iPhone - page 414

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!

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt2_lZFnpbQ

There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.

Obihai Technology, a tiny Cupertino start-up, this month brought to market its first product, the OBi110 — an unassuming $70 box with blinky lights that may well prove to be the most disruptive telephony device to come along in a decade.

The OBi110 is the physical hub in a multi-layered communications model the company believes can revolutionize the way consumers use their mobile, Internet and fixed-line telephony services, bringing emerging social networking behaviors together with maturing Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to create total communication freedom at the personal level.

With web and mobile-based software products, including an iPhone app presently in Beta testing, Obihai is poised to show the millions of consumers who’ve bought magicJacks and all 237 of them who’ve bought an Ooma just how IP telephony can be done.

AppBackr was launched this week as an invitation only beta. The service offered by AppBacker, Inc. of Palo Alto, California offers iOS app developers a new way to get cash advances for future app sales. Developers earn these advances by selling their apps wholesale to buyers via the AppBackr online catalog.

The return on the buyer’s investment depends on whether or not the app sells well. This sounds risky for the buyer, but not necessarily since they are expected to promote the app in magazines, blogs, etc. or they might just hire a good public relations firm to help.

Therefore AppBackr provides three very important services to app developers that are not very easy to come by:  marketing, financing, and an online wholesale sales catalog.

It’s war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an “epic rant” during an earnings call this week blasting Google’s “fragmented,” er, “open” approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple’s “closed,” I mean “integrated” iOS platform.

“We think Android is very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day… We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

In retaliation, Google mobile strategy chief Andy Rubin apparently posted the following dorky reply on Twitter:

the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.

That’s a set of Linux commands for copying Android.

Does Rubin have a point? No, seriously. What’s his point?

Since Google hasn’t mounted a coherent defense against fragmen… I mean the open approach to mobile platforms, does anyone here want to try?

Go here to read the whole post on IT World.

Apple’s put down webOS before in the smartphone wars, but you can’t keep a solid operating system down for the count: six months after HP acquired Palm, they have just announced webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2 smartphone.

If you’ve ever participated in any kind of canvassing for a political party or for pet causes, you know what an excruciating experience it can be on every level.

From having to put on a cheesy smile as you approach busy strangers in the street to having to put all the information together back in the office, it’s just one of the most tedious tasks around, apart from, say, taking out the garbage.

The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America have gone a long way to address all of that with their thoughtfully-designed iPhone/iPAD/iPOD Touch canvassing and organizing application, which was launched earlier this month. It’s one of the best tools I’ve seen.

Earlier this year, Etymotic began a new program that allows purchasers of pretty much any of their products — earphones, Bluetooth headsets, whatever — to own custom-molded eartips for an extra $100. Etymotic offered to let me try a set of these custom eartips (full disclosure: on their tab) with the hf2s I tested, and off we went.

Featured in our favorite iOS applications this week is the free content sharing app from Posterous that lets you post any mix of text, photos, and videos instantly to the web, directly from your iPhone.

Phoster is also featured in our must-have application list this week: it’s a universal app for both iPhone and iPad that lets your create stunning posters and invitations. With loads of templates to get you started and various effects and decorations, you’ll be able to produce stylish results in no time at all on your iOS device.

We also have the new T3 magazine app that delivers the world’s greatest gadget magazine to your iPad. Buy and download the T3: iPad Edition every month and access content exclusive to the touchscreen device.

Maybe it’s my (only somewhat) jaded inner journalist, but bubbly marketing language almost never rouses me. So naturally, I dismissed the phrases “rediscover your music” and “stunning mobile music fidelity,” printed on the box of Etymotic’s microphone-equipped hf2 earphones, as standard advertising blather.

After a few hours of listening to music through the hf2s I went back and read the box again, this time with wider eyes — because damned if for once some outfit’s marketing department hadn’t made a claim that was actually spot-on accurate. In fact, the thought crossing my mind as I gleefully ripped through my music collection, trying to see how many tracks would give me goosebumps, was that maybe those marketing peeps had even been too subtle about the hf2’s performance — that maybe the box should have just been plastered in wild neon stickers bearing candid phrases like “THESE ARE *&@#$ AWESOME!!” (and that’s why I wouldn’t last long in marketing).

Yahoo Messenger is a popular chat client with millions of users. It is available on most popular desktop and mobile platforms. So this week when I read fellow Cultist, Eli Milchman’s, news post about the big app upgrade that brought video calling over 3G or Wi-Fi I was excited about trying it out. However, that excitement quickly died off after Eli and I started to test it out. Needless to say today there is one less Yahoo Messenger user than there was before.

That user is me and you can find out why by reading the rest of my review.

As New York Times reporter Kate Zernike notes in her new book “Boiling Mad,” a good portion of the Tea Party movement is composed of youthful, tech-savvy hipsters — so it really shouldn’t be surprising that the movement has its own iPhone/iPad app.

The app features top news of interest to members of the movement, polemics from 11 conservative bloggers, Tea Party videos, and wouldn’t be complete with a feature called “Outrage of the Day.”

It’s just a clever little piece of marketing for a band that’s not half bad — and the back story is that they had their real-life instruments stolen — but here’s Brooklyn band Atomic Tom rocking the NYC Subway with a bunch of iPhones.

Can’t wait to see the band that tries this with some Windows 7 phones.

Phoster is an interesting new app for designing posters and cards on your iPhone or iPad.

The iPad seems a fairly small canvas, but it’s not much smaller than the Mona Lisa, upon which was painted the enigmatic face of history’s most beloved transvestite. Why not sling it up on an easel, then, and do some painting with Remote Palette… easily one of the neatest painting apps we’ve seen lately, largely through its fun cross-device universal functionality.

There’s no other way of saying this: Camera Camouflage is sneaky.

It’s a camera app that goes out of its way to avoid looking like a camera. It disguises itself as an incoming phone call. You can even instruct it to activate your phone’s ringtone, so you can pretend to take the call and hold the phone to your ear.

At which point, things get even sneakier.

If you recently used Limera1n or GreenPois0n to jailbreak your iOS device, and want to make sure that iTunes doesn’t automatically update your device’s firmware whenever the next update is released by Apple, then here is a quick fix to prevent you from accidentally updating your iPhone/iPod/iPad.

Ever since the iPhone was first released, there’s been at least one mouth-breathing dweeb nasally whining that the lack of physical controls completely castrates the device as a serious gaming console. Well, dweeb, three years later and the iPhone’s only the biggest handheld gaming platform ever, but you do raise an interesting point: why hasn’t someone managed to graft a D-Pad onto an iPhone after all this time?

It’s not like people aren’t working on it, of course: the guys doing the iControlPad have been plugging away at the project for years, only to be set back on the eve of release by fears of Apple’s legal team. That appears to have been the last straw for Benjamin Morisse, who has just launched the Controller or Bust project to try to quickly crowdsource the design, production, funding and manufacturing of an iPhone controller.