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Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Coming Soon. Push Notification Coming Later

Facebook 3.0 for iPhone

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]



Quick App: Reportage Twitter “Radio Tuner” for iPhone

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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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Quick App: Cellar Wine Tracker for iPhone

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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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iPhone App Store Just Says No to Nudity — For Now?

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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]


Quick App: DOOM Resurrection for iPhone

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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!

Quick App: Birdfeed Twitter Client for iPhone

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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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iPhone 3.0: Case of the Missing or Incorrect App Icons

iPhone 3.0 Missing or Incorrect Icons

Way back in the elder days of iPhone 3.0 Beta 5, there was some discussion on Twitter about how apps would have an incorrect icon, or would be missing an icon altogether. Since the iPhone 3.0 betas were private and not public, TiPb didn’t post about it as that’s just not how we play cricket. Private betas will have bugs, get those bugs reported, and hopefully have those bugs fixed by the time the software goes into general availability.

However, TUAW highlights that this particular bug is still biting iPhone 3.0, even in the release version. Now, as then, if you have an app that’s missing an icon or has the incorrect icon, you can try to reboot your iPhone, delete the app and download or sync it back on, or wait for Apple to fix it in a 3.0.x update.

Meanwhile, you can let us know the funniest app mishaps iPhone 3.0 is giving you in the comments below.

(Mine is the little AIM dude swiping my 1Passwords Pro!)

BeeJiveIM, Zombieville USA, App Store, Pocket Tunes Radio, AT&T Navigator, Oleophobic Screen, 1Password Pro – TiPb Picks of the Week

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Every week a few of us from team TiPb, bloggers and forum crew alike, will bring you our current favorite, funnest, most useful App Store apps, WebApps, jailbreak apps, even the occasional accessory, web site, or desktop app if the mood strikes us. As long as they’re iPhone (or iPod touch) related, they’re fair game.

So who’s on deck this week and what are our picks? Find out after the break!

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Dev-Team – iPhone 3GS Jailbreak Possible via 24Kpwn, Unlock via ultrasn0w?

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The illustrious iPhone Dev-Team says that the 24Kpwn techniques, originally developers as part of the iPod touch 2G jailbreak efforts, look like they just might work on the iPhone 3GS as well!

This is great news, but how did it happen? Why didn’t Apple fix this in their normal cat&mouse fashion? Well it seems this bootrom was cut in about the August 2008 timeframe, so the unintended early reveal of 24Kpwn earlier this year didn’t affect the iPhone 3GS

They’re also confident that the recently released ultrasn0w unlock will work on the iPhone 3GS once they get the jailbreak up and running.

No word on a time table for all this yet, but would-be jailbreakers keep them fingers crossed…!

(And for those still itching to customize the iPhone 3G, Jeremy now has full redsn0w jailbreak and ultrasn0w unlock guides up for both Mac OS X and Windows PCs)

[Thanks to XM_JDM in the TiPb iPhone Forums for catching this!]


Hewlett Packard Brings Classic Calculators to iPhone App Store

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Macworld formulates word of HP’s foray into iPhone application development, and it’s both nostalgic for calculator enthusiasts, and interesting from a premium price point:

When run in landscape mode, each app uses the original ROM code and provides an exact visual replica of the actual horizontal-format calculator, making it familiar to users of the originals. The $15 HP 12c and $20 HP 12c Platinum provide the same business-focused functions and formulas as the hardware models, and the $30 HP 15c includes all of the original’s scientific algorithms and calculation sequences, including matrix, root, and complex-number functions. All three apps are also, like their hardware counterparts, programmable.

Here’s the rundown again:

  • HP 12C Financial Calculator [$14.99 - iTunes link]
  • HP 12C Platinum Calculator [$19.99 - pending]
  • HP 15C Scientific Calculator [$29.99 - iTunes link]

Anyone compelled to pick up one of those heavy crunchers, and if so, which one, what makes it compelling, and does it feel enough like the hardware version for you?