Articles by Dieter Bohn
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.
Along with CDBaby, TuneCore was and is one of the best ways for independent artists to get their music onto iTunes without going through the hassle of trying to score a full-on record deal with the
Now they’ve just announced that they’re doing the same for video. The setup works thusly: you send them your video and they encode / submit to iTunes for a fee based on the length of the video. After that, your video goes through the standard iTunes terms and conditions (Sorry, Paris H, you’ll be rejected, we think) before getting added. After that, the copyrights and the revenues from iTunes go straight to you.
Indie music, HD content, incredible distribution, now all we need is that whole DRM situation rectified, kay?
As we mentioned earlier, when you purchase an HD TV show from iTunes you’re actually getting two copies of the show — one version in HD and another in standard definition for your iPhone. They’re two separate files and, well, apparently they don’t always go great together. Ars Technica is reporting that when iTunes gets around to downloading the SD version, some users are finding that it’s overwriting the HD file.
They recommend turning on “Allow simultaneous downloads” and also offer a sneaky quit-and-restart iTunes trick. If that doesn’t appeal to you, just sit tight, Apple’s aware of the issue and will likely manage to fix it up (here’s a hint, Apple, just append the resolution of the video to the end of the filename).
How about it: are you downloading HD content yet?
iTunes 8 is here and 95% of y’all are definitely going to want to get your upgrade on. A few of you might not until the pwnage situation clears up. A few more might want to avoid that Blue Screen of Death thing on Vista, although the good news there is we now have a decent fix (check that link).
Ok, so now what are we getting with iTunes 8? Follow us after the break!
We greeted the arrival of HD TV shows for iTunes with as much joy as we greeted the return of the previously nixed NBC content: with great joy.
Part of our joy was a secret hope that since the iPhone can (technically) handle HD content natively, it meant we might someday be able to play HD video direct from the iPhone — albeit through a dreamy-future-video-out capability since playing HD on the iPhone’s screen seems a little pointless. Sure, HD takes up radically more space, but hey, we like options.
Well Gizmodo [via] threw some cold water on all that by pointing out that the HD iTunes streams up might not be all that HD. The issue is roughly that not all HD is created equal — you need to check the resolution (720p or 1080i or whatnot), but you also need to give some thought to the bitrate. It’s basically a function of compression and, well, the more you compress the worse it’s going to look. So while iTunes is offering up HD content, that content is compressed into a size that’s reasonable for most people to download.
AppleInsider points out that Apple’s h.264 encoding is better than most at getting quality video into a compact package. Still, don’t expect your iTunes HD to look like BluRay.
One nice tidbit: When you download HD content from iTunes, it includes a Standard-Def version, which is what gets transferred to your iPhone. Apple probably took a look at the ‘options’ we mentioned we liked and figured we were better off with the SD on our portables. We tend to agree.
