iPhone 3.0 Rumor Round Up!

We’re just under 24 hours away from when — we presume — Phil Schiller and Scott Forestall (and maybe Tim Cook?) will take the stage at Apple HQ and preview iPhone OS 3.0 and the new SDK. We’ll be meta-live blogging it, of course, tomorrow at 1pm EDT/10am PDT, so be sure to join us for the TiPb take on things as they unfold. In the meantime, here are the current rumors, broken down by functionality… after the break!

Cut/Copy and Paste

This appears to be the big one. Daring Fireball wished for it back before Macworld (and reminded us they did) and MacRumors backing up the notion. Kevin Rose told us that it will work with pinch-able quotation marks, and Daring Fireball just weighed in again with:

I have no idea whether this description of how it’s going to work is accurate, but from what I’m hearing Copy-and-Paste is a big part of tomorrow’s announcement.

Push Notifications/Background Multi-Tasking

Another from Daring Fireball’s wish-list that MacRumors backed up, but Kevin Rose said he hadn’t heard anything about.

Apple, of course, promised Push Notification back at WWDC 2008, and targeted it for September, though that deadline came and went. Did they fear a MobileMe-style launch failure? Did they realize true background tasking was necessary? Were they just delayed? Or will this still be missing in action come Tuesday?

MMS

No sooner had Apple announced their March 17 event than Boy Genius Report claimed they’d heard MMS was coming in the update, but again Kevin Rose said it wasn’t anything on his rumor list.

New App Launcher

Back on Daring Fireball’s site, and yet again given weight by MacRumors, another new addition was wish-listed as an improved, rebuilt SpringBoard, aka the Home Screen that houses all the application icons. Rumors say it could include categories, like the old style PalmOS did.

Tethering

Apple and AT&T said they were working on Tethering, and Boy Genius Report claims we’ll finally see it with iPhone OS 3.0. Will it be free? $20 more a month? Not even show up? Guess we’ll see…

Compass

In addition to backing up Daring Fireball’s wish-list, MacRumors added a feature of their own: compass. The Android G1 already has this functionality — when you turns, it knows and can turn the view with you (for example, in incredibly cool looking Google Street View demos).

Does the iPhone need this? It would make sense if turn-by-turn GPS apps were about to appear in…

Premium App Store Plus

Rumors of a “premium” App Store Plus have been around for a while, and Wired just brought them back into the spotlight. It would be a place where $20 apps could enjoy attention exclusively away from the free fart apps that glut the regular old App Store. Office suites, high end games, and Turn-by-Turn GPS are all fantasies for this type of deployment. (Though reader antonoj did point out G-Maps has mysteriously disappeared from the App Store, and will “return soon”…)

One More Thing…

Apple being Apple, the only thing we can really expect is the unexpected. Usually we get some of what we want, and some stuff we never even dreamed of. This time last year we ActiveSync, 802.11x, remote wipe, Cisco VPN, the first SDK, the App Store, and a host of small improvements in 2.0 (which grew over 2.1 and 2.2).

Could we even get an interim iPhone OS 2.2.1 or 2.3 to tide us over? This time tomorrow, we’ll know for sure!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3.0 Rumor Round Up!

Six fun and useful iPhone apps

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Some iPhone apps are fun, some are useful (and some are neither). In this set of iPhone app reviews, we've got a mixture of each. In this batch of mini-reviews: iShred, Quik, Pro Basketball, Silly Songz, Wordology, and Silver Revolver.

iShred ($4.99US)
If you like playing the guitar or other musical instruments, then you might want to consider this app -- it could be one of the most full-featured guitar apps on the iPhone. From the ability to create and record your own songs, to the ability to listen to others play songs around the world -- iShred [iTunes link] has it all. There are over 2,000 built-in chords, scales, and fret positions that get assigned to the two fret rows at the top of the screen. When you tap a fret and strum the strings, a sound will be played.

When you set up the frets for a certain song, you have the ability to save this setup for later. You can also save your songs or transfer them to another iPhone anytime you have a wireless connection. The application includes other effects including several virtual stomp boxes, like:

• Adrenaline: A treble booster
• HK-2000 Delay: Echo
  
• Hot Fuzz: Distortion
• Kömpressör: Power chords
  
• Sybil: Dual chorus pedal
• Trembler: Tremolo
  
• Wahsabi: Tilt control for wah pedal
  

You can use up to four of these effects on a song. Getting to play your own songs is a cool feature of this app, but something just as cool is the ability to listen to others playing their iPhone guitars. AirPlay, a built-in feature, allows you to do this. Just open the AirPlay feature and watch as other users from around the world rock out. Overall, this application is great for guitar aficionados or people who just want to be able to play guitar anywhere. You can pick up iShred in the iTunes App Store for just $4.99US.




Quik Search (free, pro version available)
Searching different sites on the iPhone can be a kludge, especially if you don't like having only two search engines available natively with Mobile Safari. Quik Search [iTunes link] hopes to solve this by adding different sites and engines. Quik allows you to customize your search experience by adding a list of sites that you wish to search to the main screen of the application. You can choose from over 50 pre-designed search engines/sites (including Google, Amazon, Twitter, and of course, TUAW). Just enter your search term in the application and press the blue arrow ... your search query will be sent away to the site of your choice and you can view your results in the Safari-like browser built into Quik Search.

You might ask "What if they don't have my favorite site/search engine?" Well in that case, you can create your own "search plugin" by entering the name, adding an icon, and entering the template search string. The application helps you to understand what a template search string is, and how to format it for Quik. You can also enable/disable "Launch Safari" when searching (if you don't like the built-in browser).

If you are looking for a better search solution on the iPhone, then this application could definitely save you some time and energy. You can get Quik search for free on the App Store, although it is ad supported. If you wish to get rid of the ads, you can purchase a pro version [iTunes link] for $1.99US.

Continue reading Six fun and useful iPhone apps

Six fun and useful iPhone apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Six fun and useful iPhone apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone OS 3.0 preview event is Tuesday, and we’ll be there live!

If you're on the edge of your seat about the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 event, have no fear -- we'll be there live and direct from Apple HQ bringing you the minute-by-minute news as it happens. Just tune in right here come Tuesday, March 17th, and experience the best liveblog on the internets. What do you guys expect to see? Copy and paste (so sad we even have to ask)? MMS (also sad)? Holographic Woz (not sad at all)?

As a reminder, here's when the whole shindig is set to start:

07:00AM - Hawaii
10:00AM - Pacific
11:00AM - Mountain
12:00PM - Central
01:00PM - Eastern
05:00PM - London
06:00PM - Paris
02:00AM - Tokyo (March 18th)

Filed under: Announcements

iPhone OS 3.0 preview event is Tuesday, and we'll be there live! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Mariner Calc for iPhone

Rob Griffiths looks at Mariner Calc, the latest entrant in the ever-expanding iPhone/iPod touch spreadsheet niche.

Found Footage: Kevin Rose on iPhone 3.0 features

Filed under: Found Footage, iPhone, SXSW

Here's a short video from SXSW with DiggNation hosts Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, where Rose goes through a laundry list of iPhone 3.0 features that will allegedly be announced tomorrow during the Apple Press Event.

This video sounds rather alcohol-fueled -- at least it appears that the audience members, who are screaming out their most-wanted features for most of the video, were rather drunk -- and Rose has a somewhat checkered past with his Apple predictions, but his description of cut & paste on the iPhone sounds quite realistic.

He also states at one point that the point of the 3.0 release is to bring the iPhone's feature set to the level of the Palm Pre. If that's the case, then we should also hear about Bluetooth tethering and integrated MMS messaging for the iPhone -- which I, for one, seriously doubt. Of course, we'll all see what's coming tomorrow, and you can get your coverage of the event here on TUAW. Note that the video contains words that may be offensive to some people.

[via Engadget]

Found Footage: Kevin Rose on iPhone 3.0 features originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Found Footage: Kevin Rose on iPhone 3.0 features originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How To: Autofill Your iPhone with Music

iTunes 8.1 brought us some snazzy improvements to Party Shuffle iTunes DJ and the iPhone’s Remote app. That wasn’t the only iPhone-related improvement, however, as Ars Techica notes, there’s a new feature that used to be reserved for the iPod Shuffle that you can now use for the iPhone: Autofill.

Autofill essentially lets you just fill up the empty space on your iPhone with some randomly chosen music (you can choose to leave some space open for installing apps and the like later on). As somebody who’s not really into constantly creating playlists and managing albums, it’s a nice option. A nice option that’s squirreled away in a pretty difficult to find place.

After the break, we walk you through the steps (courtesy of the Ars Article) screenshot-by-screenshot.

Step 1: Set iTunes to manually manage your music on the iPhone

In the “Summary” tab for the iPhone, check “Manually manage music and videos.” This shouldn’t erase any of the previously-auto-synced music, but it will mean that your previous auto-sync settings won’t work anymore.

Step 2: Find that darn Autofill button

Now that you can manually manage music on your iPhone, you’re free to create playlists on the device, drag and drop albums, the whole shootin’ match. Additionally, you can, yes, autofill the sucker. To do all that, just click the little triangle next to the iPhone to get a drop down of all your device playlists. Select the Music section and then you’ll see your Autofill settings on the lower-right.

Step 3: Adjust Settings

Before you go ahead and auto-fill, you’ll want to take a moment to visit the autofill settings:

The setting for “reserve space for disk use” is a little unclear, as you likely are already using plenty of disk space for your previous video, music, and apps. Adjust as you like to choose how much music you’d like to auto-fill with and then decide whether or not you’d like iTunes to give priority to highly-rated songs. Click ok, click “Autofill” and watch your music fly on into your iPhone.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How To: Autofill Your iPhone with Music

Quick App: Boxee Remote for iPhone

Boxee, a branch of XBMC (originally Xbox Media Center, something that gave my original Xbox a life and power well beyond what Microsoft ever intended) is free alternative to Microsoft’s Media Center and Apple’s Front Row and AppleTV that many believe soundly beats both on features alone. It’s had some hiccups as of late, what with Big Media pulling Hulu content (they likely don’t want Hulu on TVs as the same shows fetch much higher ad revenue from traditional networks than they do from the internet streams), but that hasn’t stopped them from pushing forward. The latest example? Boxee Remote for iPhone:

• the boxee remote app has two modes: Gesture and Buttons
• in the Gesture mode you need to hold down your thumb and move it around in order to navigate.
• clicking on the boxee logo acts as Select/Play/Pause
• dragging the boxee logo to the edges of the screen will act as a continuous up/down/left/right
• clicking in an input field will open up the iPhone Qwerty keyboard and will enable you to easily enter text
• the app works over WiFi, so make sure the WiFi on your iPhone is turned on

If you’re a Boxee user and you try this out, let us know how it works for you!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Quick App: Boxee Remote for iPhone

iPhone Browser More Advanced than Desktop for 3D Graphics?

Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.

Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone Browser More Advanced than Desktop for 3D Graphics?

5 Tiny Tweaks Apple Could Make to Improve the iPhone BEFORE 3.0

No, we’re not talking cut/copy and paste, nor MMS, video recording, or any other of the slew of major feature omissions tech pundits can’t go an article without kicking, dead-horse-like. (There must be songs and drinking games about them — enough already!) We’re talking the minor stuff, the small things, the tiny little tweaks Apple could roll out in a 2.2.2 or 2.3 OS update that would make our iPhone experience just that much better and more enjoyable on a day-to-day basis.

Apple has done it before, of course. Double-space to add a period. Double-tap Home to get to favorite phone numbers or the iPod app. Tap Home to slide back to the first/primary/main App screen. Having Apps update in-place rather than shoving them back to the first empty slot.

And they could do it again, perhaps even with minimal effort, and sooner rather than later.

iPhone OS 3.0 will be previewed next tuesday, March 17, but likely won’t be delivered to users until June or July. Here’s what we’d like to see from Apple in the meantime, after the break…

1. Page to End

System wide, we can currently tap on the very top info-bar to hyper-jump to the beginning of that page. Whether it’s a long list like our inbox or reams of text like a web page, we can save ourselves immense “flick to scroll” time with a single tap. Jeremy would like to see this applied to the other extreme as well. Granted, not every app has a constant and consistent bottom-of-screen element the way they do the top info bar, and many also have controls arrayed down there, but if the geniuses at Apple could figure out a way to distinguish a quick bottom of the screen tap as a jump-to-bottom it would save just as much time “flicking to scroll” down. Jeremy wants it, our commenters want it. Make it so Apple.

2. Home Button Triple Click and Click-and-Hold

Click the lonely hardware Home Button and we go back to the Home Screen app launcher (or return to the primary home screen). Double click it and we go to Phone favorites or the iPod app. What about triple-clicking? We’ve seen Apple pull out all manner of morse-code inspired control schemes with their new headsets and the new iPod shuffle, so Chad wants them to work just that kind of magic on the iPhone Home Button and let users assign it to whatever app we’d like.

Triple-click to go straight to Mail, or SMS, any extra quick-launching ability would be appreciated. As another example, Dieter would also like to see some extra Home Button functionality — click and hold to toggle Airplane Mode. Rather than turning on, swiping to unlock (perhaps entering a passcode), clicking or swiping to pull up the home screen with the Settings icon, tapping on Settings, and then flipping the Airplane Mode, this would be a one-step solution. Of course, click-and-hold could also be more than just Airplane Mode, but user-assignable like the triple click.

3. Landscape Lock

The iPhone is the best iPod Apple’s ever made. They’ve said so themselves. But when it comes to traveling with an iPhone in the car, the rotation activated by the accelerometer combined with the lack of fine controls available in landscape mode, can make it a frustrating experience. Also on Dieter’s list, then, is a Settings toggle to disable the accelerometer rotation in the iPod app for those times when you want to experience your media the way you want to experience your media. Of course, no need for this to be restricted to iPod — it would be welcome in Safari at times as well.

4. Turn Off Notifications During Call

This one comes straight from CrackBerry Kevin’s round robin review, where he was flabbergasted (and almost scared out of his bright orange socks) to find his iPhone 3G pinging and buzzing repeatedly in his ear while he tried to have a phone conversation. While not everyone would agree with him, it would be nice — more than nice — if Apple gave us a a toggle switch for “turn off notifications during call”.

A vibrate only mode for event notifications would also be appreciated. Sometimes when we’re talking to people, having an iPhone ping away in our pants every few minutes isn’t exactly the epitome of cool…

5. Add Search to iPod App

We know, you want search in Mail — heck, we want it in every app, system wide, leveraging Apple’s Spotlight technology. However, that’s likely not a small change. Why would iPod search be easier to implement? Apple has already added it to the Apple Remote app.

Why should searching your iTunes or Apple TV library be possible and not the potential 16GB of media you’ve loaded up on your iPhone? (Especially for hardcore songsters who may have thousands and thousands of tracks filling their iPhone — or iPod touch).

Conclusion

So there they are, 5 small changes we think Apple could make in iPhone OS 2.2.2 or even 2.3 before we eventually get iPhone OS 3.0 next June or July (or whenever it is released).

Did we miss any? If so, let us know what tiny tweaks you’d like Apple to give us sooner rather than later.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

5 Tiny Tweaks Apple Could Make to Improve the iPhone BEFORE 3.0

15 iPhone 3.0 features we’d like to see

The iPhone 3.0 software will be announced Tuesday. Here are our 15 most-wished-for new features.

Big Stone Phone’s Twittlelator Pro ver. 1.6.2

In my opinion, one of the premier Twitter applications for the iPhone is an application developed by Stone Designs called Twittlelator Pro   . Twittlelator Pro, developed by Andrew Stone is a full-featured twitter client that brings desktop quality features to a mobile application.I posted a vid review on YouTube on the ...

Double Standards for iTunes App Process?

In an interesting twist to the current state of things iTunes app wise; are double standards now at play? Mippin have been having trouble with an Application for weeks, while their indiscretions are live through competitor. Content was an issue for Tweetie, whereas Mippin have a similar issue, thus modifications ...

The iPhone Blog Week in Review for March 16, 2009

Every week I will be bringing you what I think are the week’s biggest stories and articles. Let’s get started, after the break!

iPhone Prototype in the wild!

It is even being sold on eBay! How do people get a hold of this stuff? Why isn’t Apple going after them? Eh, who cares, check out the video!

Quick App: Coffee Buzz

Like coffee? Like Twitter? Then here is an app for you! Find people around you that are drinking coffee and post about it, best of all you can send the updates to Twitter! Have on coffee nerds! Oh wait, that’s us…

iPhone 101: Lock your iPhone

I do this and you should do this too. It is really cool: you can set your iPhone to lock after a predetermined about of time. After ten incorrect entries, it wipes your phone! Sweet security baby!

Dilbert loves his smartphone

This is just too funny…

New iPod shuffles with Voice Command!

Wow, didn’t see this one coming. I think it is cool, but I would have to try it myself. I bet this functionality will be in the new iPhone 3.0 firmware…

Phone Different Podcast #35 is up!

Take a listent to the latest Phone Different Podcast… you know you want to…

New iTunes is live!

Yeah, it is much faster and the added some new functionality like iTunes DJ. Must download if you haven’t yet.

New Metal Gear screens for the iPhone!

Man, I wish this was an action title. Alas, it still look really good! Perhaps since Konami is testing the waters with this title, a true/port will be on its way! I wouldn’t mind the PSP game on the iPhone…

What iPhone Firmware are you running?

Well, I am one of those peeps that always keeps up to date and downloads the latest as soon as it is available. Apparently, not everyone does.

iPhone Software 3.0 Live Blog this Tuesday!!!

Oh yeah, we are bloggin’ it. Will you be there? I won’t, I have meetings. Bummer

SXSW iPhone Round-up 2009!

Some cool stuff was announced this year for iPhone, the main event IMO is Facebook Connect for iPhone. I now have a reason for Flizster… I had no idea so many of my friends already use this service! Sweet!

iPhone Software 3.0 Rumors abound…

This time it is all about copy/paste! I won’t spoil it for you, but click to read more…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

The iPhone Blog Week in Review for March 16, 2009

Review: Photogene for iPhone

This user-friendly app makes cropping, adjusting, and adding fun effects to your photos a breeze.