Leave it to the army of third-party developers, hackers, krackers and programmers to plug the holes and putty-up the seams and cracks in Apple’s line of products. Somehow, somewhere, sometime soon, someone’s going to patch up the good ship Apple, in spite of Steve.

Take the iPhone for example. From a long list, my personal top three missing features are: forwarding SMS, sending contact info and the venerable ability to cut-and-paste text within or among apps.

At least the first two have been taken care of, and nicely too. There have been a few apps that already do these things, if a bit clunkily, one of them being the slow SMSD that can delete specific messages and forward SMS, but often chokes when dealing with a particularly large cache of texts.

My friend Myles turned me onto something called WeTool, from WeiPhone, the “bigest” iPhone forum in China. WeTool does what SMSD does, and does the same thing for call logs as well (as in delete specific items in the call log, something another basic app called CallD does). WeTool also forwards contact info. WeTool puts all these functions in a nice pretty package, and the app works as advertised - it can even forward SMS and contact info to multiple recipients.

To get it just add http://app.weiphone.com/installer to your Source list in Installer, and update. (You know how to do this, right?)

It’s just a bit confusing sometimes because several versions seem to be floating around (there even seems to be one made for the US - WeToolUS - but I’ll be hogtied if I can’t see much difference) and when you update, they all show up. Just get the one with the highest version number and you should be ok. As usual, caveat user; it’s still a 3rd party freebie and comes with no guarantees.

A side note: as some of these things from China often do, the English sometimes gets a bit mangled in the translation, and the About screen on WeTool, for one, is a bit of a hoot.

Hey, it’s free; shut up.

Here’s one of those no-brainer, dead-simple applications that should’ve been in the box - a way to measure lengths using the iPhone. The nice thing about this little feature is that it actually isn’t an app, but merely a calibrated graphic of a ruler that is to accurate and to scale.

Available from a website called, interestingly enough, an error occurred while processing this directive.com, it’s pretty simple to use, and needs no wireless connection whatsover.

Just download the graphic and put it into your photo album, and when the need arises access the photo and measure away. I checked with a physical tape measure and it seems the ruler is apparently spot on and lost nothing in the translation.

A couple of unavoidable and obvious limitations, though. We can only measure three-inch or 7.5 cm objects, and those in a vertical orientation - if you turn the iPhone on its side, the picture adjusts orientation automatically because of the iPhone sensor and renders the scale useless. But hey, it’s free; we can’t really complain.

We’re not quite sure if the iPod Touch’s screen has precisely the same dimensions and resolution as the iPhone in practice so we don’t know if the ruler would be accurate on the iPod, but it shouldn’t be all that different. We’re sure someone will chime in on this soon. (Bernie?)

Nice. Would that we had things like these more often, huh?

Get a batch of two dozen new effects for iChat4 and Photobooth for free by going to the Apple Download page.

More iChat Effects 1.0.1 includes the hologram effect and the ability to turn yourself into all sorts of flora and fauna, and more. It’s a 10.6MB download and requires Leopard and an Intel Mac.

Just head on to this page for the freebie.

If you’re anything like me, you’d likely have a number of old portable/handheld game consoles molding in some drawer somewhere, along with stacks of game cartridges and cards. I have several Game&Watch antiques somewhere, along with a couple of Gameboys and a Nintendo DS and more.

Third-party app developers have been steadily churning out webapps and little emulators for all modern consoles and platforms so we can go back in time and play the stuff that used to get us in trouble with the folks because we’d spend hours playing and not doing the school/housework we were supposed to. The iPhone is no exception.

You jailbreakers have probably been playing the emulated NES games on your iPhones. I got a bunch of ROMs in mine: Contra, Galaga, Arkanoid, DigDug, Karateka, Lode Runner and more. They’re kinda herky-jerky and the controls are a bit erratic, but they still are as fun to play as they day they first came out.

Well, it’s time to rejoice - some folk have released a GBA emulator called gpSPhone for the iPhone/iPod Touch!

It used to be a pain to install, but as of yesterday it’s been included in Installer, which automates and simplifies the process. It’s just a matter of locating the ROMs and you’re good to go. Granted, it’s wonky and erratic too, and a lot of ROMs don’t work with it yet. I tried installing Tekken, GT Racing and Mortal Kombat and they all don’t work yet, but there are regular updates, and eventually they’ll get it up and humming soon.

The sound doesn’t work too well as of the moment, and it doesn’t go into landscape mode when you turn the iPhone on its side like the NES emulator does, but at least the control buttons are big and easy to hit, which is a failing of the NES emulator. Additionally, the GBA ROMs are big suckers; be prepared to be selective.

It’s a nice diversion when you’ve listened to everything in your limited music and video library, and a great conversation piece.

Find out more about the GBA Emulator gpSPhone here.

For the paranoid among us:

Those of you who’ve bit the bullet and sprung for an iPod Touch (or an iPhone) and are concerned about the screen issue that has come up (faulty rendering of blacks and all) but can’t tell if your new toy is one of the defective ones, or if you’re just worried about stuck or dead pixels like we all are, there is a free online test that you can use to detect any problems. (Would that there were more of these free and useful things around, huh?)

Just pop on over to AppleServedUp, and run the two sets of tests they offer for free.

The first tests for stuck or dead pixels, which the site accomplishes by playing a video file that runs through the gamut of colors full screen so that you can examine for offending dots. You’d be surprised at what you might discover.

The second batch for the Negative Black Problem runs you through a cycle of tests, the first showing you a boxed area with a slightly lighter shade of black over the darker background; if there is no discernible difference, you might have a problem. The second test is the Greyscale Gradient Test that shows you a couple of sets of gradients that might not be visible if you got a lemon. The third one is the Faulty Black Aura test which shows you the cover of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, which messes up if you got a crappy unit.

Try it out.

[Crossposted from Mobile Philippines]