Filed under: Gaming, WWDC, iPhone, iPod touch
Archives for June, 2009
Filed under: iPod Family, Developer, iPhone, SDK
Apple has released a 3.1 beta for the iPhone SDK. Both the SDK beta and firmware are available for testing and development to paid members of the iPhone developer program. As pre-release software, any details about this new release remain under NDA.
As you might already know, the iPhone Dev Team released updated version of PwnageTool for Mac users and Redsn0w for both Mac and Windows users to jailbreak iPhone 3G running iPhone OS 3.0.
PwnageTool offers more customization options to the users compared to the RedSn0w. However, it is available only for Mac users.
We covered Jason Rohrer’s Primrose when it first came out — the creator of Passage, a critically-acclaimed indie game, had taken his first steps onto the iPhone with an abstract puzzle game, and in this latest interview with Edge, Rohrer says he’s on the iPhone to stay. He says that when he first moved from strictly art/indie games to more commercial development on the iPhone, he worried that he was selling out: he wasn’t a fan of cell phones at all or any Chinese-made gadgets sold by American companies, and yet the iPhone’s platform seemed most “palatable” to him in terms of making games and a little money from them.
And yet he says the iPhone still has pros and cons — even in an “open source, free software” world, Apple’s system offers a choice: you can buy a packaged-up version of the software and throw a little money back to the developer (not a ton — he says you’ve still got a better chance at making a living from Vegas than you do from the App Store), or you can still try building and installing your own version on your iPhone. As an open-source developer selling apps on the App Store, he says, “you’re charging for the service and convenience, not the content.”
iPhone Savior featured this short video clip this morning by Scott Patrick showing how to use an inexpensive Contour iPhone case and some common hardware to make an iPhone tripod mount.
There are two impressive points about this mount; first, by using the Contour case, you know that the iPhone is going to be held securely (my wife used one for over a year and never had it inadvertently open up), and second, Scott made it so it will work with any standard tripod camera mount head.
When it comes to adventure and travel, who could possibly know more than National Geographic Adventure magazine?
The magazine’s website has regular features about techie toys and tools, so it was no surprise that blogger Steve Casimiro would write a post featuring his choices for the top twenty travel apps for iPhone. Some of his choices, such as HearPlanet, FlightTrack Pro, the Lonely Planet Phrasebooks, and World Customs [clicks open iTunes] aren’t surprising, while others (Packing, Room) are interesting apps I wouldn’t have even thought to try.
Fellow shooter fans rejoice — id software’s John Carmack has begin delivering on his love of the iPhone with a brand new game made just for the platform called Doom Resurrection, available right now on the App Store for the price of $9.99. There’s nothing small about this game at all — it offers up 76 mb of original id shooter, including eight levels total, six on Mars, and two more (spoiler?) in Hell, all set in a graphics and control engine designed just for Apple’s handhelds (you control aiming with the accelerometer while the game runs you around on rails, and hit the various on-screen buttons to shoot or jump into cover). Unfortunately, there’s no lite version to test out (though we can probably expect one eventually, considering Wolfenstein Classic got one), but early reviews say that if you like Doom, you’ll enjoy the game.
Skype (iTunes link) has been updated to 1.1, which brings it some new features making it more closely resemble its desktop sibling. So, what’s new? Well, there’s now support for Skype voicemail (subscription needed) and SMS text messaging.
However, SMS texting is not bidirectional. Which means that you can send SMS texts, but not receive them. And while a dialog box states that sent SMS texts will show up as sent from the sender’s Skype screen name, in my case it displayed the “999-99″ caller ID that typically accompanies calls from a Skype-based client. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have a SkypeIn number?
Not too long ago we told you about an artist creating a cover for the New Yorker magazine using a paint program on the iPhone. Now an Australian photographer has won an award for a photo he took on his iPhone.
Steve Turner created a rather striking collection of images he put together, and manipulated to create a print that caught the eye of the judges at the Photo Marketing Association show in Sydney.
Looks like Stack for Jailbreak has some new improvements. For those of you unfamiliar with the application, Stack adds a quick-launch menu directly to your iPhone dock, letting you expand your dock space to hold all your favorite apps. With it you can add 16 items (using grid view) or 5 items (in fan view) for easy access in each stack. And stacks are not just limited to the dock. You can add stacks anywhere in the home screen as well.
As this video shows, you can now rename your stacks as well as use drag and drop editing. So you can create a ‘Games’ stack, an ‘Internet’ stack, and so forth. Removing items from a stack is just as easy as adding them. Just drag them out from the stack for an Apple-standard “puff of smoke” animation.
On June 29, 2007, Apple and AT&T released the iPhone for $600 to crowded stores throughout the United States. A whole lot has changed in the iPhone-world in just 2 short years. The 1.0 software is just a distant memory, and looking back I’m a little surprised how limited the original iPhone was at release. I thought for the 2-year anniversary, we could take a little walk down memory lane and see how far things have come.
Last week I ordered my iPhone 3GS from the AT&T Store (no Apple Stores out here in the boonies). Five days later it was ready to be picked up and I drove out to the mall to get it.
While the AT&T employee activated it and performed the soul-stealing voodoo that accompanies a new sale, a woman at the next counter was exchanging her own AT&T phone (not an iPhone). I only heard a part of her conversation, but it went something like this:
Beverage choice should be simple: coffee or tea to rev up, wine or beer to spin down (App Store links). Of course, when it comes to drink choices, there’s definitely an app for that: from the makers of espresso-instructions app Barista, we now have the $0.99 Cellar (under App Store review and appearing momentarily). Cellar’s slick UI and quick data entry make keeping track of your wine library almost as fun as actually drinking the wine you collect.
When you start up Cellar, you face an empty winerack; you can add bottles one by one, entering both vintage details and customizing the look/label of the bottles with photos of the bottle labels. You can adjust the number of bottles of each kind of vino you have stored away, and then as you polish them off the ‘empties’ are stored in the Garage area of the app for reference or repurchase.
You decided to skip the lines on June 19th and now you just have to purchase an iPhone 3GS for yourself. If you’re like some of our readers, you’ve found out the hard way that availability of the latest iteration of iPhone is limited. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which Apple Stores actually have the devices in stock before you hop in the Family Truckster, drive through traffic, and only then find out that they’re out of iPhones?
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