I was recently helping someone set up their new iPhone, and showing them all the cool things you could do with it using applications. We know that to get applcations you have to setup an iTunes app store account, which requires a credit card. No longer.

Apple will now allow you to open an ITMS (iTunes Music Store) account with no credit card. Of course, that limits you to downloading only free apps. 

Here is their tutorial on how to do it.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534

Awesome,
Jason

April 1st, 1976 marks the day of the founding of Apple Computer Inc. (Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computers) .

Combine this fact with the humor of April fools day, and you might not be surprised that the free music download (on iTunes Music Store) for the day is 4'33" by John Cage. (Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%2733%22).

Bravo Apple, and Happy Birthday!

Jason

3/17/09 - iPhone 3.0 Event

Read the complete MacWorld event blog at, http://www.macworld.com/article/139401/2009/03/appleevent.html

The link above is the full account from MacWorld's reporters on site as they blogged the event live from Apple. What I've written below are the highlights in thier post. At the end of the event, Apple executives answered questions from the audience. Apple did mention that the list presented today of updates is not a complete list, and that the new developer kit is available today. If you are interested in developing for this device, go to developer.apple.com.

General

Apple announced some new updates to the iPhone 3.0 software today.  Apple has opened up to developers over 1000 APIs that include:

Discoverable devices, useful for peer to peer gaming, or other bonjour type application.

In application purchases. The ability for developers to sell game levels, or extended subscriptions, or purchase ebooks all with in an application.

Other new features announced this morning include:

Cut, Copy and Paste in all applications. This also includes copying text from one application to another. Shake to undo/redo pasting. 

Landscape mode for all applications, especialliy Mail and SMS.

Support for CalDAV and .ics calendar subscriptions.

The ability to send multiple photos, contacts, locations, audio files.

The ability to syncronize your notes to yourMac or PC.

Shake to shuffle your music

Wi-Fi Auto login

Stereo Bluetooth

Support for YouTube accounts

More languages

Auto-fill, anti-phishing, extended Parental Controls, and more.

New applications:

Voice Memo. Edit, trim, and email voice memos or via MMS
(Clarification: SMS is Simple Message Service, regular texting. MMS is Multi-media Messaging Service. - Text plus media)

Spotlight - Search your whole phone!!!

Not implemented:

You guessed it, Flash.

Tethering your iPhone - To quote the MacWorld live blog's account of Apple's answer:

"There's two pieces needed for that: client-side needs to support
tethering; second is working with carriers. We are absolutely
supporting tethering on client side on iPhone. Also working with
carriers around the world, and it is coming."

What is it? Tethering is the process of connecting your laptop to your phone and using the connection from that device to connect your laptop to the internet.

Conclusion

Apple estimates that this update will be available this summer as a free update to iPhone 3G owners. The iPhone 3.0 software is designed to work on 1st gen iPhones as well though not all features will work (Stereo Bluetooth, MMS). Ipod touch users will pay $9.95 for the update.

If you have installed the Safari 4 beta on your Mac,  you may notice that typing messages in Microsoft Messenger requires that you click on the text input area before you start typing, for every message sent. This is very annoying. I too experienced this and the solution was to run the uninstaller that comes with the Safari 4 Beta download . It will reinstall the last version of Safari that you had prior to installing the beta.

Restart required.

Jason

Recently there was a huge mobile device conference in Barcelona and all the big announcements in mobile technology were announced. One of these announcements came from DataViz, the fine makers of mobile versions of office applications for various mobile computing platforms.

Today DataViz released an announcement stating that they are on track to release Q2 2009. They also attached the screen shot below. For more information regarding this upcoming release, visit the Documents To Go website at http://www.dataviz.com/. If you would like to be notified about the release of this product, they offer a notification signup on their site as well.

Jason 

Is it live, or is it....?

If you have been in a situation where you would like to take advantage of a personal digital recorder (lecture, personal note taking, etc.), then look no farther than your iPhone and iTalk (free w/ads, $4.99 for Premium ad free) from Griffin technology.

iTalk is a great little application that turns your iPhone into a personal recorder, capturing monophonic audio at 44.1kHz (CD quality), 22.1kHz, and 11.025kHz. To transfer the audio files to your Mac or PC, you use the accompanying iTalk Sync application to make the wireless connection. When your iPhone appears in the list, you only have to drag the recorded files to your desktop and your done.

I was really amazed at the quality of the sound that this application could produce. If you plan on only playing back the files on the iPhone, then the lowest setting will save you disk space. If you wanted to use the recording on the internet or some other format where audio quality is more crucial, you might be surprised by the sound captured from the little iPhone mic. With iPhone sizes reaching 16GB, file size shouldn't be too much of a problem. If you are interested in adding a microphone to your recording capability, Griffin sells a little $15 mic that pops in the headphone jack at the top of the phone. 

For more information on this application, check out the Griffin website at http://www.italksync.com/

Jason

It appears that there are a few specials running at the moment that can land you an iPhone for $99.

Best Buy is offering the 8GB iPhone 3G to their Silver Rewards Zone members. If you are a regular Reward Zone member, you can get the iPhone for $50 off the regular price. More details here...

https://myrewardzone.bestbuy.com/

AT&T is also selling the iPhone 3G for $99, while supplies last that is. The iPhone that AT&T is offering is a refurbished unit, and carries a 90 day warranty. Check the AT&T store for details for more information.

iJason

ActiveSync for Google Users comes to the iPhone

There are a lot of us iPhone users who also have gmail accounts, and why not. Google and Apple have a great relationship with each other and Google creates a lot great online applications for use on mobile devices. The CEO of Google even sits on the board of Apple. 

Never the less, if you are going to go down the path of using Google's active sync on your iPhone, there are a couple of things you need to know.

If you setup Google to sync your calendars, you would lose that functionality of syncing your Exchagne/Outlook calendars with your iPhone. The same is true if you sync your contacts too. As of this writing, Google doesn't sync mail to iPhone, but it would be a similar issue with syncing mail I'm sure. 

The big question, can I sync my Google calendars and my Exchange contacts and mail? Or, can I sync only my mail from Exchange and my calendars from Google? My answer, I'll get back to you. I'm wondering this myself. I would say that before you attempt to set this up, you should back up your iPhone using iTunes first. If things go south, then you will want to do a restore. 

With caution,

Jason

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414 - Backup and Restore your iPhone

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/tasks/ - Sync your tasks to iPhone

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=1... - Sync your calendars and contacts.

Google Doc's

"A while back we noted that Google had optimized the Google Docs services for viewing on the iPhone (and other mobile devices). It's taken a while, but now it's been announced that some basic editing is possible from the iPhone as well."-ref. TUAW 2/15/2009

As soon as I heard this I had to try it out. My first impression was that I would most likely not use this unless I was in a real pinch. If I were in a pinch, that would mean that I would need to probably print or email the document. Since I cant print from my phone or email the document as an attachment to someone who could print it, I'm left wondering how I would use this.

Let's say I found that reason, and I want to edit my document. I was able to edit spreadsheets by choosing the spreadsheet, and clicking the edit link on the row that I wanted to edit. The controls were a little small, but it appears to work. What I wasn't able to do was to edit documents that I had imported from Word. The spreadsheet I edited earlier I imported from Excel. 

In all fairness, this is in beta, which means that the functionality will come in time. If you are interested in checking this feature out, go to m.google.com/docs on your phone and give it a try. 

Google on

Jason

Couple cool things about the 2.02 update.

First, you can run OS X Server as a guest operating system. This was available prior to this release but I thought I would mention it again. We do it over here for testing and it works great.

Second, the 2.02 update allows you to mount DMG (unencrypted) disk images.

Third, the updater comes in two flavors - with a 12 month subscriptiong to McAffee Virus Scan or without. This is essential if you are running a Windows guest operting system.

Fourth, general improved performance for your guest operating systems. Lots of bug updates.

Fifth, FREE UPGRADE from previous 1.x updates! They are wanting to increase their market share (why not) so they are offering this upgrade to all Fusion customers. Cool.

Sixth, you can import Parallels Desktop 4 virtual machines into Fusion now (part of the market share thing I mentioned earlier).

DISCLOSURE

I have personally purchased both products and made the choice to go with VMWare over a year ago and have been happy with it. In all fairness, I haven't used Parallels in quite sometime and I have no dog in this hunt, so if you like Parallels then by all means stick with it. UNT does not license the VMWare fusion client for UNT, but if you are interested in this product or any other educationally priced product, I recommend visiting the Academic Superstore online at www.academicsuperstore.com.