iPhone - page 445

Lena Bryce spent four years trying to have a baby.

Then she and her husband downloaded the Free Menstrual Calendar app, timed their couplings strategically and voilà: now they now are the proud parents of a 6 pound-12 ounce bundle of joy named Lola.

“Doctors couldn’t find any reason why we hadn’t been able to get pregnant,” the 30-year-old woman from Glasgow told tabloid The Sun. “It began to weigh heavily on us. We were considering IVF and adoption when Dudley gave me the iPhone for my 30th. I typed in ‘get pregnant’ and downloaded five apps.”

Bryce found the Free Menstrual Calendar the easiest of the five apps to use — it tracks cycles and intercourse data —  and after two months she was in a family way.

The fascinating thing about these apps is that for every couple who wants to have a baby there are probably just as many relieved couples who use them to figuring out when avoid sex, too. We’re waiting for the “I avoided getting knocked up from a regrettable one-night stand thanks to an app” story to hit the tabs.

Via MacWorld

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObN9wSLSI_k

Mac aficionado Matt, who made a retro-awesome video of the Apple website over the years, also concocted this video of an iPhone running on Mac System 1.0.

This old school MacPhone does everything you’d expect from an iPhone.

It simultaneously runs apps, widgets, has an accelerometer and makes calls — the phone dial pad graphic is an excellent touch —  though you won’t be able to play Desert Trek on an iPhone any time soon since he recreated that 1984 look with video effects.

The MacPhone mock-up took him about a day to make it using Keynote and iMovie plus some photoshopped screenshots from his 128kMac.  

According to mobile analytics company Flurry, the Apple Tablet isn’t just a very real product, but they’ve detected up to fifty of them floating through Cupertino, running a new version of the iPhone OS numbered 3.2.

Although it’s amusing to think of a scenario in which the Internet threw a hype party for the a device that never came, it would be a sucker bet indeed to gamble that Apple won’tl announce a tablet-like device on January 27th. That said, the Tablet can’t be the only thing Apple has up its sleeves for Wednesday, and Hot Hardware is claiming that the media event will herald another much anticipated announcement from Apple: the end of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the United States.

The rumor comes by way of an anonymous source within AT&T. They don’t have any details about what carriers we can expect to see the iPhone on if carrier exclusivity does indeed end, but according to Hot Hardware’s source, this might actually be a welcome development for AT&T, since having iPhone exclusivity has essentially crippled AT&T’s underdeveloped 3G network, with no end in sight. Although the iPhone has made AT&T incredibly profitable, it’s also generated such extreme bad press that their recent advertising efforts have been almost solely dedicated to fighting off network attacks.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

John Gruber’s favorite iPhone notepad app, Simplenote, got an updated earlier this week. From now on, it’s free and supported by advertising.

The latest iPhone photo app to grab my attention and that of a handful of Flickr users is Phototropedelic.

Leander posted yesterday about rumoured features for iPhone OS 4.0, including multi-touch gestures OS-wide, background apps, UI changes, and more.

Today, on TechRadar, Gary Marshall outlined his thoughts on 10 ways to make iPhone OS 4.0 damn near perfect, offering ideas such as disabling orientation, deleting default apps, home-screen widgets, document sync from a Mac (or PC), Mail filters, and one I’d love to see—touchable wireless icons (so you can disable Wi-Fi without accessing Settings).

I commented on that article with ideas of my own about what I want to see in iPhone OS 4.0:

Mail needs an optional unified inbox that can be set as the default view. Forcing me to go in and out of each inbox is dumb.

All default apps should be removable, with a suitably chunky warning if you decide to do so. If Apple only hides them, I don’t care. Perhaps there should be a show/hide list in Settings.

The Springboard needs serious work, because while it was great pre-App Store, it’s now a nightmare to arrange/organise apps. One might argue you should do this in iTunes, but plenty of people only use their device, ignoring iTunes in the main.

I’d like to see an app list, available by swiping left of Spotlight to access an app launcher that lists every app on the device, but that can be filtered as per Spotlight. I did a mock-up of this for Cult of Mac back in October.

On deleting an app, you should be able to optionally store its settings, which should (again, optionally) be available when reinstalling the App via iTunes at a later date. In other words, if I’ve spent 20 hours getting 90% of the way through Myst or Peggle, but delete the app, I shouldn’t have to start from scratch on reinstalling it. As it stands, Apple’s decided iPhone and iPod touch gaming should be akin to cheapo Nintendo DS carts, as opposed to something with a battery back-up. Such a system would benefit apps, too.

Also, Apple should fire/beat to within an inch of their life whoever came up with the sync UI in iTunes and get someone with some actual talent to redesign it. I don’t appreciate ‘film’ titles being truncated after about 25 characters, forcing me to check a tiny thumbnail to see if I’m syncing the right one. And the Applications tab is a disgrace, coming across like an interactive Flash website from 1999, not a robust system for organising your apps.

So, what are your wishes for iPhone 4.0? Tell us in the comments!

Console emulators have been a firm fixture of the software grey market practically since the dawn of the Internet. A legal loophole regarding back-ups means that emulation software itself is on solid legal ground (to the degree that Steve Jobs once demoed a PlayStation emulator for Mac during a keynote over significant protest by Sony).

Unsurprisingly, emulation is one of the most popular reasons to jailbreak the iPhone. One (former) console-maker has realized that it’s usually smarter to provide a legal alternative rather than try to squash the bootleg edition. According to Gizmodo, Sega is on the verge of launching Ultimate Genesis, a free emulator that includes Space Harrier II and will enable in-app purchases of what will soon be a large library of titles from the dawn of the 16-bit era. It hasn’t shown up in the App Store yet, but based on Sega’s existing iPhone titles, from Sonic the Hedgehog to Super Monkey Ball 2 means it will be worth waiting for.

Ultimate Genesis: Sega’s Official Console Emulator for iPhone [Gizmodo]

The iPhone OS 4.0 will feature multitasking (the ability to run apps in the background), multitouch gestures system-wide, and several changes to the UI, according to Boy Genius Report, citing “one of our trusty Apple connects.”

According to BGR, the update to the iPhone OS, which may come as soon as the special Apple next Wednesday, will include:

There will be multi-touch gestures OS-wide. (Would make sense for that as the rumored OS for the iTablet is close if not the same as the iPhone)

“A few new ways” to run applications in the background — multitasking.

Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through the OS easier and more efficient. We haven’t had this broken down, but we can only hope for improved notifications, a refreshed homescreen, etc.

The update will supposedly be available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS, but will “put them ahead in the smartphone market because it will make them more like full-fledged computers” more than any other phone to date. Everyone is “really excited.”

The last piece of information is the most vague, but apparently there will be some brand new syncing ability for the contacts and calendar applications.

Half of this is pretty vague, but the UI changes to make the OS “easier and more efficient,” ring true. One of the biggest complaints against Google’s Android is the occasionally kludgy interface. Version 4.0 of the iPhone OS is a major milestone — and it sounds like it’ll be miles ahead of anything else out there.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BP5ax1qs5o

Digg founder Kevin Rose has become an investor of the Square iPhone payment system (which was in turn created by another social networking visionary, Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), and so he’s posted an informative video tour of the technology on YouTube.

Cheese, ladies and gentlemen: cheese.

Beloved foodstuff of Wallace and Gromit, primary geological building block of the moon, and cause of a surprising number of international disputes. And frequently, the main ingredient in my lunchtime sandwiches.

Anyway, if you can’t let a day pass without thinking about cheese, without wishing for a nice firm chunk of cheese to chew on, or without wondering what cheese would best accompany the cheesy dish you’re planning to eat when you get home tonight, you might wish to shell out a couple of dollars for the Fromage app for iPhone or iPod touch.

Fromage lists hundreds of cheeses from Europe and the United States. For each cheese, there’s a photo, a description, and some tasting notes.

Version 3 of the app added personalization: you can add star ratings to all the cheeses you’ve tried, and write your own notes into a built-in database of cheese history goodness.

Cheese. Cheese, cheese, cheese. Cheese.

The Copenhagen climate talks last December might have been a political disaster, but here’s another project from the same city that might make a difference for some. And yay – it’s iPhone friendly.

The Copenhagen Wheel is an ingenious hub that you can fit to almost any bike, instantly turning it into a hybrid electric bicycle and data capture device.

Clip your iPhone or A.N.Other smartphone on to the handlebars, and it can talk to the wheel over Bluetooth.

The iPhone app Busted! Real Mugshots serves up police pics from around the US with full names, birth date, age, arrest date/time plus the offending crime.

Dubbed “Facebook for criminals” by a pithy CoM reader, the app, offered gratis on iTunes, launched January 11, generating controversy faster than an ACLU lawyer can say “FOIA.”

Cult of Mac talked to Jeff Jolley, president of the app’s maker Fountain Dew.

He told us about getting the app approved (easier than you’d think), the “bad karma” aspect, and more importantly, how to get your mugshot removed after that artsy late-night prank ended in tears.

CoM: How did you get the idea?

Jeff Jolley: We read an article on the popularity of mugshot pages on newspaper websites
and thought that could be extended, in a more interesting, mobile and viral manner, to the iPhone.

CoM: How do you get the photos?

JJ: We search the Internet for publicly available (and regularly updated) mugshots, and then make them available for use in the app.  We continue to look for new sources to expand the available repository of mugshots.

CoM: Are the mugshots storeable and searchable?

JJ: Not at this point.  You always stream the photos and you always start with the most recent mugshot available.  This could be a good future feature.

Although the Tablet is obviously prompting a degree of speculative slathering unlike anything we’ve seen for the last years, the last month has seen a persistent trickle of next-gen iPhone rumors coming out as well. The latest is courtesy of Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chan, who claims (amongst some “no duh” predictions like a 5-megapixel camera and a June release) that the 4G iPhone will have a new plastic casing similar to that used by Apple’s touch-panel Magic Mouse.

Ever have that feeling that you’ve had a rotten night’s sleep, and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed?

Yeah, me too.

Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that says it might be able to help.

Got your iPhone ready? Great.

Go here. See the pretty animation. You just got Flash on your iPhone.

And people said it would never happen.

Keeping to the straight and narrow often sucks: bloviating co-workers, passive- aggressive clients and hobbling back to the homestead to an empty fridge after a long day.
Still, it’s not as bad as being in jail. Or arrested, for that matter.

Busted! Real Mugshots, offers some handy, much-needed schadenfreude for the working stiff, as per the description:

“Real people! Real Arrests! Real Mugshots!”

The iPhone app, gratis on iTunes, serves up police pics from around the US with full names, birthdate, age, arrest date/time of arrest as well as the offending crime. (At least in the first release, it doesn’t give location and does not appear to be searchable).

GigaOm’s been releasing a slew of admirable, Apple-oriented infographics lately, leading with a fantastic look at the money at stake if AT&T loses the iPhone, and now following with a through vivisection of the thriving App Store economy.

Here’s the jist: 28,000 developers have generated over 133,000 apps to date. Surprisingly, the average approval time is only a little under five days,which is shockingly lower than the collective complaints of Internet developers about long App Store turn-around times… although it’s worth noting that that statistic only applies to apps that are approved, not ones that have been rejected.

In general, the average iPhone or iPod Touch user downloaded 3.7 apps in December, only 25% of which were paid apps. Ninety nine cents is the most popular price for paid apps, although the average app price goes as high as $2.59. Even given the low margins on most apps, though, December saw renuews of $500MM, with $350MM of that going to developers.

As usual, it would be downright rude to just slurp up and regurgitate the whole graphic, so click through to check the full thing out.

When Shawn Ahmed travels to places such as Bangladesh to fight poverty he counts on iPhones and Macs to help him do battle.

Ahmed is the founder of a one-man global relief effort he calls the Uncultured Project and is using technology and social media in inventive ways to engage people across the globe in their common humanity.

In partnership with the Save the Children Foundation and USAID, Ahmed went last summer to a cyclone devastated village in Galachipa, Bangladesh to distribute non-food relief items to victims of the disaster. He provided individual donors to Uncultured Project real-time receipts for their generosity using his iPhone and TwitPic.

As seen in the clip above, Ahmed used his iPhone to show villagers in another Bangladeshi community videos made by the people in the west who helped bring safe, clean drinking water to their lives. “This is not a charity,” Ahmed said, “it’s an experiment in community.”

The 28 year-old native of Toronto, Canada quit his scholarship graduate studies at Notre Dame University after being inspired by Dr. Jeffery Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) to try and make the world a better place — one meaningful difference at a time.

“I’ve also been using the iPhone to report real-time in the field,” Ahmed said in an email. He makes extensive use of Twitter and YouTube to break down the distance between his supporters and the communities they support. Connecting to them with his iPhone, Ahmed said, “I hold votes on how I should help people in Bangladesh. Voting has led [to] school supply distributions to orphans and much more. And, of course, all my videos are edited on a MacBook.”

The Uncultured Project’s YouTube channel just went over 10,000 subscribers and Ahmed is hopeful for the prospects of his unpaid, unemployed, uncultured journey to help the poorest of the poor: “It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty.”

While smartphones have certainly upped their resolutions in recent months, Apple’s iPhone line doesn’t usually garner negative reviews based upon the quality of their display panels, at least as far as their accuracy is concerned. The guys at MOTO Labs have come up with an easily reproducible DIY test that anyone can do to see exactly how accurate their smartphone’s touchscreen is. No surprise here: the iPhone’s is best of class, when compared to the HTC Nexus One, the Motorola Droid and the HTC Droid Eris.

The test works like this: opening a drawing program on your smartphone and slowly draw a grid of intersecting diagonal lines across the touchscreen with your finger. If the lines are smooth, the engineers of the smartphone have managed to seamlessly integrate the hardware components and software of the touchscreen display; if they are jagged, something’s off.

According to MOTO Labs, you need to go slowly because “on inferior touchscreens, it’s basically impossible to draw straight lines. Instead, the lines look jagged or zig-zag, no matter how slowly you go, because the sensor size is too big, the touch-sampling rate is too low, and/or the algorithms that convert gestures into images are too non-linear to faithfully represent user inputs.”

This is, of course, hardly a scientific test, but it’s hard to look at the comparison images between, say, the iPhone and the Motorola Droid and not see a major discrepancy in terms of quality. Apple’s flawless implementation of reliable touchscreen displays in the iPhone line is certainly a feather in their cap compared to the competition, and a great example of just how hard Cupertino works to get the details just right.

This video is all over Twitter this morning, and you can see why.

Never mind a rotating Lego iPhone dock – here’s one with added steering wheel, so you can use it to play all your fave tilt-to-steer racing games.

Expect crappy plastic versions of this to appear pretty much everywhere in the coming months, all of them priced 20 bucks and none of them any good. If you really want one, build your own.

Inspired.

LAS VEGAS — The iTamtam is perhaps the strangest iPod dock yet conceived — but also the most practical. It’s a sturdy iPod speaker that doubles as a stool. It is based on a famous stool from the sixties that’s now featured in the Museum of Modern Art.

“It’s a speaker you can sit on,” said Patrick Parma, a spokesman for Branex Design, the Parisian firm that holds the rights for the Tam Tam stool.

The seat was updated as a speaker for its 40th anniversary. Called the iTamtam, the speaker/stool has an iPod/iPhone dock on top and a pair of 25-watt speakers built under the seat.

Apple’s iPod earbuds are the next earring, says Deos, a New York jewelery company which makes crystal covers for the ubiquitous white earbuds.

“Coming from the fashion business, we asked ourselves: ‘What is the next earring?” said Deos partner Charles Siebenberg.

“This is the next earring,” he said, holding up a pair of white earbuds.

Encrusted in Swarovski Crystals, the $98 earbud covers snap right on the earbud speaker housing. Each pair has more than 200 Swarovski Elements and is available in solid colors, floating colors (gradient mixed) and patterns.

As well as Swarovski crystals, the company also sells covers with Swarovski Crystal cuffs, and covers made from diamond and titanium, aluminum, and sports silicone.

Of all the cases at CES, Ivyskin’s SmartCase looked to be one of the best. Made from tough polycarbonate in a range of colors, the SmartCase is a nice-looking iPhone/iPod case with a removable back plate that can be swapped out for an interchangeable battery pack (hit the jump for more photos of Ivskin’s Federa Hedayatnia showing how it works).