With the constant trickle of TPAs (third party applications) for the iP
hone and their quick and painless installs, you tend to try everything
out - because it's just as quick and painless to uninstall them. (And believe
me, there have been a lot that don't last ten seconds on mine; the ratio of cra
p to good stuff is heavily one-sided.) Whatever the case, updating Inst
aller has become a daily routine, which I expect is the same for a lot
of you guys.
At the moment I have four pages of apps on my iPhone (considering that the Apple-legal stuff takes up only over half a page, that's a lot of
TPAs). The number of pages grow and shrink as the weeks go by, and staying on t
he iPhone is survival of the fittest; the ones that stay are either really usef
ul or fun, or are just really good conversation pieces. The common thread among
most of them is, why didn't Apple think of these? (The only one I haven't yet
come across, but was fully expecting to appear this year, was something that le
t me cut and paste text.)
It being year-end, people have a compulsion to make lists, and I've succumbed a
nd made a listing of apps I've kept on my iPhone over the many weeks. Please ta
ke note that these are personal, subjective choices. I'm sure you have others
you prefer, or some you feel are moronic. But hey, it's my list. Why don't you
post some of yours in the comment box? Who knows, there might've been some we m
issed and should know about.
Anyway, here are some that have managed to stay on my screen this year:
weTool - Th
ere have been a few other apps that individually do all the small things that w
eTool does, but none all together, none as well, and none in a more professiona
l looking package. You can delete specific items in the Call a
nd SMS logs, you can forward texts (to multiple recipients!) a
nd contacts, you can even save texts to Notes. You can even makes calls directl
y from it. One of the best parts is that it has a set of visually stunning page
transitions you can select that Apple is only beginning to do (as the page cur
l transition seen in a screenshot of the 1.1.3 preview.) Nice one.
TuneWiki
- This is for the karaoke lover in you. When connected online, it will search a
n online wiki database for the lyrics of the song currently being played in iPod mode and will show it to you line by line as the song plays,
ostensibly so you can sing along. Of course you have to manually forward each
line by tapping on the TuneWiki icon on the screen, but hey, it's free. Who's c
omplaining?
weDict - It
's an all-in-one info repository from the weTool guys in Shenz
hen. Just by adding the available dictionaries, thesaurii (is that a word? Bett
er check it in weDict.), lists of jargon and slang, lists of technical terms, a
bbreviations, even CIA factbooks, you can have an entire reference of anything
and everything at your fingertips. It's even got a feature to pronounce the wor
ds you are researching (although personally I've never gotten it to really work
; and to be fair it still misses some basic words).
Stumbler - This is a new version of an old standard being used
for Macs since, well, since as far back as I can remember Macs had wifi. It's
just a wifi signal finder. It "stumbles" onto signals weak or strong, locked or
open, hidden or public. And that's all it does. Oh, it also gives you a load o
f info about the signal as well. Useful little sucker.
NES One of the
more polished emulators out there, although the polish seems to come from the
fact that the source ROMs are the least complicated of the lot and the easiest
to work with - GBA and PS2 ROMs are way harde
r to emulate. This Nintendo Entertainment System emulator brin
gs back happy memories for this old fogey.
MIM - Howard,
my editor friend, looked aghast at my iPhone and exclaimed "AT&T?!? You've
using the US SIM?? You must be paying a fortune!" Joke's on him. It was "AT&
;T" because it's what I put there - I could put "Howard The Duck" if I wanted
to. Which is what MIM does - change the provider name to whatever you want. A s
imple little program created by the famous Erica Sadun, it's a
great gag app. I once put A&TT for the longest time and no one noticed the
misspelling. Heh.
iSlots - Th
e One-Armed Bandit comes to the iPhone. A relatively recent app, it looks great
and plays the way it should, perfect for a few minutes of mindless fun. The Sl
ot Machine visuals are way exceptional as well, and it keeps me sane: virtual g
ambling is all I can afford at the moment.
ContraSense - It was a toss-up between Labyrinth and this one for Best Game to Make Pointless Use of the Accelerometer. Tilting th
e iPhone on its horizontal axes steers and speeds up or slows down a car naviga
ting a multi-lane highway congested with traffic. Great fun, although I don't p
lay in public - you'd look pretty weird twisting and tilting your iPhone like m
ad. The latest version adds sound effects.
Books - An e
Book reader app to keep the art of reading alive in this age of YouTube, Britne
y Spears, podcasts and silly driving games. No explanation needed. The toughest
thing you need to learn is to find the books you like, and figure out how to u
pload them. (Which you really needn't trouble yourself with; check out our Hono
rable Mention at the end of the list.)
CameraPro for the
iPhone - This was just released yesterday, but is so useful and funct
ional and full of that "Where Have You Been All My Life?" vibe that it immediat
ely earns a spot on my Top 10. It's one of the most egregious omissions on Appl
e's part. See previous post for details.
One last. It isn't really an iPhone app itself, but rather an app for the iPhon
e, but is so damned convenient and useful that it merits an Honorable M
ention on my list: iFuntastic is a do-all utility tha
t runs on the Mac and does things like file management, screencapping, adding r
ingtones, wallpaper and a gazillion other stuff that normally would involve com
mand-line magic and ftp trickery beyond the ken of an ordinary Mac user. God bl
ess you!
Ok, that's it for me. What's on your list?
weTool - Th
ere have been a few other apps that individually do all the small things that w
eTool does, but none all together, none as well, and none in a more professiona
l looking package. You can delete specific items in the Call a
nd SMS logs, you can forward texts (to multiple recipients!) a
nd contacts, you can even save texts to Notes. You can even makes calls directl
y from it. One of the best parts is that it has a set of visually stunning page
transitions you can select that Apple is only beginning to do (as the page cur
l transition seen in a screenshot of the 1.1.3 preview.) Nice one.
TuneWiki
- This is for the karaoke lover in you. When connected online, it will search a
n online wiki database for the lyrics of the song currently being played in weDict - It
's an all-in-one info repository from the weTool guys in Shenz
hen. Just by adding the available dictionaries, thesaurii (is that a word? Bett
er check it in weDict.), lists of jargon and slang, lists of technical terms, a
bbreviations, even CIA factbooks, you can have an entire reference of anything
and everything at your fingertips. It's even got a feature to pronounce the wor
ds you are researching (although personally I've never gotten it to really work
; and to be fair it still misses some basic words).
Stumbler - This is a new version of an old standard being used
for Macs since, well, since as far back as I can remember Macs had wifi. It's
just a wifi signal finder. It "stumbles" onto signals weak or strong, locked or
open, hidden or public. And that's all it does. Oh, it also gives you a load o
f info about the signal as well. Useful little sucker.
NES One of the
more polished emulators out there, although the polish seems to come from the
fact that the source ROMs are the least complicated of the lot and the easiest
to work with - GBA and PS2 ROMs are way harde
r to emulate. This Nintendo Entertainment System emulator brin
gs back happy memories for this old fogey.
MIM - Howard,
my editor friend, looked aghast at my iPhone and exclaimed "AT&T?!? You've
using the US SIM?? You must be paying a fortune!" Joke's on him. It was "AT&
;T" because it's what I put there - I could put "Howard The Duck" if I wanted
to. Which is what MIM does - change the provider name to whatever you want. A s
imple little program created by the famous Erica Sadun, it's a
great gag app. I once put A&TT for the longest time and no one noticed the
misspelling. Heh.
iSlots - Th
e One-Armed Bandit comes to the iPhone. A relatively recent app, it looks great
and plays the way it should, perfect for a few minutes of mindless fun. The Sl
ot Machine visuals are way exceptional as well, and it keeps me sane: virtual g
ambling is all I can afford at the moment.
ContraSenseBooks - An e
Book reader app to keep the art of reading alive in this age of YouTube, Britne
y Spears, podcasts and silly driving games. No explanation needed. The toughest
thing you need to learn is to find the books you like, and figure out how to u
pload them. (Which you really needn't trouble yourself with; check out our Hono
rable Mention at the end of the list.)
CameraPro for the
iPhone - This was just released yesterday, but is so useful and funct
ional and full of that "Where Have You Been All My Life?" vibe that it immediat
ely earns a spot on my Top 10. It's one of the most egregious omissions on Appl
e's part. See previous post for details.
One last. It isn't really an iPhone app itself, but rather an app for the iPhon
e, but is so damned convenient and useful that it merits an Honorable M
ention on my list: iFuntastic is a do-all utility tha
t runs on the Mac and does things like file management, screencapping, adding r
ingtones, wallpaper and a gazillion other stuff that normally would involve com
mand-line magic and ftp trickery beyond the ken of an ordinary Mac user. God bl
ess you!
Ok, that's it for me. What's on your list?
It works, too. Here's a shot I took using the default no-choice settings:
And using the zoom feature of Camera PRO where I didn't move the iPhone:
Focus seems to be a problem still, but hey, anything's better than what we got
now, right?
V. 1.04 now available via Installer.
FYI: folk travelling by air to or within the United States wil
l not be allowed to carry lithium batteries, whether loose or
in battery packs for equipment like laptops or cameras, in their checked-in lug
gage for safety reasons beginning January 1, 2008, by order of the US D
epartment of Transportation.
Lithium batteries will have to be inserted into the hardware they're meant for
and be handcarried to pass. If loose they'll have to be enclosed in a ziplock p
lastic bag or remain sealed in their original packaging, and stowed in your car
ry-on luggage, with a limit of two lithium batteries to a passenger.Â
(Do they differentiate between single batteries and battery packs
? Do coin-shaped lithium batteries count? Are computer batteries and camer
a batteries counted together or separately? Hmmm.)
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, if lithium b
atteries catch fire in the cargo hold, current built-in extinguishing and safet
y measures won't be able to deal with it. This sort of situation is widely spec
ulated as the cause of a fire at an airport in Philadelphia in 2006.
Bummer for us road warriors who like to carry extras.
(Via 
Somehow website 
They have a picture gallery of screenshots (if you can get to it) over 
The Financial Times 
No, it's not exactly a phoned-in thing.
Engadget reader Claude M. proposed to his girlfriend Doris by
painstakingly producing a faux-Apple iPhone iProposal ad and t
hen showing it to her. She said yes. Don't you just love geeks?
Watch the iProposal
If you aren't yet aware, Adobe updated and patched their Flash Player last week, and fixed
nine weak spots in the app - most of them rated "highly critical", where malwa
re and hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities in SWF fi
les. These weaknesses are present in Windows, Linux and 
Only 20GB?
From Flickrer Max Aretz's 
I was in an crowded elevator at the
La Salle College of St. Benilde the other week, and I was a bi
t puzzled at the muzak being piped in. It wasn't too clear, but I could tell it
was a noisy metal band blasting away. Metal muzak? I listened closer and was s
tartled to realize that it wasn't from the elevator sound system - it was comin
g from earphones plugged into the ears of a student at the back of the car. Dear God, I thought. Is he deaf?
If he isn't yet, he will be soon.
iPods are capable of hitting 100 decibels - t
he equivalent of standing 10 ft from a pneumatic drill running full-tilt-boogie
- and just listening at that level for 15 mins can seriously damage your heari
ng, say experts. New models of iPods can run for more than 12 hours straight, s
o you can imagine the potential for damage. Even if you don't crank it up all t
he way, the cumulative damage from listening at high dBs for 21 hours a week, t
he average amount of time a typical user keeps the buds plugged in, can be very
disastrous.
The Playstation<
/strong> emulator circulating in beta has officially been released at Version 0
.1.0.
The emulator, psx4iPhone, of course needs PSX ROM files, like
the other emulators out for Apple's phone, and you're on your own trying to fin
d some. It looks a lot like the GameBoy Advanced emulator, and
has roughly the same features, like game saves, etc. And like the others, it's
still a bit clunky, with poor audio and herky-jerky video, but it's a great st
art.
You can download it from the Home of Homebrew 
The US Army is the latest recruit in Apple's creeping invasion of te
rritories that used to be exclusive to other platforms.
The American military is integrating Macintoshes into their co
mputer systems to make their setup harder to hack, according to a 
(I've known this trick for
some time and have actually been teaching it to friends ever since, but it nev
er occurred to me to post the darn thing. Taught it to Game Magazine editor Howard Paw the other day and realized I haven't
even mentioned it here. Well, better late than never.)
Apple has left out cartloads of basic features, apps and utili
ties that should be no-brainers to add. Even worse, they even forget to mention
things that are actually already there for you to use right out of the box.
One of the things they forgot is how to find out currency rates in real-time ov
er the net, quickly and easily without going to websites when all you want to d
o find out what the rate today is. Don't worry, there's no specific icon for it
; you didn't miss anything. It's built into the Stocks widget
that comes with the iPhone.
Updating the rates of currency worldwide is done through Yahoo
online. All you need do is run the widget and add the "stock" of your selected
currency manually, and every time you update it'll check the current conversat
ion rate for your preferred coin. Finally, a use for Stocks th
at those of use who don't dabble in the market will find way useful. (Remember,
it's not a currency conversion calculator, mind you - someone else ca
n invent one; this just gives you the current conversion rate. You can
use the built-in Calculator to find out how much you've made
or lost, which is now a snap because you know the current rate.)
Run the widget, then tap on the "i" icon on the lower right co
rner.
Then tap on the "+" or add button on the upper left c
orner, which is supposed to let you add stocks you wish to monitor.
In the text window, type the currency equation in this format: yyyzzz=x
, where yyy is currency you're asking about and 
Those of you who own a regular 5 or 5.5Gen iPod video but secr
etly covet an iPod Touch with its wifi and multi-touch interfa
ce - well, you're SOL: you'd still need to either buy a Touch or get over it; n
o hack'll solve your problems.
But if you want to settle for just a similar looking interface, you're in bette
r luck.
The same kooks who brought you the hack that gives your iPod video the
iPod Classic's interface has created a new hack that gives iPod videos
the same menus and look of the iPod Touch - if not the multitouch capability.
It's a bit involved, but the guys at iPodHacking.com assure us
there is no way the hack will brick your iPod video, so you can rest easy and
hack away with impunity.
Free download link and instructions are 
The ongoing Apple - Think Secret legal wrangle is over, with
the end result bringing about the demise of the notorious and sometimes uncanni
ly accurate Think Secret rumor site perenially engaged in a running gun battle
with the secretive Apple.
This agreement ends a two-year legal action by Apple to try to flush out Think
Secret's source of a leaked story about a Firewire-based input device for music
al instruments that was never actually made. The confidential settlement result
ed in Apple dropping the lawsuit and not pursuing the identity of the source, i
n exchange for the shutting down of the site.
Nick Ciarelli, publisher of Think Secret, said of the decision
As I've mentioned in a couple of previous posts, when I was in 
The Security Update released the other day has its good and ba
d side, users report.
Good news first: apparently the keyboard glitch that plagues MacBook and MacBook Pro users who've upgraded to Leopar
d where keyboards freeze for up to over a minute when using Ca
rbon apps has been solved with the Security Update.
Bad news: under special circumstances, the new Security Update can cause crashe
s in Safari. Changes made to address security issues in the ap
p inadvertently crash Apple's own browser, particularly in handling frames. 
Long ago, to remove Digital Rights Management from my music tr
acks, I started with the rigamarole of burning them to a CD from iTunes
then re-ripping them back to iTunes, fresh, sparkling clean and DRM-f
ree.
After I had a accumulated a small stack of CDs I never used from this method, I
thought of just reusing a CDRW, erasing and burning over and over, even if I j
ust had one track to clean - I didn't have to wait to fill up a CDR with DRMed
songs just to save a little money.
5thirtyone.com shows us an even easier way that doesn't involv
e burning digital media at all, and is so simple I smacked myself on the head a
nd said, dang, why didn't I think of that?
One caveat - you'd need to have iMovie HD on your system.
The basic idea, in a nutshell, is for your to import the DRMed track into iMovi
e as a soundtrack, export it to iTunes as AIFF, then convert i
t to AAC within iTunes then just manually adding back the meta
data and artwork. A little tedious, but no more ripping and burning to CD. And
easier, as 5thirtyone.com points out, to create an Automator
sequence to do this by the numbers every time you need to strip DRM from a trac
k.
More detailed instructions and explanations from 
From earlier this year, when he went to Norway to see Al Gore
receive his Nobel Peace Prize.
Snazzy, but he's looking his age. Stick to the t-shirt, dude.
(Via 
Podcasting News has put together a comprehensive list of 
There's apparently a hack to remove the arbitrarily-imposed 1K limit of <
strong>SMSs that can be stored on an iPhone. Since
I got one I've come across this upper limit a few times already and I've always
wondered why this has to be so.
New retro-style animated ad with Santa out. 
A portrait of Steve Jobs at home during leaner, meaner days 25 years ago. Durin
g this time in his life the Apple ][ was king, and he would ap
pear for the first of his (so far) 
The Garageband update released ye
sterday lets you roll your own - and throws wide open the doors to lots of user
-created original ringtones.
The Garageband 4.1.1 update lets you export your creations easily to your 
Folks at Monster & Friends have confirmed something we all
knew - that video recording is possible on iPhones, and 
A Brazilian ice cream company called Kibon has come up with a
cold - I mean cool - idea: sell special Fruttare pops
icles with a free iPod shuffle frozen inside. In fact, Kibon i
s giving away 10,000 of them ice cold shuffles in their iPod No Palito<
/strong> promo.
Before you iPod experts jump up in protest that a shuffle can't survive being f
rozen inside a popsicle even if you seal it in plastic because of the humidity,
relax.
Kibon studied the situation and invented a fake ice cream that doesn't damage t
he iPod shuffle. The faux popsicle, or propsicle, is safe for shuffles
, and Kibon had to get the approval of Cupertino before they c
ould go ahead with the promo in Brazil, which is currently in the throes of the
ir summer.
The shuffle is in random propsicles, and buyers can't tell if there is an iPod
in there or not. They buy a Fruttare popsicle in one of the ten fruit flavors a
nd take a chance if they can get a shuffle or not. Mentor Muniz Neto of Bullet Brazil, the agency that cooked - er, froze up this promo, expl
ains how the iPods stay safe in the popsicle:
For joy! 
We have a new chapt
er in the continuing mystery of why normally astute and business-savvy companie
s continually produce anti-virus software for the Macintosh ye
ar after year.
One of these companies is Symantec, which has just released 
Yesterday I came across something so tasteless and crude yet so brilliantly fun
ny at the same time that it had me ROTFL that I can't resist linking to it.
It's a point by point comparison of the iPhone versus the 
New York City's got a new Apple Store, and an
even bigger one than the original.
The new branch opened Friday at the corner of 14th and 9th, and is home to the
largest, most elaborate and complicated-looking glass staircase ever built. Thi
s Apple Store has three floors, with the first floor 40 by 85 feet. It's got th
e same styling as the other branches worldwide, but is unique in that you can g
et a view of the inside from anywhere around the corner because of the wide gla
ss windows on both street fronts.
Apple's press release:
Apple's just reversed themselves and have increased the number
of iPhones an individual can buy, from their previously manda
ted two units, to five iPhones in the US and the UK, according to 
Ooh. Apple seems to have finally gotten off its butt and is st
arting to throw its weight around.
Wireless distributors in Singapore who are selling unlocked 
For joy! New ad available 
Conceited Software today released a tiny app (3.8kb) called 
Ever since Gollum lost his fave ring in a scuffle with Frodo in Mount Doom, he's been looking for a new precioussss
- and he's found it: an iPod touch.
Well, maybe not good ol' Gollum himself, but actor Andy Serkis
, who provided the voice and motion-capture for The Hobbit Formerly Known A
s Smeagol in The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, seems qu
ite completely immersed in Apple's Reality Distortion Fiel
d.
In 
