The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released. Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives. Sponsor Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight's Technical Program Officer told us. "It's definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI." Discuss

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Sunlight Brings Congress to Your iPhone

Sketch Nation is a forthcoming iPhone app that takes iPhone photos of drawn images and uses them as avatars, obstacles and enemies in a customized fly-and-shoot mobile game. It's pretty sweet and was the winner of the recent AppsFire AppStar Awards for unlaunched iPhone apps. I was one of 20 judges for that contest and yes, I voted for SketchNation. Check out these demonstration videos below and keep your eyes peeled for Sketch Nation to go live in the App Store. We have no idea if and when that will happen, but hopefully soon. This looks awesome. Sponsor It would be great to see other classic game-types that could be created using this same process (those old Nintendo hockey games would be fun to draw players for), but there's no indication yet whether that's part of the plan. SketchNation is also on Twitter , where we're sure they'll announce the availability of the app as well. Discuss

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Draw Your Own iPhone Game With Pencil and Paper

Google Chrome may be the best browser on the market. It's faster and more stable than Firefox and today began opening up to user modification with the availability of more than 300 browser extensions . Official Mac and Linux versions were just made available today as well. Can Chrome remain so much stronger than Firefox once a pile of extensions or added on? That's the question and now is your chance to start finding out the answer. It's been more than a year since Google launched Chrome , but today is a big day for the browser. Sponsor The one bit of bad news is that neither the official Mac version nor the developer version we've been testing for months - called Chromium

Google Calendar has a new experimental feature in the works that allows you to check the availability status of people you're inviting to an event. In our early testing the experimental feature looks utterly broken, but once working it should be great. If you'd like to see how it works, open any event on GCal and click the "sneak preview" link at the top of the event listing. This ability to view someone's busy/available status only works if they have a publicly viewable Google Calendar account, but many people do. Even as a work in progress, this is a reminder of how much room for innovation there is in online calendaring. Sponsor The feature remains a far cry from the kinds of functionality offered by services like TimeBridge or Tungle , but it's a good and simple idea. With the sneak preview turned on, the busy or available status of invitees to an event appears side by side with your own calendar, viewable as you drag a translucent box over possible times to suggest. Right now it doesn't seem to work at all. Schedules aren't viewable until after someone's been invited to an event, the creator of the event is misattributed and a number of other problems have already come up. It should just be a matter of time, though. If you're interested in hearing about the bleeding edge of calender innovation, check out Jon Udell's excellant interview this summer with Mike Douglass and Steven Lees , two men working on an XML standard for iCal. There is a whole lot of room for new developments in the world of online calendars, especially through cross-network standards that enable users of different systems to communicate. We'd heard rumors about this new GCal feature for a few days but didn't confirm its existence until tech blogger Orli Yakuel Twittered about how to access it this morning. Discuss

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Google Experimenting With Social Calendar Previews