TouchType (iTunes Link) is a new app available now in the App Store for the low price of $.99. Now all that is left is some SMS landscape love.
Here’s a brief overview of how it works: Open the application and you get a landscape mode keypad, get your email groove on, tap the send button and it automatically sends it to the email application. Type in the email addresses and you’re all set.
This is all great. But it would be much much better to see this kind of functionality in Mail. app, rather than separate standalnone application.
Update: Four landscape email front-ends popped up on the App Store last night, including this one:
iPhone-Backgrounder (available for jailbroken iPhones via Cydia Installer) brings another much-desired functionality that Apple's not allowing for legit apps—the ability to run in the background.
This is very usefull for iPhone applications like Skype (Fring), MobileChat, IM+, and many others.
To enable backgrounding for the currently-running instance of an application, press and hold the menu/home button until a message pops-up stating "Backgrounding Enabled". Note that only the current instance will be affected; if the application is terminated and relaunched, the new instance will not have backgrounding enabled.
To properly terminate an application instance that has backgrounding enabled, press and hold the menu/home button until a message pops-up stating "Backgrounding Disabled".
Issues:
Application immediately quits when holding menu/home button:
One possible cause is having the Intelliscreen application installed with the "App Launch Boost" option enabled. This option can be disabled in Intelliscreen settings on the "Performance" page.
Application "XXX" runs fine in the background for a while, then suddenly quits:
This is most likely due to the device being low on available application memory (RAM, not disk space). This can be caused by either having too many applications running at the same time, or by using applications that require a lot of resources. Unfortunately there is no fix for this issue, other than to avoid having too many backgrounded applications.
First of all Apple has addressed one common request within the iPhone's Keyboard settings, allowing users to disable the iPhone's auto-correction.
The other feature is for Japanese market - Japanese emoji icons. The lack of emoji support has been blamed as part of the reason for slow iPhone adoption in Japan.
The third new feature is Street View. It allows users to view panoramic street level photographs in select cities within the Google Maps application.
Hopefully we will see more new features in this and next beta's of 2.2 firmware.
Several users have reported problems syncing their iPhones after updating to iTunes 8.0.1. The most common error message is “an unknown error 13014.”
As one reader writes:
“I just downloaded and installed iTunes 8.0.1 on my iMac running 10.5.5, and synced my non-3G iPhone. I immediately received an error message stating that “The phone ‘[my iPhone's name]‘ cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (13014). Thinking I’d probably be able to fix it by resetting the phone, I did so.
Now, 15 minutes into the reset, the phone is syncing nicely with no major issues, except that I’m still getting prompted that it can’t be synced about every 15 seconds or so. It’s even kind enough to queue up the errors so that if I ignore them for a few minutes I can go back and just click ‘OK’ half a dozen times and then go back to whatever I was working on. No idea of the cause, outside of the iTunes upgrade.”
Users are reporting similar issues with the iPod touch.
In some cases, simply restarting the host computer and restarting the iPhone can resolve this issue. In other cases, this procedure is unsuccessful.
The other workaround is to reinstall iTunes. If this doesn't help, uninstall it and install iTunes version 8.0.
Firmware 2.2 beta 1 appeared just a day ago. It seems that DevTeam never sleeps They published a screenshot of jailbreaked iPhone 2G with this new firmware:
It runs Terminal.app (non-apple application) running on 2.2b1 firmware. Thay say that version 2.2 is still vulnerable to pwnage and quickpwn on everything but iPod Touch 2G.
No news about software unlock for iPhone 3G or jailbreak for iPod Touch 2G.
Apple is now selling its iPhone 3G unlocked via its on-line Apple Store in Hong Kong. The 8GB model is HK$5,500 (about US$694) and 16GB is HK$6,200 (about $797). It is available since July 11th with a local Hutchison Telecommunications contract, but this is the first time that Apple has sold its device unlocked in Hong Kong.
"iPhone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier. Simply insert the SIM from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation."
Unfortunately for the 1 billion mainland Chinese, the terms and conditions limit sales to those in Hong Kong only.. But the gray market usually doesn't care about t&c's.
Apple just published firmware 2.2 beta 1 for developers. It is accompanied by a new beta of the iPhone SDK (build 9M2611). There are not much news about new features and improvements... but iphoneatlas already published a screenshot of new Safari interface, that is in firmware 2.2:
The new MobileSafari doesn't have the magnifying glass and refresh buttons at the top of the screen. There are the URL bar and search fields side-by-side instead. It looks much like the desktop version. Page refreshes are now accomplished via a tiny icon located inside the URL bar.