Don’t have an iPhone 4 but still want to use iMovie for iPhone? There’s no real reason it can’t work on the likes of the 3GS, and so it does, with a little jailbreaking.
The hack’s easy enough. If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, you just edit the info.plist file of the app and change the “Minimum System Version” to 3.0.0 and “Front-Facing Camera” to False. Launch the app again and you’ve got the ability to edit videos on your last-generation iPhone, seemingly without much performance degradation.
If you haven’t already played Giana Sisters, you’re missing out! It’s one of the best platform games on the iPhone & iPod Touch and I highly recommend you try it. If you share my love of Giana Sisters, you too will be pleased to hear that a HD version is making its way to the iPad soon, according to Touch Arcade.
Originally released in 1987, The Great Giana Sisters was first developed for the Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64 and other consoles of the era. It was quickly pulled, however, after running in to legal trouble with Nintendo due to its similarity with Super Mario Bros. The game was reborn in 2005 when it was renamed simply Giana Sisters, and made its way on to mobile phones, and a few years later, the Nintendo DS.
Today, 5 years on, Giana Sisters is one of the best platform games in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Touch Arcade have reported today that its developers, Bad Monkey, have sent them a bunch of screenshots for their upcoming HD version of the game. You can check them out and find out more info here, or read Touch Arcade’s review of the current game here.
If you can’t wait until the iPad release on 9th July, you can find the iPhone & iPod Touch version in the App Store here.
When a buddy of mine suggested (insisted, actually) I try using HeyTell, my first feeling was that using it was like having a ridiculously slow-mo phone conversation: short staccato bursts of talking interspersed by long, frustrating periods of having to wait for a response.
Well, that feeling lasted all of about 10 minutes; the more I played with it, the more I realized that — besides the fact that I could already call, text, tweet, email, IM and use Facebook — yep, here’s another method I’ll use semi-regularly to blab with.
Touch Arcade have reported today that game developers, Mobile 1UP, have “bitten the bullet” and announced in the Touch Arcade forums that they are porting Lemmings to the iPhone & iPod Touch. All 120 levels of the original game will feature, and what’s more, it will be a free download.
If you’re unfamiliar with Lemmings, it’s a 20-year-old puzzle game that was originally developed by DMA Design, now Rockstar North, and published by Psygnosis. The aim of the game is to guide a group of Lemmings through different landscapes by assigning them individual skills, in order to get a certain number of them through to the exit.
Lemmings first appeared on the Commodore Amiga and was one of the most popular games of its time. Since then it’s been ported to a wide variety of game systems, most recently to the PSP and PlayStation 3 consoles.
If you’d like to keep track of Mobile 1UP’s progress on the iPhone & iPod Touch port, you can follow their live blog throughout the whole process.
Mobile 1UP have stated that Lemmings will be submitted to the App Store as soon as it’s ready – stay tuned for a review when it’s released!
The iPhone might not run Flash, but that hasn’t stopped Zynga from bringing their popular social gaming phenomenon Farmvilleto the App Store.
Almost everything short of a Flash-engine is the same in the iPhone version, allowing players to buy and sell their crops and livestock. Any changes on your farm are reflected in the Facebook app, and vice versa. Additionally, iOS players get some exclusive new Farmville items to play with, including a Snow Leopard.
Farmville is available now on the U.S. App Store. It’s free to download.
Just a few hours before the iPhone 4 officially goes on sale, Apple has dropped iMovie for iPhone onto the App Store.
The $4.99 app will allow users who own an iPhone 4 (and presumably future video-capable iPads and iPod Touches) to edit and share videos directly from their handset, adding everything from transitions, background music and titles to your clips before shooting them off to YouTube, MobileMe or to a friend via e-mail.
There’s nothing out there when it comes to mobile video editing like iMovie for iPhone, so if you plan on stitching together some movies on the go, this is your best and only real choice. Just one caveat: while you can export your videos to your computer at 720p, any emails you upload to YouTube, MobileMe or send out by e-mail will be downgraded to 568×320… almost definitely to help accommodate 3G network providers.
Following the steps of their comic book competitors Marvel, DC Comics has just released their own iOSself-branded comic reading app for iOS, built for them by Comixology.
Like the Marvel app, comics cost between $0.99 and $2.99 an issue, and there are some free comics available… although the selection of those is quite paltry compared to Marvel’s offerings, although no doubt this will change. The best freebie right now is probably a black-and-white comic by Neil Gaiman and Simon Bisley that portrays the Joker and Batman as actors working on a television series.
Otherwise, if you’ve used Comixology or the Marvel app, you’ll be pretty familiar with how the DC Comics app works. It really only trades in Spider-Man for Superman.
TomTom is a popular turn-by-turn navigational app for the iPhone that has recently been updated to support multitasking and iOS 4. The new app released on Tuesday is version 1.4 and TomTom has advised all users to upgrade to this version immediately if they are running iOS 4.
There are over 200,000 apps in the iTunes App Store now and everyone can agree that wading through all those apps trying to find the real gems is a big problem. We all muddle through somehow and find an app gem or two usually by word of mouth, a Cult of Mac review, or other means. I’m happy to announce that I’ve found another way to find good apps and this solution is entertaining to boot — Adam Curry’s Big App Show app.
If you’ve got an iPhone 3GS or third-gen iPod Touch and you’ve upgraded to iOS 4, you’re probably ready to give multitasking a try. Good news, then: Pandora have just updated the iPhone app to version 3.1, which now supports background audio playback under iOS 4.
Because of the same RIAA licensing nonsense that keeps Spotify out of the U.S. App Store, Pandora is only available in the United States right now, but if you’re a yank who wants to experience the same background functionality in Pandora that you get already in the default iPod app, you can download the app for free here.
I like my apps to be simple and clean and I think that you would agree that is what Apple likes to see in apps designed for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Echofon Pro from Naanstudio is a universal app which makes it compatible with all of Apple’s iOS based devices. All of these attributes made Ecohfon Pro a great Twitter app for my iPhone, but the recently released iPad compatible version really put the icing on the cake.
Police in Sussex want to test an app that would let gun owners start the renewal process using their iPhones.
Part of a £3 million cost-cutting campaign, anyone who wanted to renew shotgun and firearm licenses would start via iPhone, then be visited in person by officers.
Not everyone thinks the streamlining is a good thing.
”We’ve got to be extra careful giving gun licenses,” Lyn Costello, of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression (MAMAA), said. ”We have this attitude that gun murders don’t happen very often so its OK to be lax, but it is not OK and we’ve got to do everything in our power to stop it happening again.”
MobileMe went down for some ‘scheduled maintenance’ last night, and when it came back up it included a whole host of new features. As well as the Mail web application now out of beta, Apple’s list of improvements includes:
Widescreen and compact views.
Rules to keep your email organized everywhere.
Single-click archiving.
Formatting toolbar.
Faster performance.
Increased security with SSL.
Support for external email addresses.
Improved junk mail filtering.
In addition to the new features, Apple has updated the login page (above) and introduced a fancy new application switcher (below) that provides a nice new way to navigate between the MobileMe web applications.
Apple have also released a Find My iPhone app that now provides you with quick and easy access to the Find My iPhone service from each one of your iOS devices. All of the web application features are included like sending a message to your device or playing a sound, locking the device and even wiping your data remotely.
Apple has been busy releasing a few of their own iOS applications this week, and as well as Find My iPhone, we’ve also seen iTunes Connect Mobile which gives application developers the ability to monitor their app’s success in the App Store from their iPhone, and the Apple Store application allowing customers to make purchases from their iPhones and schedule reservations at an Apple Retail Store.
I’ve never been quite convinced about the prudence of combining the spatial-awareness requirements of augmented-reality iPhone activities with benders — but if I were in NYC, this pretty cool use of AR might just have made me risk barfing all over my iPhone.
Metaio, the company behind augmented-reality app Junaio, has partnered with the iconic NYC nightlife rag TimeOut New York (TONY) to point users toward hot offers at bars throughout the city via a new “TONY Summer Drinking channel,” included in the 2.0 version of the free app. Of course, tips on where to find these deals is available via less hip methods — aka “the Internets” — but that’s so 2009.
Oh, and keep your eyes peeled next week for another surprise from Junaio.
The flow of apps through the App Store is thicker than a swarm of locusts in a Biblical plague these days (though somewhat less icky, and considerably more beneficial).
So on August 24-26, a bunch of app developers and the sort will gather in the desert at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino for the inaugural Appcon to discuss mobile app development across all major platforms, hear speakers from, for example, Chicago-based NAVTEQ (the guys who provide all those cool maps for the likes of Garmin and Magellan), and probably indulge a little too much at all-you-can-eat buffets and the craps table.
And who knows — we might be seeing the birth of something close to an E3 if the importance and revenue gathering ability of the app market continues on its upward trajectory, right?
If, like me, you walk around all day executing random karate hand-chops to the theme of Mission: Impossible running through your head, then you might consider adding this next app to your quiver.
Just like the messages sent to IMF (Impossible Mission Force, for all you non-spies), Self-Destructing Message will erase evidence of clandestine texts, on both the sender’s phone, and the recipient’s — just so long as you both have a copy of the app. It also has a “black book” feature that hides the actual identities of your contacts.
With the snap of an iPhone camera, one police department is identifying suspects on the go.
Using an app called MORIS (Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System), the police department in Brockton, Massachusetts is matching photos of suspects with a database in development by statewide sheriff’s departments.
Sean Mullin, president and CEO of BI2 Technologies of Plymouth who developed the app, explained that the app allows officers to identify suspects through facial recognition, iris biometrics and fingerprints – all on one device.
Apple’s done a deft job mitigating the disadvantages of true multitasking with iOS 4 by giving devs access to a few intelligently chosen APIs (like background audio) and universal state saving.
That’ll be good enough for most people and most apps without causing a huge drain on battery life or processing power, but unfortunately, the new iOS 4 APIs don’t do anything to address one of the biggest advantages to multitasking: background applications that can update or sync information when they don’t have focus. In other words, when iOS 4 comes around, apps like feed readers, Twitter clients and IM programs will still need to be open the whole time in order to suck in new information from the Internet.
Over at his personal blog, Marco Arment — developer of App Store favorite Instapaper — has posted a great suggestion to Apple on how to allow apps to update themselves in the background efficiently: give iOS the ability to prioritize periodic third-party app network requests.
As the tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues, many of us wish there was some way we could help. iPhone users along the Gulf coast now have an opportunity. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have created MoGO, a free iPhone app to report injured animals in spill affected areas, take geo-tagged photos and send them directly to groups providing assistance.
Say the app’s developers:
The free Mobile Gulf Observatory (MoGO) app turns you and your iPhone™ into a ‘Citizen Scientist’ helping us track the environmental impact of the BP oilspill, and enable wildlife experts to find and rescue stranded birds, sea turtles and dolphins. The MoGO app allows you to take and submit photos of oiled wildlife, tar balls on beaches, oil slicks on water, and oiled coastal habitats. With your photo, the location of oiled wildlife and coastal habitats are pin-pointed using GPS co-ordinates generated by your iPhone™. Instantly, your photos are sent to the wildlife hotline helping trained responders rescue oiled animals, and to mobilize efforts to protect and restore vital habitats for fish and wildlife.
My birthplace, South Africa, has shared some cool stuff with the world. Rooibos tea, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Dave Matthews, J.R.R. Tolkien — all hail from South Africa.
However, judging by comments I’ve encountered in the media, on Facebook, in bars, on the phone and elsewhere, there seems to be a large contingent of ungrateful sods who are less than enamored with the country’s latest gift — the Vuvuzela horn (if you’ve watched a World Cup match, it’s the reason for that noise in the background that sounds like a swarm of apoplectic bees climbing up into your head through your nose).
That sentiment has spilled over to the iPhone/iPad, because there’s now a $1 app — Vuvuzaga — that joins the throng of protests against the yellow horn, this time in the form of a game that lets the user wander around a 3D arena hunting down horn-blowers. Of course, there’s also a variety of freeapps that transform your iDevice into a Vuvuzela, should you wish to see how well your iPad mimics a frisbee when grabbed from your hands and flung out the window by the person sitting next to you.
Over at Gizmodo, they’re making a big stink about Apple’s decision to ban two graphic novel adaptations of famous literary works from the App Store for obscenity— namely, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Now Apple’s reversed the ban on these two graphic novels… but in the process of doing so, have ironically made themselves look far more hypocritical in their App Store censorship policies than if they’d stuck to their original decision.
Arguably the best soccer game on any console, the much anticipated Pro Evolution Soccer is now available on iPhone and iPod Touch and boasts a unique ‘true flow’ control system, unrivalled realism and official UEFA competitions exclusive to Pro Evolution Soccer 2010. But does it compete with other big soccer games already available in the App Store?
As seen at last week’s WWDC, iMovie for iOS looks like nothing else out there when it comes to mobile video editing. The Tidbits blog has posted some more details about what you can expect, and unfortunately, there’s some limitations on what you can do with iMovie.
The bad news is that for right now, it’s iPhone 4 only, with iPhone 3GSs needing not apply because of the lack of A4 processor. Don’t expect it on the iPad until Apple’s tablet gets a camera, though.
There’s more bad news: right now, you can’t export projects to iMovie on the Mac for giving your edits some more advanced finesse. iMovie for iPhone exists in its own little vacuum for people who want to quickly edit a movie on the go. If you want to edit your iPhone 4 footage on your Mac, you’ll need to start from scratch, at least for now.
While iMovie for iPhone is likely to be locked to next-gen iOS devices, I imagine Apple will eventually integrate the software with the desktop suite and bring it to the next-gen iPad and iPod Touch. Either way, at $4.99, iMovie for iPhone looks like a steal of an app.
If you’re a developer itching to deploy any one of iOS 4’s 1500+ new APIs, good news: Apple has started accepting iOS 4 apps for submission.
There’s not much more to say, except for a personal plea to developers to get a move-on, since I want some multitasking apps to test come June 21st. And if you’re the developer of Skype or Reeder, that goes double for you.
We’ve known for some time that the iPhone and iPod Touch are not as secure as we would like them to be — and unfortunately the same can be said about the new iPad. The lack of built-in encryption leaves our personal data on any of these devices at risk. Luckily for iPhone and iPod Touch users third party vendors are supplying apps that help fill some of these gaps in security. One such app, which was popular on the Palm OS platform, is SplashID from SplashData, Inc., which stores all your passwords, logins, and banking details.
