The saying is actually “a penny for your thoughts” and not “a penny for your iPhone case”, but whatever, I’ll take three.
Default Case is having a 99% off sale on their iPhone 3G/S and iPhone 4 cases, and there doesn’t seem to be any catch, aside from the shipping costs. I picked up three cases for 12.00 USD just last night. I’m not expecting all that much, but if these Default Cases approach the quality of my excellent Griffin + Threadless case, then I’ll be very, very happy.
You can pick up your own case from DefaultCase.com — each case costs $0.01, but you will get slapped with a $3.99 shipping charge for each case in your cart, so don’t go too case crazy. There are really only two designs (one for each iPhone model), but each one comes in six colours.
[thanks to @lgreenberg for the heads-up]
This may well be my favorite iPhone wallpaper ever, ever, ever. It’s called simply Landscape 01, and it’s by Paul Isabella. I spotted it because it is featured on the excellent Poolga.com site today, along with another lovely grey landscape wall by the same creator.
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MusicBarExtended is a skinnable iPod controller for jailbroken iPhones that sits in the status bar until summoned by an Activator gesture. Once activated, MBEx acts a lot like the native pop-up music controls that have been around since iOS 1.x — except a lot more customizable. I bought this extension for the requisite $1.59 on Cydia because I was a little curious, but something about it just doesn’t feel right to me, and I’m not using it as much as I thought I would.
I’ve tried a few of the available skins (MBEx Verendus, MBEX Dman, and the default skin, MBEx Recon) but none of them have really stuck. I think it comes down to the actual buttons feeling far too small, and the animations a little too faint, so that the interface never really feels as “real” as the native alternatives. The status bar is a great place for small icons, but not for small buttons, and I still prefer the pop-up or multitasking iPod controls to the MBEx renditions I’ve tried thus far.
Don’t get me wrong: I think this extension is a great idea, but I think I’ll wait for more advanced skins to pop up before I give it another shot.
I had a different sort of Apple event experience today. When these events roll around, I’m usually at home munching on some food with my teeth and watching the event with my MacBook. This time around I was in Chinatown finishing up some errands and rushing back home in a cab to see the event. Then I remembered that Apple was streaming the whole thing live to Macs and iOS devices, and — to my surprise — it worked beautifully. I watched about 20 minutes of the keynote while on the street or in a cab, and the quality was quite amazing.
Then there were all of the goodies that Steve announced:
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Epic Citadel is the tech demo that was shown at today’s Apple Event. It’s based on the Unreal engine, which powers triple A games like Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, and Mass Effect. Oh, and it’s drop-dead gorgeous on the iPhone. There’s not much to do in Epic Citadel, but it’s absolutely incredible to see such a detailed landscape rendered in real-time on a smartphone.
There are a few frame rate hitches on my iPhone 3GS, but it works beautifully for the most part. Epic Citadel is a real achievement on iOS and I can’t wait to see what kind of gameplay Epic can bring to our devices with such an amazing engine already in place. The whole download is about 80MB, but it’s definitely worth a look!
[thanks to @Cocoia for the heads-up]
