iPhone - page 447

Apple’s January 27th surprise product announcement will see the introduction of the tablet, the iPhone OS 4.0 and an associated Software Development Kit for programmers, the French site Mac4Ever reports.

According to the Mac4Ever (Google translation), the SDK will include a tablet “simulator” to help developers port their iPhone/iPt apps to the tablet’s larger screen.

Several of our sources give us two pieces of information concerning the famous Apple tablet: In late January, in addition to its tablet, Cupertino should have a beta of iPhone OS 4, accompanied by an SDK. Our informants also tell us of a “simulator” specifically adapted for the tablet. Evidently, the major novelty of the SDK therefore concerns the interface, making it easier for developers to adapt to different screen resolutions. The new iPhone could also benefit from a higher pixel density.

Mac4Ever notes that the information should be taken with a grain of salt. But the site recently nailed details of Apple’s new iMac models and Mighty Mouse weeks before they were released.

Mac4Ever also recently claimed that the tablet will be “far different” than most internet mockups, a tantalizing tidbit bolstered by a NYT report that we will be “very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

What is it?
Political GPS is, hands down, the best way to leverage your iPhone or iPod Touch as a tool for political activism.

Created by Thomas Huntington, this handy dandy app can help pinpoint your personal location in the political spectrum, provides unprecedentedly comprehensive contact and biographical information for every senator and member of congress in Washington, DC, allows quick access to the full text and summary of every bill passed by the US Congress, back to the 106th — including all versions and amendments — and features the full texts of such seminal documents of freedom as the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Why it’s Cool:
Did you resolve to become more politically active in the coming year?

Perhaps you’re disenchanted with the return you seem to be getting from your vote in 2008 for Barack Obama or your local senator or congressperson. Perhaps you find yourself firmly in the Libertarian/Conservative quadrant of the political compass and smell both blood and an opportunity to swing the balance of power rightward in November’s midterm elections. Perhaps you’re just intrigued by the idea of a tool that might help you make your voice more easily heard with your representatives in congress.

Political GPS is the app you’ve been waiting for.

No flashy graphics or a fancy GUI here, but a quick 30 question survey helps you place your own political leanings on a compass-like map that measures general attitudes toward ideas of economic and social freedom, plotting your answers on axes measuring liberal/conservative and anarchist/totalitarian tendencies, as well as those for communism/libertarianism and socialism/fascism.

You can view your results in a theoretical landscape or plot them against the views of historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Ronald Reagan.

Full disclosure: this writer’s views aligned most closely with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama.

Then the real fun begins. Political GPS’s Congress Tracker gives you detailed information for each member of the US Congress. From biographical information and links to each member’s website to in-depth voting information and the ability to easily contact each member by phone, email, or Twitter, Political GPS helps you to learn more about your congress.

The search engine built into political GPS is far more robust and sophisticated than something you might expect to pay $2 for. Search representatives by name or state, search congressional bills by topic, content, title, or bill number; the member tracker and bill tracker databases are linked, too. Comprehensive information about the laws passed by congress and the people passing them has never been so easily accessed.

Full text access to historical documents is the lagniappe in Political GPS. Easily study the US Constitution, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man right inside the app. Organized by Articles, Sections, and Amendments, it’s easy to go right to the area you want to read and it’s all easy on the eyes with large fonts and antique parchment backgrounds that give the documents a weighty feel without making them harder to read.

For anyone who believes in the idea that you should be the change you want to see in this world, Political GPS is certainly one of the coolest tools available to American iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Where to get it:
Political GPS is available at the Apple iTunes App Store in both free and $1.99 versions. But really, just pony up the $2 and make your voice heard.

Responding to an inquiry made by the FCC to explore the transition to an IP-based communications network, AT&T has asked that a firm date be set for the total extinction of landlines.

“With each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (‘PSTN’) and plain-old telephone service (‘POTS’) as relics of a by-gone era,” AT&T wrote.

They continued: “It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete.”

Given AT&T’s fundamental inability to address the substandard service and network congestion caused by their iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple, it seems blushingly laughable that the telecom would now be asking for the death of landlines, which can only increase network congestion.

But AT&T has a point: for everything but businesses and emergency services, landlines are already a technology of the dodo. AT&T must spend considerable money every year maintaining an increasingly obsolete network, which means funneling away from the development of the clear and rapidly evolving future of telephone communication.

Keeping New Year’s resolutions is hard. Who has the willpower? Here’s 10 iPhone apps that might help.

We’ve all learned to live with the iPhone’s woeful reception, but with more and more phones following Apple’s lead and circumcising any and all protuberant nubs from their streamlined smartphones, it’s easy to forget that the iPhone’s reception issues could be fixed with a protruding antenna.

Apple’s own thinking seems to be leaning towards the re-integration of an external antenna into future versions of the iPhone or iPod Touch. According to a patent recently granted to Apple by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple may be considering adding a push button style antenna to future devices, in order to ensure “high-quality wireless transmission and reception.”

Don’t worry: we’re not looking at a slide-out set of bunny ears. The antenna design is elegant: the iPhone would retain its streamlined design until the antenna was called for, at which point it would pop out a tiny little antenna nub. If your reception is good enough, you just push it back in.

However, as Patently Apple notes, the most interesting patent detail is that it may utilize a coaxial cable. That implies the ability to pipe in cable television.

Personally, I doubt we’ll see this patent in action any time soon: elegant or not, a pop-out antenna strikes me as too much of a kludge for Apple to take seriously. Still, the prospect of a cable ready iPhone or Apple Tablet is too tantalizing not to report.

I hope you’ll never have to use these tips, but in the freak moments when you just can’t go back and pick up your iPhone because you have a plane to catch and you just realized you left your iPhone at home while parking your car in Lot B at LAX these steps might come in handy.

Consider it a Holiday Blessing

Though I think everyone should own and use an iPhone because it’s the most powerful computing tool you can fit in your pocket, it’s nice to take a break for a while. My wife was able to hold conversations with me and I didn’t google something or check to see what made my phone vibrate.

It was also entertaining to see how many times I would try to reach for my absent phone. I use it for everything. So when I needed directions to a restaurant or wanted to know the time, I had to use the Yellow Pages and a GPS or find a clock. Not fun, but I felt like I was being all nostalgic or something. Using a clock… that’s old school.

Another fun activity is noticing how many people are consumed by whatever is happening on their smart phone. For the past five days, I was able to look down on these people as the poor addicted souls that they were, and I felt pity. I wanted to drop a couple coins in their empty starbucks cups and tell them to buy themselves a life, or a better marriage/relationship. Then I would ask them for the time and if they could pull up a terminal map so I could find the nearest McDonalds.

News To Me: Call Forwarding is Free

The last time I used call forwarding AT&T charged me $.75 a minute and I ended up paying $125 in fees. When I arrived in Cleveland, I called them up and asked to set up forwarding and Customer Service Associate Matt told me the forwarding is free. Minutes are charged twice, but other than that my calls went to the wifey’s phone penalty-less. This doesn’t help with SMS messages, but your incoming calls are covered. You might want to change the voicemail on the phone you’re forwarding to so you don’t confuse people.

When you get back to your forgotten iPhone, you can turn off call forwarding in Settings>Phone>Call Forwarding.

If You Use Google Voice, You’ll Be OK

If you receive incoming calls and SMS through Google Voice, you can just add another phone to your account and direct incoming activity to the newly added phone.  Once you add the number, Google Voice will call the phone and ask for a confirmation code. Just dial the numbers (mine was two digits) and you’re good to go.

It’s a good idea to just embrace using your Google Voice number as your one and only number. Sure, Google owns another part of your communicative life, but convenience is worth it even if you’re bringing the apocalypse one step closer with every call/email/document/wave/search/checkout.

My MBP Saved Me

I don’t like to bring my notebook with me on trips involving family because I’ll typically ignore people when I’m using my phone and I don’t want to double ignore them while on my Mac. But since I forgot my phone, my Mac gave me just enough of the internet to hold me over. My nephew scored an iPod Touch for Christmas and I was able to show him my app library in iTunes for ideas on what to download. I didn’t have to open the Yellow Pages for an address to plug into the GPS–thank you baby Jesus. And photo and video sharing ends up being more enjoyable on a 15″ screen rather than 2″x 3″.

Hopefully, this article is useless to you because you’ll forget clean underwear before you leave your iPhone at home. That said, I think I enjoyed my time at the in-laws a bit more without my iPhone ant it’s nice to know that life is ok without it.

Although our record is sullied by a few occasional missteps generally caused by a lone rumor- monger tickling our plush, erogenous wishful thinking zones, the Internet’s grown remarkably adept at seeing new Apple products coming. Most gadget bloggers and tech pundits would be willing to part with a digit if Apple doesn’t at least announce a tablet next year: there are just too many supply reports, patent and trademark filings and industry insiders telling us to expect one. The same was true with the iPhone: we all knew an Apple phone was coming. We were just laughably wrong about what the iPhone turned out to be.

It’s worth keeping that in mind as we come up on January’s presumed announcement of Apple’s tablet: the chances of it being what we expect (a large iPhone) are probably as wrong as our belief that the iPhone would be just an iPod with a SIM card in it. To remind us all of exactly how wrong our predictions were, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken has posted up a fantastic speculative prehistory of the iPhone, correlating all of the earliest predictions about what the iPhone was going to be and then fact-checking them against reality.

After word leaked to the Internet that AT&T was preventing residents of one of the largest and most populous metropolises in the country from buying iPhones online thanks to wide scale fraud, every hour that passed without iPhones available on AT&T’s official website was further egg-on-the-face of a carrier that has, in recent months, become synonymous with incompetence and bad customer service. There was no way it could have lasted for long, and so it didn’t: AT&T is now selling iPhones through their official site again.

Back in the day, Louis Lumière and others magically set still pictures in motion, and — voila — the motion picture was born.

Over 100 years later, unbelievably, the ability to make motion pictures still hadn’t appeared on arguably the most advanced smartphone in the world — even more absurd was the fact that phones much cheaper and less sophisticated had absolutely no problem shooting video. Yes, the 3GS has a pretty cool vidcam feature, but the Original and 3G still couldn’t shoot video.

Only now, they can.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp29W61pwTA

Gunman seems like a keen little iPhone app. Think of it like suburban Lazer Tag, replete with a healthy dash of augmented reality, but missing the cute beeyooping space guns or the likelihood of being shot to death by a trigger happy cop.

In Gunman, two iPhone-toting players square off in a suburban deathmatch arena. First, each player identifies the shirt color of their opponent; then, using their iPhone’s built-in camera as both gun barrel and sights, they take aim and shoot at one another, shaking their iPhone to reload their virtual glocks. If the Gunman app detects that the opponent’s shirt color was in the iPhone’s crosshairs when the shot was fired, it will register a kill and vibrate the iPhone of the perforated victim.

It looks like a lot of fun, and for this holiday week only, it’s on sale over at the App Store for only $0.99. You can check out Gunman’s trailer above. Matrix techno ahoy!

[via 9to5Mac]

The camera in the iPhone is pretty crummy, even when compared to the constabulary of terrible camera sensors installed in other smartphones. When the iPhone 3G came out with a 2-megapixel camera provided by Aptina, the competition was boasting 3.2MP, and when the iPhone 3Gs matched that ante thanks to a sensor from OmniVision, other phones raised the bet to 5.

So there’s reason to believe a report from Taiwan’s Digitimes that Apple’s forthcoming iPhone will again boost its megapixels to match the likes of the Motorola DROID, which has a 5MP sensor. According to their sources, OmniVision is set to supply a 5-megapixel camera for the next-generation iPhone, due to arrive in the second half of next year.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0V4SNt-c4&feature=player_embedded

With yesterday’s release-then-nearly-instantaneous-pull of the Nescaline NES emulator, the message should be clear: jailbreaking is the only real option for iPhone emulation enthusiasts. Good news, then, for jailbreakers: ZodTTD has has released the Nintendo 64 emulator N64iPhone through Cydia just in time for Christmas, with one killer little feature… Wiimote support through Bluetooth pairing.

Emulation tends to be slow on less beefy hardware, and it doesn’t look as though N64iPhone manages to defy expectations in that regard: even when using the Wiimote, the emulator appears tricky to control, with notable slowdowns. Still, at least it’s working. Heck, at least it’s real, unlike the last N64 emulator we wrote about, which turned out to just be a clever video.

If you can deal with slowdowns and convoluted controls in your quest for mobile Metroid Prime, you can download N64iPhone through Cydia for just $2.50.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4IjeO7g6kA
If you’re not sold on the freshmen  augmented reality apps available for the iPhone, this one probably won’t change your mind.

With it, you launch a simulated iPhone on your iPhone screen. Then you can zoom your virtual iPhone or spin it around and run other apps on it. The virtual “apps” aren’t real applications but the effect is suitably trippy nonetheless.

Developed by Ogmento for Orange Telecom Israel to generate interest for the iPhone launch there, it’s not available to the general public.

Useless? Pretty much. But sort of an Escher for the digital age.

Via Mashable

An iPhone price war currently underway in France may be our first glimpse of what we can expect if, as rumored, AT&T’s exclusivity deal with Apple runs out next year, and the iPhone comes to other carriers.

A word to drivers down under: make sure your license and registration are up to date.

Police in Tasmania are using iPhones to snap plates, relay the pics to a database of unregistered vehicles and unlicensed and disqualified drivers via an app developed for the department.

In just 10 days of operation,  the app has outed 167 unregistered vehicles and caught 107 disqualified or unregistered drivers, the Mercury reports. Formerly, officers had to radio in the information and wait for a co-worker to check.

Within the first 10 minutes of trying it out, police pulled up alongside a car at a traffic light ran the app and found the car was unregistered. They pulled over the car, found the driver was also without a license and drugs in the car, too.

The app, designed by the Tasmania police department, is also used by motorcycle cops.

Via Mac Daily News

You can take your business school degree and cram it up your plush Christmas stocking: iPhone games developer Tapulous, best known for their rhythm game Tap Tap Revenge, are now bringing in $1 million a month in sales.

In the laughable understatement of the year, Tapulous says they are profitable. Tap Tap Revenge has been installed on over one-third of all iPhones and iPod Touches. CEO Bart Decrem says that he experiences his company to exponentially grow as the mobile app market gets broader. “It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘holy cow, where did those guys come from?'”he said.

That’s great for Tapulous and its small constabulary of employees — it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys — but they are, of course, in the minority. I suspect Tapulous just has too much momentum to stop: they launched an iPhone game early inspired by a very popular and casual-friendly genre of music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and they can ride that early success for awhile. Things are doubtlessly not so rosy for the developers trying to get their apps noticed in a sea of a hundred thousand now.

Mark your calendars. It looks like we have a date for next year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.

Thanks to an update to the Moscone Center’s summer schedule, it now looks like this year’s WWDC will be held from Monday, June 28th, 2010 to Friday, July 2nd, 2010. There’s no official confirmation just yet, but the Moscone Center has blocked off those dates for a “Corporate Event.”

That can really only be one thing. It overlaps nicely with the third anniversary of the iPhone’s release… and, not so coincidentally, the presumed lapse of AT&T’s exclusivity deal. Even if Apple doesn’t reveal a new iPhone model at WWDC this year (and they will, if only to bump screen resolution to be competitive with the likes of HTC Droid and the Nexus One Android smartphones), I imagine we will all be happy to hear the announcement of new carrier choices. God knows we need the option.

[via Macrumors]

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgKDvWdi6o

Over the weekend, Seth Myers’ made a joke about the iPhone’s inability to actually place a call thanks to AT&T’s shoddy service during “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. The joke was terrible, but as terrible as it was, the entire audience immediately burst into hysterical laughter: they all knew what he was talking about.

I’ve never been such a big fan of using voice search on my phone. Take Google’s own voice search app for the iPhone. As far as translating my own search terms, it does pretty well, but it has an issue with ambient noise. For example, I may need Google’s help to spell the longest town name in Scotland, but I’m pretty sure the correct spelling isn’t “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogery BEEP HONK SCREECH CRASH chwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”

Still, voice search enthusiasts who own iPhones now have another program to loudly and emphatically yell at. Following up on last week’s Dragon Diction app, Nuance has released Dragon Search

It works very similarly to the Google Mobile app: you simply tap a button, clearly say your search term, and then beam your search query up to Nuance’s servers, which promptly spits back the applicable results. Where Dragon Search differs from Google’s efforts is it can easily extend its search beyond just Google results: it will also search iTunes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Youtube, Yahoo and Bing.

If you’re interested, the app is free for now, although you should move soon on that free download: the free introductory offer ends soon.

We’ve lamented the iPhone’s unsuitability to be used as a weapon before. An iPhone wielded in the sock makes a satisfying nunchuku, don’t get us wrong, but in the viscera-choked inferno of the modern battlefield, you’re just never going to be able to close the projectile-perforated distance between you and your enemy enough to give him a really meaty thwack upside the head with one.

But while the iPhone’s physical design has inferior potential to cause mutilative harm to your fellow man, the App Store presents marvelous opportunities for the art of warfare. At least, that’s what U.S. military contractor Raytheon thinks, having just announced a range of military-oriented apps for the iPhone that will help soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan use their handsets for war.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZWC0kk77GI

Six iPhones daisy-chained together to simulacrum the full ivory-and-ebony array of a piano’s 88 keys, progressing upwards through five octaves from a low C. Upon them, Mario Raimondi of the El Desafio foundation turns in a note-perfect rendition of Yann Tiersen’s “Comptine D’un Autre Été: L’après Midi,” which you might recognize from the Amelie soundtrack. A beautiful song, and we can only marvel at the dexterity required to tickle such small keys without relying on any haptic feedback whatsoever.

The only question is: what app is Raimondi using? It looks a bit like Mini Piano. Anyone know for sure?

[via TUAW]

There’s probably nothing so dissimilar to an iPhone as a fresh, greasy donut covered in powdered sugar; and Homer would probably be the last person on Earth to ever have one (an iPhone, not a donut, dufus). So pairing Homer Simpson with an iPhone might just be crazy enough to be brilliant (this is Homer logic, it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense).

The Simpson’s Arcade features a hungry Homer in a quest for — you guessed it — donuts, with mini-games that include using “touch and accelerometer controls to ‘Slap Homer’ back to life,” says game publisher Electronic Arts.

EA says the the game — which it says is due out sometime this December — is voiced “by the real, live actors” from The Simpsons; with any luck this means the incontestably brilliant Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer will be channeling Chief Wiggum and Mr. Smithers from iPhones everywhere, soon.

Lou Reed’s a strange one, but then again, you’d pretty much expect him to be: as a teenager, the Velvet Underground founder was institutionalized by his parents and underwent a course of electro-convulsive treatment in order to cure his “homosexual feelings”… a traumatic event that I’ve always felt directly inspired Reed’s 1975 double album of recorded audio feedback, Metal Machine Music, which certainly sounded like brain synapses wildly misfiring. Reed’s latest accomplishment? A surprising foray into iPhone App development called Lou Zoom, which may be just as much of a waste of money as Metal Machine Music ever was.

As you can see, Lou Zoom basically just strips down your contact list to its barest essentials and explodes the text with a large point Helvetica Neue font, although it does include some improved search functionality as well. Frankly, it’s not much of an app: it looks pretty terrible, and only seems like it might be even marginally useful to the visually impaired. Still, Lou Reed “designed” it, so you can expect to pay $2.50 for it.

Lou, you know I love you.You are one of the greatest guitar players of the 20th century. You have single-handedly changed the course of rock and/or roll. But you can’t be all things to all men. It’s okay if you’re just a rock god: you don’t need to be an iPhone app developer too.

[via Daring Fireball]

Although their App Store approval procedure has recently been modified to automatically reject apps that use them, Apple’s stance prohibiting developers from using private API calls has been looking a bit wobbly lately. First, Steve Jobs personally approved an app that used a private API to enable video streaming, and now comes word that Apple will officially allow developers to use the UIGetScreenImage() private API call in their applications.

According to the Apple forum moderator who outlined the change over in the official developer forums: “After carefully considering the issue, Apple is now allowing applications to use the function UIGetScreenImage() to programmatically capture the current screen contents.”

Developers should expect, however, to update their applications if a “future release of iPhone OS… provide[s] a public API equivalent of this functionality,” at which point, “all applications using UIGetScreenImage() will be required to adopt the public API.”

That’s an interesting development for a couple of reasons. For one, it actually allows streaming video from the iPhone camera on even older model iPhones, just by pasting enough UIGetScreenImage()s together. More interestingly, it implies that Apple is working to create public API equivalents of a lot of their most in-demand private API calls, which should expand app development possibilities dramatically by the time iPhone OS 4.0 rolls around.

[via TUAW, image via Aral Balkan]

Although they’re certainly not head turners like the 3D head tracking patent Ed wrote about earlier today, Apple’s latest two patents describing improvements to the iPod interface are at least more likely to hit a device you own sometime soon.

The first patent suggests on how an iPod or iPhone might track an individual user’s preferences in order to improve the overall user experience. For example, if you skip the first 22 seconds of a particular song consistently, your iPod would automatically skip it for you next time you tried to play it. The same approach could be used for volume, equalizer settings, etc, as well as dimming songs in the track listings that are continuously skipped in favor of bolding ones that a user prefers.

Apple’s other patent application is pretty simple, but it’s a great, common sense idea: when a user tries to play a video on their iPod or iPhone, the operating system does a quick check against the battery life to determine if there’s enough juice left to play the whole thing, and, if not, warns the user.

Both patents seem like pretty useful additions to the iPod’s already robust user interface, and fairly easy to implement to boot. Don’t be surprised to see these features creep into an update sometime soon.