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CNNMoney.com News, Stocks, and Video [free - iTunes link] for iPhone (and iPod touch) is the latest big name entrant into the App Store financial news and media space. Leveraging their brand and resources, it looks like CNN.com’s mobile site while working like an iPhone app. iPhone-likeness aficionados may take a few blinking moments to adjust, but it’s a deliberate design decision that will no doubt appeal to the massive user-base of CNN.com’s existing web services.

TiPb had a chance to test drive CNNMoney, and from a pure content standpoint it’s impressive. When you first launch, you’re greeted with the News dashboard. At the very top is a rotating stock-ticker, then a sampling of latest news, stocks, videos, etc. Users can easily check or uncheck specific content options, and drag them around to re-sequence them in whatever order they prefer. (I immediately put technology news at the top).

The content itself isn’t merely a feed. In an effort to give mobile users the best experience possible, both statistical measures like popularity and hand-picked curation on the part of CNN Money’s editors determine which stories and in what order they’re made available to the iPhone app. Also, stories loaded into the app are cached locally in case you need to go offline (i.e. on an airplane).

The free app is supported by advertising, but when there is no appropriate or available ad, rather than filler or “house ads”, CNN Money cuts users a much-appreciated break and removes the ad space completely.

My Stocks is pre-populated with a few high profile favorites but can be easily customized. Tapping a stock brings up a details and graph view. As is typical with online stock reporting, quotes are delayed roughly 15 min. Once you’ve viewed a stock quote, a new section pops up on your dashboard News tab called Last 3 Quotes, and as the title indicates, it keeps track of your most recently views stocks.

Videos shows thumbnails and a brief description of the story. CNN Money typically produces over a dozen unique video segments a day, and they load quickly and look good on the iPhone.

The Add/Remove tab lets you do the content re-arrangement mentioned previously.

It should be noted that while CNN Money is compatible with iPhone 3.0, and the system-wide Copy functionality works fine, it doesn’t yet support push notification alerts, or automatic HTTP video stream optimization. Hopefully we’ll see these in an update. Along with a good James Earl Jones rendition of “This is CNN”.

Screenshots after the break…

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OH (original hacker, yo!) George Hotz has posted the RC2 version of his iPhone 3GS jailbreak tool, purplera1n. Along with other improvements, the new version supports Vista, Windows 7, and supports 64-bit.

If any of the above interests you, and you’re a responsible adult who understands the risks involved, hit the link below and check it out. Jarrrr!

[On the iPhone]

There has been so much jailbreak/unlock news as of late, it’s enough to make your head spin. So let’s end this week with two more tidbits of news from the community.

The Dev Team has released yet another demo video. This time they are showing off their iPhone 3GS 3.0 ultrasn0w unlock. Please keep in mind for the unlock to work you cannot update to 3.1 — and yes, this includes the 3.1 beta.

It’s pretty well known in the jailbreak community that the Dev Team delayed releasing their iPhone 3GS jailbreak for their own reasons. Well someone else has stepped up to the plate to bring you a iPhone 3GS jailbreak alternative. iPhone original hacker, George Hotz, has released purplera1n which is currently only available to Windows users (not Windows 7 though). Mac users don’t panic, your version is coming soon!

In his latest blog post, not only does George explain the steps you must take to jailbreak your iPhone 3GS, he is pretty vocal on why he has decided to release purplera1n to the public.

Normally I don’t make tools for the general public, and rather wait for the dev team to do it. But guys, whats up with waiting until 3.1? That isn’t how the game is played. We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes. It isn’t worth waiting because you might have the “last” hole in the iPhone. What last hole…this isn’t golf. I’ll find a new one next week. Also your purplera1nyday files ensure that you can always get back to a jailbroken state, so if you have it it’s just a matter of tools.

Has this brought back to life a heated rivalry? It’s time to sit back, relax, and jailbreak!

And as always, TiPb and staff take no responsibility for any bricking, failures, security risks, etc… that may occur during the jailbreak process. Proceed at your own risk!

[Not iPhone-friendly video -- we know -- please encourage them to post video to YouTube in the future. Thanks to everyone who sent these in!]

Rolando 2 Quest for the Golden Orchid [$9.99 - iTunes link], available now for the iPhone (and iPod touch) shows that Ngmoco not only takes great gaming concepts and beautifully renders them on the iPhone, but that they can make those great concepts and renders even better.

New gameplay includes a 3D stylized world, driving, swimming, and flying, and — now the Rolandos can fight back!

The first Rolando game won TiPb’s Editor’s Choice Award last time around, how does the new one stack up? If you give it a try, let us know!

Whether the idea of push notification for the iPhone Facebook app makes you want to do a happy dance, or just run screaming for the delete button, according to a recently published note, you won’t be getting it in the 98% completed Facebook 3.0 anyway:

Push Notifications, is in development but it won’t make it into 3.0. You can expect it in a 3.1 update later this summer.

So what will Facebook 3.0 bring? The “new” news feed, ability to “like” status, events with rsvp, notes, pages, better photo management and browsing, a new home screen, fixed comment notifications, SMS and call from friends screen, and auto-save so incoming calls don’t kill your unfinished messages.

[via Facebook, thanks @sil3ntrid3r11 for the tip]

If the iPhone and Twitter go together like chocolate and peanut butter, then for the most part current iPhone Twitter client developers give us many variations of the peanut butter cup. Tasty confections though they may be, and each unique and delicious in their own right, at the end they still tend towards variations of the peanut butter cup.

Enter Reportage from wherecloud [$2.99 - iTunes link], which rearranges those twin flavors like nouveau cuisine, utterly deconstructed and left for you to explore.

Too obscure? Okay, rewind. Reportage bills itself as a “radio tuner” for Twitter where followers are treated like stations on the FM dial and you can tune in (or tune out) to what they’re saying, and spin the dial to move from user “station” to user “station”.

It should be noted at the beginning that Reportage isn’t a general purpose Twitter workhouse. There are tons of those already. Like Birdhouse, which models itself on a “notebook” writing experience for Twitter, Reportage has also chosen to focus on one specific concept — pseudo-”live broadcast” of the Twitter users you follow.

Keep that in mind as we go along…

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From the team team that brought us Barista, Cellar aims to give wine the same app love coffee has enjoyed for a while now:

Cellar is a portable, swipeable showcase of what’s currently in your cellar or wine rack, plus the Garage feature lets you store wine that you’ve decided you might buy again.

Cellar has been submitted to the App Store and should be available… as soon as Apple decides to make it so.

In the meantime, enjoy the screenshots after the break!

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Last week the first iPhone (and iPod touch) app to feature nudity was live in the iTunes App Store. Technically, however, it was simply a change in the server behind the app — the developer added nude images.

Subsequently, however, the app became unavailable. The developer first reported that their own servers couldn’t keep up with demand for the newly nudified images, but it turns out Apple laid the hammer down on the “soft-core porn” app:

Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.

Given that Apple has included new parental controls and App Store restrictions in iPhone 3.0, including a declaration for nude content, and given the eternal argument that nudity is available for age-appropriate viewers via iTunes movies, is there some contradiction still at work? Or is Apple drawing the line artificially close for now while it watches and gauges reaction?

[via CNN]

DOOOOOOOOOM! [$9.99 - iTunes link] That’s right, the mother of all Martian first person shooters (FPS) is in the App Store now:

-Advanced graphics engine designed from the ground up to take full advantage of the power found in Apple’s mobile devices -Wield an arsenal of heavy-hitting weapons to defeat a variety of hideous monsters and bosses -Innovative controls for fast-paced and accessible first-person action -An all-new chapter of the DOOM saga that new players and long-time DOOM fans can enjoy

How does a golden oldie translate to the newest, greatest mobile platform? If you try it out, and live to tell the tale, let us know what you think!

Birdfeed [$4.99 - iTunes link] bills itself as “A very nice Twitter client for your iPhone”. That’s pretty much spot on. It doesn’t try to razzle-dazzle, or focus exclusively on one element or another, but what it does do is provide a quick, clean, interface to manage your Twitter account (or accounts).

Highlighted features include the simple design, local caching of already-loaded tweets so you can keep reading when/if offline, SMS-style handling of direct messages (DMs) to help keep the conversation flow, unread @mentions (replies) and DM counters, and time stamps to indicate where you last read up to should new tweets have since been loaded.

To answer the immediate question, no support for iPhone 3.0 push notification yet. Birdfeed’s Twitter account says that feature is likely, but there’s no time-frame yet.

TwitPic and yfrong are available for image posting and tr.im for URL shortening. (Where’s the bit.ly love, and tinyurl for retro chic?) Instapaper is supported, though you have to exit the app and go to the iPhone’s Settings app to find and set it up. This makes sense given Apple’s preference for keeping Settings in Settings, and also because it’s unlikely you’ll have to do it more than once.

Great from a user experience perspective, when you get to the end of currently loaded tweets, Birdfeed automatically starts loading older ones. That’s right, no button tap required. (The default is 20 but you can change that in Settings). To get newer tweets, however, there is the perfunctory big honking — yet tastefully rendered — button at the top of the tweet list.

For users who put capital letters in their Twitter account names, there’s currently a bug those accounts to go missing from the app, but it’s known and a fix is on the way.

All in all, Birdfeed is exactly as presented — a clear, consistent, and enjoyable general purpose Twitter client with some great new ideas in a even greater UI.

More screenshots after the break!

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