Archive for July, 2008

At Apple's iTunes online store, Britney Spears and Shakespeare are separated by just a few clicks. While an episode of "Desperate Housewives" will cost $1.99, a series of lectures by renowned University of California-Berkeley philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus is absolutely free. A single song by pop diva Rihanna is 99 cents. The price of a course on modern theoretical physics by Stanford University quantum mechanics professor Leonard Susskind? Free!!!.

Apple calls it iTunes U, an unsung but popular feature of iTunes. Audio and video downloads of classroom lectures are available to anyone who wants to listen to them through a computer or an iPod. Though the program has existed on a smaller scale for a few years, it now offers more than 50,000 audio and video tracks - course lectures, language lessons, speeches - from scores of universities and colleges. Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Yale are there. Beginning in the fall, both UC-Berkeley and Stanford are planning expansions to their respective digital lecture programs.

Go to iTunes U in the iTunes Store.

Just a week after the first iPhone 2.1 beta seed, Apple has released another 2.1 firmware release to developers. The new version appears to include several bug fixes.

"This is the second beta of the iPhone SDK targeting iPhone OS 2.1, including bug fixes to iPhone OS as well as an early implementation of the Apple Push Notification Service API. This API is not yet integrated with a live push server."

Related posts:

• Firmware 2.1
• Copy/Paste might appear in firmware 2.1
• Firmware 2.1b - no problem for Pwnage

No direct download link yet. Just run iTunes and hit updates. The update includes "fixes to improve stability and performance".

Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later. Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store.

iTunes 7.7.1 includes fixes to improve stability and performance.

This is one of the most interesting applications for IPhone.

Dynolicious is an all-purpose automotive performance meter, utilizing the built-in accelerometer in the iPhone and iPod touch to record your driving characteristics. BunsenTech, the makers of the software, claim that it can record 0-60 times within .08 of a second, accurately estimate your current speed and monitor and record any directional G force. The system seeks to perform nearly every function of (much) more expensive dedicated monitoring units, which seems like an awfully tall order for a $12.99 piece of cellphone software.

Specifically, the Dynolicious software gives you:

• 0-60 MPH
• Other Speed Tests (0-10 MPH through 0-100 MPH in 10MPH increments)
• Quarter Mile Elapsed Time
• Quarter Mile Trap Speed
• Elapsed Time and Trap Speed for standard intervals (60', 330', 1/8 Mi, 1000')
• Lateral G's (current and peak)
• Braking G's (current and peak)
• Wheel Horsepower
• Estimated Engine Horsepower
• Realtime Speedometer and Graphs
• Realtime graphical skidpad display
• View results for latest test run or any saved run
• View averages based on vehicle, date, or modification
• Compare results between vehicles, dates, or before-and-after modifications

More screenshots:

Read the rest of this entry »

On the 13th of July Apple sold 7,124 million IPhones. млн. There are 1001 aplications in App Store. The overall unique downloads from AppStore is 25 million (July 21). Not bad at all. 10 million Iphoes will be sold quite soon.

A number of iPhone 3G owners are reporting the appearance of hairline cracks in the plastic finish of the phone. According to threads on Mac Rumors forums and Apple’s Discussion Boards, the cracks appear to be manifesting mostly in the white 16GB version of the phone; however, Engadget notes this may be due to the fact that the cracks are easier to see in the white model than the black (see photo below). Importantly, iPhone owners experiencing the issue report that the cracks appear without the device being dropped, sat on, or misused in any way. It is unclear what might be causing the problem, or how widespread the issue is.

This application was quite popular. It allows to modify look and feal of your Iphone: icons, slider icon, battery indicator, wi-fi/gsm indicators, dock, keyboard, chat, sounds and mcuh more.

What's new:

• Theme Browser: you can download them directly from this application, no ssh as before.;
• Elements of themes can be used partially (just sounds, foe example);
• User themes can be downloaded through the web site.

Install through Cydia. Source: Hack&Dev Team Source.

via iphoneapps

Developer of WinPwn (curent version is 2.0.0.3), IPhone unlocking and jailbreaking tool for Windows, announced today, that new version 2.5 will be released soon. Not much new features, mostely bugfixes.

"New WinPwn is being developed which will be a lot easier to use and should help a lot of people having issues."

The new version of the popular NES emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch now includes accelerometer control for all games. The implementation is very simple: A tilt is equivalent to controlling input in that direction. This means that tilt control can be used in any game loaded into the emulator, but also that some of the controls are pretty much balls. Also, this app does not live in the official app store. NES.app 2.3.0 with tilt control is available now in Cydia.

As seen in the video, controlling Mario is fairly natural, though quick turns and exact jumps are difficult to execute (playing Mario with the stock controls is often worse, though). Bomberman sort of works, but in that case—and many others—the old touch control overlay is much easier. Obviously none of these games were designed with tilt control in mind, but a surprising number are at least playable.

via gizmodo

This video walkthrough of MagicPad, a rich text editor app that is still pending acceptance into the App Store, is notable for showing the first working copy and paste framework on the iPhone (at the 1:00 mark). Of course, SDK limitations keep the functionality quarantined within MagicPad itself, but its developers, Proximi, hope to use it as a case study for pushing forward one of the iPhone software's most wanted features.

via gizmodo

Related posts:

• Copy/Paste might appear in firmware 2.1
• Copy/paste on IPhone

Apple's Fairplay DRM, which protects all the applications you download from iTunes, has been hacked. The method for hacking this has actually been around for a while, but has been recently applied to Super Monkey Ball and distributed into the wild. To do this, you'll need a jailbroken iPhone and SSH installed (to transfer the game and to fiddle with permissions). The theory is a bit techy and complex, but the execution isn't too insane. iPhone developers are disappointed about this

The big winners in Apple's new online App Store are gamemakers, who dominated sales in the week since the new iPhone 3G hit stores.

Seven of the top 10 paid applications, including the top five, were video games, led by Sega's Super Monkey Ball, a rolling racing game. Even among the free iPhone and iPod Touch applications, which include popular social networking sites like Facebook and the Internet radio service Pandora, the top title is Tap Tap Revenge, a rhythm game similar to Guitar Hero.

These 10 titles sold the best in the iTunes App Store:

1. Super Monkey Ball (Sega) games

2. Texas Hold 'Em (Apple) games

3. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3-D (Vivendi) games

4. Enigmo (Pangea Studios) games
5. Tetris (EA) games

6. iBeer (Hotrix) entertainment

7. Recorder (Retronyms) utilities

8. Solitaire (MobilityWare) games

9. Units (Crossword Solutions) utilities

10. Scrabble (EA) games

Apple created a new IPhone firmware version 2.1 beta. Of course DevTeam tried their Pwnage on 2.1 firmware. Here's a screenshot of 2.1 running on an unlocked iPhone 1G:

So far Pwnage has worked for 1.1.4, all eight (!) 2.0 betas, 2.0 itself, and now 2.1 beta1.

DevTeam posted a new interesting screenshot. They successfully downgraded modem firmware. This is not an unlock (yet), but it is a good illustration of the first progress made with regard to hacking the 3G baseband. They accomplished this by being able to execute their own code on the baseband that allows to circumvent security checks and flash the baseband with older, disallowed firmware. Please note this has been accomplished using software only, the iPhone 3G has not been disassembled or hardware modified in any way.

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just released a large document detailing "Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics".  There are lots and lots of information in this patent (#20080174570) but only one particular section that really caught my eye.  It has to do with one feature many of us have been wishing for on the iPhone --- support for Flash content.

The content from this patent doesn't say whether Apple will add support for Flash to future versions of iPhone OS 2.0, but it does tell us that Apple has most definitely considered it.  And as an added bonus, we may even see native support for Windows Media content.

[0778]FIGS. 40A-40F illustrate exemplary user interfaces for playing an item of inline multimedia content in accordance with some embodiments.

[0779]In some embodiments, user interfaces 4000A-4000F include the following elements, or a subset or superset thereof: [0780]402, 404, 406, 3902, 3906, 3910, 3912, 3918, 3920, 3922, as described above; [0781]inline multimedia content 4002, such as QuickTime content (4002-1), Windows Media content (4002-2), or Flash content (4002-3);

via iphonebuzz