MacDork :)

Murlock Phone Holder

Check out my iPhone holder :) This cute murlock was a gift from my woman. He makes a great phone holder. Also pictured: my Macbook Mini.

I just added Prowl Notifications to the blog (throttled, of course).

Awesome.

I was really pleased to find a few controls added to the audiobook (and podcast!) iPod controls in last night’s iPhone 3.0 update.

The small “30″ with the arrow moving in a circle takes you back 30 seconds; quite handy when you’ve missed something that was just said.

The “2x” is a speed toggle; clicking it multiple times will change between double, normal and half speed. Prior to this, you had to take a trip onto the Settings app to change it. Handy!

Lastly, you now get visual feedback when you scrub back and forth in a track. The way this works is hard to explain, but it works like this: if you grab the play head and start dragging it to the right, you move forward in the track. This is fine for relatively short tracks, like a five minute song, since each pixel only represents a few seconds on the scrub bar. On longer tracks (take a two hour podcast, for example), each pixel then represents a huge chunk of time and it becomes very difficult to skip back a few seconds (though the new 30-second skip alleviates that need!). Apple’s solution is for you to keep your finger on the screen, but to move it lower on the screen, completely off of the scrub bar; the lower on the screen you go, the finer the control you have! Fantastic! This used to work in past versions, but it wasn’t as well implemented, and had no UI.

Macworld is running a story today about how Apple has changed the conditions of the latest iPhone OS 3.0 NDA to explicitly denounce jailbreaking.

Apple is taking a more aggressive stance against developers who create apps for “jailbroken” iPhones. According to a new report, the Cupertino-based company recently updated its “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement” – the agreement to which all iPhone developers are required to adhere — to explicitly disallow jailbreaking, assisting in jailbreaking, and developing and distributing jailbreak apps. The Ars Technica report says that while previous agreements forbade the creation of apps that violate privacy, facilitate crimes, or violate intellectual property laws, the new one restricts developers from jailbreaking their own phones.

This is complete bullshit. One of the greatest things about OS X is the inclusion of the developer’s tools, allowing you to completely build whatever app you want for yourself if what Apple offers doesn’t suit your needs. Yes, the learning curve is steep, but even if you don’t necessarily have the chops to crank out an app on your own, the ability is there, and the challenge is often taken up by other developers. I happen to buy a LOT of software for OS X, something I nearly never did when I was a pc user, so many years ago.

With this latest move, Apple isn’t actively denying the same functionality on the iPhone — you can download the iPhone dev tools just as easily as you can the Mac ones — but there’s a not-so-subtle difference in the iPhone world. Censorship. Apple controls what apps get put onto the iPhone app store.

My developer argument is purely academic, as I’ve never written an app for either of the platforms, but as a consumer, I’ve been using a lot of the jailbreak functionality in ways that do no harm to Apple. I use a shell program that I prefer over the other free ones on the app store, a calculator that supports RPN, and a backgrounding app that allows my shell to stay open when I need to check my mail (I’ve given up the Super Mario theme and Zelda sound sets I was using last week).

None of these pieces of functionality compete with Apple or take any revenue away from third parties. There are, admittedly, apps in Cydia that do, which brings us to the whole issue here.

Apple has a track record of not allowing apps on the app store that compete w/ them. I get it — it’s their system, they control what’s allowed to go on it. You might be thinking, “If you don’t like it, don’t use the product”. That’s not a bad point, but as a consumer, it’s also our responsibility to voice our displeasure (this counterpoint was made by someone on Buzz Out Loud when a discussion about some other company being heavy-handed came up)

Eff you Apple. Eff you up the a.

Source — Lifehacker.com

I have to admit, I was really skeptical, but the selection’s pretty compelling! Now if that text to speech option available, I think it’s be a must have!

Saweeet.  I’m installing it right now.

IPhone Apps: 5-Row QWERTY Jailbreak App Fixes One of the iPhone Keyboard’s Most Annoying Flaws:
You can find this app listed under “5-Row QWERTY Keyboard” in Cydia.

iPodNN | Apple greenlights third-party iPhone browsers:
Apple greenlights third-party iPhone browsers
A slate of new third-party web browsers has unexpectedly appeared at the App Store, reports indicate.

Fantastic.  I hope this leads to a mobile version of Firefox that supports addons.

On the way home yesterday, I stopped at the grocery store and thought, “This is the perfect time to try out that app I downloaded!”

Trapster IMMEDIATELY started telling me, “Police often hide here.” in a pleasant female voice. Since the phone is also my mp3 player, and is plugged into the car stereo, it was imposssible to ignore. I dropped my speed to within reasonable limits, crested a hill and SURE ENOUGH: there was a cop sitting there with his radar pointed straight at me!

Thanks, Trapster!