iPhone - page 408

SocialPhone is a brand new app for iOS that combines an impressive, full-featured address book with access to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in one handy application.

At 9 AM ET on Thursday, November 4, the Skyfire Browser will be coming to iOS and will allow users to watch Flash video on their iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch by converting it to HTML5.

Priced at $2.99, Skyfire Browser has been available on Android devices since May 2010, and has been incredibly popular with 1.5 million downloads. Now, after a “rather rigorous review,” Apple has finally approved the app for iOS devices, and it will soon be available in the App Store.

At first, Chris Pollock‘s hack to connect his iPhone to a computer’s serial port seems like a “because I can” sort of project, but in reality, it appears that it’s actually incredibly useful.

Why? Chris apparently works in IT, and as it turns out, a jailbroken iPhone armed with a serial port connector and many of Cydia’s console packages is a godsend for an IT worker: it’s an entire computer that you can just whip out of your pocket in a pinch to do some mainframe troubleshooting.

Fantastic. Now if only your could use this serial port hack to sync through iTunes.

If you use a pair of Monster brand headphones using Apple’s Remote and Mic technology and if you’ve been noticing your iPhone or iPad fritzing out on you when they’re plugged in, don’t worry: it’s not in your imagination and you haven’t just gotten a dud pair. There’s an issue with Monster cans, and Cupertino is very aware of it.

If you love Bees, Hedghogs, Cats, Sushi and Dungeons you’re going to get hooked up with our App Code giveaway on Facebook this week! We’ll pick five random winners to win 6 great apps and if you want a chance to get your hands on some these iPhone and iPad apps this week, then follow the instructions carefully below:

1. Like us on Facebook AND Like Appular
2. Post a tip on our Facebook wall. The tip can be anything related to Apple/Mac or it can be a suggestion for an app that you’d like us to review.
3. Your post on our wall will be your entry into the giveaway, only ONE entry is allowed per person, and the giveaway will last until 11:59pm PST  tonight. We’ll contact the winners on Wednesday about how to get the codes!
4. Optional step – Tell us what you think about these apps if you own them already in the comments section.

Special Thanks to Appular for helping us put together these app code giveaways! If you’ve got a mobile app that you’d like marketed effectively, contact the good folks at Appular!

Here’s a look at the apps we’re giving away:

Now here’s a story that wins on many fronts: after a two year courtship, Frank proposed to his girlfriend Kasey on a bridge in New York City’s Central Park.  What makes this particular proposal notable – besides its success – is that the Big Moment was assisted and captured by their friends using four synchronized iPhones, and managed by an ‘event director’ using a MacBook Pro.

VLC Media Player is now available on the iPhone as a universal app, and firmly puts itself in to our must-have apps list for this week. Allowing you to play an impressively wide range of video codecs on your device, it’s very simple to use and it’s free!

Another must-have app this week is Task Pad. Available for both the iPhone and iPad, Task Pad is a powerful organizer and to-do list that syncs with your Mac or PC, helping you to remain productive and on top of your tasks.

Amazon’s Windowshop also makes our list this week – a new way to shop Amazon’s millions of items – with a simple and intuitive interface that makes online shopping a pleasure on the iPad.

See our full list of must-have iOS app after the break!

Featured in this week’s must-have iOS games is the much-anticipated Age of Zombies – the new game from Halfbrick Studios. The creators of Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash bring us their biggest adventure yet, which sees the return of Barry Steakfries – the tough-as-nails commando who loves nothing more than to shoot up zombies.

Also earning a place on our list of favorites this week is Gun Bros, another shoot ’em up from Glu that features non-stop 3D action as the ‘Bros’ attempt to protect the cosmos from the evil ‘T.O.O.L.’ organization, who are set out to enslave the universe.

Word Solitaire: Aurora is a unique word puzzler that puts an interesting, intellectual twist on the classic Solitaire card game, and another of our favorites this week. Instead of cards that feature numbers, you play with cards that feature letters, and you must drag and drop to arrange them in to words.

See our full list of favorites after the break!

Steve Jobs says that multitouch must be horizontal, but for some reason, I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind: the Table Connect for iPhone is a close-to-complete project that marries a 58-inch multitouch surface with your jailbroken iPhone 4 through a 30-inch Dock Connector… not only charging your iPhone but turning your desk into your iPhone.

I’d want one to perch my iMac, but seeing as how I’ve never once seen the surface of my desk underneath its perpetual detritus of tobacco ash, beer bottles and discarded Starbucks cups, it might be money ill spent.

[via Engadget]

During the final stretch of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a number of different media organizations set up different kinds of maps to track real-time activities at the polls. Wired.com, for example, set up a voting machine problem map where voters could use a ZeeMap we had set up to tell us what went wrong in their experience.

Fast-forward to 2010. Foursquare, the mobile social geolocation service, has teamed up with Google, Pew, a couple of get-out-the-vote groups and a couple of Washington DC-based technology and design firms to update that idea.

The coalition recently launched its “I Voted” project, which enables iPhone Foursquare users to broadcast the fact that they voted to their friends, and to report what it was like, and whether there were problems like long lines or voter intimidation.

The idea is to harness the attributes of peer pressure and political campaigns’ competitive spirit to spur more people to actually vote. Another side benefit of this project is that it could potentially uncover trending problems at polling places.

On election day itself, all the data emanating from this activity on Foursquare will stream to an online map to give people a big-picture portrait.

The project so far is an experiment. It started off as an idea being batted around between some young political technology consultants on Twitter this June.

Mindy Finn, a co-founder of EngageDC, one of the participants that set up this project, sees the application’s use this election day as a dry run for the 2012 presidential election. Political campaigns could possibly use it to ignite socially-inspired viral voting campaigns.

“We’re certainly not at critical mass right now,” Finn said. “But the potential for this type of social voting, and the use of geolocation services to encourage civic engagement, the potential is just huge.”

The iPhone’s been big in Japan for awhile: back in 2009, it commanded an amazing 72.2% market share of the nation’s smartphone segment. That’s a huge chunk of the pie, but because most Japanese customers were gravitating towards featurephones over smartphones back in 2009, that 72.2% market share only actually translated to 4.9% of the entire Japanese cell phone market.

Not to worry, though: smartphone sales in Japan have continued to grow over the last year, and the iPhone is still the best selling smartphone in all of Nippon.

Here’s Devonthink To Go for iPad and iPhone, and it has a lot to offer.

For starters, there’s two-way sync between desktop and mobile databases. Documents that have been edited in other apps can be “opened back” in Devonthink, which will update its database accordingly. And plain text files can be edited inside Devonthink To Go itself.

It’s unclear whether voters will approve California’s ballot measure to legalize and tax the growing and use of medical marijuana next week, but in light of the growing industry that’s sprouted up around the medical marijuana business, it seems immaterial.

One of the elements of that industry is the proliferation of pot-related iPhone and iPad apps.

With T-Mobile losing its iPhone exclusivity in Germany to O2 and Vodafone, the last European iPhone exclusivity deal is dead. That’s good news for German consumers, who now are not only in a position to avail themselves of the spoils of the carrier wars as different mobile providers scramble to attract customers, but who also now have the option to buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple.

Yesterday was a big day for Verizon iPhone rumors. Hot on the heels of a rumor that Apple was working to create a reprogrammable SIM Module that might open the door to dual GSM/CDMA compatibility comes a perhaps contradictory report from the always dicey Digitimes that suggests that Cupertino has already awarded the build contracts for a CDMA iPhone to two of the biggest Asian electronics makers.

Say goodbye to your iPhone SIM tray. Apple may be looking to get rid of their phones’ reliance upon SIM cards once and for all, instead replacing it with a custom, writeable module that would enable Cupertino to sell iPhones directly to the user without being locked to a specific carrier.

New York City is full of characters — that’s one of the biggest attractions of living there.

Freelance radio producer and artist/animator Eric Molinsky spends his commuting time on the city’s subway system capturing the visual aspects of those characters using Autodesk’s SketchBook Mobile application, as the New York Times notes in a blog post profiling Molinsky on Friday.

The results are available for all to see on Molinsky’s iPhone Sketchbook Drawing blog.

From the beaky-nosed, middle-aged woman in a blue hat to other characters whose faces are artfully-shaded, each of these portraits manages to capture the spirit or mood of a person, a bit like a Richard Avedon portrait. In my mind, the pictures look as if they should be in an edition of the New Yorker magazine illustrating some story, or in the Times‘ “Metropolitan Diary” section illustrating some anecdote.

There’s something utterly romantic and wonderful about bringing the timeless art of sketching to a device like the iPhone — in my experience, it’s actually cool functionality like this that seems to have  converted a lot of my older technophobe friends  into iPhone and iPAD devotees.

As you’ll see from the comments on the Times blog post, it turns out that Molinsky’s hobby isn’t that unusual: a lot of other people have been using apps like Brushes to do sketches too.

Above: A subway rider on the 3 train August 9, 2010, sketch by Eric Molinsky.

Our most beloved of open-source video players, VLC, got a spankingly sexy iPad port last month… and now it’s been updated as a universal binary that supports the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and third/fourth gen iPod Touch.

If you’ve previously downloaded the iPad version, the update also adds the ability to delete files within VLC itself, as well as faster decoding and increased support for some of the more esoteric extensions.

Is there anything VLC doesn’t run on at this point? Besides the AppleTV, that is, which is positively twitching for a port?

VLC is a free download from the App Store. Go get it.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq8Dok2Th2s&hd=1

Watch out! A major new security hole in the iPhone software has just been discovered… a bug that allows anyone who picks up your phone to easily unlock it and access all of your phone data under iOS 4.1.

In case you want to try it yourself, here’s how you gain access to a locked iPhone through the security hole. When your iPhone 4 is locked with a passcode, tap the emergency call button, then enter three hash keys. Now tap the call button then immediately hit the lock button.

Do the above correctly and you’ll be rewarded by being dumped into the iPhone’s Phone app. From there, you can access the user’s favorites, contacts, dial pad,. recent calls, voice mails and even send SMS and email messages through the Address book.

It’s a pretty huge bug, and it seems to work on all iPhones running iOS 4.1. This is the sort of thing Apple will patch pretty quickly, but in the meantime, show extra dilligence and care in not leaving your locked iPhone lying around.

Photo effects apps are two-a-penny on the App Store now, so if your photography app is going to make a splash it needs to offer something more than just whimsical visual effects and a selection of fake-Polaroid borders.

Pinhole Camera claims to turn your iPhone into a digital pinhole camera. It’s quite fun to use, mocked up like a home-made pinhole cam made of sticky tape and cardboard.

But what sets it apart isn’t the basic photos – it’s the double exposure feature that lets you merge two photos into one.

If you’ve not discovered Trainyard yet, it’s high time you got yourself to the App Store and spent a dollar on it. It’s one of those games that offers a great deal of entertainment for a very low price.

One of our favorite applications this week is a great new photography app called Simply Postcards that lets you turn any photo into a real postcard that you can have printed with a personal message and mailed to friends and family.

Printer Pro is Readdle’s latest application for iOS, and one of the most impressive applications in our favorites this week. It allows you to wirelessly print a whole range of documents direct from your iPad, including email attachments, web pages, and iWork documents.

Also featured is a great language translator for the iPad, and the most definitive guide to Central Park for your iPhone.

This week’s must-have iOS games features a great new sports package for the iPhone that offers 5 action-packed sports games including archery, bowling, and tennis. Yoo! Sports claims to be the next generation of iOS gaming.

Reckless Racing is EA’s fantastic new dirt-road racer and another of our favorite games this week. It combines traditional top-down racing with state of the art graphic environments optimized for the Retina display.

Angry Birds Halloween also features – the ghastly special edition of one of the best-selling iOS games in the App Store.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ifrXlloH9s

Cult of Mac was asked by CNBC’s Street Signs to contribute our thoughts on the current market debate of whether it’s wiser to invest in Gold or Apple. Even though we don’t masquerade as financial advisors, the debate in the short-term seems fairly straightforward to us, and here are a few of the major points:

Taking its audiophonic cue from the giant brass horn your crotchety grandfather greasily crams down his cochlea when his nurses attempt to shout pleasantries at him, the Bone Horn Stand is an unpowered amplifier that slips over your iPhone’s bottom half and channels the sound of your speakers up through the trumpet shaped gramophone tube at top, amping up the output by another 12 decibels. It even works as a stand. Only $25!