Posted By PatrickJ on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 under General | No Comments
30
Apr
A few sites have got instructions up today for how to find and use the iPhone ringtone that was used in several of the TV ads - the one that is talked about as ‘missing’ since Apple didn’t choose to include it amongst the standard ringtones.
Apparently if you’ve got iLife ‘08, you can find the sound file for this on your Mac, at:
Sometimes the initial infatuation is strong but quickly diminishes as time goes on. It happens with romantic connections. It happens with friendships. It even happens with technology. (Like my friend who just ordered her sixth notebook in almost as many months. She makes my technology habits look downright tame by comparison and that’s not particularly easy these days. Her routine goes like this– Buy it. Love it. Use it. Find fault with it. Sell it. I kid you not!)
If you follow JAiB you know that Patrick, Brandon and I were all initially smitten with Evernote. We positively gushed over it and were thrilled to hand out so many Beta invites to this innovative service.
But what happens when the initial "WOW" wears off? Can something that quickly starts off so positively possibly remain anywhere near as good?
Wow, talk about iPhone apps that will chew up *big* chunks of your time - I am finding vWallpaper is now near the top of that list for me. If you haven’t discovered it yet, vWallpaper is the new video wallpaper app for the iPhone - and I’ve been having tons of fun playing around with it tonight.
Here’s some of the cool ways I’ve been finding to get even more ‘Wow’ factor out of this fun application:
Check out the new vWallpapers.com site, setup by the folks at AppleiPhoneSchool. They’ve got some fun video wallpapers to use - like some chain featuring chain lightning, Matrix clips, and more - and they’re adding to them regularly. I found a couple of them were in formats that didn’t work for me, but an alternative download link via the comments worked. I especially like the chain lightning clip.
Use your own video clips. I am now using one that I recorded on iPhone Video Recorder, emailed to myself, imported to iMovie, and exported back out a favorite section of it at the iPhone 320X480 format. I even found that audio works - as my first export on this clip includes my daughter saying ‘I am silly, very silly, very, very silly’ - funny, but I think audio is a bit much except maybe for quickly showing it to someone. So I just now figured out how to mute or strip out the audio in iMovie (not sure which, as I’ve never really used iMovie before) and now have both the silent and non-silent versions on the iPhone.
Use iMovie to import a favorite YouTube clip, pick a short favorite section, and export it back out at the iPhone size for use with vWallaper. I just did this with a section of the ‘Yes We Can’ video.
In order to have vWallaper see and use the videos that you find or create, you need to copy them (via SSH or your preferred method) to this directory for the latest version (0.5): /var/mobile/Media/Skrew/Videos
I’m sure there are much more clever things you can do to customize and spice up your video wallpapers on the iPhone, especially if you know what you’re up to in iMovie (which I absolutely do not) - but just the above methods are providing a lot of fun and entertainment for me tonight.
When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy.
AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499.
So says the Techland blog on the CNNmoney.com site. They’ve also got some math in their post about how quickly AT&T could get their money back on any subsidy by way of the data plans all iPhone users have to fork out for and through just standard subscription costs.
This is all from another of those famous ‘un-named’ sources - but hey, this is definitely my favorite rumor of the week, or the month of April even
Some very nice news today from Erica Sadun - one of our favorite iPhone developers (and also an excellent writer on all things iPhone and iPod Touch). She has updated the Xlaunch - iPhone application launching app - to work with the new 2.0 iPhone firmware:
The new 2.0 SDK version of XLaunch combines all the features you use and love in the 1.1.4 version plus several new options. I’m pleased that I was able to upgrade the application without losing features along the way–and especially happy that I was able to merge MakeItMine and Banner in without destroying the simple interface.
You can still launch webclips and badge apps, and assign applications to the home key for double-taps. You can still browse in both table or coverflow modes.
I’m already a big fan of Xlaunch - it’s my preferred way of speeding up the process of finding and launching apps. This new version sounds even better, especially for those who are fans of Erica’s MakeItMine and Banner apps - as you can now also set carrier text and the banner text via the Customize options within Xlaunch. And Erica is looking for suggestions on any further features anyone would like to see added to Xlaunch. Go HERE to share your thoughts on that …
The day has finally come for Canadians (this is not an April Fools joke)! Ted Rogers this morning issued a press release that confirmed the iPhone is coming in Canada! The company has finally come to terms with the big Apple. Here is the quote from Mr. Rogers himself:
“We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” said president Ted Rogers in a statement. “We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”
Posted By PatrickJ on Monday, April 28, 2008 under General | No Comments
28
Apr
Last week we finally got ourselves in gear (a bit) and got ourselves setup to do a weekly TalkShoe ‘Talkcast’. It’s called Just Another iPhone Chat, and our first ever episode will be live tonight at 11:00 Eastern.
We had a lot of fun doing a trial run last week, and we’re hoping that the weekly shows will be big fun. The great thing with Talkshoe is that it’s *very* interactive - you can talk via the live chat client, or call in and ask questions, share a cool tip, or tell us about a topic you’d like to talk about. We hope you’ll join in and do plenty of that - that’ll make it a lot more fun for all of us!
To join in, just click on the graphic above or go HERE to get to our show’s page - then at 11pm tonight you can choose to join via a simple web client, or download the Pro version, or you can call in to 724-444-7444 and enter our Call ID, which is: 18509.
From that same page, you can also listen to the show online or download the MP3 if you don’t catch it live, subscribe to it via RSS, choose to follow us on TalkShoe, and all that sorta good stuff.
Contest / Case Giveaway
We’ll also be running a little giveaway contest during the live show tonight. We’ve got a very nice iPhone case to giveaway, and a pretty tough iPhone trivia question to help determine our winner
Hope some of you will find time to join us tonight …
It’s been a good while since I’ve used a Windows Mobile device on a regular basis, but two of my *essential* apps when I was using one were Pocket Informant and Note2Self (formerly known as Voiceminder), both produced by WebIS.
WebIS has big plans for Pocket Informant and Note2Self on the iPhone - and I’ve had a chance to catch up with Alex Kac, the CEO at WebIS, over the last few days and talk to him a little about plans for these apps and a couple other topics.
For those who haven’t tried these apps out, Note2Self is a slick voice-notes program that makes it a no-effort process to create a new voice note and email it to yourself or others; and Pocket Informant is the leading PIM program on Windows Mobile, providing Contacts / Calendar / Tasks management and more in a very powerful and hugely feature-rich package.
As with any app, and perhaps especially with a voice command program, your mileage may vary a whole lot - but I honestly felt the last few days like I wanted to turn into the Verizon TV ads guy, and just ask Voice Dial ‘Can You NOT Hear Me Now???“ — Patrick's Voice Dial review
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