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.
Coming about one month after the much heralded first release of their client for the iPad, Applidium has just announced that they will be making their popular VLC video client universal as of the next update.
With all due respect, this was originally intended to be a gallery post dedicated to discovering the magic of MC Escher, a 99¢ app that brings users hi-res imagery of the artwork that’s decorated millions of dorm rooms and student apartments worldwide over the years. The app incudes two mindbending games as well, and for a buck, it’s got to be good value. MC Escher on the iPhone and iPad — how could you go wrong?
However, digging around for something to say about the Escher app, iFractal surfaced. It’s a free app that allows users to play around with renderings of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets of images derived from mathematical visualization theory. There’s also Fractals, a $2.99 app that seems to offer the same thing, with perhaps a finer manipulative granularity — but in the end, these apps warrant a gallery.
One of the last bastions of iPhone exclusivity in Europe has finally tumbled: Vodafone and O2 are now reporting that they will soon be offering the iPhone 4 in Germany, breaking the knuckles of T-Mobile’s long standing stranglehold on the handset.
It was pretty easy to see the writing on the wall in Germany that this was coming: earlier this year, T-Mobile’s “exclusivity” was downgraded from the exclusive right to sell all Apple handsets to the exclusive right to sell the iPhone 4. Pretty much every carrier in Germany has been offering the 3GS ever since.
It’s two days late, but late is better than never. GreenPois0n the jailbreak for iOS devices running iOS 4.1 is here. Unfortunately the first release is for Windows and Linux only, but the developers of the hack, Chronic-Dev, expect to release a version for Mac OS X soon.
The jailbreak supports iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, the third and forth generation iPod touch, and the iPad. Although it doesn’t presently support the second generation Apple TV at this time a future update will fix that.
The release of GreenPois0n follows last weekends surprise release of Limera1n by Geohot. Afterwards, Geohot and Chronic-Dev got together, so GreenPois0n now uses the same exploit as Limera1n. This cooperation saved Chronic-Dev’s SHAtter exploit for a future jailbreaking tool.
As far as I’m concerned the hacker cooperation can continue. I appreciate what they do for people who want out of Apple’s walled garden and I hope they continue to work together on future iOS hacking tools. You can download a copy of GreenPois0n for Windows or Linux by visiting www.greenpois0n.com.
If you use Posterous for posting stuff online, you might be interested in the new, free Posterous iOS app that’s popped up in the App Store today.
It’s got everything you’d expect to see in a mobile blogging tool. Namely: a big green POST button that’s everywhere in the app; no matter what else you’re looking at, you can always start a new post with one tap.
The Amazon iPhone app received an update Tuesday, allowing iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users to scan barcodes anywhere and instantly compare prices on the scanned item at amazon.com.
Using the device’s camera, users of the free app can point at a barcode out in brick-and-mortar land and know within seconds whether Amazon has a better deal on offer.
This new TV commercial for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 inspired me to write a script for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live. No, really!
WEEKEND UPDATE SEGMENT
Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler
SETH
Microsoft this week unveiled its long awaited Windows Phone 7 to compete with the Apple iPhone and Google Android phones. The company also released a TV commercial depicting a world of people so engrossed in their cell phones that they fail in their jobs, neglect their kids and ignore the sexual advances of their spouses. To which people in the commercial respond: “Really!?!”
Which brings us to a segment we like to call, “REALLY!?! with Seth & Amy.”
<Applause>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXkoIBDXwd8
Taking their iPhone Where No iDevice Has Gone Before, a father and son in Newburgh, NY recently took a weekend science project to new heights. Luke and Max Geissbuhler attached an HD Video Camera, iPhone and some styrofoam packing to a weather balloon, then launched their homemade satellite on a journey that lasted 72 minutes and climbed over 100,000 feet into the atmosphere!
Who knows what Hyundai intends on using this desk for, but I have to admit, I can imagine worse desks than a 70-inch, 1080p iPhone. It was on display at the Kintex show in Korea this week, for some reason.
[via Gizmodo]
This isn’t a 3GS tarted up by Colorware, it’s the “iPhonc,” a little no-name Chinese cell phone looking to capitalize upon a bit of brand confusion with a stolen Apple logo (albeit, one with a reversed stem) and the elimination of a single stroke from the product name’s typeface.
I would be curious one day to pick the brain of one of these iPhone knock-off designers. They really are ingenious. If only they used that same ingenuity to design capable smartphones instead of dancing around trademark infringement.
[via 9to5Mac]
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both agree that a CDMA iPhone is coming to Verizon in January, and their agreement on the matter has one of Apple’s strategic leaks written all over it. But when the iPhone comes to Verizon, will it be boasting 4G mobile internet speeds?
Don’t count on it, says Steve Cheney of Techcrunch, who reports that the Verizon iPhone to debut in January will be unable to access Verizon’s LTE network.
No matter how much you might dislike Microsoft and all its creations, you have to admire their pluck for calling in none other than Stephen Fry for today’s Windows Phone 7 launch event.
Fry is well known as an ardent supporter of all things Apple, but that reputation is to some degrees a creation of Fry’s own fans.
The thing is, he doesn’t just support Apple and OS X; he loves all technology, and like most of us prefers to use the best stuff he can get his hands on. “I’m all for biodiversity in the smartphone market,” he says.
People who have been desperate to turn friends into badgers – your prayers have finally, finally been answered.
Because for you, Badger Face is likely to be the best dollar you’ve ever spent on an iPhone/iPod touch application with turning-people-into-badgers functionality.
For the rest of us? Well, for the rest of us, Badger Face will make us momentarily double-take as we browse the App Store for amazing stuff. It will make us choke on our badger burgers as we read the app description. Badger Face is simultaneously the weirdest thing we have seen this week, and it is this week’s Best (Badger-Related) Thing Ever.
Who knows what will come next? The user comments suggest Dinosaur Face, but why stop there? What about Panda Face? Squirrel Face? Unicorn Face? And for A-Team fans, Face Face?
Love your MacBook’s MagSafe adapter? Good news: it might be coming to the next iPhone or iPad.
The most notorious iPhone knock-off at all is the Meizu M8, a cheeky doppelganger that looks virtually identical to the iPhone before you dive below the surface into the excremental ocean of its software: a custom-shelled version of Microsoft Windows CE 6. Meizu CEO Jack Wong has been cheekily shining Apple on about the Meizu M8’s more-than-subtle likeness to the iPhone for a while now, having laughed as recently as last month that the new iPod Touch looks just like their upcoming Meizu M9II Android smartphone.
Wong’s probably wishing he’d kept his mouth shut now. According to Wong, Meizu is now being forced by Cupertino’s lawyers to stop selling the M8… and it might be enough to put the company under.
Halloween is Big Business in historic Salem, Massachusetts. It’s now High Tech too. For the 29th Haunted Happenings Celebration, the annual festival of witches, ghosts, and fall in New England, the town has created a new Haunted Happenings App for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
The app features info about the Festival Calendar of Events, local attractions and museums, restaurant and retail listings, and directions on how to get to Salem (tip: plan ahead and leave time). Users also have an opportunity to purchase tickets for some events and attractions directly from the app.
Let the Frightful Fun Commence! [via boston.com]
One of our favorite iOS apps this week is Gordon Ramsay’s Cook With Me, which features 52 mouth-watering recipes, with simple to follow steps for cooking up gorgeous dishes.
Esquire‘s new magazine app for the iPad is another featured this week: see the World Trade Centre being built, complete with information on how it all will happen.
We also have an amazing new painting application for the iPad!
Slide-on iPhone 4 do cause scratches and cracks on the device’s glass back, the vast majority of readers reported in a poll we ran on Friday.
Almost 75 percent of repondents said their iPhone 4 has been scratched, cracked or otherwise damaged by a slide-on case. Only 26 percent said they’d had no problems.
The poll was prompted by a report Ryan Block in GDGT that Apple is actively investigating slide-on cases before it turns into a PR disaster like Antennagate.
The results are at total surprise to me. I’d not heard of the issue before Friday, and I’ve used several slide-on cases with my iPhone 4 without problems.
Of course, online polls are far from scientific surveys. In fact, most commenters on the post report that they’ve had no problems. If you read the comments and ignore the poll, you’d get the impression that there isn’t an issue, or that trapped dirt affects all cases and all phones — not just the iPhone 4.
The results are interesting because it was unclear how widespread the issue was — it certainly didn’t seem mainstream. But as Block pointed out this morning, Apple is trying to preempt the issue before it becomes a public relations nightmare. More here: Following up on yesterday’s “Glassgate” story.
