Articles by Dieter Bohn
BoingBoing [via giz] got an exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming South Park App. The verdict: pretty darn cool, with some fun functionality for any South Park fanatic:
[...]the ability to stream clips, grab wallpapers for your device, read news, and browse the complete episode index. Also: choose character likenesses as “contact images” for your iPhone — assign a face to the phone book entry of your choice.
It’s not the full episodes available at http://www.southparkstudios.com/, but it will mean you’ll be able to look up the episode when Saddam first fell for Satan. Knowledge like that will serve you well, as people will have to, you know, Respect your South Park Authoritah!
Engadget brings the news: there will be an Apple event next week, on October 14th. Obviously, based on the invitation above (which we didn’t receive, sniffle), the focus is going to be on notebooks. Presumably there will be a new form factor or two to talk about here based on Apple’s rumored “Brick” manufacturing technique, where they carve the case out of a single block of aluminum.
The only possible iPhone angles we’re seeing here:
- Steve comes clean about when we’ll see background notifications during a tiny aside about the iPhone
- The rumors of a Glass Touchpad with iPhone-esque multi-touch and even an iPhone-like secondary display down there may be true
- Tethering becomes allowed? Pretty Please?
We’re putting the above 3 possibilities in the “One More Thing” category — which is to say we haven’t really seen a real “One More Thing” moment from his Steveness in awhile now and have pretty much given up hope of seeing one at this event, but we haven’t given it up entirely.
Although Microsoft themselves haven’t deigned to design applications for the iPhone directly (yet!), that doesn’t mean their various subsidiaries and hangers-on aren’t eyeing the platform. We already told you about the first zany Microsoft-tech to hit the iPhone, the Olympic-version of the Zumobi tiled-content application. Now Gizmodo brings word of another Microsoft-related company coming to the iPhone: TellMe.
TellMe is a more direct Microsoft subsidiary than Zumobi and it’s essentially a voice recognition company whose technology is already used by Microsoft in various applications (notably for mobile users, on their excellent Live Search app for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices). They also have a stand-alone BlackBerry app that enables localized search. The basic premise is that you talk at your phone, your voice gets transmitted to the TellMe servers for very quick and very intelligent voice recognition and parsing, and finally those servers send your phone the information you asked for. All in all, it’s a pretty sweet system ….as long as you have unlimited data.
Our hope / assumption is we’ll see some voice recognition software that will not only handle local search (and integrate with Google Maps) but will also manage to search contacts. Pretty Please?
TUAW (nice redesign, guys!) notices that the iTunes App Store no longer has a link on the lefthand side to browse all free apps. The best we have now is the Top 100 Free Apps over on the right. TUAW is hopeful that Apple will bring back the link to browse all them free apps, and indeed, so are we. Even stores that traditionally only sold for-pay mobile apps like the Mobihand store sister-site WMExperts have seen the writing on the wall and added a link for free apps.
Fear not, though, loyal TiPb Readers. We have the link to browse all 90 pages of free apps, over 1850 apps in total, right here. Go on, browse those free apps, don’t let the man keep you down. Browse all Apps
Update: Turns out that you can, in fact, stop the signal. The “Browse all free apps” listing linked above contains, well, a lot of apps that ain’t free. Could it be that Apple got sick and tired of developers listing their apps as free to move up the top apps chain, then switching to for-pay to bring in the cash? Our best guess: Apple must not have a good, automatic way to categorize “free,” so they took the above link down to tweak the store.
If you’re an IM-hound, it’s time for you to head over to iTunes and lay down $15.99 for BeejiveIM. The multi-client software can handle AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, MySpace, ICQ, and Jabber all in one little app. The whole services works via Beejive’s own servers which allows them to include a couple of neat features. The first — they’ll cache your messages so if you go out of service or quit the app your messages will be waiting when you return. The second — if you have an Exchange or MobileMe account, you can punch in your email address in the preferences and Beejive will shoot you a quick email letting you know that you’ve just received a message. Nice. Hopefully that feature will be unnecessary once Apple offers push notifications, but in the meantime it’s a clever stopgap solution.
The only real downside is that the price, $15.99, doesn’t really seem in line with the current $9.99 default price on a lot of apps. I’m of two minds on this issue. Come read the pros and cons with us after the break!
I’ve gone ahead and followed Jeremy’s excellent iPhone Jailbreak instructions for one specific reason: the ability to install PdaNet on my iPhone for tethering. PdaNet let us know, along with reader Lawton, that they’ve given up waiting for App Store approval (which will likely never come anyway) and have gone ahead and released their application for jailbroken iPhones. You can get the full skinny here.
PdaNet for the iPhone is heads and shoulders above their other offerings in that it doesn’t require any software on your laptop. You simply need to set up an ‘ad hoc’ WiFi network (here’s how) on your laptop and then have your iPhone join that network. Then, boom, you’re online.
PdaNet will also work in the background (yet another reason to Jailbreak — real background apps), although they caution that you’ll want to make sure that you get back into the app relatively quickly so it doesn’t idle. They’ve also implemented another neat accelerometer-based feature: set your phone face-down and it will turn off the screen, saving power. Truth-be-told, though, you should probably leave it plugged in, an active 3G connection and WiFi connection isn’t going to be very good to your battery.
One last note: over-usage of PdaNet’s tethering is likely to draw the eye and the ire of AT&T, so use with care!
Thanks to Lawton for the tip!
Let’s Rock, iTunes 8, iPhone 2.1 update, and of course, an extended rant [ED: with some cussin', beware!] on the App Store debacle. Tune in!
Chances are, if you’re reading this you’ve been in this spot: a loved one suddenly wises up to your gadget addiction and is forced to call you out on it. Looking into your desk drawer and the tangle of USB cables snaking out of your computer, you’re forced to agree that, yes, perhaps you don’t need all these iPods.
Above, the heartwarming tale of how Paolo dealt with his familial intervention. The next time you realize that, yes, you maybe didn’t need to buy that 2nd iPhone to back up your first, we guarantee Paolo’s method for resolving the issue will get you out of the bind. Well, maybe we don’t guarantee it, but it’s certainly worth a shot.
(Not one, but two premiere game reviews on TiPb today. If you haven’t already checked out the review of The Force Unleashed for the iPhone, go get your Star Wars on)
Given all the hype these past couple of weeks — heck, these past couple of years — you probably don’t need much introduction to Spore, so we’ll keep it quick. Spore is a game about evolution that works via a little intelligent design: you start out as a helpless, single-cell organism and work your way up the food chain. On the console and PC versions of the game, this eventually leads you to intergalactic conquest.
In Spore Origins for the iPhone ($9.99 at iTunes), that process is scaled back quite a bit. Over the course of 30 levels you stay pretty much at the single-cell level, adding various eyeballs, feelers, spikes, and the like as you tilt your way through the primordial sea, gobbling up smaller creatures and avoiding the larger ones.
We at TiPb have been waiting for Spore ever since it was announced. Heck, we were hoping it would come to the iPhone well before that. Does it live up to our expectations? Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
Got a video camera with a nightvision (infrared) setting? Grab your iPhone and take a look at the left-rear of the phone, as fskj85 of Austrialian Whirlpool did, and you’ll see the snazzy “Data Matrix Code” underneath the body of the device. Wazzat, you ask? It’s essentially a two-dimensional bar code (many Nokia phones are able to photograph these to get links to downloads, for example). Apparently the plastic in that section is transparent to infrared light, allowing you to see the matrix underneath. That’s some secret-agent-design right there, folks, somebody nominate Jonathan Ives as the next James Bond.
Engadget Mobile, where we first saw the story, posits that the matrix likely encodes the IMEI and the Serial for the iPhone. That information is also printed in human-readable form on the SIM-card tray, but since that tray could technically be removed / swapped into another iPhone, it makes sense that Apple would find a way to get that data onto the iPhone itself.
That, or Apple is secretly tracking us with every camera we pass by.
