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!
iDayZ is a simple application for your iPhone or iPod Touch that reads through your contacts and gives you a list of all upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. You can sort by upcoming events, age, event type or last name. Click on the individual birthday or anniversary and see all the details including what what astrological sign the person is or what gift for that anniversary.
Is it possible that web apps can return from the dead? It seems to me that the 2.0 firmware pretty much buried the poor web apps six feet under. Even if they are not used nearly as often since we have 3rd party apps along with the App store, it seems as if Apple are quietly tweaking the iPhone for them.
According to a reader over at AppleInsider.com:
One unpublicized feature introduced by Apple’s latest iPhone software updates is the ability save Web Apps to the home screen and have them launch in full-screen mode without the Safari wrapper, essentially mimicking the experience of a native app.
The reader also notes that the capability is “only present in Web applications specifically authored to include the full-screen code”. Pretty clever trick Apple. But is this enough for you to start using web apps again? Or have you never given up on them even though we have the App Store?
We here at TiPb are curious what you think, sound off in the comments!
Today on the forums come a few hot threads from one user! ExBBUser want to know, what are you current top 5 apps from the App store? He’s a newcomer to the iPhone and would love to hear your opinions! In this next thread ExBBUser wants to know do you use any other device in addition to your iPhone or if you still carry around your old BlackBerry, Palm, or Windows Mobile device? Would you be so kind to help him out?
What makes this edition of Today on the Forums a special edition? Because of the contest of course! Don’t have any idea of what I am talking about? Check out our TiPb AT WORK Contest that we are currently having in our forums! The voting ends this Saturday, which just happens to be tomorrow! So you don’t have much time left! Get in there and vote for your chance to win some FREE Apps! Vote here!!
Just a reminder, you need to be registered in our forums to vote, registration is free and easy. You can get registered here.
Last month, Dieter let us know that Facebook’s popular, but feature-thin App Store application would be getting an update to (hopefully!) bring it up to par with the older WebApp version accessible via MobileSafari browsing. The due date was September, and boy did they just manage to sneak it in under the wire! Check out the iTunes App Store for Facebook 2.0 (still free!).
So what’s in the Facebook 2.0 update?
Notifications
Full news feed
News feed story comments
People search
Friend requests
Photo tagging
Photo captioning
Photo posts to friends’ walls
Full mini-feed combined with the wall
Entire inbox, including sent and updates
Inbox search
Message attachments
Speed and stability improvements
Impressions so far? The extra content accessibility is awesome. The UI changes are interesting, especially the horizontally scrolling menu bar under Home, but the visualization of it seems more than a little strange. What do you think? Is it as good as the WebApp yet? As the Facebook website? Has it changed your experience of the social monster? Let us know!
Atari’s legal team is getting quite a workout lately, just yesterday they demanded that 4 more App Store games be removed with more likely to come. It was not long ago that TiPb reported that two other notables were forcefully removed, Tris and PhoneSaber.
The 4 apps kicking the bucket this time around due to “infringements against the pong and breakout copyrights” are as follows (iTunes links): BreakClassic, BreakTouch 3D, Super Pong 2, and 3D Vector Pong.
As of today, all 4 of these apps are still available via the App Store. So get them while you can!
Tuesday’s “Let’s Rock” event brought a sneak-peak of Gameloft’s latest iPhone (and iPod Touch) offering, Real Soccer/Football 2009. Well, it’s now available via iTunes App Store, and according to Gameloft:
This dynamic game takes advantage of the iPhone’s touch screen allowing players to pull off spectacular moves with the touch of a fingertip. There are almost 200 teams available to play and real player names, tournaments and exhibition games and a soon to be introduced multiplayer feature.
Apple’s pushing OS X Touch as the “funnest” mobile gaming platform yet, which is market speak for wanting it in more markets. With accessories like the gaming pad on the horizon, the already 100 million in sales is only the beginning.
Sure, the PSP (see our iPhone vs. PSP article for more!) and DS dominance won’t be going anywhere any time soon, but Apple’s combination of communications (with the iPhone) and media and data management present considerable differentiation and appeal all their own.
And for Apple, at this point it means gaming is all gravy.
Trouble finding a certain app in the app store? Well, there is a new website out there called iPhonexe (mobile version can be found here) that gives everyone with a iPhone a alternative to using Apple’s official app store. While I personally have not checked for every single app currently in the app store, iPhonexe claims to include them all, broken down into categories ready for nice and easy browsing. Keep in mind that this does not bypass Apple’s app store completely. If you click “Buy Now” you are taken directly to the app in the app store to purchase it via iTunes.
But wait! I’ve saved the best feature (by far) for last: the ability to search Jailbroken apps! I know there are other sites out there that you can use to see what is available on that side of the iPhone world but none do it this nicely. It is worth a look for sure.
Gotta love Steve Jobs and his blunt-force emails. This time, it’s a lucky AppleInsider reader who sent it on a complaint about crash-prone applications, a problem which has plagued the iPhone 2.0 pretty much since launch. And what did the drive-by-Steve’ing say?
This is a known iPhone bug that is being fixed in the next software update in September
Will that be the still-in-beta 2.1? Another hotfix like 2.0.2? Jobs, of course, didn’t elaborate. Smart money, however, would be on a 2.0.3 rev. so that Apple doesn’t have rush 2.1 out prematurely, with just more of the same issues.
I know my Apps experience the dreaded Home Screening of Death (HSOD) semi-regularly, especially the new/updated ones. What about you? Smooth sailing or lots of crashes? If the latter, how far away must September seem? (And is it just us, or is the unresolved bug list for 2.x pretty dang scary compared to the relatively stable 1.x?)
Good news on the Facebook front: their native application is due to get an upgrade in September. The upgrade should actually make the app reach some sort of feature parity with the web-app version of Facebook, which right now is far superior to the native app.
New features include a revamped profiles view, viewing all notifications in the home tab, friend search and approval, the ability to view your full inbox, and more.
