi likely giving way to the vast noise from other devices.

Fleishman also says over at Ars Technica that there might have been another issue: the iPhone 4's pre-release network drivers. If you look at how the iPhone actually behaved, it's apparent that the software might not have been ready to deal with everything happening during the keynote. Of course, that doesn't mean that iPhone 4 will have issues at release -- Apple tests these devices thoroughly, and we couldn't imagine Steve releasing subpar drivers on the iPhone. Even if the drivers were the issue, obviously we'd never heard that from Apple. But Steve's irritation at Monday's keynote may have been slightly misplaced -- there were probably a few different factors going into the reason he couldn't load a page in Mobile Safari.

Two new Apple Stores are nearing completion, and they both look fantastic. The first one is in Shanghai, China. Much like the famed 5th Avenue Store in New York City, this location is underground and topped by a mass of glass. It sits at the base of two skyscrapers, both 1,000 feet tall, and is topped by a huge cylinder of glass. You can see the structure in the video above, draped in grey cloth. Watch as the camera operator moves in close; a floating Apple logo is clearly visible. Unfortunately, there's no solid opening date for this location.

Meanwhile, curtains have also been employed in Paris, France, where the grand opening of the Opéra (Paris) retail store is just weeks away. Why the name" Opéra" and theatrical curtains? Because this store is just across the street (almost) from the city's iconic Opera House.

This isn't the first time Apple has gone with a theme to obscure the facade of a store in progress. Before Boston's Boylston Street location opened, its storefront was decorated to resemble Fenway Park's Green Monster. Good luck to the crews working on these projects! If you're in the area and you snap a picture, please let us know.

[VIa ifoAppleStore]

Hey TUAW's Developer Brain Trust! For many of you WWDC is just wrapping up, and you're now probably hanging around in airports bored and checking on e-mail, visiting web sites. We thought it would be a great time to offer you something to think about. Now that you've been exposed to iAds and are able to start returning to your offices to build and submit 4.0 apps using the GM release candidate, are you going to be adding advertising to your apps or not?

I've had very mixed results with ad-supported apps. For me, they've been successful outside of App Store (and a big old "thank you" to every single one of you who has clicked through! I very much appreciate it!) but not so successful in App Store itself. Now, with Apple behind iAds, I'm willing to give App Store another try.

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